The Kiowa’s turbines shut down, and Pat raised the antenna on the boom box and punched the power button. He held the speaker close to Jessica’s ear. A crashing sound began to thunder from the speakers, a horribly distorted noise that suggested metal shelves being hit repeatedly with a baseball bat. A high-pitched male voice howled over the noise, distorted even more than the crashing sound in the background. Jessica wanted to cover her ears.
“Is this the day?” the voice cried. “Is this the day? Is this the day of the Lord?”
“Fifteen thousand watts AM,” Pat said. “The Voice of Rails Bluff.” The Arkansas was slow and wide and choked with debris. Jason and Arlette worked on the bass boat’s foredeck, each with one of Captain Joe’s oars, fending off the trees, the chunks of lumber, the pieces of paneling or shingled gables that had once been a part of someone’s home. It was slow and tiring work. Nick fretted aloud about the fuel they were using idling down the river this way. Jason was dreadfully aware of Arlette’s presence, of the tantalizing warmth of the girl’s bare legs as they moved next to his. It was as if his nerves were reaching out toward her, straining in her direction like new green shoots reaching for the light. He wondered if Arlette shared this awareness, or if this pleasant torture, was for him alone.
He heard Nick and Manon in a whispered conversation in the cockpit, and then Jason heard Nick say,
“Well, I hope you don’t expect me to find a service station,” and Jason felt a grin tug at his lips, a grin that he was careful to turn away from the cockpit. There were more whispers between Manon and Nick, and then Nick cleared his throat.
“Manon needs to pee,” he said. “Jason, I’d be obliged if you’d keep your eyes to the front.”
“And you, too, Nick Ruford,” Manon added.
Jason strove to control his amusement. When he and Nick had been alone on the bass boat, this had not been much of an issue.
The boat took on a list to port, indicating that Manon was hanging her butt out the cockpit. Jason moved a little to starboard to help keep the boat balanced, crowding against Arlette. She gave him a glance over her shoulder—their eyes met for a moment, and she looked away. Their arms touched, and Jason felt the hair prickle on his arm at the touch of Arlette’s skin.
There was a pause. Then a wail from Manon.
“I can’t, Nick! Not here in the middle of the river!”
“Nobody’s around to see you.”
“I just can’t!”
“There’s no place else to have a pit stop out here,” Nick said. “Not unless you want to hold it till we get to Vicksburg.”
“Just take us over into the trees,” Manon said. “Please, Nick, I can’t pee out here.” Nick nudged the throttle forward and turned the wheel. The boat stabilized as Manon came inboard. Jason stepped back from Arlette, took a grip on his oar, fended off the garbage until they were in the shade of the trees.
Manon hung herself outboard again and managed to overcome her mortification at the procedure. After she was finished, Nick said, “Anyone else? Because I’m not taking this detour again.”
“I’ll go, Daddy,” Arlette said.
“There’s not much toilet paper,” Manon remarked.
“Plenty of leaves and cattails,” Nick said cheerfully. Manon made a noise of disgust. Jason stood on the foredeck, eyes rigidly forward like a soldier, his oar grounded like a spear. They sure sound married, he thought.
It was slow going on the river. They passed a broken highway bridge, its span completely fallen, and shortly thereafter a shattered lock and dam, now abandoned. A towboat and a small fleet of barges were sunk in the lock, apparently having been caught there by the first big quake. At nightfall they kept moving. Nick decided they were safer in the channel than anywhere else—if they moored beneath the trees, an aftershock could drop the trees right on them.
Eventually they grew tired and decided to drift. They had used two-thirds of their fuel and could no longer see any landmarks. Nick shared out the food he’d taken from the two guards—there wasn’t much, and it didn’t last long.
“This is the last,” he said, “till we find civilization.” There was a roaring overhead, the sound of rotors flogging the sky. Navigation lights flashed against the blackness. A whole squadron of helicopters tearing away on some urgent errand. If it were only daytime, they could have waved.
After the helicopters passed, Jason lay on the foredeck and looked up at the sky. He could spot M31 easily, and M13 and M3. Funny how easy it was when you knew how.
His eye searched for the Ring Nebula, but couldn’t find it. He thought he could detect a smudge where Captain Joe had showed him the Veil Nebula.
A supernova. The Veil wasn’t a veil but a shroud, draped over the corpse of its once-mighty star. Jason gazed at the sky and felt on his mind the subtle pressure of its millions of stars. He wondered what his life meant in regard to that brilliant, diamond-hard, uncaring immensity. Compared to those stars, his life, his thoughts, his very existence was the merest nothing—no, a fragment of nothing, a spark that flared briefly and then was gone, unnoticed in the vast darkness.
His mother, Jason thought, had believed that she mattered, that the universe cared what became of her, that she and the universe were of equal importance. Frankland believed, as far as the universe was concerned, that he was a person of consequence, that he was chosen to carry out a monumentally important plan on behalf of the being who had created all this immensity.
If they had only looked up, if they had seen those millions of stars, perhaps they would have come to a different understanding. That life was not of consequence to anyone but the living, that there was no plan but what life made for itself.
Jason acutely felt his own fragility, his own lack of significance in the cosmos. But that consciousness, in some strange, paradoxical way, seemed a kind of liberation. Life mattered only to life. Life could choose its own meaning, give itself significance, attempt to preserve itself against the violence and destruction of the universe. Life could value itself.
Nothing else would, that was certain.
And life could treasure other life, as Jason treasured the lives of the others adrift on the little boat. They could guard each other’s fragile spark, preserve themselves and each other.
Floating in that starry immensity, each was all the others had left.
After listening for a few minutes to Brother Frankland’s Hour of Prophecy, and rerunning the Kiowa’s recording one more time, Jessica decided that, whatever the dangers, she needed to send her rescue mission after all.
“We’ve got to dust off that farmhouse,” she told her staff. “I don’t know what the people in there did to get those others shooting at them, but I think we’d better do our best to part the combatants and sort out who did what later.”
Most of her helicopters had returned from their days’ errands, and after refueling she sent a half-dozen to Rails Bluff. Each craft was FLIR-enhanced so as to be able to navigate and maneuver at night without giving themselves away with spotlights or floods. Her own Kiowa was out of action until its ground crew could determine the extent of any damage, but since her pilot knew the country, she sent him as an observer on another craft.
The helicopters either weren’t armed or had no ammunition loads, but Jessica was able to send a platoon of engineers armed with light weapons and grenade launchers, soldiers who could either fire from the helicopter doors or deploy on the ground. They were to avoid confrontation, and fire only if fired upon, but primarily they were to find out who was in that farmhouse and evacuate them if it was at all possible.