The Genocides

Orville saw this no more distinctly than he had heard the sound preceding it, but without taking thought he hurled himself over a nearby snowbank. He rolled in the powdery snow till he was out of sight of everything—the carcasses, the other men, the pigsty. Everything but the flames rising from the burning sty. “Mr. Anderson!” he yelled. Terrified lest he lose his intended victim to the fires of the incendiaries, he crawled back to rescue the old man.

Three spherical bodies, each about five feet in diameter, floated just above the snow at the periphery of the flames. The men (with the exception of Anderson, who was crouched behind the flank of the dead cow, aiming his pistol at the nearest sphere) stood watching the blaze, as though bewitched. Spumes of steamy breath drifted from their open mouths.

“Don’t waste bullets on armor plate, Mr. Anderson. Come on—they’ll fire the commonroom next. We’ve got to get the people out of there.”

“Yes,” Anderson agreed, but he did not move. Orville had to pull him away. In that moment of stuporous incapacity, Orville thought he saw in Anderson the seed of what Neil had become.

Orville entered the commonroom first. Since the walls were buttressed with great drifts of snow, none of them was yet aware of the blaze outside. They were, as they had been all evening, leaden with unhappiness. Several had already gotten into bed.

“Everybody—start getting your clothes on,” Orville commanded in a voice as calm as authoritative. “Leave this room as quickly as possible by the kitchen door and run into the woods. Take anything with you that’s at hand, but don’t waste time looking for things. Don’t wait for someone else to catch up. Quickly, now.”

As many as had heard Orville looked dumbfounded. It was not for him to be giving orders.

“Quickly,” Anderson directed, “and no questions.”

They were accustomed to obeying Anderson unquestioningly, but there was still much confusion. Anderson, accompanied by Orville, went directly to the area by the kitchen where his own family was quartered. They were all bundling into their heavy clothes, but Anderson bundled them faster.

Outside there were screams, brief as the whistle of a slaughtered rabbit, as the incendiary devices were turned on their spectators. A man ran into the room, flaming, and fell to the floor, dead. The panic began. Anderson, already near the door, commanded respect even in the midst of hysteria and managed to get his family out among the first. Passing through the kitchen, Lady grabbed an empty cooking pot. Blossom was burdened with a basket of laundry, which, proving too heavy, she emptied into the snow. Orville, in his anxiety to see them out of the commonroom safely, took nothing at all. There were no more than fifty people running through the snow when the far corner of the commonroom caught fire. The first flames shot up thirty feet from the roof, then began to climb as they ate into the bags of corn stacked against the wails.

It is hard to run through unpacked snow, just as it is hard to run in knee-deep water: as soon as you acquire momentum, you are apt to tumble forward. Lady and Greta had left the house wearing only straw slippers, and others streamed out the door now in their nightshirts or wrapped in blankets.

The Andersons had almost reached the forest edge when Lady threw aside her cooking pot and exclaimed: The Bible! the Bible is back there!

No one heard her. She ran toward the burning building. By the time Anderson was aware of his wife’s absence, there was no longer any way to stop her. His own scream would not be heard among so many others. The family stopped to watch. “Keep running,” Orville shouted at them, but they paid no heed. Most of those who had escaped the house had reached the wood by now.

The flames illuminated the neighborhood of the building for a hundred feet, making the snow shine with an unsteady orange glow upon which the swift, uncertain shadows of the smoke rippled, like the fires of visible darkness.

Lady entered by the kitchen door and did not re-emerge. The roof caved in; the walls fell outward, neatly as dominos. The three spherical bodies could be seen in silhouette to rise higher from the ground. In close formation they began to glide toward the wood, their hum disguised by the crackling of the flames. Within the triangle they defined, the snow melted and bubbled and rose steaming into the air.

“Why would she do a thing like that?” Anderson asked of his daughter, but seeing that she was delicately poised on the brink of hysteria, he took her in one hand and the length of rope he had taken up from a wheelbarrow outside the house in the other and hurried after the others. Orville and Neil were practically carrying barefoot Greta, who was screaming obscenities in her rich contralto.