Cries of “Bomb!” and “Fire!” rose up all around Georgette. The Carbon Division was emptying behind her as she ran, which was a great relief, but the people in the main part of the plant were in danger, too. She continued to scream her warning as she ran to them beneath tremendous boats and airplanes, partially assembled, one after another after another. The war machines loomed over her head, incomplete, like whales and condors ravaged by scavengers.
She’d seen the box that Justine opened and she’d seen Martin moving boxes all week. Maybe longer. He could have put bombs anywhere. Everywhere.
Throngs of people were leaving the plant. Georgette rejoiced for every one of them, but she couldn’t go with them. She had two things to do.
***
Justine’s pelvis and elbows and skull banged against the concrete as Martin dragged her down the ramp with one hand, using the other one to press a gun to her belly. She could see Charles and Jerry, quite near now.
Their guns were drawn, and Charles was yelling, “Let her go, Martin. This is between us.”
Her body was rigid with fear, which was helpful in a way, since her stiff fingers were managing to hang on to the wrench and to the pocketknife concealed in her palm, but her mind had never felt quicker. Her thoughts were sharp. They cut through everything and found inarguable facts. Using those facts as building blocks, they made intuitive leaps that couldn’t feel more true.
The guns that Charles and Jerry were training on Martin gave her one fact she could trust. Until she saw them take him on, she couldn’t be sure that they weren’t all three working together. Clearly, they were not.
What else had she learned? She had already known that Charles spoke German. Now she was certain that Martin did, too. Were they both German spies who were somehow in conflict? Maybe, but the better scenario for Justine was that Jerry and Charles were American spies embedded among Higgins’s employees to protect against things like industrial sabotage.
Logic said that the saboteur was Martin, the one who was strewing bombs hither and yon. Logic also said that he had an agent among the Carbonites, because she knew of no way for him to get onto their factory floor to commit sabotage. She tucked that nugget away for later. It was going to be important to find out who his agent was, but first she had to survive the next few minutes.
***
Georgette took the stairs to Sam-the-Timekeeper’s office two at a time. He was standing in his open door, peering at the melee below.
She felt disoriented, dizzied by the vertiginous view through the stairs’ metal grating. A vast sea of people was moving directly beneath her, emptying one end of the plant, but she could see that word was spreading too slowly. Farther away, the crowd of workers who had already lined up in front of the podium for Higgins’s speech stood and waited, oblivious.
Sam-the-Timekeeper’s puzzled face was focused on hers. “What’s happening?”
Georgette’s chest was about to burst and her heartbeat was deafening in her ears, but she needed to find a way to speak. She stepped onto the landing outside his office and bent over, hands on her knees, to catch her breath. Gasping, she got out the words that had to be said.
“Bomb.” She dragged in a long breath. “Blow the—” She stopped to cough.
He was already in motion. “We need to blow the whistle and get people out of here.”
***
“Drop your guns,” Martin said. “She’s going with me.”
He dragged Justine to her feet, holding her in front of him like a human shield. Locking eyes with Charles and Jerry, he said, “I said to drop your guns.”
Crouching slowly, Charles laid his weapon at his feet and stood back up. Equally slowly, Jerry leaned hard forward, eased the gun to the ground, and used his arms to pull himself back upright.
Martin should have taken Justine’s wrench, but Charles and Jerry and their guns had distracted him. Her right hand hung at her side, still holding the wrench. In her left palm, she hid a pocketknife that he knew nothing about. Her weapons made her feel a small stir of hope.
Justine was right-handed. It wasn’t easy to manipulate the pocketknife, but she was doing her best to slide her thumbnail into the crescent-shaped nick that should give her enough purchase to lever it open. Working in her favor was the fact that the knife was old and well-used.
Hoping that Martin wouldn’t feel her brachioradialis muscle flex and ease, she worked to open the blade. Since his attention was still on Charles and Jerry, he never noticed the slight movements of her lower arm, and he didn’t notice the involuntary thrill that shook her body, oh so slightly, when the blade swung open on its loose and aged pivot. She let her arms dangle and waited for an opportunity.
Martin leaned down to speak in her ear. “You’re going with me because they’re fools. All they have to do to stop me is shoot through you, but Americans are too weak for that. We have five minutes before those bombs blow, so we’re going to walk to my car, get in it, and get the hell out of here. When this place is far enough in my rearview mirror, I’m going to ask you a question, so start thinking about your answer.”
Justine thought she knew what the question was.
“I’m going to give you a choice. You can come with me and leave this mind-killing job behind. I think I can promise you a good life. I know I can promise you an exciting one.”
