'I pride myself on having a good wit.'
John Lourdes pointed to the lagoon. 'Do you think you could part the red sea for us?'
WITH RIFLE IN hand Rawbone loped ahead of the truck. Water spilled out through the slow-turning wheel wells and John Lourdes kept watch from the cab. Every time the truck sank or the tires spun he sweated out the moments till the reflection of the rig on what looked to be a pan of liquid fire rolled on.
Rawbone swung about and looked back. The advancing riders were no longer dust but men trampling down upon the phalanx of their shadows stretching out across the earth.
This was to be the hour. They swung the truck up onto an island of red clay in the heart of the lagoon. They plotted their defense. They protected the tires with crates. They rolled two drums of gasoline out from the truck until they were almost submerged. They knifed holes through the metal casings large enough to wedge in sticks of dynamite. They set the charges and ran the wire along the surface of the water to the detonator behind the truck. They would have the sun at their backs, and if they could survive to see nightfall they might yet steal away with their lives.
The oncoming battery of guards reached the edge of the lagoon. Doctor Stallings had one group under his command, Jack B the other. Stallings focused his binoculars. The truck sat sideways on a shell of ground. The words AMERICAN PARTHENON were streaked wet with red cake kicked up from the wheels, and imprinted like a coat of arms upon the water before it.
Doctor Stallings issued orders. The two wings of the assault started forward at a slow walk, the attackers feeling their way until that slow walk became an easy trot and Doctor Stallings lifted his arm and there was a volley of gunfire from their ranks followed by a storm of flares.
The shells exploded against the truck, above it, in the water before it. The air burned and stank, the sky discolored. John Lourdes huddled with the detonator, Rawbone in the truckbed with his face against the .50 caliber barrel. The riders veered to the flanks of the truck, closing, firing; another assault of flares followed. That small island now under a hellish rocket siege. Bursts of red glare, tracers spiraling off wildly on into the lagoon, sparks falling from the sky like smoking confetti.
Upon that barren plain futures met in a blinding instant. The shining sea around the truck erupted in a volcanic heaven of men and mounts and red rain. Horsemen consumed in flames like something out of an apocalyptic nightmare reached the island in the last moments of their existence with weapons extended from scorched arms. The second charge blew, and death's mouth opened with a force that consumed them all. The red rain fell. It fell through blazing streamers of fire and it fell through banks of black smoke rising in the windless air.
From amongst the carnage and the dead one man rose like an apparition without a shadow or a name. He stepped over an arm with its inked flag floating lifelessly, and alone he walked amongst the remnants of men and mounts scattered across the shallows and up onto that island of red clay where the truck still stood. There, beneath the words AMERICAN PARTHENON, lay John Lourdes.
THIRTY-SIX
HE FATHER STAGGERED past a fallen mount and came to his knees over the son. There was a bloody eyelet through the vest just below the ribs on the heart side, and also a matching hole in the back. But John Lourdes's eyes were open and he was breathing.
'Has it gone clear through?' came the halting voice.
'It has, Mr. Lourdes.' Rawbone looked past the dead around him and the desolation beyond ... survival, that's what he was searching for. 'We've got to make clock, Mr. Lourdes.'
He hastened to the truck. His being tightened as he kicked over the engine, unsure it would go. It started like a charm. He shifted gears and it went forward sluggardly.
'Mr. Lourdes ... hear that ... Parthenon here is gonna carry you home.'
THE TRUCK CLIMBED the first altar of hills and shouldered along the skyline with a falling sun far to their west. Before them a world as it was at the time of creation.
John Lourdes lay on the cab seat facing a hard run of two days with barely enough water for the truck. Rawbone drove through the night with lanterns hung from the cab stanchions to light the way. He drove through dust that scored his eyes, and heat that dried them to the bone.
He watched the son weaken and yet refuse to drink. If there wasn't enough for one, there wasn't enough for the other. The father cursed him furiously, and John Lourdes answered, 'We'll make it, or we won't.'
They labored hugely over swells of white pumice and through unreckonable granite canyons. John Lourdes's words came back to the
