Frankland’s mouth went dry. In a movement that seemed to take forever, he reached into the drawer next to his chair and put his fingers securely around the custom grip of his P38 semiautomatic pistol. He eased the wheeled chair back from the control panel, but the wheels crunched over broken glass, and swift, angry reproach flashed through his mind at the sound.
The intruder halted at the sound, then moved down the corridor. Glass and wreckage crunched under his feet. Trying to breath in utter silence, Frankland thumbed back the hammer on the pistol and slowly raised the weapon. The intruder loomed closer. The pistol seemed heavy as sin.
“Reverend?” Hilkiah’s voice. “You in there?”
Frankland let his breath sigh from his throat. His head swam with relief.
“Yes, Hilkiah. I’m here.”
The big man groped uncertainly toward the doorway. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Frankland eased the hammer of the P38. “I’m just fine.”
“Praise the Lord you’re all right! I can’t see a damn—whups, sorry, Brother Frankland—a dang thing in here.”
Frankland put the pistol back in its drawer, rose from his chair, and shuffled through the rubble toward the door.
“Were you in town?” he asked. “What happened there?”
“Town’s wrecked,” he said. “The courthouse and the old Bijoux theater are the only buildings still standing, pretty much. A buncha houses caught on fire. Bet you we’ve got five, six hundred homeless people in this county, probably more.”
The Bijoux was an old opera house from the nineteenth century, later converted to cinema, but abandoned now for years. It had a strong iron frame, and Frankland had once considered buying it for the site of his church.
“God bless it!” Frankland said as he barked his shin on a fallen shelf. “How about my wife? Our kids?” meaning the Family Values picketers in front of Bear State Videoramics.
“A few cuts and bruises, but they’re okay. We were all knocked down when it started, but it was safer in the parking lot than inside the buildings, and we were away from the store fronts and the flying glass.” He gave a chuckle deep in his throat, hugh hugh. “You shoulda seen them cars jump! Like they was trying to fly to the moon!”
“And the Piggly Wiggly? The video store?”
“Roof came down. We had to pull people out. Some busted legs and heads—I didn’t stay to take count, I just helped round up the kids and then Sister Sheryl sent me here to make sure you were okay.” They emerged from darkness into the gloom of the outer office. “Where are the kids now?” Frankland asked. “Did you hear my message?”
“I don’t got no working radio in the pickup, pastor. But Sister Sheryl was going to try to get them back to their families, then come here. And Dr. Calhoun had his bus there, and he was going to take care of the kids that live out of town.”
If the bus doesn’t break down somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Frankland thought. He sighed.
“We’ve got to get ready,” he said. “I’ve told people to come here if they’re in need. We’d better be set for them when they come.”
He opened the metal door, let murky sunlight flood the room. “We need to clean the glass out of the church, so people can sleep there. Hang some plastic sheets on lines inside so the women can have privacy.”
He looked across the road and saw Joe Johnson with a blade on his tractor, trying to shore up his leaking catfish ponds. Those catfish, he thought, they could feed a lot of people.
“Is it time to open the vault?” Hilkiah asked.
Frankland stepped into the parking lot and savored the sulfur in the air. Even though there were a number of vaults, all containing supplies laid under concrete until the End Times, Frankland knew which one Hilkiah was thinking of. “Not yet,” he said. “We don’t want to scare people with all those guns before we have to.”
Jessica rolled up to the headquarters of the Mississippi Valley Division in Pat’s red civilian Jeep Cherokee, with her husband behind the wheel, half her senior military staff either in the back or hanging off the vehicle’s sides, and Sergeant Zook, her driver, sitting on the vehicle’s hood brandishing a Homelite chainsaw.
No one could say she didn’t know how to make an entrance.
It had taken Jessica almost half an hour to get to her head-quarters, normally a three-minute drive. The roads were badly torn, blocked with fallen trees, power poles, and land-slides. The aftershocks that came every few minutes theatened them with further slides and falling trees. Only the Cherokee’s four-wheel-drive made the journey at all possible. Along the way she’d picked up most of her staff, who lived on the same road above the WES, and found Zook, who after the quake had tried to fetch her in her car, but had got bogged down trying to negotiate a landslide.
The headquarters building was still standing, but Jessica suspected that this was going to be about the only good news. She bounded out of the Jeep before it quite pulled to a stop on Arkansas Road, and she headed for the group of soldiers she saw on the grass inside Brazos Circle. She was followed by a wedge of senior officers.
To the poor junior MP lieutenant on duty, it must have looked as if the whole Pentagon was descending on him. All the soldiers were in battle dress, BDUs, and most were wearing helmets, a sensible precaution in an environment where things might fall on their heads at any second. The lieutenant had no good news. “We evacuated the building, General, because it’s damaged and we figured it was dangerous to stay inside,” he said. “Ground lines are down. Power’s out. Most of our communications gear is wrecked, inaccessible, or without power. We got a Hammer Ace radio out of stores, but the batteries were dead, so we’re recharging with the solar recharger…” Jessica looked at the radio. It had a segmented antenna with a metal flower at the end, meant to communicate via satellite. Now useless, until they could recharge the batteries that were sitting in the solar array next to the radio on the lawn.
“How long is that going to take?”
“Quite a while, General.”
Jessica looked at the red Cherokee. “Recharge it with the vehicle engine.”
“Ma’am!” The lieutenant looked happy for an excuse to leave the cluster of senior officers.
“Just a minute, soldier,” Jessica said. “How many personnel do we have on station?”
“You’re looking at most of us, General. Most of our people went home at five o’clock, just before the quake.”
They should know to report back, Jessica hoped.
No communication, no information. No information, no decisions. No decisions, no orders. No orders meant waiting. Jessica was not very good at waiting.
“Have you tried cellphones?” she asked.
The lieutenant looked embarrassed. “Didn’t think to,” he said. “I don’t happen to have one, and I guess nobody else here does, either.”
“Right. Get that battery recharged.” Jessica’s cellphone was clipped to her belt. It was connected to the Iridium network: 66 satellites sent into canted polar orbits in the late nineties by a consortium headed by Motorola. The satellites were supposed to cover every inch of the globe, capable of patching into every active phone network in existence.
The disadvantage was that, if the local cells were down, the phones had to be used out of doors, because buildings would impede the signal to and from the satellite. Jessica considered that the advantage of instant communication with Moscow, say, or Antarctica, outweighed the disadvantage of having a conversation during the occasional rainstorm.