She said nothing, but she let her eyes suggest that her answer might be one that he’d like.
His voice lowered even further to the point where she knew that neither Charles nor Jerry could hear. “Or you can end this day dead and under ten feet of swamp water.”
Just like her parents.
Her arm muscles wanted to tense, ready to slam him with the wrench or stab him with the knife, because she was so sure that he was the one who had put them in that bayou to drown. Justine was ready to let Martin shoot her, just for the joy of striking out at the man who took her parents away, even if she only felt it for an instant before the bullet hit her. But she didn’t, because she could hear the voices of Gerard and Isabel telling her to relax and wait for the right opportunity. She could hear them telling her to live.
His arm tightened around her. “I was told not to leave anyone alive and on the loose who might help the enemy’s nuclear program, but I have plenty of justification to spare you if I present you as someone useful to our goals. Imagine the laboratory they would give you. Imagine the time and the raw materials and the laboratory assistants. Imagine what you could do if somebody believed in you.”
He knew what would tempt her, because a beautiful laboratory could certainly do it, but he didn’t understand her at all. If he believed that she would run away with a man preparing to firebomb thousands of people, then his mind was truly diseased.
But how could she escape him? Despair tried to take her, but she shook it off. This man had been ordered to kill anyone who might be useful in developing a nuclear program. If he knew about Gloria, then he had just threatened to kill her. Nothing was more important to Justine than protecting her godmother. Nothing was more important than the selfless love that Gloria had always shown her. Surely that kind of love could win the day.
As she felt herself wrapped in the love of Gloria and of her parents, a familiar noise rose over the frantic beating of her heart. Somebody was blowing the factory whistle, over and over.
***
At the word “bomb,” Sam-the-Timekeeper had pointed at the dangling cable and told Georgette to pull it, offering her the special thrill of sounding the factory whistle, but she’d held up a hand because she had more to say. It came out with a wheeze.
“Firebomb.”
Sam had frozen in place, still pointing at the cable that would blow the factory whistle. All Georgette needed to do to get more people moving toward the exits was to pull it, but the whistle wouldn’t be enough. She needed to stop a fire before it started.
Still gasping for breath, she choked out, “Turn on the sprinklers,” over the noise wafting up to them from the factory floor. Sam had paused, silent, and Georgette had thought for a heartbeat that he was going to refuse to activate them, and she didn’t know how to do it.
She knew it was an odd request that she was making, asking Sam to douse the whole plant and everything in it with water when there was no fire. Still, he had listened when she said, “The person I’d most trust to recognize a firebomb just hollered that there was one. So it must be true.”
He’d kept listening when she said, “I think the man standing beside her set the firebomb, and I bet he planted them everywhere. I just know he did. He’s been moving boxes around this place all week. Longer, probably.”
Sam-the-Timekeeper had a quiet, wise air about him, so he’d merely nodded to acknowledge that he’d heard her. Then he’d asked, “Why do you think it will help if we douse the place with water?”
“I spent a lot of time with my friend’s physics book last night.”
Sam-the-Timekeeper hadn’t even given her a funny look when she’d said that, like she was too stupid to be reading books about fancy things like physics, and she loved him for it. Then she’d explained to him what she’d learned from Justine’s physics book, while she was trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong during the welding fire.
“I found out that it’s a big mistake to put water on electrical fires, but water cools flammable materials like wood down below their ignition temperature, so that they can’t burn. So if the whole plant is being doused with water when the bombs go off, don’t that mean that it’ll put out the firebombs before they even start burning?”
Using only logic, Georgette had made Sam-the-Timekeeper believe that drastic action was called for. It was necessary. So he had activated the sprinklers while she pulled the whistle cable again and again. She didn’t know how to use it to signal an emergency, but she thought maybe people would figure things out if she just kept tooting.
***
Water was everywhere. It fell from the ceiling onto the bellies of boats destined for the South Pacific. It collected in the cockpits of half-built planes that would be flying to points unknown. It dripped onto duckbilled boats like those that had disgorged a winning army onto the beaches of Normandy. It drenched the finely tailored suit of Andrew Higgins, the man who had designed them all. It drenched the throngs of people hurrying away from the rumors of bombs and from the sound of a whistle blasting again and again.
Georgette watched them go. When she was satisfied that every corner of the plant had heard the whistle, she ran back down the stairs as water poured on her head and collected in her work boots. Her instincts said to run and hide, but she had one more thing to do.
She had to make sure that Justine was safe.
