“Stop the shooting!” shouted Frankland.
The crowd was screaming, picking itself up, scattering in flight. To Nick they were just obstacles, slow-moving, stupid things blundering between him and his objective. He moved through them like an Olympic skier charging down the slalom slopes. Nick alone, of all these people, knew where he was going.
“This way! This way!”
Nick ran for the parking lot. Arlette, Manon, and Jason were with him. Manon’s eyes were big as saucers, and she clutched at Arlette, trying to shield her. They leaped a four-foot crevasse rather than queue up for a plank bridge.
The firing, a part of his mind observed, had died away. But the noise level had vastly increased as over a hundred people screamed and shouted and ran like panicked animals for cover. But this was an old field, plowed flat over scores of years and still rutted from the last time it was sowed with cotton, and there was no cover really, nothing but the buildings and a few trees and the dangerous crevasses left by earthquakes. Not enough to shelter everyone.
There were also the vehicles parked by the road. But you couldn’t run away to the parking lot, you had to angle toward the sniper to get there. Nick hadn’t led his group straight to the parked vehicles, he first took them parallel to the highway until there were plenty of cars between him and the sniper, then led them into the shadow of the Reverend Doctor Calhoun’s old bus, then on to a truck parked just beyond.
“You wait here,” Nick said. He pressed Manon and Arlette down behind a big tire. The truck body itself would provide little protection against a high-powered rifle, but the engine block would, and the engine block was behind the front tire.
“Send me my family!” The sniper’s high-pitched voice could barely be heard over the shrieks of the crowd.
“Just stop the shooting!” Frankland begged over wild feedback shrieks.
Nick opened the truck door, checked to see if there were keys in the ignition. There weren’t. He passed a quick hand over the top of the dash, then over the top of the sun shade to see if the driver had stashed his keys there.
No luck. He needed to find another truck.
He herded the others to the next truck, checked there, found nothing. Moved everyone to the next. Frankland and the sniper were shouting at each other, trying to negotiate.
Olson, he remembered. The sniper’s name would be Olson. The loud, red-faced, blustering man. Now his bluster was backed by a large firearm, which elevated the bluster to a new level.
“We’re going?” Manon gasped, realizing at last what Nick intended. “We’re leaving the camp?”
“No better time,” Nick said as he groped for keys.
“That one,” Jason said, pointing to a Ford F-150. “I was in it yesterday.” Nick led the others to the truck Jason indicated, opened the door and saw, gleaming in the ignition, the dangling keys. He turned back to Manon and the others.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m going to start the truck and get it moving. I don’t want you in the truck just yet! You move alongside the truck, okay? Crouch right down! Keep the engine block between you and the shooter. And when I give the word, you just pile in the cab next to me, and keep your heads down. Understand?”
Nick saw a series of nods. He looked in the wide eyes for comprehension and saw it.
Adrenaline flamed through his veins. Nick crawled into the cab of the truck and slid across the bench seat to the driver’s side. He slammed down the clutch so hard that it hit the floorboards with a boom. His hands shook so much that it took him two tries to get a proper grip on the ignition key. He pumped the accelerator, twisted the key.
And the engine started. By God, it started.
Nick blinked sweat out of his eyes as he jammed the shift lever into first and let out the clutch. The truck shuddered and Nick remembered the parking brake— he slammed at it with his hand and the truck leaped forward. Nick juggled accelerator and clutch as he slowed the truck to match it to his family’s pace on foot. He crouched down over the wheel, trying to make a smaller target, and he tried to keep other vehicles between himself and the catfish pond, keep more metal between himself and any bullets.
He ran out of parking lot and cover at the same time. He put in the clutch and let the truck coast to a stop.
“Everyone in!” he said. “Fast now, fast! Heads down!”
Manon and Arlette came scrambling in, Manon on top in an attempt to shelter her daughter with her body. Jason came next, jamming himself in with difficulty next to the others, his task made more difficult by the hard red body of the Astroscan telescope he’d slung over his shoulder.
He had brought the scope with him that morning, Nick remembered, to have Frankland store it. And he’d kept ahold of it through everything.
