Mormon woman's supposed to have, and I won't burden you with
'Maybe I shouldn't be asking you—'
'Ask away, whatthehell,' she said as if sealing some internal bargain.
'Why do they raid other people? I thought Mormons had food and stuff all socked away.'
She silenced the labeler, fixed him with a firm gaze. 'They do. I repeat, these guerrillas aren't true Mormons. Of course they take terrible chances driving like maniacs through fallout, and some of them will be sorry. Some of them are just banditti, out for loot, but some honestly think they're bringing the gospel. The cars they steal, the churches they burn, are all part of their saintly splinter-group zeal to stamp out heretics. And there are in- betweeners who aren't above collecting some riches on the way to Heaven. Reminds me a little of the devout conquistadors of the Sixteenth Century.'
As the labeler began ticking away again, Quantrill put some other labels — political labels from newscasts — together. 'Let me guess; a heretic is anybody who doesn't wear a Collier button.'
''Pull through with Collier',' she quoted the campaign slogan. 'Collier's a good man, for my money; he publicly disavows the cults, but they may intimidate a lot of people from the polls. You can't expect police to control them all. I'm inclined to think Governor Street is fighting an uphill battle, even here in his own home state.'
The ex-Governor of Texas was also an ex-Major General, whose current position as Undersecretary of State bolstered his.claim as potential commander-in-chief of a besieged country. But fairly or not, James Street was saddled and hagridden by blame for a war which had come while his party was in power.
'At least all the networks seem to like Street,' Quantrill said.
'Of course they do; they don't like censorship, and an LDS Apostle in White House Central will lean in that direction.'
'Who needs holovision? Seems to me if you read the Book of Mormon, you know what's gonna happen anyway.' She smiled at what she imagined was a joke. He read her expression, then pulled a thin faxed pamphlet no bigger than a wallet card from his pocket. She glanced at its cover. “Urn. The Church of God In Revealed Context, eh? Yes, they're one of the biggest splinters in the backside of the LDS. Not as violent as some.'
'Just tell me if that's really from the Book of Mormon, Palma. The centerfold. Read it,' he urged.
Wherefore it is an abridgement of the record of the people of Nephi: 1 Nephi, 17.
He raiseth up a righteous nation, and destroyeth the nations of the wicked. And he did straiten them in the wilderness with his rod; for they hardened their hearts, even as ye have; and the Lord straitened them because of their iniquity. He sent fiery flying serpents among them; the day must surely come that they must be destroyed, save a few only, who shall be led away into captivity. Ye have seen an angel, and he spake unto you; yea, ye have heard his voice from time to time; and he hath spoken unto you in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling, that ye could not feel his words; wherefore, he has spoken unto you like unto the voice of thunder, which did cause the earth to shake as if it were to divide asunder. For God had commanded me that I should build a ship.
'It's disjunct, as I recall,' said Palma. 'Junk, hell. Destroying nations with fiery flying serpents is a pretty close description, I'd say. The only thing that doesn't follow is that explanation where they tell you the ship is a ship of state. No kidding, Palma; is it, or isn't it,—'
'DISJUNCT,' she said loudly to silence him, 'means separated; disjointed. I don't remember the whole Book of Nephi, but I do know the special wackiness of the Church of God In Revealed Context. They do numerology mumbo-jumbo, like numbering phrases and reading off those that are prime numbers, or something equally arbitrary. And sometimes they come up with passages that fit when they were never intended to. This particular cult doesn't invent any new text — I think. They just combine pieces of what's already there — usually in order, but that piece about building a ship might be pages away.'
He mulled this over. 'I guess it'd be easy to check.'
'Yes, but few gentiles do — and Revealed Contexters play strictly by their own rules, so even if their compressed text doesn't match the original, they can claim it's all
Again, Quantrill was silent for a time. Then, 'You think these religious nuts would hurt a little kid?'
She thought of the Church of the Blood of the Lamb, a full generation before; of true believers who would shotgun their kin in a quarrel over dogma. 'No, Ted; certainly not a little girl who won't cast a vote for years to come.' She met his glance and his smile, and wondered if she were right. There seemed little doubt that somehow, the Granges had met with one of the zealot gangs.
A week later — with all the delays from precincts where ballots were hand-counted, it was on Wednesday afternoon, 6 November, — President-elect Yale Collier delivered his victory speech. Cathy Palma listened morosely, though she had voted for the man. She was more concerned about QuantriU's defection; hadn't known of his delta pass until too late to stop him.
And what could she have done to stop him? The captain of the delta
Marcos. With either destination, Quantrill's intent seemed clear. Perversely, Palma hoped the kid would break a leg en route to enlist. He was diving headlong, she thought, into the meat grinder that had devoured his family, his friends, his future. To Palma it seemed a popular form of suicide.
For the dozenth time, she-unfolded the page she'd crumpled after reading it. She had found it, in Quantrill's hasty scrawl, on his bunk atop a neatly folded yellow delta coverall. Palma's heart would have leapt if the yellow flight suit had been missing, for then she might have expected to see him again.
Palma did not expect to see him again. '
No, she thought, staring sightlessly at the page. They wouldn't argue; first because he was probably right.
And second because he would very probably be dead in sixty days.
PART II: GUNSELS
Chapter Forty-Eight
The winter of 1996-7 was a relatively mild one, but a killer nonetheless. In Syracuse and Worcester, without natural gas, neighbors fought over ownership of trees they should have stacked as cord wood months before. In Roanoke and Knoxville, paranthrax crippled essential services until the cities, gasping in their own filth, welcomed December's refrigeration. The rat population leaped, and typhus was not far behind.
On the central Siberian plateau millions died of simple starvation, with the removal of countless trainloads of Evenk beef and Yakut wheat to storage near the Black Sea. The aboriginal Evenk and Yakut people fared well enough on the land by returning to their old ways; but city-dwelling Russians in Mirnyy and Tura starved. The RUS needed rations for the armies that were moving south from Archangelsk to vast training areas in the southern Ukraine. Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria had declined the honor of hosting the Allied troops, and the RUS could not persuade where once the USSR had commanded.
The RUS did not quarter American troops in the south out of kindness. They did it because advanced training of entire armies could be carried out more or less secretly there. And because thirty divisions of Americans wintering in the Urals would have died like thirty divisions of ants on an ice floe. North of the fiftieth parallel in a
