Nick blinked. “Murder, anyway.” he said, and thought of Gros-Papa lying on the floor with his watch chain torn from his vest.
Oh God, he thought, I’m going to have to tell Manon.
The earth thundered with an aftershock. The old truck bounced up and down on its springs. Hilkiah remained behind. The black guard, whose name was Conroy, got behind the wheel of the truck. Nick took the passenger seat, and the two boys rode in back.
The road was torn across by fresh fissures, one every few hundred feet; these were rudely filled in with dirt, rocks, and timber, sometimes sawn-up power poles that had fallen and been chucked into the gap. Every building visible from the road was in a state of collapse. The young cotton grew untended in empty fields. The pine trees that lined the road in places had almost all fallen and been shoved aside. The result was that the area’s large population of hawks had very few places left in which to roost. There must have been a lot of vermin for them to eat, because every remaining power pole or tree had at least one hawk sitting in it, each carefully facing away from all the others.
Conroy turned to Nick. “Say, brother,” he said, “you been anywhere near a radio or TV?”
“For a while I was.” They had listened to the radio regularly when they were aboard Beluthahatchie.
“Is it true about what happened to the nuclear power plant over in Mississippi? That it’s poisoned all the country south and east of here?”
“That’s not what I heard,” Nick said. “I heard there was some trouble, with a little radiation released. But that’s all.”
“Reverend says that the plant practically blew up. He says whole states are poisoned. And he says the rivers are poisoned, too.”
“There is a problem with the water, yes,” Nick said. “Pollution from chemicals and fertilizers, oil tanks, that sort of thing. That’s why the Mississippi and parts of some other rivers are being evacuated.”
“The comet Wormwood,” Conroy said. “That’s what poisons the waters. You can read that in the Book.”
Nick didn’t quite have an answer for that, so he fell silent.
The truck crawled over more crudely repaired asphalt. The Church of the End Times was a strangely ordered island in the sea of devastation. The small metal-walled church stood intact, as did the radio station, with its tall tower and the small metal house behind it. In and about the area were ordered rows of tents, awnings, and vehicles. If it weren’t for the gaping rents that scarred the ground, the place would have looked as neat as a military encampment on inspection day.
Two middle-aged white men sat under a picnic table umbrella by the road. They rose to their feet as the Chevy approached, each lifting a rifle. Nick’s nerves jangled a warning as he recognized modern assault weapons, AR-15s, the civilian version of the Army’s combat rifle, the M-16.
Guns, Nick’s nerves jangled, guns and crackers. The combination didn’t look good. Conroy halted the vehicle by the table, and one of the men peered in.
“Heaven-o there, Conroy,” he said. “You got some new folks for us?”
“This is Nick,” Conroy said. “The boy’s Jason.”
“Welcome to God’s country,” the man said, and held a callused hand through the window for Nick to shake.
“Thanks,” said Nick. The jolt of adrenaline that he’d received at the sight of the assault rifles was still jangling through his veins.
A man’s amplified voice shouted in the background, ” is this the day!” it shouted. “Is this the day of the Lord?”
The guard smiled with crooked teeth as he peered at Nick through the window. “Do you have any liquor, drugs, or guns?” he asked.
Conroy answered before Nick could make up his mind whether he wanted to answer the question or not. “A rifle, shotgun, two pistols,” Conroy said. “I put them behind the seat.” The guard nodded. “Me and George have some tags here,” he said to Nick. “We’ll tag your weapons and put them in storage. You can get them out when you leave.”
Nick thought for a long moment while the guard and his buddy George fooled around on their table for a ballpoint pen and their jelly jar of tags. He didn’t want to give the guns up, not in a situation like this, not in some kind of religious camp guarded by men carrying Armalites.
But on the other hand, he thought, how else would he see Arlette? And why should he expect people in a refugee camp to allow guns inside?
The guards scrawled Nick’s name on the tags and attached them to his guns with string. The ammunition went into a plastic bag and was likewise labeled.
Nick, who had spent the first twenty years of his life going past military checkpoints with his father the general, figured he could have shot the guards fifty times over while this was going on. His anxiety over the assault rifles eased.
“Are you ready for judgment?” the amplified voice asked.
By the time the two guards were finished, two more people had hustled up from the camp. One white man and one black. Nick left the truck to greet them.
“Heaven-o,” the white man said. He was a big, burly man and would have been good-looking if he hadn’t lacked a chin. He and Nick shook hands. “I’m Brother Frankland.” His was the voice, Nick recognized, that was shouting from the speakers.
“Pleased to meet you,” Nick said.
“This is Brother Garb from True Gospel Church.”
Garb was soft-spoken and toffee-skinned, dressed neatly in a pressed white cotton shirt and gold-rimmed spectacles. Nick shook his hand. “I heard my family was here,” he said to Garb. “I heard they came in the other day from Toussaint.”
A bright smile spread over Garb’s face. “Is Arlette your daughter?” he said. Relief and joy seemed to float Nick right off the ground. “Yes!” he almost shouted. “Yes, she is.”
“She’s a smart girl, your Arlette,” Garb said. “She said you might be coming.”
“Where is she?”
“In the church, most likely, looking after the children. I’ll take you.” Nick almost danced after the Reverend Garb, but then he remembered Jason, and he stopped. He turned to the boy, who had been standing in silence by the truck.
“You want to come, Jase?” he asked.
Jason seemed uncertain. “Sure. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all. I’d like you to meet my family.”
Jason brightened, then hesitated again as he looked at the truck. “Don’t worry,” Frankland said. “We’ll look after your belongings.”
“What does the Book of Daniel tell us?” said the amplified voice. A generator roared. Garb led Nick across the gravel parking lot, past the radio station—“Arkansas’ Voice of the Lord, 15,000 watts AM”—and toward the church. Nick saw that big crosses, twenty or more feet long and made from trees or fallen power poles, were scattered through the area, lying on the ground, with the crosspiece lashed or bolted into place.
The sight of the crosses, of the sort that men in white hoods burned on Southern summer nights, sent a shimmer of unease up Nick’s spine. But there were plenty of black people around, he saw, and they and the whites seemed on friendly terms.
“What are the crosses for?” he asked.
“‘The cross shall be your salvation,’” Garb quoted, then laughed. “The crosses are to save lives. You see these big chasms? If a chasm opens up underneath it, a big cross will bridge the gap, won’t fall in. We’re teaching everyone that when a quake hits, they’re to jump onto one of the crosses and hang on till it’s over.”