“Maggie!” Olson’s voice, crying over the battlefield. “Maggie you get out here, you bring Liza and Dickie!”
Nick let out the clutch before his three passengers had quite wedged themselves in, and Jason gave a yell and clutched at the dashboard as the truck leaped forward and threatened to spill him into the bar ditch. The truck swayed as it ran up the shoulder of the road, and Nick flung the wheel over and punched the accelerator to the floor.
His back tensed. Waiting for the bullet.
Nick shifted into second, then into third. Tools and planks in the truck bed boomed as the truck thundered over broken asphalt and a filled-in crevasse. The last of the camp, the unmarried men’s compound, fell behind.
Gears clashed as Nick shifted into fourth. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a demon smile.
The sniper wasn’t gunning for them. They were free.
*
Frankland tried to take a step and stumbled over Hilkiah’s inert body. Another shot boomed. There was the weird whine of a bullet sheathing itself in flesh, but all he could see was trampling feet. He clutched the microphone in his fist. He knew that if he gave up the microphone, he gave up all hope of saving the situation.
“Stop the shooting!” Frankland cried. “Stop!”
Shots chattered out into the air, people firing wildly. The panicked crowd screamed as it scattered over the fields. Choir members sprawled over the ground as the risers on which they were standing were tipped by panicked singers.
Frankland scurried on hands and knees after the crowd, trying to get the solid bulk of his steel-framed church between himself and the sniper.
Some people ran past him, dragging Dr. Calhoun over the bloody grass. Calhoun had been shot, Frankland thought dimly. And a voice in him said, Oh, iniquity!
Another cry, barely audible over the panic, came from the man lying behind the banks of Brother Johnson’s catfish ponds. “Send me my family!”
Olson, Frankland thought. It was Olson out there. Somehow he had not quite realized this till now.
“You’ll get your family!” Frankland shouted into the mike. “Just stop the shooting!”
One of the Armalites ripped off a dozen rounds. “Stop that firing!” Frankland commanded, and the gunshots ceased.
He scurried around the corner of the church. There were thirty people lying there— Frankland saw Sheryl with a pistol in her hand, and Calhoun lying pale, and old Sheriff Gorton standing there with a mild, puzzled look on his face, as if he were trying to work out the daily crossword in the paper.
“Maggie!” Olson called. “Maggie, you come out here!”
Frankland looked out at the terrified crowd stampeding away from the site of the shooting, and he wondered if there was any way he could find Maggie Olson and her children anywhere in that panicked mass.
“Maggie!” Olson’s voice again. “Maggie you get out here, you bring Liza and Dickie!”
Olson squeezed off two shots that rang on the steel sides of the church. Frankland looked over his head and saw two bullet holes.
The church wasn’t cover at all. That high-powered rifle of Olson’s could punch right through it.
“You’ll get your family!” Frankland shouted, “just stop the shooting!”
He had been the target, Frankland thought. If he hadn’t turned his head when he did, to whisper into Hilkiah’s ear, it would have been his own head that exploded under the force of the bullet. And if he hadn’t tripped, he would probably have been gutshot instead of Calhoun.
The Lord had preserved him, he realized. And that meant that the Lord wasn’t done with him yet, that the Lord still featured him in his plans.
Frankland and Olson shouted back and forth for long moments while the crowd dispersed over the camp and beyond. Eventually Maggie Olson and her two children were located and sent forward to her husband. Maggie wept as she dragged herself with slow steps across the asphalt highway toward her husband, and her youngest was hysterical, screaming against his mother’s shoulder as she carried him toward the catfish pond where her husband had fortified himself.
“Now you just leave us alone!” Olson shouted after his family joined him. “You leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone! If you send anyone after us, I’ll shoot him dead.”
Frankland saw no point in replying. He looked at Calhoun lying gasping and pale. Hilkiah’s corpse was barely visible around the corner of the church. The flies were already busy about his brains.
They hath taken my right arm, Frankland thought, but I shall smite them sore with my left.
He had better things to do than wonder if the phrase that just popped into his head was actually from the Bible or not.
