The tidal flats were a-churn, murmuring ceaseless and sullen like some big animal, the yellow surface dimpled with lunging splotches that would burst through now and then to reveal themselves as trees or broken hunks of wood, silent dead things bobbing along beside them that I didn't want to look at too closely. Like under there was something huge and alive, and it waked for a moment and stuck itself out to see what the world of air was like.
Bud showed me the metal piece all twisted, and I say, "That's Russian," right away 'cause it was.
"You never knew no Russian," Angel says right up.
"I studied it once," I say, and it be the truth even if I didn't study it long.
"Goddamn," Bud says.
"No concern of ours," Mr. Ackerman says, mostly because all this time riding back with the women and child and old me, he figures he doesn't look like much of a leader anymore. Bud wouldn't have him ride up there in the cabin with him.
Angel looks at it, turns it over in her hands, and Johnny pipes up, "It might be radioactive!"
Angel drops it like a shot. "What!"
I ask Bud, "You got that counter?"
And it was. Not a lot, but some.
"God a'mighty," Angel says.
"We got to tell somebody!" Johnny cries, all excited.
"You figure some Rooshin thing blew up the causeway?" Bud says to me.
"One of their rockets fell on it, musta been," I say.
"A bomb?" Angel's voice is a bird screech.
"One that didn't go off. Headed for Mobile, but the space boys, they scragged it up there-" I pointed straight up.
"Set to go off in the bay?" Angel says wonderingly.
"Musta."
"We got to tell somebody!" Johnny cries.
"Never you mind that," Bud says. "We got to keep movin'."
"How?" Angel wants to know.