Dispatches After the Apocalypse

By RICHARD WOODBURY, in Waco, Texas

For those who were residents of Waco last year, while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI were laying siege to David Koresh and his followers, few have more painful memories than Robert and Marcia Spoon, who live on narrow Double EE Ranch Road, across from Mount Carmel, the former Branch Davidian compound. Startled by gunshots early on the Sunday morning in February when agents of the ATF raided the compound, the couple and their daughter Amanda, now 6, waited out the fighting crouched in back rooms. Later, with only the clothes on their backs, they fled across a pasture to safety and took refuge for 70 days with friends and then in an apartment in town. When they returned -- after the fire in April that killed more than 70 Davidians -- they found bullets in their home and the place overrun by FBI agents, who had used it as a command post. Now, months later, they still drive 100 miles a week to take their daughter, who remains traumatized by the events, to a therapist. "It won't be over for us till there are no more Davidians," says Robert Spoon.

Spoon, like many of his neighbors, has heard rumors that Davidian cultists eventually hope to build a new worship center at the apocalyptic site, and he is concerned that some of Koresh's followers could come back. Eleven cult survivors go on trial this week in San Antonio for conspiracy in the murder of the four ATF agents who died in the February raid, and it is anybody's guess whether some of them will be acquitted.

In the days before the trial begins, tourists are making the curious trek to Waco, as they have steadily since the nightmarish days. They don't see much out on EE Road: piles of broken beams and concrete, the husks of two old cars and a trailer, and the Silver Streak Express -- Koresh's bus, which somehow survived the flames and which security guards use as a warming hut -- are about all that remains of the compound. A broken high chair and rusted toys lying in the gray earth provide reminders of the young dead.

"It's eerie, being up here this close," says Craig Martin, a Waco TV production supervisor who covered the siege from a mile away. He is snapping photos of his parents, Baptist missionaries visiting from Thailand. "I could see how it burned so fast in this wind," observes a tourist from Minnesota, "but what really happened?"

The only person on the scene providing a definitive answer to this question is Amo Bishop Roden, a Branch Davidian woman who for months has conducted a lonely sit-in in an effort to reclaim the land once owned by ex-cult leader George Roden, her former husband, who is in a state mental hospital. Amo emerges from a tiny metal shack to point visitors to an altar she has fashioned from concrete slabs and sell them $15 videotapes purporting to show how the FBI started the fire with a tank-mounted flamethrower. She hints of missing corpses and CIA involvement.

In town, the lingering embarrassment over seizing the world's attention on account of such gruesome events has faded. "The whole world knows where Waco is now," says restaurateur Sam Citrano. "We're going to put it to positive advantage."