There was a rushing sound in Frankland’s ears, like a thousand angels in flight. He picked his way through the prone figures toward Dr. Calhoun, who lay surrounded by the crouched forms of Sheryl, the Reverend Garb, and several others. Calhoun was pale, and his skin was moist. Frankland crouched by him, saw Calhoun’s midsection soaked in red. Someone’s shirt was folded and pressed over the wound to stem the bleeding, but Frankland knew that bleeding was not the greatest danger facing a gutshot man.
Calhoun would die within a few days, and he would die of peritonitis because there wasn’t a doctor in Rails Bluff capable of saving him. Frankland took Calhoun’s hand. “How you doing, Lucius?” he asked.
Calhoun licked his lips. “Praying,” he said. Dust blew from his ginger mustache as he spoke.
“Well,” Frankland said, and touched his colleague’s shoulder, “we’ll get the man that did this.”
Calhoun nodded. “Olson,” he said.
“Yes. Smite him. We’ll smite him.” The sound in Frankland’s ears resolved itself into a band of angels singing a chorus of vengeance.
Calhoun nodded again. His bloody fingers tightened on Frankland’s.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” Frankland said, “and we’ll pray together, if you like. But right now I got a posse to put together.”
Calhoun nodded. “Heaven-o,” he said.
Frankland rose to his feet. His skull filled with the sound of angels crying for vengeance.
An unprovoked attack, Frankland thought. He just fired from ambush, without warning, and blew Brother Hilkiah’s head right off. Frankland couldn’t let Olson get away with that.
Olson and his family had to leave the safety of that catfish pond embankment sooner or later. And when they did, Frankland and his people would follow. Olson would find he wasn’t the only person with a high-powered hunting rifle.
Frankland cocked his head up as he heard the sound of a rattling little motor echoing from across the road. A dirt bike, he thought, or an ATV. That was how Olson was making his getaway.
Olson didn’t even have a proper vehicle. He’d found a gun in a ruin somewhere, and some little Japanese scooter, and that was as far as his luck would go.
Frankland felt his lips turning in up in a grim smile. Spoke the words that the angels sang into his mind.
“Vengeance is mine,” he said.
That was one quote he was sure of.
*
Nick put Arlette and Manon behind some bushes by the roadside near the broken bridge. “You wait till I call,” Nick said. “Jason and I will talk to the guards.”
And maybe kill them, Nick thought, if they don’t do what’s needed. Kill them with my bare hands.
He could do it, he realized. He could do exactly what was necessary. And he found that he was not surprised by this knowledge.
Jason dropped out of the cab to let Manon and Arlette out, then climbed back in. The telescope swung into his lap on its strap.
“Whatever happens,” Nick said, “I need you to back my play.”
Jason licked his lips. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to tell them they’re needed at the camp.” Which, he considered, had the virtue of being true.
He rolled the truck to the top of the bluff near the broken bridge, turned off the engine, set the parking brake. He could see the jetty down below him, boats bobbing in the water.
“Let’s go.”
He made his way down the red-clay path with Jason at his heels. It was still early morning and the Rails River gorge was deep in shadow.
“Hey there,” a man said from the bushes that lined the Rails.
Hey there, Nick thought with sudden scorn. He could imagine what his father would have said if a sentry had ever hailed him with Hey there.
“Hey there,” Nick answered. “Hey. We got some trouble at the camp.”
Two men emerged from where they’d been sitting beneath the bushes. The speaker was a stranger, a grizzled white man maybe fifty years old, but the other was Conroy, the brother who had driven Nick and Jason to the camp on their first day.
“Hey there, Conroy,” Nick said.
Conroy’s unshaven face was uncertain under his baseball cap. “What’s happening at the camp?”
“Reverend needs you back there,” Nick said. “That Olson came back, with a gun.”
Conroy and the guard exchanged glances. Hesitated.
“Better get moving,” Nick said. “There’s a bad situation there.” He heard his father’s voice in his head, tried to echo the commanding tones.
The guards’ eyes snapped to Nick at the sound of command. Then Conroy looked down at the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.
“Can’t call from here,” he said. “Have to go to the top of the bluff.” The two guards looked at each other again. “I suppose we ought to check it out.”
