TWO HOURS LATER, the bus reached the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Here a drab, prefabricated building stood at the center of a network of guard posts and concrete chicanes. All vehicles were slowly ushered through this bottleneck. A smattering of armed guards—some of them Louisiana Reservists, others bearing the red, three-starred insignia of the Free Southern State—milled about on either side of the border.
The bus slowed to a crawl as it slalomed between the chicanes. A white minivan made the same journey a few feet ahead. The minivan’s roof was marked up with lines of black electrical tape that spelled out the word PRESS. At every third chicane the path straightened for a few feet and the vehicles crossed a set of tire shredders aligned northward. An FSS soldier looked on from a nearby guard tower, indifferent.
The bus idled, waiting on the guards to inspect the minivan ahead in line. The soldiers ushered a group of four men out of the vehicle and then stepped inside. Two of the soldiers began removing equipment from the back of the minivan—cameras, tripods, satellite phones, bright green flak vests, and helmets. A third guard stood nearby, inspecting a few sheets of paper given to him by one of the minivan’s occupants. He flipped through the pages with no discernible interest in their contents or the various notarized seals upon them. Occasionally the man who’d handed the papers over tried to interject, but was told to keep quiet. More soldiers began to congregate around the minivan, gawking at the equipment now strewn on the ground. Eventually the soldier reading the papers folded them up and placed them in his pocket and ordered the vehicle, its passengers, and contents moved to a small building off to the side of the road. The passengers protested, but to no avail.
Another soldier waved the bus forward. The driver inched closer until he was ordered to stop. The driver opened the door and the soldier came inside.
“Good morning, sir,” the driver said. “Just making the run up to Patience. Gonna stay north till Grenada then cut northeast to the border towns. Got my permit from Atlanta right here…”
The soldier ignored the driver. He nodded in the direction of the rebel fighter.
The soldier inspected the bus and its five occupants. He was just as spindly as the fighters Martina had seen in Eliza Polk’s house. His red Mag uniform, with its gaudy overabundance of copper buttons and stars, hung loosely on his frame. He wore a box military cap with a flat visor that shadowed his eyes. He looked like a child.
“Ain’t supposed to bring any in from the Purple country,” he said.
“They’re the only ones, sir,” the driver said, fumbling through his stack of permits. “Just a couple folks displaced by the fighting out near the Texas border. We got an approval order right here from the Mag rep in Baton Rouge, if you’ll take a look…”
The rebel fighter motioned for the driver to stop talking.
“It’s all right,” he told the soldier. “They’re Red.”
The soldier nodded. He took the permits from the driver and walked out of the bus. “Go on,” he said.
The driver closed the door and the bus crawled forward toward the gatepost. One of the soldiers untied the post from its moor. The concrete counterweight at the other end dipped and the gatepost opened. The bus passed into the clearing and for a moment it transited through the silent gray suture between two worlds.
Soon they were on the other side. Martina saw out the west-facing windows the mass of refugees packed against the southbound crossing, held back by a small army of Louisiana Reservists. The bus moved forward, gaining speed, and soon the border crossing disappeared.
“Welcome to the Mag,” the driver said to his passengers. “The last real set of balls in the whole of God’s green earth.”
THEY MOVED NORTHWARD. Sarat looked out the window. The water that inundated so much of southern Louisiana was gone, but in other ways the land looked the same. The fields they passed were empty and browning, the trees limp and bare. Curls of blown-out tires littered the ditches by the side of the road.
But there were different sights too, things she’d never seen before—craters ten feet in diameter splitting the highway open, covered over in places with haste: sometimes with concrete, other times with crude wheel bridges made of wood and steel planks. An old, fossil-powered muscle car screamed past the bus, its hood decorated with a stylized rattlesnake.
There were strange billboards on the side of the road. They bore images of destruction and carnage: city blocks reduced to rubble; the dust-lacquered corpses of children; soldiers from the Free Southern State assisting the destitute families who lived in the border towns. Affixed to all these images were no words except: Nehemiah 4:14.
Near Jackson, the driver steered the bus eastward. Soon they were in Alabama, and once again headed north. When they reached Huntsville, not far from Alabama’s wartime border with the Blues, the driver slowed and turned into town.
“This the North, Mama?” Sarat asked.
“Not yet, baby,” her mother replied. “Soon.”
The driver squinted, looking ahead at the town from the peak of the highway turnoff. “Christ,” he said. “I can see them already, crawling all over one another like rats.”
The bus stopped near the doors of a proud brown-brick church. A human swarm blanketed the courtyard: women and their children huddled around sacks and suitcases, men hobbled by age or amputation slumped in their wheelchairs. Volunteers tended to them with cling-wrapped sandwiches and fruit juice cups. Some of the volunteers were priests, clad in their clerical blacks, but all wore white vests on which were stamped, large and readily visible, the symbol of the Red Crescent.
Seeing the bus, the crowd began to fidget. A few volunteers held them at bay behind the black iron gate that marked the church grounds. A priest emerged from the horde and came to the bus. The driver opened the door.
“?’Afternoon, Father,” the driver said. “You look set to be trampled by your own flock, don’t you?”
“They shelled Hazel Green Saturday night,” the priest said. “God knows who they were after, but it sent the whole town running. You got ninety for me, right?”
“Eighty-five.”
The priest looked at a manifest attached to a clipboard in his hand. “Says here ninety. I already told them ninety would get to leave.”
“Don’t worry, Father. I bet by now these folks are used to being told all kinds of things that turn out not to be true. Eighty-five, no more.”
The priest rubbed his temple. “Fine, wait, just wait a while. And keep the doors closed; when I tell them they might come for your throat.”
“Whatever you say, Father.”
The priest returned to address part of the crowd in the courtyard, and soon the murmur in the crowd rose, and the priest was shouted down from all directions. Martina listened through a sliver of open window.
“It’s my turn, you said it yesterday,” a woman said. “You swore it.”
“I have no say in the matter,” the priest replied.
“The hell you don’t,” a man leaning on crutches said.
“You know I don’t.”
“Then show us who does have a say. You give us that man to talk to.”
“There is no one man, and you know it,” the priest said. “There’s just the war. The war has say. And the war says five of you have to wait another night.”
The priest huddled with the other volunteers to decide which five would stay. Preemptively, people in the crowd began yelling reasons why they should not be made to wait one more day. They shouted of their ailments, of festering wounds that required urgent care; they shouted the number of their dead and the names of their children. The priest and his advisers looked at the manifest and crossed and uncrossed and crossed the names again.