The rebels were taking a while to lose, because the United States had other things to worry about and weren’t giving them anything like their full attention. But the Mormons and their pals had to be chewing locoweed if they thought they had a Chinaman’s chance of bailing out of the USA.

Rex Stowe said, “The way things are around here, I don’t even know if I want to come out of the line. Aren’t they likelier to jump us when our guard is down than when we’re looking for it?”

“Who says our guard’s going to be down? I don’t know about you, but I’m still watching all the goddamn time,” Armstrong answered.

Stowe considered, shrugged, and nodded. “You’ve got something there.”

On they slogged, past buildings pulverized in the slow, brutal U.S. advance. Armstrong wondered if there’d be enough Mormons left alive to keep their faith going after this rebellion finally got smashed. There had been the last time around, which struck him as a damn shame.

He marched for a solid day to get back to the recuperation center that had sprung up in Thistle, southeast of Provo. That put it out of range of Mormon guns-unless the rebels got sneaky, which they might well do. Barbed wire and machine-gun nests around the center made the place seem like a prisoner-of-war camp, but the guns faced out, not in.

Once inside the perimeter, Armstrong followed signs to a bank of showers and then to a delousing station. The showers were cold. His father had talked about hot water as part of the delousing process, but times had changed. They sprayed him with something that smelled like poison gas instead of boiling him or soaking him or whatever they’d done in his old man’s day.