American War(20)

The driver squinted, looking ahead at the town from the peak of the highway turnoff. “Christ,” he said. “I can see them already, crawling all over one another like rats.”

The bus stopped near the doors of a proud brown-brick church. A human swarm blanketed the courtyard: women and their children huddled around sacks and suitcases, men hobbled by age or amputation slumped in their wheelchairs. Volunteers tended to them with cling-wrapped sandwiches and fruit juice cups. Some of the volunteers were priests, clad in their clerical blacks, but all wore white vests on which were stamped, large and readily visible, the symbol of the Red Crescent.

Seeing the bus, the crowd began to fidget. A few volunteers held them at bay behind the black iron gate that marked the church grounds. A priest emerged from the horde and came to the bus. The driver opened the door.

“?’Afternoon, Father,” the driver said. “You look set to be trampled by your own flock, don’t you?”

“They shelled Hazel Green Saturday night,” the priest said. “God knows who they were after, but it sent the whole town running. You got ninety for me, right?”

“Eighty-five.”

The priest looked at a manifest attached to a clipboard in his hand. “Says here ninety. I already told them ninety would get to leave.”

“Don’t worry, Father. I bet by now these folks are used to being told all kinds of things that turn out not to be true. Eighty-five, no more.”

The priest rubbed his temple. “Fine, wait, just wait a while. And keep the doors closed; when I tell them they might come for your throat.”

“Whatever you say, Father.”

The priest returned to address part of the crowd in the courtyard, and soon the murmur in the crowd rose, and the priest was shouted down from all directions. Martina listened through a sliver of open window.

“It’s my turn, you said it yesterday,” a woman said. “You swore it.”

“I have no say in the matter,” the priest replied.

“The hell you don’t,” a man leaning on crutches said.

“You know I don’t.”

“Then show us who does have a say. You give us that man to talk to.”

“There is no one man, and you know it,” the priest said. “There’s just the war. The war has say. And the war says five of you have to wait another night.”

The priest huddled with the other volunteers to decide which five would stay. Preemptively, people in the crowd began yelling reasons why they should not be made to wait one more day. They shouted of their ailments, of festering wounds that required urgent care; they shouted the number of their dead and the names of their children. The priest and his advisers looked at the manifest and crossed and uncrossed and crossed the names again.

“Goddamn Anglicans,” the bus driver said. “Never could make up their minds.”

Finally it was agreed that four men and one teenage boy would remain at the church. The other eighty-five refugees, all but two of them women and children, were made to form a line that snaked back and forth from the courtyard to the sidewalk. The bus driver opened the door and, one by one, they boarded.

It was a sullen, dead-eyed procession. The women filled the seats with mechanical indifference, their children ahead of them, their belongings stuffed in backpacks or suitcases or laundry baskets. They wore track pants and T-shirts and tank tops soiled with food stains and emblazoned with the names and logos of restaurants and hotels and companies that no longer existed. More than a few of the women wore the same cheap polyester T-shirts. On the front of these shirts was drawn the undulating flag of the Free Southern State: three hollow black stars, aligned horizontally, upon a white horizontal bar. The white split evenly an otherwise red background. On the back, the shirts were stamped in bold font with the date October 1, 2074—Southern Independence Day.

Martina shifted close to her children, protecting her corner of the bench. Slowly the bus filled to capacity with its human cargo. The bodies brought with them their warmth; the air within the bus began to turn stale and humid with the pickled acidity of sweat and unbathed skin. Three women filled the rest of the available space on the back bench, their children and belongings piled high upon their laps. One woman, who looked to be in her late twenties and dragged behind her a boy not much younger than Simon, approached Martina.

“You’re taking up too much room,” she said, pointing at the Chestnuts’ belongings. “Get rid of all that shit.”

“We’re taking up as much room as anyone else,” Martina replied.

The woman looked with contempt at the statue of the Virgin, which rested on the bench next to Sarat. “They’re keeping my husband another day in that hellhole so you can bring a goddamn statue with you? That ain’t fair.”

“I didn’t know it’d be like this.”

“I don’t give a shit what you know. Throw it out.”

A woman occupying the seat next to the old man from Blind River turned around. “Just sit down, Lara,” she said. “Stop pestering the poor woman.”

“Shut up, Holly. You ain’t in charge of nothing.”

At the front of the bus, the rebel guard stood. “Shut your mouth and sit down,” he said.

“It ain’t fair, it ain’t fair!” Lara replied. “Why’d they get to bring every damn thing they own when my husband doesn’t even get the seat he was promised?”