The deputies in the truck bounded out. “Everyone out!” one of them said. For the first time, Jason saw, he was smiling.
Nick and his family rose to their feet and stared aghast at the camp. “I’m not going in there,” Nick said.
“And neither is my family.”
Without a word one of the deputies, standing behind Nick, reached into the truck cab and drew the shotgun out of the rear window rack. Jason cried a warning, but the deputy was fast: he slammed the butt of the shotgun into one of Nick’s kidneys before Nick was aware of the threat. Nick gave a cry and fell to one knee. The deputy raised the shotgun again.
Fury flashed like steam through Jason’s veins, and he screamed. Without thought he found himself flying through the air at the deputy that had hit Nick, arms outstretched to claw open the man’s throat. Jason bowled the man over and their heads came together with a crack. The world spun in wild sick circles. Something hit him in the face, then a heavy boot stomped him in the stomach. He gasped and curled into a fetal ball, and then something dug into his throat and his wind was cut off. He clawed at his throat as the strangling-strap pulled him, half crawling and half falling, along the wet, rutted ground. Then he was flung onto the grass, and he heard the chain fence slam shut behind him.
Air sighed at last into his lungs, and he choked, began to cough. He pulled the ligature from around his throat and found that it was the Astroscan strap that he hadn’t slipped off before launching himself at the deputy. For a while Jason was sick, puking up burning acid from his empty stomach onto the grass. He heard Arlette sobbing, Nick muttering. Tears blinded him. Then a cool palm touched the back of his neck.
“Take it easy, Jason,” Manon said. There was a strange sadness in her voice. “We’ll be okay. Just take it easy, cher.”
After the pain came rage. Nick staggered to his feet, breath hissing through his teeth with the agony that throbbed through his kidneys. Blind anger almost sent him lunging after the deputies, who were backing away from the closed gate with their shotguns leveled. With his bare hands he would tear the gate to shreds, then the armed men.
Arlette must have seen the fury in his face, because she ran to him and flung her arms around him. “No, Daddy!” she cried. “Don’t!”
And he didn’t. He stood there, poised to launch himself at the deputies, and Arlette clung to him, her terrified, tear-stained face pressed to his chest. Then Nick shuddered as a wave of pain and nausea rolled through him, and he looked down at his daughter and raised a hand to caress the back of her head.
“It’s okay, honey,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
The red rage faded from his mind as he stood holding Arlette and he became aware of Jason huddled on the ground nearby, Manon crouching over him, absently caressing his hair.
Somewhere a baby wailed. Nick glanced around, saw people approaching from all directions. Approaching cautiously, not yet convinced that shots wouldn’t be fired.
Black, he saw, all black. And the deputies all white.
A dreadful certainty began to chill his anger, the certainty of nightmare. The river had cast him up on an unknown shore, where some madman’s malevolent fantasy was being enacted.
A woman was walking up to him with a firm tread. She wore boots and bib overalls and a yellow T-shirt. Her white hair was shorn close to her scalp, and her skin was a deep ebony.
“I’m Deena Johnson,” she said. “Come with me, please. I’ll take care of the young one, and perhaps I might find you some food.”
Miss Deena Johnson performed some first aid on Nick’s and Jason’s abrasions, then found the newcomers some food: stale cheese and some kind of flat, greasy crackers that tasted as if they’d been buried in a pit for fifteen years; but it was the first food that Nick had eaten in almost two days, and he devoured everything that was put before him.
“Perhaps the young people might take a walk,” said Miss Deena, “and Nick and Manon and I can talk grownup business.”
She had an authoritative way of speaking, like the David women, that choked off debate before it began. Unlike the Davids, she had a way of not making it seem overbearing. Even Jason, who Nick suspected would bridle at being sent away because he wasn’t old enough to talk with the adults, accepted Deena’s ruling without protest, and left the dining tent along with Arlette.
Miss Deena reached into a pocket of her dress, pulled out a sheaf of rolled papers and a stubby pencil. She smoothed out the pages with her lined hands and put on a pair of reading glasses. Nick saw that the pages were filled with minuscule writing.
“Could I have your full names and addresses?” Miss Deena asked. “And your girl’s name, and the boy, too?”
“Certainly,” Manon said. She and Nick gave Deena the information, and Deena wrote it down in tiny print.
“There,” she said as she rolled up the pages and put them once again in her pocket. “There will be a number of copies made and hidden. So that when we are dead, a record of our names may survive.” Jason walked fast through the tent city. The boot-scrapes on his face burned. There was a sharp ache in his throat when he tried to swallow. It hurt less if he swallowed while tilting his head to the left. He was getting out of here. Out and away. He just had to figure out how. There were two big structures on the campsite. One was a large tent with metal folding tables for meals, where they’d just had their little meal of cheese and crackers. Next to the dining tent was a huge brick barbecue pit and a small frame building—since the quakes much reinforced with a strange supporting structure of timber and metal pipes—which held a propane-fueled cooking range, sinks for doing dishes, and the wellhead.
The other structure was a huge tent intended for church meetings, but which now housed entire families. The rest of the campground was a litter of tents, plastic sheeting, and cotton wagons slowly sinking into the mire. The ground was so wet that it squelched beneath Jason’s feet as he walked. Soaked clothing, bedding, and blankets had been strung up everywhere to dry, and now hung limp in the windless air. There were outhouses, a tool shed, and some pecan trees. Hungry people had scrounged all the old pecans. There was a softball field, with bleachers and a screen behind home plate, but that was outside the wire fence.
There were lots of people in the camp, entire families with children. It was strangely quiet. Even the children seemed subdued, walking or playing quietly in groups, and only occasionally would a lone child’s laughter ring out among the tents. The summer warmth had risen quickly from the damp ground and smothered the camp in sultry heat. The mist had risen farther from the ground, but still hung unbroken overhead, a bright white shroud that cloaked the world.
The strange silence that pervaded the camp kept Jason and Arlette from speaking as they made their way toward the back fence. Arlette kept her hand in her pocket, touching the box that held the necklace that Nick had given her. The camp had once backed onto a hardwood forest, but the chainlink wall now glittered between the camp and the trees, and the trees had been bulldozed back in order to clear a lane between the woods and the camp. A pair of deputies, neither in uniform, paced along the back fence of the camp. One of them had a shotgun in the crook of his arm, and the other—he drank Diet Dr. Pepper from a can—had a little black machine gun hanging on a strap from his shoulder. Jason walked slowly toward the fence, glanced left and right as he tried to find the weak spot in the camp’s defenses. Jason figured he wasn’t going to stay here long.
“You don’t go to fence,” someone said. Jason turned, saw an elderly black woman crouched in the shadow of a homemade shelter made out of plastic sheeting. “Only camp committee’s allowed to go to fence. You go to fence, they shoot you.”