Sheryl nodded. “Your parents knew what they were talking about,” he said.
“Yep.” Frankland grinned. “When I was a child, I didn’t understand that it was just a, a what-d’you-call-it, a metaphor. There wasn’t a literal Devil in there, not the kind with horns and tail—well, I guess there wasn’t, I never looked. But my folks were right that if you went to the Catholic church, the Devil would get you in his clutches.” He laughed. “You know, I’ve never been in a Catholic church to this day. Not even just to look around.”
“Me neither,” said Sheryl.
“Ba ba,” Robitaille muttered through his broken teeth.
Frankland looked down at him. “Look at the Devil now.”
“Hah,” Robitaille said. His eyes came open, seemed to focus on Frankland. “Hah. Help.” Frankland leaned closer. “Yes. We’re here for you.”
“Help.”
“We’re here to save you,” Frankland said. Which wasn’t the same thing as help, not exactly.
“Ta,” Robitaille said. “Ta. Trink.”
“He wants a drink,” Sheryl said.
Frankland poured a glass of water from the pitcher and held it to Robitaille’s lips. Robitaille raised a hand to the glass and gulped eagerly at the water, and then his whole body gave a violent shudder, and he turned away, retching. Water spilled from his lips.
“Cochonl” he shouted. “Qui es-tu? Un espece defou?”
“He doesn’t want a drink, teddy bear,” Sheryl said. “He wants a drink.”
“Donne-moi un verrel Un verrel”
Frankland straightened. “Well. Water’s what he gets.” He looked down at Robitaille. “Water’s what we’ve got! It’s all we’ve got!”
Robitaille began to cry. Fat tears fell from his blackened eyes. “Je vais mourirl Donne-moi un verrel Je vais mourir si je ne trouve pas un verre.”
“What’s that language?” Frankland asked. “Latin, like the pope talks?”
“I guess.”
Frankland refilled the glass, put the glass on the table within the reach of Robitaille’s arms.
“I’m gonna let him calm down,” he said. “Then maybe the two of us can have a real chat.” He and Sheryl left the room, and nodded to the guard that Frankland had put on the door. One of the older men in their church, a tough farmer who wasn’t about to let a drunk priest sway him from his duty.
“Look after him,” Frankland iaid. “Give him anything he wants except alcohol—and I’m afraid that’s all he’s going to want.”
“Where would I find alcohol, Brother Frankland?” The farmer grinned.
“Somebody might have snuck some alcohol in.”
“Well, I’ll keep on the lookout.”
“I appreciate it, friend,” Frankland said.
Frankland made his way down the hall, past the extra furniture and breakable items they’d taken from the bedroom before they put Robitaille in the bed.
And then Robitaille, behind the steel door, began to scream, hoarse wails that prickled the hair on Frankland’s arms.
“Dang,” the farmer said. “That don’t even sound human.”
Frankland thought about that for the next hour or so, and then he decided it was a question to which he’d better find out the answer.
Jessica’s stomach gave a pleasant rollercoaster lurch as her helicopter circled the Gateway Arch. The ruins of St. Louis were spread out below her. The blackened devastation of yesterday morning’s propane explosion, where the fire chief and a couple dozen of his men were martyred, was plain to see. There was a circular crater in the center of the area, filled with water from the River Des Peres. Smoke rose from persistent fires. The morning’s brisk southwest wind was whipping up flames that had died down the day before.
Still, there were parts of St. Louis that were more or less intact, standing like hollow-eyed sentinels above the rubble that surrounded them. The earthquake had laid entire districts in ruin, but spared others. It was like a game of survival roulette: if you put your chips, your house and family, in the right area, you could come through with some broken windows and fallen shingles, while other people’s chips were swept off the board. The only problem was that no one knew which neighborhoods would be spared until after the game began, and by then it was too late for most of the players. The riverfront was a wreck. And the Chain of Rocks Canal in Illinois, through which river traffic bypassed the rapids that infested the river north of St. Louis, was now unusable. The canal’s banks had caved in, and so had the sides of the newly built Lock No. 27.
The grounds of the National Expansion Memorial were covered either with tents or helicopters. MARS
had moved in force: the Memorial held a battalion of paratroopers from Fort Bragg and a thousand rescue workers from all over the world, all in addition to the refugees who had poured out of the ruined city. Other city parks were also filling up with rescuers and refugees. Airlift Command was having a hard time just keeping them fed, particularly as there were few surviving runways big enough to carry heavy fixed-wing transports. Even the tough and reliable C130s were having a hard time finding places to land. Almost everything had to be flown in by helicopter, and choppers were fragile craft that required a lot of down time for maintenance.
Jessica sympathized with Airlift Command. They were trained to supply a mere army. This was an entire population.
During the Second World War, the United States had at its peak supported 15,000,000 soldiers, but that was after years of military buildup. Now there were millions of homeless refugees on American soil and the government was being asked to take care of them overnight, and with the heart ripped out of the country’s infrastructure.
“Take me down over the river,” Jessica said.
Her pilot gave a redneck grin. “You want to go under the bridges, or over?” For a moment she was tempted, and then she decided she would feel truly ridiculous if, during the greatest adventure of her life, she was killed by a falling railway tie. “Better go over,” she said. Jessica’s stomach sank into a single location as the Kiowa Warrior settled into a smooth dive. G’s tautened her grin.
She was going to have to learn how to fly one of these, that was clear. This was just too much fun. The river was fast and carried tons of debris. Once they got south of the bluffs at Cape Girardeau, Swampeast Missouri spread out before them like a shimmering inland lake. There were a pair of waterfalls at Island No. 8, though the Mississippi was busy reducing them. Jessica asked the pilot to make a detour to Sikeston, west of the river, to look at the power plant. The Sikeston Power Plant had been built directly on an earthquake fissure that was clearly visible from the top of its smokestack. At the time when the plant was built, no one realized this was an earthquake feature. But even after the fissure had been properly identified, land atop it had been acquired for a housing subdivision. Neither the power plant, the smokestack, nor the subdivision had survived M1. Brown water washed through the wreckage.
The next power plant south had been built at New Madrid, not exactly the best choice under the circumstances. It and the town were a flooded ruin. So was Cabells Mound. The river had cut the New Madrid bend and the bend at Uncle Chowder.