The crowd outside the Carbon Division had thinned enough to let her through, so she ran back through the double doors and into the familiar space. Water rained onto the floor, rinsing black dust off the concrete. The floor was slick, but her boot soles gripped it. She could see daylight at the loading dock and that was her destination, but first she needed to stop at Jerry’s shed and grab something to help her with the problem of Justine’s safety.
***
When Mavis had heard Georgette scream the word “bomb,” her eyes had turned toward the innocuous shelves where the Carbonites stored their lunchboxes. She had been uneasy about her instructions to carry a strange lunchbox into the plant without looking inside, but she’d done it. The money didn’t motivate her any longer, not since she’d seen Justine come so close to fire and death. Now, she was motivated by fear. She didn’t know what her contact would do to her if she said no.
All along, she had believed that she was valuable to him, so it had never occurred to her that he might give her a suicide mission. As she considered this possibility, Mavis had lingered at the back of the crowd leaving the Carbon Division, trying to decide what to do. Georgette was calling out “Justine! Justine, are you still here?” As Mavis watched Georgette squeezing through the throng, running upstream, she knew what had to be done.
Breaking free of the crowd, Mavis had fought through bodies, moving slowly as she dodged one coworker and then another. She needed to reach her lunchbox as fast as her short legs would take her, but there were so many people in her way. The Carbon Division was almost empty of its workers before she reached the lunchbox.
Snatching it up, she ran for the only safe place she could think of. If she could get to the loading dock and hurl it out onto the pavement, away from the plant building, surely that would be a safer place for it to explode.
***
The plant whistle had gone silent. There was no sound but water gushing out of overhead pipes and slapping onto the floor far below. Justine stood with a gun’s muzzle pressed to her belly and listened to the sound. The man holding the gun was restless, and Justine knew why. The more the water flowed, the greater the chance that it was neutralizing his bombs.
Dynamite would certainly explode underwater, so the water wasn’t going to prevent Martin’s bombs from detonating. Some people fished that way, throwing in the explosive and waiting for the fish it killed to float to the top.
A fire fueled by gasoline or kerosene wouldn’t necessarily be immediately snuffed out by water, either, since those fuels floated. A nightmare situation of burning fuel floating atop flowing water, being carried hither and yon, was possible, but a whole lot of water should spread out the floating fuel, cooling the flames and snuffing them out eventually. Having the sprinklers on when the bombs detonated was probably a better option than not.
Neither of these ideas were the thing that gave her the most hope. No, the weak point in Martin’s bomb design was likely the design of the timers. They probably resembled a watch in the way that they worked, and Justine had never known a watch that tolerated much water. The timers might even be electrical devices that could be shorted out. She cheered on the spewing sprinklers. They might not keep all the bombs from detonating, but every bomb that was ruined by the water was a step in the right direction.
Martin glanced at the boxes at their feet and began backing away from them. The time when all his bombs would detonate must be approaching, because his steps were coming faster. He dragged her back…back…back. He was gaining speed, and she could tell that he was afraid he’d waited too long.
Water was flowing over the lip of the loading dock like a waterfall, and now it was splashing onto those deadly boxes. Maybe it would defang the bombs. Maybe she wouldn’t die from flying debris or flames or a compression wave. This didn’t solve the problem of how she would escape a man with a gun.
A motion at the top of the loading dock caught her eye. It was Georgette, kneeling in the water as it flowed over the edge. In her hand was a long-handled sledgehammer, and she looked like a woman trying to decide how best to use it to take her one and only shot.
Justine was hanging onto hope, but Georgette couldn’t have saved Justine by beating Martin into submission with her sledgehammer, not any more than Charles and Jerry could have managed it by shooting their guns before Martin made them drop them. There was no way to do those things without the risk of hitting Justine.
A muffled boom sounded from inside the plant and Justine knew that the time had come. Martin was dragging her away from the bombs at the base of the loading dock, but there was no path to getting far enough away. Either the water pouring onto the boxes would stop the detonations, or else they would die. All of them: Georgette, Charles, Jerry, Martin, and Justine. The question of whether the bombs would blow could only be answered by physics, and she didn’t have enough information to do the math.
***
Georgette let the water flow around her, watched, and waited for her chance.
***
Mavis heard a bomb blow inside the main plant, then another, then a third one. The time had come. She had to do the right thing, but first she had to decide what it was.
She saw Georgette kneeling in her path, so she changed course. Her plan was to run past the makeshift stage, all the way up to the lip of the loading dock. From there, she would hurl the lunchbox as far as she could. Then she would tackle Georgette and cover her with her own body, hoping that they were far enough away to survive the blast.
