THE WROUGHT IRON BRIDGE OVER ST. JOHN’S RIVER IS OLD AND RUSTED. IT IS NARROW and long. From the air it looks like a wheat straw between the trunks of two fallen logs—not like anything meant to carry weight. But when you get close to it, you see the heft of the iron from which it was made, many years ago. You can see the tresses and the girders and the bolts, as thick as a man’s wrist, that hold the bridge together. The roadway itself is half-inch steel plate, laid unfastened on those girders and tresses. The steel plates clatter when your car or truck goes from plate to plate. But the bridge itself doesn’t shift or move when your car, or even a goods lorry, drives over it. And so you learn this is a bridge that will withstand both man and nature; a bridge that has seen storm, flood, and war and still stands.
They were the last vehicle in a three-vehicle caravan that crossed the bridge at daylight—two battered white pickup trucks and their green RAV. The first pickup truck was filled with booty—bananas, pineapple, dried fish, and gasoline in five-gallon glass jars. The second truck carried six armed young men sitting on benches in the bed. Both pickups had gun racks with guns hanging from them silhouetted across their rear windows, and both had bed-mounted heavy machine guns. There were no other vehicles on the bridge yet, and the people walking on it were walking alone or in groups of two or three people. The women walked single file and carried big multicolored plastic tubs on their heads.
The road on the far side of the bridge was better than the road leading from Harbel to St. John’s. The country was flat there, and the road decently wide, and though the pavement was as often broken as it was smooth, there were no washouts and no ravines, so you could drive twenty-five or thirty miles an hour for minutes at a time, and the plain on the other side of the bridge was broad enough so that the crowd of walking people could walk next to the road. A good number of the cement block houses that stood next to the road were still standing, and a number of those houses had big garden plots. The few compounds of mud houses were well cared for, with whitewash handprints carefully arrayed on the red mud walls and roofs that had been recently thatched and looked able to withstand the hardest evening rain. The yards of red earth between the houses were swept every day so a person walking would not surprise snakes, because the brush had been cleared away.
They weren’t even ten miles from Buchanan.
Then they were on the outskirts of Buchanan, and the road was lined by empty shops, ruined houses, and burned-out churches; the air smelled of burned rubber and rotting flesh and the sky was filled with smoke. They came to the Y-junction that Carl had driven through just thirty-five days earlier, when he had come in with David and the two women and the sick kid stuck in the back, just after they had seen Julia’s Land Cruiser on its side on fire.
The trucks turned north, not south, into the country where Julia had disappeared.
After a few minutes, the lead truck dropped back, and the second truck shot in front of it. The second truck ran fast for half a minute, and then spun to the left, raising a cloud of orange dust as it stopped short.
“Down-down,” Terrance said. “Quick-quick. Now.”
Then the guns exploded. The pop, boom, and rattle of gunfire was right there. They were in it. The men and boys jumped from the back to take cover behind the truck. The other truck spun around and stopped, and the RAV took cover behind that truck. The men in the truck in front of them popped out of the cab and crouched as they ran with an RPG, taking cover behind the first truck.
With gunfire came the whizz and plink, plink, plink, plink of bullets into the truck in front of them. The air hissed as bullets flew by them.
There was more gunfire. They heard a short burst, and then four long rumbling bursts. Metal crunched. Bullets sprayed the dirt and whizzed through the trees. They whopped into cardboard and fruit in the bed of the first truck. They sizzled into flesh and cracked bone. A man called out. Another cursed and grunted.
Terrance saw a gun on the rack on the rear window of the pickup they took cover behind. In case. Just in case. I’m ready, he thought. Alive again. Tastes good. My boys can carry this one. I’m backup. Levin and Carl don’t know how to fight enemy. I’m with them. Until I’m not. I ready.
Carl kept down. We’re close, Carl thought.
Their guys got off another burst. Machine guns pounded and rattled, low-pitched and high-pitched at once. Three times there was a sizzle, a pop, and then a boom that shook and rattled the earth. Three RPGs shells whooshed and exploded. Carl felt the heat before he saw the flame and smelled the fire.
The firing stopped. The air was filled with shell smoke and smelled of burning rubber.
“Clear,” Terrance said. He started the engine.
Then the little convoy of three vehicles rolled through the roadblock, which was a downed tree. There were three dead men on the other side of the tree, the blood soaking their fatigues and pooling in the red dirt of the rutted road. Their truck was on fire.
Terrance looked at Levin and Carl. Terrance was boss here. They are in a war now. No theory here. Kill or be killed. No world to repair. Only firefights to survive, one at a time. His boys had become their boys, wilding down thunder road, playing for keeps.
“Where the hell are we?” Levin asked.
“We’re on our way to where Julia is,” Carl said. “We just finished the easy part.”