“Hey,” he said again, but the cop kept shouting.
“Stay away from my family, motherfucker!” And then another round went off, and Nick felt a breath of air on his face as the pellets whirred past his face.
Click-clack. Nick felt concrete bite his hands as he scrambled out from beneath Viondi’s heavy body. The cop was standing right over him, and the barrel looked the size of a cannon. Nick stared for a long, cold eternity at his own death, an invisible fist closing off the air in his throat, and he saw the cop’s brown finger twitch on the trigger.
Snap. That was all. No explosion. The shotgun had jammed.
“Shit!” the cop screamed, and he banged the butt of the shotgun on the ground. Nick took off. He didn’t know how he got to his feet, how he managed to start running, suddenly he just was, and he was running fast. And when the gun went off again, he just ran faster. He could hear the cop’s screams behind him as he fled into the night.
After a while, he realized he’d run off the road into a field, and that in the dark he couldn’t find his way back.
And then, when he ran into the water, he couldn’t find his way out of it.
Before nightfall Dr. Calhoun drove up to the Church of the End Times in his bus. “Heard your message on the radio,” he told Frankland. “The Rails River bridge is out, and I can’t get all my kids home. And they won’t have homes anyway, because every home out here is wrecked, and so is my church, and so is my trailer.”
“Your people are welcome,” Frankland said.
The bus was full, adults as well as children. Calhoun had been trying to drop off the kids, but instead he’d ended up rescuing their families from wrecked homes.
“I’ve put Sheryl in charge down at the church,” Frankland said. “She’ll find room for your kids to sleep.”
“Thank you, Brother Frankland.”
Calhoun gave the news to his people on the bus. People began pouring out. Frankland recognized some of his own parishioners, adults and children both, and some of Reverend Garb’s black kids, still in their white shirts and slacks. Frankland turned to Calhoun.
“Can you ask some of the men if they’re willing to join some teams I want to send out to find the injured and bring them in? And also to scavenge for food and such? We should get back to the Piggly Wiggly just to get the food before it spoils.”
Calhoun nodded his bald head. “That’s good thinking, Reverend.”
“I knew this would happen. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.” Frankland smiled. “In just seven years, Christ’s kingdom will be established here on earth. And we can help, if we can get things organized fast enough.”
“Well,” Dr. Calhoun said, “as someone who just gave up being a pre-Tribulationist Rapture wimp, let me just say that I’m pleased to offer any assistance that you or the Lord may require.” Frankland smiled down at the shorter man. His heart glowed at the sound of this endorsement.
“Well,” he said, “I’m sure I will be thankful for your assistance.” Larry Hallock gazed out at the flooded remains of the Poinsett Landing Nuclear Station, the broken double hyperboloids of the cooling tower that glowed softly in the night. The soft darkness and bright starlight gave the power station a majestic, almost ancient air, like the ruins of the Coliseum crouching beneath the Roman moon.
Water lapped at Larry’s feet, and Larry wondered if it was still rising. It had kept rising after the earthquake, and finally Larry and everyone else realized that the levees had gone—some distance away, apparently, because the flood, however inexorable, came slowly. It was clear that the plant personnel would have to evacuate.
There was but one place to go. The buildings were unsafe, the roads blocked by fallen timber. The only high ground was the old Indian mound that the archaeologists had insisted remain on the plant site.
It was there that the plant survivors fled. Those who could brought their vehicles, and the old mound now resembled more of a gypsy encampment than a gathering of highly trained engineers and technicians. None of the paramedics in the infirmary had survived the destruction of the administration building. The senior administrators had either been absent during the catastrophe, or died in it. Larry, if anyone, was in charge. He had done his best for the injured, sheltered them from the elements by putting them in a few pickup trucks that had camper shells. He had found some people with Red Cross or Boy Scout training to put in charge of his pathetic infirmary. He had counted heads, and had made a survey of the survivors’ food (none) and water (ditto). He had seen to the digging of a pair of slit trenches to use as latrines.
And he had tried to make contact with the outside world. But nothing worked. Even cellphones were dead. He would have sworn that somebody among all these people would have had a citizens’ band radio, but no one did.
There were a few radio stations that car and truck radios could pick up. Aside from one crazy preacher in Arkansas ranting—barely audible at this distance—about the end of the world, everyone on radio was discussing the earthquake, retelling over and over the few bits of news they seemed to think were certain. Memphis and St. Louis were hard hit, apparently—in flames, the radios said. Roads were out. Electricity was out. Communications were out. Floods, broken levees, fire. Even the Mexican station they picked up was discussing the quake in Spanish.
Larry and his cohorts were stuck on the mound till somebody came to get them. And surely, no matter how comprehensive the disaster seemed, it would be somebody’s job—either at the power company or at the NRC or at one of the contractors—to remember that there was a nuclear power station at Poinsett Landing.
He had done all that he could do. He had ridden that mare in as many circles as she was going to go. There was nothing to do now but worry.
He was capable of worrying on the same level of thoroughness with which he did everything else. He had no reason to think that his wife Helen was anything other than alive and well. The quake had been bad, but their frame house in Vicksburg was sturdy, and Vicksburg was safe from flood on its bluff. There was no reason to think that Helen would not have escaped the quake: she would have known to stand in a doorway, or roll under a table.
The problem was that his imagination was too strong to find this logic in any way reassuring. Extrapolating from the way things had flown around the control room, he was fairly certain that his house would have been full of deadly missiles. He pictured Helen on the phone in the dining room, the sideboard flying at her, all deadly broken glass, crystal, and china. Or the heavy bookshelf in the living room toppling on her as she ran for the front door.
Or the water heater or the furnace—which so far as he knew were not secured to the floor, but just rested there—leaping into the hallway from their closet, spilling hot water and fire… The worry gnawed at him. He needed something to do, so he made the rounds again, making sure his people were as comfortable as the night, the flood, and the insects would permit. The burned man that Larry had met was there, and in agonizing pain. Two worried coworkers were sitting on his arms to keep him from tearing the flesh from his scalp. All they had to give him was Tylenol. Larry couldn’t think of any way to help the man.