But then she neared the edge and saw that this would never work. There were people standing on the pavement below the loading dock. If she threw the lunchbox and its bomb out onto the asphalt, she would be throwing it at Justine, Charles, and Jerry. She would have been happy to throw it at Martin, who had given her the lunchbox and who must have set the bombs she was hearing, but she couldn’t risk hurting the others.
Mavis didn’t hesitate. Her courage would have failed her if she had. She ran hard toward Georgette and used all the momentum she could gain to shove her off the loading dock to the pavement below. Then she turned away from all of those people and fell on the bomb.
The well-built lunchbox had kept the omnipresent water out, and so the bomb and its timer had stayed dry and functional. An instant after she flung her body over the metal case holding it, the timer ticked down to zero.
Mavis thought of her children, and then she was gone.
***
Justine’s heart stopped as she saw Georgette fall and lie still on the pavement. The blast of a nearby bomb rattled the ground under Justine’s feet, and she felt a shiver of panic pass through Martin’s body. She felt him obey his reflexes, which told him to release her and run hard, but for just a second. It only took that second for him to regain control and reach out to grab her again, but the second was too long. She used it to wheel away from him, slashing upward with her knife at the hand holding the gun. He dropped it and it slid away from him on the wet pavement.
Unfortunately, it also slid away from Justine, but she still had a weapon in each hand. She swung the wrench at his head and connected, but this succeeded only in bringing him to his knees.
Still conscious, he went for the gun, and this motion took him far enough from Justine for a trained agent to see his opening. Charles dropped to his knees and grabbed his gun. Then he put a bullet neatly in Martin’s chest.
Justine fell, stunned but determined to crawl away from Martin’s bleeding body and toward Georgette’s crumpled form. Georgette lay between two green-stamped crates holding Martin’s bombs, and Justine hadn’t seen her move since she fell off the loading dock.
“Georgette. Say something. Georgette, tell me you’re okay.”
Jerry wheeled past her, coming to a halt beside Georgette. He reached down to put a hand flat on Georgette’s back. Leaning further, he rested his fingers on her throat, beneath her jaw.
He said something, but the gunshot was still ringing in Justine’s ears. She was crawling toward Georgette, hoping for a breath, even a twitch. Anything.
Georgette gasped and her legs stirred. Justine felt hope stir, too.
Jerry looked beyond Justine and spoke to Charles. Her hearing was coming back, so she caught most of it. “…going to have to risk moving her.”
She turned to face Charles, hoping she’d be able to hear better if she could see his face. He was kneeling beside Martin, checking his pulse. He stood and shook his head.
“Let’s get out of here,” Charles said, lifting Georgette and draping her gently over Jerry’s lap.
Grasping the handles of Jerry’s wheelchair, he turned to Justine, who was already on her feet. He asked, “Can you run?” but the question was pointless. They were both already running.
Some of Martin’s bombs had survived the flood of water spewing out of the plant’s sprinkler system. Justine knew this, because she felt the ground shake under her feet as she ran, and shake again, but she saw no flames. Charles, in the lead, had chosen the only possible route that would get them away from the building quickly.
Going straight back toward the bayou was out of the question. They would have run out of pavement before they were safely away from a plant building that still might explode in flames, and a wheelchair carrying two adults would not get far in the Prairie Tremblante without sinking. Going left would have forced them to run parallel to the time bomb that was the Michaud plant for its entire vast length. But going right gave them a chance of getting well away from danger. The Carbon Division was located at the southwesternmost end of the plant, so they were within striking distance of the end of the building. Charles pushed Jerry, Jerry cradled Georgette in his lap, and Justine sprinted close on their heels.
As she ran, her ears continued to wake up, and they were picking up a soft roar ahead of her. The sound was a cross between a wildfire and music, but Justine only realized what it was when they rounded the corner of the plant and she could see everything that lay beyond it. It was the combined voices of a huge crowd of people. Ahead of them, at the end of a diagonal road taking them to the airstrip, a crowd milled on the pavement. The sight of them made her want to weep. These were the people who had gotten out alive, and there were so many of them. Maybe it was everybody.
Still running, Justine followed Charles and Jerry toward the crowd. Two people broke away from the others, a tall man and a petite woman. The man pointed at Georgette and cried out, “That’s her! The one who told me to blow the whistle. She got out!” A cheer erupted.
