Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [828]

The two guys from KSF were patient once they realized the kids weren’t thieves or vandals. Those two guys with their uniforms, pistols, whips, and clubs, looked more like cops than movers. No doubt they had even more substantial weapons in the truck. My brother Bennett said he saw bigger guns mounted inside the truck when he climbed onto the hood. But when you consider how much a truck that size is worth, and how many people might want to relieve them of it and its contents, I guess the weaponry isn’t surprising. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 828

Note

The list ‘uniforms, pistols, whips, and clubs’ stacks nouns without adjectives until the sentence buckles into its punchline — ‘looked more like cops than movers.’ Lauren then does the book’s characteristic move: she argues herself out of her own alarm, converting the paramilitary escort of a moving van into simple market logic. The child on the hood is the detail that keeps it from being a policy paragraph.