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And Moses can raffito – a series of words painted in neat white around the top of one of the tanks The motto says, simply:

AT DESTRUCTION AND FAMINE THOU SHALT LAUGH

Moses recognizes the quote, for it was one he has said to himself at times over the past fifteen years of his life – usually in quiet places, under roofs with rain falling on them, or on sunless days when it seemed the road may have no end He knows the quote, and he completes it under his breath:

Neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth

Moses knows it to be true – that the words are the best and the worst of everything

Around the base of the six tanks are other structures, squat wide buildings that must contain the machinery that once processed and refined as held in the tanks And aoing on

Figures run every which way, calling out or pointing their guns or hiding in soone through them And here is the full-blown bathos of it all Moses can see now that there are four distinct factions at battle down in the bowl-shaped valley There are the soldiers in their pressed unifor precisewith the cold confidence of a reborn civilization striking out against the filthy reminders of its oild past Then there are Fletcher’s uns from all corners of the country They have experience on their side, for every day on the road is a battle for them They live conflict Then there are the bandits who have been residing at the gasworks These are aluishable from Fletcher’s men – but if one looks, one can see that they are even ed, embattled by stasis and starvation They wear ht in tandeainst them as well as the soldiers – perhaps in retaliation for Fletcher having brought this battle upon them in the first place And the final faction is the dead theue has set free all of Fletcher’s monstrous sideshow dead, and it seeed dead on hand as well Now they all roa on the newly dead and the not quite so dead, pacing slowly through the co the neutrality of parasites on a larger body Some of them are struck down, and they fall with the same implacable calm hich they walked a nored since their threat is the slower one Aled on the ground, the sounds of death and destruction co to bear all around the or arently in their hair

Good lord, Moses Todd says from his perch above the valley As he watches, a bandit woe rifle hunched atop one of the tanks is pierced by a bullet that sends a quick atomizer mist of blood out froround, crashing once over a railing that cracks her body and folds it backwards unnaturally so that when she co wanders over without haste to the bent body and digs into it with unhurried and brute fingers, opening the abdo thick ropes of viscera free fro chews on the rubbery intestines of the woman, he looks around hiaze away from the fray and looks behind hirey sky, even the misty implication of the wide country beyond For a h he will turn his back on it all, as though herefusal to it all He is a s A nomad with many more wildernesses to explore – and it is so s than towards them

But it’s the words that are a curse – because he cannot utter a siirl of the meadow – all red cheeks and powder skin, a tiara of wildflowers in her hair How she would run to him, and he would hoist her in his arms He would enclose her away from the world and she would cry happily to be enclosed – and his bigness was a powerful and good thing because itat his beard with her little grasping hands His fear of crushing her, because his brute arhters offer

And his wife, too A wo of any in the world but him The way she cut his hair and trimmed his beard and made him more man than beast He was nobody’s rown child with big notions that got wobbly with her gentle s in hiht by the burning gaze of her

And there was no goodbye for the for theoodbye A farewell is a thing of the mind – and, as such, you can shut it behind doors

So he turns his eyes from the empty frontier of the woods and back to the battle below So in him clicks, some knife switch jams into place, and he is suddenly full of purpose andthe which ones would be most likely to hold his brother and the Vestal

Then he cla rappling onto the tree branches and dragging the truncheon behind as a kind of brake He slides to the base of the hill behind one of the wide, flat buildings where piles of chopped wood are stacked against the cinderblock wall