The woman ran toward them, calling out, “Justine! Georgette! You’re okay!” and Justine saw that she was Darlene. As she neared them, Darlene skidded to a halt in front of the wheelchair where Georgette sat on Jerry’s lap, head lolling against his shoulder. She reached an uncertain hand out to touch the brunette hair escaping from its chignon, and Georgette whispered something that sounded like, “Hey.”
“Jerry?” Darlene asked. “Is she okay?”
“She will be. I’ll make sure.”
Sam-the-Timekeeper sidled up and said, “That one’s got nerve, and she’s got heart. She’ll be back to herself soon enough.”
Then Darlene threw her arms around Justine and started to cry. “We were looking for you.”
Candace stepped out of the crowd, with Sonny behind her. Nelle, Nadine, Della, Betty, and Shirley followed. More and more carbon-dusted people approached, and the sight of them put a lump in Justine’s throat.
Scanning their faces, she caught Darlene’s eye and murmured, “Mavis?”
“Not yet. We’re still hoping.”
A stocky man hustled toward the wheelchair, saying, “This is the one? The woman in the wheelchair? She’s the one who raised the alarm and got us out before the bombs blew?”
He wore a light gray business suit, double-breasted with wide lapels, and Justine would have known him anywhere. This was Andrew Higgins, the man whose boats won D-Day.
He nodded pleasantly at Justine, but his eyes were on Georgette. “Somebody here must know first aid. This woman is injured.”
Justine heard Georgette mumble, “…just fine…I’m fine…”
From beneath Georgette, Jerry said, “Actually, sir, I know first aid. She’s conscious and lucid. Her pulse and respiration are good. I saw her fall and she hit her head pretty hard, but her shoulder took most of the blow.”
“That’s a lot of medical information to gather while you’re being wheeled at top speed away from a disaster. Well done.” Higgins shook Jerry’s hand.
Raising her head, Georgette said, “Don’t forget Justine. She…” And her voice drifted away again.
Realizing that Justine and Charles were standing there, he shook their hands, too. Then he clasped one of Georgette’s hands in both of his and said, “We all owe you a great deal.”
Georgette opened her eyes and focused them on his face. This time, her words came more clearly. “…the least I could do. Sir.”
Justine watched it all. She did her best to store up every detail of Georgette’s big moment, so that she could describe it to her and, perhaps someday, describe it to Georgette’s parents and to her brothers.
***
Justine sat in the back seat of Jerry’s car, and Georgette lay stretched out with her head in Justine’s lap. Every time the car hit a rough patch on the Chef Menteur Highway, Georgette groaned. She cradled her left arm tight against her side, and Justine couldn’t tell if it was her ribs, her arm, her head, or her shoulder hurting her. She was glad they were headed for the nearest emergency room.
“We’ll be at the hospital soon, and the doctors’ll fix you right up.”
“I see you’re talkin’ to me now.” Georgette looked up at Justine with an unreadable expression.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you, but I was afraid that I was dangerous to be around. I was afraid of…of this.” Justine gestured at the blood in Georgette’s hair and the bruised shoulder peeking through the torn shoulder of her sodden coveralls.
“It sure does take a lot to get your attention, chère. Blood. Bruises. Bombs. Guns. Factory whistles. A whole heckuva lot of water. I gotta remember that.”
“I don’t know why you’d want my attention, after the way I behaved. I’m a terrible friend.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You’re real good at talking about uraniums for hours and hours. And spec-TRAH-scopy. You made sure I knew how to say that. I bet there’s women waiting in line to be your friend, just so’s they can brush up on their algebra.”
Jerry looked over his shoulder and his white teeth flashed. Charles kept his eyes on the road, but she heard a short laugh before he managed to smother it.
Georgette cut her eyes in their direction. “I guess I need to be careful what I say in front of a couple of spies.”
Now there was dead silence in the front seat. Justine felt her eyebrows reach for her hairline.
“How ignorant do you people think I am? Somebody tries to blow up a plant full of military secrets, and them two just happen to be standing there with their guns. And you right there with ’em? And the three of you standing there, as quiet as my old corncob baby dolls, while Mr. Higgins gives me all the credit for saving everybody? It’s a good thing I was too beat up to talk right then, or I would’ve given away the whole show.”
Nobody answered her.
“That’s okay. Y’all take me to the hospital and get me patched up, and make sure you get me some painkilling happy pills, because I’m gonna make Justine explain everything that just happened. I’ll probably need them pills to get through all her talk about ‘uranium isotopes’ and ‘nuclear fissions.’”
The car kept rolling down Chef Menteur Highway and the silence held.
Georgette sighed and said, “The less y’all talk, the more I know I’m right.”