“The keys are in the truck,” Nick said. “The boy and I will look after the boats for you. Hurry!”
Nick watched, heart throbbing, as Conroy and the other man labored to the top of the bluff. Conroy lifted the walkie-talkie to his ear, then Nick saw a shock run through his frame. He and the other guard hustled into the truck, started the engine, and drove off.
Nick turned to Jason. “Fetch Manon and Arlette. I’ll get a boat ready.”
There were a half-dozen or more boats, either tied to the plank jetty or drawn up on land, but only one boat actually possessed a motor. The rest of the outboards had apparently been taken to the camp and put into storage.
The one boat with a motor was Retired and Gone Fishin’, Jason’s battered old bass boat. American Dream, the speedboat Jason had got at the casino, wasn’t even there.
For a moment Nick considered shifting the outboard to another boat. Retired and Gone Fishin’ was small for four people, and there was no canvas top as there had been on American Dream.
But then he thought of the delay. It would take time to shift a heavy motor from one boat to another, along with its fuel. The bass boat, whatever its other disadvantages, would be fast under power. He could probably stay ahead of any pursuit. And the bass boat had built-in storage compartments, and the silent electric motor that could be rigged to the bow.
And then it occurred to Nick to wonder where Olson would go once he got his wife and children free of the camp.
He would come here, Nick realized. Olson would have to get a boat and flee. It was the only way he would escape Frankland’s revenge.
He was probably on his way. Conroy and the other guard wouldn’t be able to stop him: Olson would riddle them before they even got out of the truck.
Nick’s heart lurched in his chest. He turned to Jason, shouted, “Hurry!” and jumped into the bass boat.
The oars that the Beluthahatchie had provided were still there. There were plastic jugs of water in one of the boat’s coolers, but the compartments were empty. The fifty-horse Johnson had two plastic jerricans full of fuel. Nick wondered if he could find more.
He ran from one boat to the next, checking each in turn. Nothing. Then he turned to the bank and was luckier— four more plastic jerricans sat in the shade under the bluff, ready to be placed aboard any boat that was running low. Next to the jerricans were a pair of box lunches intended for the guards’ midday meal, a plastic jug of water, a roll of actual toilet paper, a blanket, and a bright orange plastic sun-shade held in place with rope and tent pegs.
Nick gave a breathless laugh at the sight. He carried the jerricans two at a time to the boat. By the time he finished his second run, Jason and the others had come down the bluff, and they brought the food and other supplies aboard, including the awning.
Nick got everyone on the bass boat, then cast off. The boat drifted gently down the Rails River as he readied the engine, primed the fuel, worked with the clutch and choke, then pressed the self-start.
As the outboard boomed into life, Nick looked at the joy and relief in the eyes of the others. His heart thrilled. It was the most glorious sight he’d seen in his life.
He moved forward into the cockpit and took the wheel. Spun the wheel to correct the boat’s course, pushed the throttle forward.
They were on their way.
“Daddy!” Arlette’s arms came around him from behind. “That was brilliant!”
“Man, Nick,” Jason said. “The way you gave orders, you sounded just like a general.”
Joy sang through Nick. He kissed one of the brown arms that embraced him.
“Next stop,” he said, “civilization.”
The bluff parted before them, opening like a curtain sweeping left and right over the stage, and they coasted into the Delta. The still, brown waters of the Arkansas floodplain were littered with wreckage, and Nick had to keep his speed down. He took comfort in the thought that pursuit couldn’t go any faster. He put Jason on the front deck, with one of the oars, to pole off such of the flotsam as he couldn’t avoid.
Retired and Gone Fishin’ glided slowly and cautiously through perhaps three miles of maimed, flooded forest before catching a glimpse of the main channel of the Arkansas River through the trees.
It was then, just as Nick’s heart was lifting, just as he was about to throw his head back and laugh his triumph to the sky, that he heard the sound of a big outboard booming into life just ahead.
Nick’s pulse thundered louder than the engine. He stood in the cockpit to stare ahead, and despair fell upon his heart like rain as he saw a familiar shape easing out from between the trees. It was American Dream, with its hundred-fifty-horsepower motor that could run down the bass boat without even trying. And inside the boat’s cockpit Nick saw at least three silhouettes.
