*
“Here.” His guide, Martin, handed Nick a blue bandanna. “You’ll be needing this.”
Nick took the bandanna from his team leader’s hand. “What for?” he said.
“Tie it around your mouth and nose. We’re going to be digging out bodies.”
Nick looked at the bandanna for a moment, then felt his stomach turn over as he remembered Helena. He put it in his shirt pocket till it was needed.
Martin had clerked in an auto parts store before the quake had made him “guide” to the Thessalonians— the Second Thessalonians, actually, since the team had been divided into two. Martin was around thirty and white and very blond, with pink skin flaking from sunburn and what looked like a permanent angry red stripe across his nose. He had a wife back in the camp, and four kids. There was a dirty armband on his left arm, a whistle on a chain around his neck, a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, and in the small of his back a holstered semiautomatic pistol of a businesslike aluminum shade.
The pistol, he explained, was for snakes or mad dogs. He and Nick were riding in the back of a pickup truck to the town of Rails Bluff, where they would be scavenging items from the remains of the town. And digging out bodies. Nick wasn’t ready for that.
Whose food is your child eating? Manon’s words rose in his mind. His job was to preserve his family. If he had to do it by watching former porn salesmen humiliated, or by digging dead people out of ruins, then that was what he would do. He would be a good soldier, do his duty, and keep his head down, because he owed it to Arlette.
*
Rails Bluff was a desert of fallen power lines, dusty piles of brick, cracked concrete, shattered glass, torn trees. The pickup pulled up before a largish ruin in what had been the downtown section. A fallen marquee, tumbled letters and broken bulbs, showed that the place had been a theater. Piles of bricks, timber, roofing material, and tools showed that people had been working here.
“The people who weren’t staying at the Reverend’s camp were mostly in here when the second big quake hit,” Martin explained. “The Reverend wants to give them a Christian burial. There might be medical supplies and food in there, too.”
Martin dropped the tailgate and Nick lowered himself out of the truck. Glass crunched under his work boots. The First Thessalonians and some other crews rode in, and Martin and the other guides began to organize things. Nick tied the bandanna over his face, put on the gloves he’d been given, and began his work.
The morning’s breakfast— a largish lump of oatmeal, served with a spoonful of raisins— sat like a stone in Nick’s stomach, at least until some of the First Thessalonians uncovered the first body, and then the oatmeal began to turn cartwheels. The body— an elderly white lady, starting to bloat— was pulled from the ruin, wrapped in plastic, then covered with a sheet. Nick turned away from the scene and concentrated on tossing bricks into a wheelbarrow and keeping his breakfast down. Aftershocks rumbled continually through the earth.
Martin was cheerful and encouraging as he led his crew. During the course of the morning two more bodies were recovered, and precious little else beyond a few blankets and some battered kitchen gear. At noon a truck arrived from the camp, with peanutbutter-and-jelly sandwiches on homemade bread, two for each worker, and a wheel of white cheese off which the men carved chunks with their pocket knives.
“Hey,” one of the Second Thessalonians said, peering into his sandwich. “At least we got jelly today.” He looked at Nick. “Sometimes it’s just peanut butter.”
“I don’t think we’ve met, officially,” Nick said. “I’m Nick.”
“Tex.” Tex had deep black skin and broad shoulders, with grizzled hair under a tall-crowned straw cowboy hat. The two men sat on the tailgate of the pickup— facing away from where the three bodies lay on the broken street— and began to eat their sandwiches.
“I been hoping to ask,” Tex said, “if you heard ’bout what was happening on the outside.”
On the outside. It sounded like the language a man might use in prison.
“I listened to the news on radio until a few days ago,” Nick said. Be cautious, an inner voice warned.
“We could listen to the news on the truck radio,” Tex said, “but Martin won’t let us.” He chewed his sandwich thoughtfully. “Is it true about the nuclear plant that blew up over in Mississippi?”
“They had some problems,” Nick said, “but it wasn’t Chernobyl. A very small amount of radiation released, nothing of any great concern.”
Tex wrinkled his eyes in thought. “You sure it didn’t blow up, and the government covered it up?”
