*
Jason hadn’t had a good day. Most of it was spent cleaning out a feed store. The roof had fallen in, but a team of grownups had cleaned up some of the wreckage, and propped up the roof so that it was safe to go inside. The Samaritans were employed in hauling out fifty-pound feed sacks, twenty-pound sacks of dog food— Jason hoped he wouldn’t be eating it later— and sacks of useful seeds, which apparently people hoped to plant for food. Most of the Samaritans were older, bigger, and stronger than Jason, and the work was easier for them. Sweat dripped in his eyes and he panted for breath in the humid air. The roof creaked and groaned to aftershocks. By the time lunch break came, all he wanted to do was throw himself to the ground and try to sleep. Mr. Magnusson had to badger him into eating his peanut butter sandwiches.
During the lunch break, three of the other Samaritans asked him if he’d brought a nuclear reactor into camp with him. They pronounced it nu-cu-lar. He always told them yes.
After lunch Jason went back to hauling sacks, but shortly thereafter a call came on Magnusson’s radio, and everyone was loaded into the truck to go somewhere else and harvest fish. Whatever a fish harvest consisted of, Jason thought, it had to be better than hauling feed sacks.
The fish emergency was across the road from Frankland’s camp. When Jason stepped up the earth embankment onto the edge of the catfish pond, he looked at the pond in stunned surprise. There were acres of still water glinting silver in the sun, all divided into smaller ponds by earthen barriers. All of the water was choked with fish, tens of thousands of them.
And all the fish were dead, floating belly-up. They were so closely packed in places they formed shoals.
A number of adults, Jason saw, were gathered around a man who lay on the earthen bank by one of the ponds, next to a large, bright blue machine that looked like an oversized outboard motor. Jason was sufficiently exhausted that he didn’t realize right away that the man was dead.
“Right,” Magnusson said. “We’ve got to harvest all the fish, okay? So we can eat them, okay?” He grinned. “Big fish fry tonight!”
Jason’s head reeled. The fish were dead. He were supposed to eat poisoned fish for dinner?
He raised a hand. “Mr. Magnusson?” he said. “What killed these fish?”
Magnusson looked at him, grinned. “It wasn’t anything that’ll kill us, okay?”
“What was it?” Jason asked.
“Oxygen starvation,” Magnusson said. “They weren’t poisoned, they strangled to death. So we can eat them, okay?” He went on to explain that if the temperature and humidity were right, algae could grow in the catfish ponds. The algae used up all the oxygen, so the fish would die unless they could get oxygen.
Joe Johnson, who owned the ponds, had died attempting to save his fish. The blue object was, in effect, a large blue outboard motor, electrically powered, with a propeller on the end. It was called an aerator, and its propeller acted to thrash air into the water so that the catfish wouldn’t die. When algae began to grow in his catfish ponds, Mr. Johnson had tried to start his aerator, but had electrocuted himself by accident, and his catfish had died before anyone noticed.
Stupid way to get killed, Jason thought through his weariness. But then, he thought, what was the intelligent way to die? Get blown up by your star?
Jason looked from the dead man to the acres of dead fish. “We’re not going to harvest them by hand, are we?”
Magnusson grinned. “Not exactly, no. We’ve got other plans for you.”
In a few minutes a truck arrived, with a crane on its bed. A net was strung from the crane, and a team of men deployed the net along the far side of the pond. Then the crane hauled in the net, brimming with dead catfish, and dropped the fish into the back of one of the pickup trucks that had brought the work crews to the site.
“Right!” Magnusson called, and clapped his hands. “Everyone get on the slime line!”
Jason realized with a certain listless revulsion that he was not expected to rescue the dead fish from the ponds, he was going to have to clean them afterward.
“Ten tons of fish!” Magnusson shouted. “And we’re going to save every pound, glory hallelujah!”
*
“Omar,” Tree Simpson said. His voice crackled over the radio in Omar’s police cruiser. “Omar, I’ve got some information for you. About Morris.”
“Yes?”
“Well, you know, I thought I should maybe get the body X-rayed, to see if there were any bullets in it. But Dr. Patel’s little X-ray machine is out of commission, so what I did— I’m kinda proud of this, actually— was to borrow Joe Roberts’ metal detector. And when I passed it over the head, it started beeping. So I probed into the skull, and I came out with a deformed nine-millimeter round.”
“I took a nine millimeter into custody today,” Omar said. “From one of the rioters.” The gun would test negative, of course, because the pistol that killed Morris was sitting on Omar’s hip, but that didn’t signify. All that meant was that there was more than one armed bad man in the camp: more information with which to terrify the good people of the parish.
“It may be a while before we can send it to the state police to test it.”
“It’ll wait,” Omar said. “Thanks a bunch, Tree. This is real helpful.”
Now he would tell Mrs. Morris that someone from the camp had killed her husband. He would put out a murder warrant for a man already dead, send out a bulletin, and then he would send deputies to everyone who lived around the camp, warning them of armed, murderous refugees. Don’t talk to anyone from the camp, they would say, just call the police and we’ll deal with them.
And then Omar would do what was necessary. He didn’t want to think about it yet, because it would mean the end of everything he had worked for.
But he knew he would face it when the time came.
*
Jason was given a knife and instructions on the filleting of a catfish, a task more difficult than it sounded. The dorsal spine had to be avoided, and the tough skin, which had no scales, had to be peeled off rather than scraped. The easiest way to accomplish this was to nail the fish’s head to a plank, then peel the skin off with a pair of pliers. Jason repeatedly demonstrated his incompetence at this task, so Magnusson reassigned him to another group that gutted the fish before the stronger, more experienced boys peeled them.
Others were getting the big smoker ready to smoke fish on an industrial scale, other fish were being salted, drying racks were being readied, and the kitchens were frying and baking fish as fast as they could be delivered.
Dinner was fried fish served with a ball of rice. For once Jason ate as much as he wanted. He suspected this generosity wouldn’t survive the current emergency, and though the fish half-nauseated him, he made himself eat as much as he could. The work went on after dark, by floodlights strung up on the poles that held the PA speakers. Sister Sheryl’s Apocalypse, the weird artwork with its iridescent, hallucinatory rendition of biblical scenes, glowed in the light of the floods and provided an eerie backdrop to the toiling workers. The Reverend Frankland’s tones boomed from the speakers, either old recorded speeches about the upcoming Apocalypse or genial encouragement to everyone on the slime line.
An exhausted cheer rose from the camp as the last of the fish was cleaned about one in the morning. Jason’s clothes were covered with blood and fish guts. He smelled like offal and his head swam with exhaustion. He’d cut his hands with the filleting knife, and no bandage would stick to him in the slime, so he just bled onto the fish until the wounds closed. He washed in a galvanized horse trough and threw himself onto the first piece of level ground that wasn’t already occupied by a stunned figure.
If boys cried that night, Jason didn’t hear them.
*