One of Frankland’s river patrols out looking for refugees, the same sort that had brought them to the camp in the first place.
Plans flailed through his mind. He didn’t think, in this instance, the “Brother Frankland sent me to tell you to come back to the camp” ploy was likely to work.
“Oh, hell,” Jason murmured. “It’s Magnusson.”
“The porno guy?” Nick said. He cut power as the other boat approached. Fleeing at top speed was a futile idea, and therefore reserved for the moment when everything else had failed. The other boat throttled back, then reversed briefly to check its momentum.
“Heaven-o there, Adams,” Magnusson said. “What’s going on?”
“There’s shooting in the camp,” Nick called out. “A war almost. Olson came back with friends and guns. Hilkiah was shot dead in front of the whole camp, and so was the Reverend Calhoun.”
The others looked at each other in surprise. Whatever they’d been expecting to hear, this clearly wasn’t it.
“So what are you-all doing?” Magnusson said.
Nick stood straight, squared his shoulders. You are telling them, he informed himself, you aren’t asking their permission.
“We’re getting to safety,” Nick said. “We’re not armed, and there’s nothing we can do. If you’ve got weapons, you should go back to the camp and help restore order. But otherwise I advise you to stay away.”
The other two men seemed uncertain, but Magnusson returned an answer quickly.
“I don’t think you’re thinking very clearly, sir,” he said. “There’s no safety on the river. It’s dangerous, and that’s why we’re supposed to bring in anyone we find here.”
“There isn’t any warfare on the river,” Nick said. “It’s a lot safer than the camp.” He nodded as calmly as he could at Magnusson, but he felt helplessness drain the strength from his knees, and he leaned slightly against the side of the cockpit in order to support himself.
A momentary aftershock shivered the tops of the trees. Twigs and leaves rained down on the water.
“Sir,” Magnusson said, “I can’t let you out on that river, okay? Not with your family. It’s too dangerous.”
“People are dying at the camp,” Nick insisted. “You don’t believe me, you call them. You have a radio, don’t you?”
“It don’t work this far out,” one of the other men said. “Trees and water just eat up the signal, I guess.”
“I think you should come back with us, okay?” Magnusson said. “We’ll check out the situation, make certain that things are safe before we bring you into the camp.”
So here it was. Nick drew himself up, tried to summon his father’s authority.
“No,” he said. “No. We’re not going back.”
“I can’t permit you to leave, mister,” Magnusson said.
Nick narrowed his eyes. Looked at the pistol holstered on Magnusson’ hip. “What are your orders exactly?” he asked. “You supposed to shoot us or what? And what exactly gives you the authority to do that?”
And the question, Nick thought, was, Would they? Would they actually open fire?
The other two, Nick thought, probably wouldn’t. They seemed intimidated by the situation. He couldn’t see either of them raising a weapon against someone who wasn’t trying to harm them. They would look for excuses not to.
Magnusson, though, was more problematic. Magnusson was the strong-willed one, the one with the white armband that marked him as a leader. The one who wailed in front of a hundred and fifty people about the evil pornography he had sold, and how Frankland had helped him see the light.
“You’re coming back with us, okay?” Magnusson said.
“Calhoun is dead.” Nick barked out the words like his father dressing down a recruit. “Hilkiah’s dead. Other people died with them. And Reverend Frankland’s dream is dead! There’s nothing to go back to.”
Fury blazed in Magnusson’s eyes. “That’s not true!” he snapped. One hand touched the butt of his pistol. “You’re coming back!”
Nick’s heart sank. He’d played it wrong. General Ruford had given too many orders. If Nick had stayed sweet and reasonable, he might have been able to talk his way out of this.
Now it was hopeless. General Ruford had failed, and it was up to Nick to make up for the general’s failure. The only thing for Nick to do was to try to talk his way onto the other boat, then knock Magnusson down and get a gun, hold them all off at gunpoint or go down blazing ...
Hopeless, but it was the only thing he could think to do.