The state of Louisiana’s office of tourism maintained a roadside hospitality depot, perched at the riverside just at the state border. The tourist HQ was a touchingly ugly structure of faux-antebellum brick and white columns.

The building had been surrounded with fresh, razor-edged concertina wire. The highway into Texas was thoroughly blockaded with sentry boxes, striped barriers, and nonlethal clusters of glue mines and foam mines.

A huge matte-black military helicopter perched on its skids at the side of the highway, mechanically attentive and deeply bizarre. The black copter lit the tarmac with searing bluish spotlights. The colossal machine was armed to the teeth with great skeletal masses of U.S. Air Force weaponry. The ancient air-to-ground weapons were so insanely complex and archaic that their function was a complete mystery to Oscar. Were they Gatling flechettes? Particle accelerators? Rayguns of some kind, maybe? They were like some nightmare mix of lamprey fangs and sewing machines.

Within the brilliant frame of helicopter glare, small squads of blue-uniformed Air Force personnel were stopping and confronting the cars attempting to leave Louisiana. The people within the cars, mostly Texan tourists, seemed suitably cowed.

The Air Force people were engaged in an elaborate roadblock shakedown. They were pulling white boxes out of refrigerated trishaws, and confronting travelers with their contents.

Norman-the-Intern was an engineering student. He tore his fascinated gaze from the copters’ appalling weaponry. “I thought this was gonna be a party roadblock, more like those cool gypsy bikers back in Tennessee,” Norman observed. “Maybe we’d better just get out of here.”