Tomorrow, Omar thought as he looked at the guns piled into the trunk of his cruiser, we better do this to the white folks’ camp.
There was the sound of distant thunder to the north. The earth trembled to an aftershock. Micah Knox strolled up, and with an elaborate gesture pulled a large gold pocket watch that was on the end of the chain he’d been wearing. He opened the watch cover, looked at the dial. Bells in the watch played “Claire de Lune.”
“One hour and twenty minutes,” he said. “Pretty efficient, Omar, with so many people who ain’t been trained for police work.” He snapped the watch shut and put it in his pocket. “I think we got some real potential, here. Don’t you?”
“Your people will get more practice at Clarendon,” Omar said. “That’s where we’re going next.” He looked at his own watch. “We’ll have a bite, then get there just in time for their noon meal.” He had less trouble searching the Clarendon camp, but he collected many more firearms. The Clarendon camp, he decided, was going to be more trouble: it was closer to town, and people kept wandering off the camp limits into Shelburne City.
He wondered if he could get the parish council’s permission to fence it off somehow. The parish was a little short of food and hospitality, but there was plenty of fencing material. Hunger burned in Nick as the boy Orville guided him to Rails Bluff. In Rails Bluff there were fourteen people who came off boats from Toussaint two days before, and according to the boy one of them sounded like Arlette.
Yearning filled Nick to the brim. He saw Arlette every time he closed his eyes. Love, your daughter. And a row of hearts.
Orville was twelve years old, and he, his older brother, and his uncle the church deacon had been sent out the day before, after the second big quake, to look for refugees and guide them to Rails Bluff. Orville had joined Jason and Nick as guide, while the others continued their search. He hadn’t looked twice at the firearms piled around the boat. Guns weren’t anything to Orville one way or another, just a part of the background.
The way to Rails Bluff was difficult, but not as difficult as their earlier wanderings had been. Orville’s father had blazed a trail through the wreckage, and though there was still a lot of tree trunks that had drifted back into the channel and needed to be shoved out of the way, it was easier with much of the work already done. And part of the journey was along the Arkansas River, which though flooded and nearly choked with debris was open to movement by small boats.
Jason was quiet, Nick noticed, but he did his job. Nick couldn’t manage to concern himself with the boy’s moods, though, not with his daughter’s presence tingling through his mind. There was a rumble, and the boat tilted to port as something large and solid thundered along its aluminum bottom. Nick cut the throttle and jumped to the stern to tip the outboard up, out of the water, so its prop wouldn’t be sheared off.
“That’s a sawyer,” Orville said. “Log just under the water.” He grinned. “Lucky we’re not in a wooden boat! We’d have a hole punched in the bottom!”
The boat grated as it slid off the sawyer. Nick waited till the boat was clear, then cautiously dropped the outboard back into the water.
“I wonder if Tom Sawyer was named after one of those,” Nick said.
“Who’s Tom Sawyer?” Orville asked, without interest. Then he looked up. “There’s the bluff. We just bear off to the right here, till you get to Rails River.”
The bluff rose gradually above the flooded land. It had been covered by thick stands of pine, but most of the trees had fallen in the quake and lay tumbled on the slope, their torn roots revealing the bluff’s red clay. It looked as if a bulldozer had run mad among the pine groves, leveling everything it could find. They followed the bluff, and Nick found himself in a flooded river. The fallen girders of a venerable iron trestle bridge lay spread across the river’s channel, with the wreckage of an old Lincoln washing around amid the rusting beams.
There was a kind of improvised landing below the broken bridge, a homemade pier supported by oil drums. A miscellaneous collection of boats were moored there, or run up on the bluff, and there were two guards on the boats. Nick didn’t like the look of that, particularly the man who set Nick’s cracker vibe tingling, the big white guy with the homemade tattoo of an angel on his biceps. But the other was black, which was reassuring, and the big man, who said his name was Hilkiah, said that one of their scavenging parties had been shot at two days ago, by some men who Hilkiah thought were probably trying to break into the safe at a rural grocery store.
Nobody had been hurt, the big man said, but the Reverend was being cautious. He wanted armed men posted on anything that anyone might want to steal.
Nick figured he knew who the Reverend was: he’d heard about the situation in Rails Bluff from Orville. A bunch of preachers, Orville said, were running Rails Bluff. Nick reckoned that he’d rather have his daughter in the care of preachers than some rural sheriff or town council.
“I’m looking for the people from Toussaint,” Nick said. He couldn’t keep it in any longer. “They were supposed to have been brought in a couple days ago.”
The black guard nodded. “I drove ’em to the camp myself,” he said. “There was a whole bunch of ’em, right? Three or four families?”
“How were they?” Nick said.
“They spent a couple days in boats, which was hard on the old folks, but they was okay.” The man looked concerned, put a coffee-colored hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Any of ’em family?”
“My daughter,” Nick said. “And… her momma.” Hesitating because he almost said “my wife.”
“They probably just fine,” said the guard. He looked at Hilkiah. “Should I take these folks to the camp?”
“Might as well,” Hilkiah said. He looked down at Orville. “You and your Uncle Tyrus find anybody out there?”
The boy shook his head. “No, sir. But we didn’t get far—too many fallen logs in the way.” Hilkiah nodded, then looked back at Nick. “What do you have in the way of supplies? Food and water?”
“We’re well supplied. We ran into a towboat that gave us provisions.”
“And I see you’ve got three, four gallons of gas left. Well—if you’ll help carry your stuff to the top of the bluff, we can get it in the truck and you on to your family.”
The pickup was an ancient Chevy that looked as if it had been salvaged from some junkyard. It had a bumper sticker reading trust in god and the second amendment. The five of them managed to carry most of Nick’s supplies from the boats, up the slippery red-clay path, to the back of the truck. Jason carried his telescope on his shoulder.
“What’s that?” Orville asked.
“A telescope.”
“That don’t look like a telescope.”
“Well,” Jason said, “that’s what it is.”
“Can I look through it, then?”
“Maybe later.”
Jason put the telescope in the back of the pickup, nestled it safely against the cooler filled with provisions. Nick looked at him.
“You okay, Jase?”
“Yeah. I’m just tired.”
“You can rest up here if you want. We can carry the rest of the stuff up without you.” Jason shook his head. “I can do it.”
“I see you’ve got a rifle and some other guns,” Hilkiah said as they trudged down the path again. “We don’t allow guns in the camp, but we’ll take care of ’em for you.” He nodded. “We take good care of people’s guns,” he said. “In times like these, when the Lord is testing us, people want to know their firearms are being looked after.”
“They’re not my guns, exactly—I picked them up for protection after I found some people murdered.” Hilkiah looked at him. “Wars and rumors of wars,” he said.