TWENTY-EIGHT
Tuesday 17th— I never before thought the passion of fear so strong as I find it here among the people. It is really diverting, or would be so, to a disinterested observer, to see the rueful faces of the different persons that present themselves at my tent— some so agitated that they cannot speak— others cannot hold their tongues— some cannot sit still, but must be in constant motion, while others cannot walk. Several men, I am informed, on the night of the first shock deserted their families, and have not been heard of since. Encampments are formed of those that remain in the open fields, of 50 and 100 persons in each.
Extract from a letter to a gentleman in Lexington,
from his friend at New Madrid, dated 16th December, 1811
The day after the fish cleaning was devoted to cleaning up. Nick shoveled offal into trucks, to be carried off and used as fertilizer on the food crops that Frankland’s people had planted, after which Nick was then carried off with the rest of the Thessalonians to the Rails River for a bath. He was given soap, but it was intended more to clean his clothing than himself. Feeling like a Stone Age villager, he cleaned and pounded his clothes with a stick, then laid them out on grass to dry in the sun. Then he and the others washed the truck, after which Nick returned to the river to wash off the sweat.
The smell of dead fish still clogged his nostrils. He felt as if he’d never get rid of it. After riding back to the camp, the Second Thessalonians were given the rest of the day off.
Nick went in search of his family. The cooks had been up most of the night and hadn’t been excused their duties for the daytime, so he found Manon in one of the cook tents, wearily frying fish in a skillet. Stock pots full of fish bones bubbled on all sides.
“Well,” she said, “at least we’ll have plenty of catfish to eat.” She looked up at Nick and lowered her voice. “I overheard some of them yesterday morning. Before the big fish kill, they were thinking of cutting way back on our calories. Except for nursing mothers, down to fifteen hundred a day. That’s over the line into slow starvation.”
“And now?”
“Now we’re okay. But it’s catfish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
I’ve got to get my family out of here, Nick thought. He didn’t like what he was hearing about the place from people like Tex and Olson, and he especially didn’t like what he was hearing from Martin, his so-called guide.
There were too many guns in this camp, and too little sense.
*
“The problem with massacres,” Knox said next morning, “is that they always have survivors. Always. Even if you set up machine guns outside and start mowing people down, some people will escape. It doesn’t stand to reason they should, but they always do. Somebody’s going to get away. Look at history.”
Something twisted inside Omar’s gut. He put a hand to his stomach, grimaced. He needed more Akla-Seltzer, he thought.
“What you’re telling me,” he said, “is that it’s hopeless.”
“No, not at all. You can’t kill large numbers of Mud People all at once, that’s all I’m saying.” Knox flashed his jittery grin. “You have to sneak up on ’em. Just clip ’em in small groups, and with as much cooperation from the victims as possible.”
They stood on the highway within sight of the A.M.E. camp. Omar had set up a roadblock here, and another farther down the highway. Any traffic between the two would move only under escort from Omar’s special deputies.
Not that there was much traffic on the road to worry about. With the highway washed out to the north, there was no reason for anyone to travel in this area unless they were one of the half-dozen or so families that lived between here and the Floodway; and their movement was restricted, because there was so very little fuel remaining in the district, and any additional gasoline had to come in by helicopter.
The roadblocks were Knox’s idea. He remembered something the Germans had done during the Holocaust. There was a Jewish ghetto in some big city, Warsaw or Prague or someplace, and an important tram line ran through the ghetto. The Germans couldn’t shut down the tram, because people needed it to get to their jobs, so they just painted the tram windows so people couldn’t see out, and made sure that soldiers were on board the trams to keep people from looking.
What the people couldn’t see couldn’t bother them.
Omar’s roadblocks operated on the same principle. People would pass the camp only when he wanted them to. He couldn’t paint over the windows of their vehicles, but he could keep them moving down the highway, under escort, at a brisk enough clip to keep them from seeing much.
“You’ve got to control the information,” Knox had said. “Whatever story gets out, it’s got to be your story.”
Omar’s story was that the camp was full of dangerous, armed felons. Camp inmates had shot a little girl and killed a local preacher who was only trying to help them. The killer of the preacher was still at large somewhere in the parish. People who got away weren’t refugees, they were escapees, or possibly even murderers. And for the good of the parish, these people had to be corralled by armed force.
That was Omar’s story. And so far, no one had heard any other.
A sudden pain clamped down on Omar’s midsection. He winced, put a hand to his stomach.
“You okay, Omar?” Knox asked.
“It’s the heat,” Omar said.
“Hey, it’s only morning! That air-conditioning’s made you soft.”
“I guess.”
Knox looked at the camp again. “The question is, who’s going to be the most trouble,” Knox said. “It’ll be the young, healthy, unmarried men.” He grinned wolvishly. “Like me,” he said. ”I’ve always been trouble. So what you do, see, is you separate the young men from the rest.”
“How?”
“Put them out on a work detail. And then when they don’t come back, you just tell everyone that they’re staying on site.”
“It’s pretty boring in that camp,” Omar said. “Bet we’d get plenty of volunteers.”
“You make sure none of your volunteers have family in the camp, and they won’t be missed.”
“Tell them we’re building another camp,” Omar said. “For single men.”
“That’s good,” Knox approved, “that’s good!”
And send them, Omar thought, where the woodbine twineth.
He would use Knox and the other Crusaders for that. Afterward Knox and his people could disappear. Either wherever they came from, or— if Omar needed a scapegoat— they would be found dead, killed in a gunfight with the last of the camp inmates.
And David would be safe. Safe. Which was the only thing that really mattered.