He delivered his message and left. Taunts rang in his ears as he stalked away. Merle stood by his car at the gate, his easy grin turned taut on his face. “Figured I might have to pull you out of there, boss,” he said, and showed Omar the Ingram Mac-11 he was holding concealed behind his car door. The thing fired eighty zillion rounds per second, Omar knew, and not a one of them accurate.
“Jesus,” Omar said. “You would have shot me along with all the others.”
“The first burst would have gone over their heads,” Merle said.
Omar was not comforted. He looked over his shoulder at the angry crowd, the video cameras that were still trained on him. “Put that gun back in the car.” he said, “if you don’t want it on the evening news.”
“I’m gonna need more boys here for crowd control,” Merle said.
Omar pushed his sunglasses back up his nose. Anger snarled through his nerves. “You’ll get them,” he said.
“Make sure they’ve got shotguns at least,” Merle said. “These aren’t our niggers we’re dealing with.” Omar rolled his cruiser carefully over a barely-filled-in crevasse as he drove down Main, then turned onto Courthouse Road. Anger still shimmered in his nerves, though weariness was beginning to beat it down. The courthouse lawn, with its stubs and torn stumps of blackjack oak, looked strangely bare in the slanting western rays of the sun. A wrecker, with a crane on the back, had been backed onto the courthouse lawn. Probably yanking stumps or hauling wood away, he thought.
He would sleep in his office tonight. After sixteen hours of coping with one emergency after another, he didn’t think he could face the wreckage that was his home.
The parking place that had been reserved for the sheriff and other parish employees had been filled by a truck full of building scrap from the collapsed Robbie’s Barber Shop across Courthouse, so Omar turned the car around and parked next to the courthouse lawn. He got out of the car, crossed the broken concrete sidewalk, then stopped in surprise as he saw who was standing by the wrecker under the cracked plinth of the Mourning Confederate.
Micah Knox. The biggety bantam Crusader stood among a knot of strangers, a camouflage baseball cap cocked back on his burrcut head, the long sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled down to his wrists. And standing next to Knox, looming over him almost, was the tall figure of Omar’s son, David. David looked up and grinned as Omar approached. “Hey, Dad,” he said.
“Hey,” Omar said.
The wrecker had been backed up to the Mourning Confederate, Omar saw. The bronze statue had pitched head-first off its plinth during the morning’s earthquake and stuck in the soft ground like a spear. A cable had been wrapped around the statue, and the crane on the wrecker was about to lift the Confederate and set it upright.
“Micah said it wasn’t right that the statue should just be left there,” David said.
“Not in Liberated America,” Knox said.
“I agreed with him,” David said, “so I got ahold of Judd Criswell and got him to bring his wrecker.”
“Micah?” Omar said. He looked from David to Knox and back. “You know each other?”
“Since this afternoon,” David said. “Micah and his buddies came in on a boat this afternoon, down by the Bayou Bridge.”
And David and his partner patrolled down there, Omar knew, looking out in case refugees managed to get across the bayou.
“We were pretty grungy,” Knox said. “We’d been on the river almost a week.” He grinned at David, fiddled with a gold watch chain looped between a front and back trouser pocket. “Dave here took us to your house so that we could get a shower.”
“And they cleaned the place!” David said. “Set the furniture up, tidied up the broken glass. Nailed the ceiling panels and the box siding that come loose.”
Knox grinned, bounced up on the tips of his toes. “Five people,” he said. “Working for an hour, while Dave was off on his patrol. It’s not as nice as Wilona would make it, but it’s a lot neater than it was.” Omar looked at the strangers. “Who are your friends, Micah?” he said.
“Crusaders brave and true,” Knox said. “We keep in touch through the Internet and arranged a rendezvous. They’re all happy to be here in Liberated America.”
He introduced them. They were all bigger than Knox. Some looked like serious streetfighters that Omar would hate to encounter in a barfight situation. They were all young and wore combat boots and bits of military uniform. Their ears stuck out from short-cropped heads. Two had bad acne, and all displayed lots of insect bites. None of them seemed particularly happy to be in Shelburne City, liberated zone or not.
“Where’ve you been?” Omar asked.
“Arkansas, mostly. We met up there, before everyone started evacuating. We just wandered around, then got a boat when we got caught by flood—” His restless hands touched his cap brim, his belt, his shoes. His voice turned louder. “Hey, you know Omar, this quake knocked ZOG for shit. No Feds anywhere. No FBI, no DEA, no judges, no marshals, no military. No Equal Opportunity Commission. Just the people, for a change. It’s like the frontier all over again.”
“Hey, Omar,” Judd Criswell said from the cab of his wrecker. “Can we get moving, here? I got plenty work for this truck.”
“You bet,” David said.
The winch whined, and the bronze man slowly rose from the soil. The others pitched it over so it would land right-side up, and Criswell carefully lowered it again to the ground.
“There we go,” David said admiringly. “Straight up-and-dicular.” The figure had survived remarkably well. The muzzle of the statue’s rifle had broken off, but the bowed head, with its somber expression, and the body in its caped overcoat had come through unscathed. David stepped forward and wiped dark soil from the mustached face.
“Can’t get it back on the pillar, I guess,” he said. “But the least we could do was set the ol’ boy on his feet again.”
After Judd Criswell disconnected his cable and drove off in his truck, Knox drew himself to attention and gave the statue an elaborate salute. “Comrade, we salute you!” he said. “We have kept the faith! The struggle goes on!” The Confederate gazed at him with glacial sorrow.
Then Knox turned to Omar and gave another salute. “Micah Knox and detachment reporting for duty, Sheriff Paxton,” he said. “Tell us what you want us to do.”
“I mentioned you could make ’em special deputies.” David said.
Omar hesitated. “I don’t know rightly,” he said. “You’re not from around here.”
“Neither are the Klan boys you brought in,” David said. “I heard the radio calls from that African Methodist camp—sounds like you need more people.”
Omar paused for a brief moment to admire the thought of Knox and his Crusaders National race warriors guarding the nigger camp—now that would be fun to watch—but he remembered the video cameras and reluctantly dismissed the idea.