is Top Secret. You are not supposed to know that. You cannot know that! How dare you know that?
Who do you think you are to know that? This is the most secure?'
'I saw the red radiation marking on a package shipped to you some months back. Didn't mean a thing then. But then someone you don't know nothing about ferreted you out, and saw you's receiving correspondence and shipments from Los Alamos and Fort Dietrich. It wasn't hard to put two and two together. But tonight it comes out zero. I'm ending it.'
'Look, you idiot, stop and consider. Yes, what has happened here is monstrous, and I am the monster in charge. But the bigger picture, the only picture that counts, is the war we will fight sooner or later against people who would destroy us. We must stop them. We must. We will fight it in Asia or Africa or South America. And what if we have become so comfortable we lack the will? And what if we can't use atomic bombs?
A biological weapon, untraceable, undetectable until too late, could decimate an enemy force. It could save the lives of hundreds or thousands of American soldiers. That is my humble contribution to our survival. I am building a weapon that will destroy our enemies. I am almost there. And you come along and destroy it in a single night.'
He stood.
'You started out to cure the disease,' said Earl, 'after what it did to your wife and child. Now you're turning it into a weapon. You're killing American men, same as you and me, to test it, and you say it's for commies. But I know soldiers and I know whores and I know it can't be controlled. It'll just go on and on and on.'
Far off came the sound of detonation.
Everything in the lab rattled a little and leaped ever so slightly from its place, including the liver on the plate. The vibration rolled through the room.
'That's the water,' said Earl. He reached into his case.
'What is that?' 'That's the fire,' he said.
'You cannot?'
Earl unscrewed the cap, pulled the cord; this one worked just fine. It sputtered, spraying sparks this way and that, and he tossed it deep into the room.
'Stand clear,' he said. 'It's burning time.'
The doctor did an insane thing. Earl had heard of such a thing in the war, and knew that men were capable of such commitment, or bravery. And it was bravery. Nevertheless, it stunned Earl; it was the last thing he figured on.
The doctor threw himself on the canister, to muffle its destructiveness.
He was atop it when it detonated, and the radiance of the flame blowtorched him alive and swallowed him in incredible destruction. He burned, screamlessly and passively, his body just absorbed in the totality of the fire. He melted like a witch in an old movie.
And in his insane courageousness, he succeeded. The fire simply expended its entire force on him until nothing remained but a smoking carcass.
Earl turned away. He'd seen Japs fried crispy with the flamethrowers and hadn't liked it. This was all that, only concentrated on one figure. He fought a surge of vomit in his throat but then regained control. He had one more bomb left. He removed it, pulled the cord?it worked just fine again, and tossed it. The device ignited, and the room filled with its illumination. Earl now saw in the light that the place was a kind of museum on the theme of atomic-powered Treponema pallidum: along the walls on shelves stood jar after jar, each full with liquid, each with its biological treasure, a harvest of items from inside the body, dense, meaty, placid. Or outside it: several large diseased penises were included.
The fire's heat was explosive. It burned furiously, spewing gobbets of itself about, lighting the room in just seconds.
Earl beat it to the door, and by the time he was outside, the building was gone in fire. section Boss had no taste for battle. When he heard the shots, he knew immediately that one loomed. It so happened that he had drawn duty that night in the dog kennel, a job he hated and felt should be beneath him, given all his responsibility. His job was to beat the dogs with rawhide soaked in Negro sweat, not care for them. But as the firing mounted and mounted and the glow of flames began to light the horizon, he understood how lucky he had been in being way out here, away from the prison's central structures.
The dogs yowled. He didn't care. He just wanted to get the hell out of there.
He took Mabel Louise, of course, his treasure: the Thompson submachine gun. He took a bagful of thirty- round magazines brimful with ammo and all the food he could carry. His damned horse was back at the corral, so he couldn't ride. It was simply a question of following the river upstream, staying calm, and living to live another day.
He stayed close to the riverbank, and came soon to the big levee the engineers had built in '43. It was grassy and broad, and walking it was no difficulty. At the center he halted. There he could see it and… My God!
The whole sky was lit up with flames. Knowing the place as intimately as he did, he could place each blaze to a building and figured in a second that his intuition had been correct: the whole place was going. It was over, razed to the ground, forgotten and flattened to ashes.
Glad I ain't there, he thought.
Turning, he continued his way along the levee, the gun in his hand, the going easy.
But soon levee gave way to riverbank, and the going got tougher.
Sawtooth cut at his legs and boughs whipped his face. The ground here was infirm, a soupy insubstantial margin between earth and water. But onward he went, at a considerably reduced pace.
Sometime toward dawn he heard an explosion. It shook the trees and rattled the leaves. Dust seemed to be torn from the earth by its vibrations, and he realized what had happened: they'd blown the levee and whatever remained of Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) would shortly be gone completely. One thing about them boys: they did the job up right.
But he continued on, now altering his plan. He'd just get far enough out and go to ground for a bit. No sense in trying to fight his way out of this place, and getting torn to shreds.
Then, maybe in a day or so, he'd work his way back. He'd shoot off a couple of clips, dirty his face, and by the time he returned and the state authorities had found out and taken over the site of the disaster, he could represent himself as a weary veteran of the fight who'd stayed at his post 'I'll it was overwhelmed, then heroically fought his way out of there and laid up.
Hell, he guessed there'd be no other damned witnesses. This thing could play out right swell for him.
So it was that he found a dry spot off the riverbank and set himself down for a nice nap in the cool pines, far removed from the violence.
He dreamed of glory and escape and a better life and at some point people were cheering him madly. But then he realized the cheering was in the real world, not the dream one, and he blinked awake to the sound of voices.
He fought his panic as he looked around. He checked his watch. It was nearly 10:00.
The voices seemed to be coming from the river. He snaked his way forward, and then he saw them.
Cowboys.
There were six of them, sixty feet out in the water. They were in the prison launch, which they had commandeered. They were laughing and joshing loudly among themselves, having a fine old time.
Then he recognized that goddamn Bogart.
That one!
Still alive!
Suddenly it made all kinds of sense. Bogart had somehow survived his murder, and as everybody said he was a trickier man than he let on.
Back in the world, he recruited these bandits, and they came back in the dead of night for the dark pleasures of retribution. Now on the stolen prison launch they were escaping, heading upriver.
Section Boss had a machine gun.
He could kill them all. Even if he didn't get them all, he could shoot the shit out of the boat and sink it dead in the water. Then if there were any left alive, he could finish them, or simply vanish before they could get organized and come after him.
He would be a hero. An actual, real-life hero.