Nick looked at his sandwich. “Earthquake or no earthquake, we still have a free press. There must be a hundred reporters with radiation detectors camped out around that plant. If there were even modest amounts of radiation released, it would have been on the radio twelve hours a day.”
Tex scratched his jaw. “We’ve all been sort of wondering, you know, where the reverend gets his news.”
“There’s been no big nuclear accident,” Nick said. “That’s for sure.”
Tex nodded. “And the poisoned waters?”
“Well,” Nick said, “the quake threw a lot of bad stuff in the water. Jason— my, uh, friend— Jason and I went through a lot of it on our boat, and some of it has to be pretty nasty. The government is evacuating places that get their drinking water from the river, but if you get your water from wells, you should be all right.”
“So we safe here, from the poison.”
“From the poison,” Nick said, “yeah.” He sipped from his cup of water and cleared the peanut butter sticking to the roof of his mouth.
“We can’t listen to the radio?” he asked.
“The reverend collected them all when we came into camp. Cellphones, too, though none of those were working. He said that the noise would upset the children, and it was better if he just told us what was happening.”
Nick looked at Tex cautiously. “What do you think about that?” he said.
Tex chewed thoughtfully. “What I got, see,” he said, “is a farm that got destroyed three nights ago, and a momma who just lost her husband, and four kids who just lost their grand-daddy. And if the man who feeds my family don’t want me to listen to the radio, then I guess I don’t listen to it, and I don’t think much about it, neither.”
Nick nodded. “I understand,” he said.
“Besides,” Tex said, and shrugged his big shoulders, “where is there to go? The roads and bridges are gone. We got poisoned water and floods north and east. South and west we got the piney woods— pines was so close together you could barely get between ’em anyway, and now the quake knocked ’em all down, so it’s nothin’ but a big tangle that people can’t get through. I can’t get through it with my family, that’s for sure.”
Nick nodded. The quake had knocked the middle part of the country back two hundred years. With transportation and communications gone, each little community might as well be an island all to itself.
“Do you know,” Nick asked, “if the reverend, or anyone else, is trying to communicate with the outside?”
Tex just shook his head.
“Hey.” Martin walked around the truck. There was a grin on his face, but a wary determination in his eyes. “Y’all don’t need to talk about this.”
Be cautious, Nick’s inner voice said. “Well,” he answered, “I’m new here. I’m just trying to work out the rules.”
“That’s good.” Martin nodded. “But if you need to know things, you should ask the guides. That’s what we’re here for, to guide you.” He hitched up his belt, and Nick remembered the holstered pistol he wore behind his back.
“I wanted to know if we can call our families outside Rails Bluff,” Nick said.
“No communications,” Martin said. “There’s no way.”
“There’s a radio station,” said a new voice. “If the Reverend Doctor Brother His Holiness Frankland could just be persuaded to use his radio station to call for help, we could have food and fuel and medicine brought in.”
Nick looked at the new man. He was a red-faced, balding man with a large stomach and a loud voice.
“We got all that now, Brother Olson,” Martin said. “People were worried about things like insulin, but it turned out that Reverend Frankland had a whole refrigerator of the stuff. Every time food supplies start to run short, he opens another bunker, and there’s the food. The reverend’s been preparing for this for years.”
“So why are we digging in the ruins for beat-up old cans, if we have so much?” Olson asked. “And why can’t we just send a message, on Brother His Holiness Frankland’s radio station, to let our families outside the area know that we’re okay? I’ve got a sister in Mississippi that must be worried sick about me and my whole family.”
Martin shook his head. “Take that up with Brother Frankland. But if I were you, I’d just give thanks to the Lord that you’re with us, where it’s safe.” He looked at his watch, clapped his hands together. “You guys better finish. We need to start workin’.”
Olson kicked a chunk of brick fifty feet, then stalked away. Nick washed the last of his sandwiches down with water and began clearing rubble. The truck that had brought their lunch left with three bodies in its bed.
A couple hours after lunch Martin blew his whistle. He’d got a call on his walkie-talkie: there was a situation near the camp.
Someone had died. There was an emergency. And now everyone had to catch fish.