The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  The earth’s motion ceased, but it was some minutes before Charlie could move. He opened his eyes—the sky was full of murk—and he tried to sit up. His head spun and he had to close his eyes again until the spinning stopped.

  He wondered if a bomb had gone off. Or a tractor-trailer rig filled with liquid natural gas. The bad smell made him think it must have been gas.

  Charlie opened his eyes. His house was before him, strangely shrunken. Part of it seemed to have collapsed. The big oak tree in the front lawn had split in half, raw white wood showing, but it still stood. The garage had fallen on his car. The ornamental brick on the front of the house had peeled off and lay in little dusty piles. All the windows were broken and the yard was littered with cedar shakes fallen from the roof.

  He couldn’t believe it. He had paid a lot for that house. It wasn’t supposed to just fall down. The sounds of shouts and screams came dimly to his ringing ears. He looked left and right, saw more ruin. All the houses on his quiet, expensive Germantown road were damaged. Windows gaped. Trees had fallen across hedges and rooftops. Chimneys sprawled across lawns. A three-story brick house, two doors down, had simply collapsed into a pile. Porches had fallen, and roofs leaned at strange angles. Stunned people lay stretched on lawns. Some people, some-where, were calling for help. Charlie stared dumbly at the carnage. It must have been a big bomb, he thought. Terrorists. No—probably the U.S. Air Force had dropped a bomb by accident. He would be able to sue for damages.

  Megan’s BMW 328i, he saw, sat in his driveway with its hood and windscreen covered in cedar shakes from the fallen garage. She would be happy, he thought, the car hadn’t suffered much more than a few nicks.

  Megan.

  She had been in the shower, he remembered. She was going to shower, and then they would make love on his big king-sized bed, and then they would open a bottle of champagne and wait for the caterers to deliver his canard a la Montmorency and Megan’s croustades aux crevettes, and they would celebrate the fact that they were both very, very rich. While he waited for Megan to get out of the shower, Charlie sat in the front room to listen to the financial reports on CNN.

  And then the bomb, or whatever it was, had gone off.

  Charlie wondered where Megan was. Perhaps she was still in the shower.

  He tried to get to his feet. His head whirled, and his stomach was tied in knots. Vomit stung the back of his throat. He took a few steps to the house and leaned on one of the portico’s pillars, but the pillar swayed as he put his weight on it, and he saw now that the portico was no longer attached to the house, it had taken a few jumps onto the lawn, and there was a yawning two-foot gap, studded with nails, between the portico and the house proper.

  “Megan?” he called. “Are you in there?”

  He walked across the portico, feeling planks sag beneath his feet, and stepped across the gap between the house and the portico and into the front hall. Inside was a shambles: every shelf fallen, every glass object broken, the furniture moved around as if scrambled by a giant. The bottle of Moet had fallen from the bucket and rolled across the hall from the spilled ice.

  “Megan?” he called.

  He went to the back hall and looked down it. It was dark. Charlie flipped the light switch and the light did not come on.

  There was a little closet off the back hall where the water heater and the furnace boiler were located. The door was open, and the water heater had fallen out and was sprawled in the hallway like a drunken sailor. Water spread across the thick carpet.

  Charlie ventured down the hall and stopped before the water heater. He saw that the flexible metal gas line had been yanked taut when the water heater fell. He could smell a whiff of gas.

  “Megan?” he called. “Are you there?”

  He wondered if he should call a repairman, but then decided that the gas maybe couldn’t wait. He leaned forward and turned the gas tap off at the wall.

  Then he went back down the hallway, picked up the phone, and tried to call 911. The phone line was dead.

  Charlie returned to the water heater and looked at it a while. He took a big stride and stepped over the fallen water heater, then continued down the hall to the master bedroom. The wet carpet squelched under his shoes.

  “Megan?” he called. “Love?”

  Everything leaned at a strange angle here, and it seemed to Charlie as if he were walking downhill. The house seemed partly to have fallen into the cellar. The doorframes were very crooked. The water from the broken water heater was all running downhill.

  He paused at the door to the master bedroom. He was afraid to look inside.

  Maybe, he thought, he should try calling 911 again.

  “Megan?” he called.

  He took a breath and looked around the corner into the master bedroom.

  Acid flooded into his throat, and he turned away and fell to his knees and vomited. Directly above the master bed and bath was the deck, with the hot tub. This was convenient, because the spa shared a lot of the plumbing with the master bath.

  But the hot tub, which weighed over a ton when full, had gone through the deck, and everything was wet and Megan was dead and she was lying beneath the tub and there was no question that she was dead and the room was wrecked and the water was red and Megan was dead beneath the tub. Tears stung Charlie’s eyes. He got off his knees and went down the hall as fast as he could, stepping over the water heater and almost running until he got to the front room. He picked up the phone again, but the phone was still dead. Glass crunched under his feet as he ran for the front door, and then he crashed down because he stepped into the gap between the house and the portico, and he fell hard and felt a bolt of pain as nails tore at his shin. He jumped upright—nails tore at his trouser leg—and hobbled forward off the porch. He ran to the middle of the lawn and then stopped, because he didn’t know where to go next.

  The brick house that had fallen down entirely was on fire, big leaping flames jumping through holes in its curiously intact roof. Another building, across the street and two houses down, was also on fire, though the fire seemed to be confined only to one corner of the building. Smoke poured out the broken windows, but Charlie could see no flames.

  People were in the streets running. Charlie recognized one neighbor, who looked at him and waved.

  “Come on!” he said. “McPhee’s on fire!”

  Charlie stared after the neighbor as he ran. This was ridiculous, he thought. He was not the fire department. Someone should call the fire department.

  He could feel the warm blood as it ran down his wounded leg.

  He remembered that Megan had a cellphone in her car, so he walked to the BMW and opened the door and slid into the front seat. The car smelled securely of leather and Megan’s perfume. He took the phone from its cradle between the two front seats and tried to call.

  Nothing. Nothing but a distant hiss.

  “Megan,” he said, “are you there?”

  Damn, she thought. Guessed wrong.

  She should have read the earthquake report.

  Major General Frazetta looked cautiously from beneath the dining room table. Took a breath. Took another. Waited to make sure that her words wouldn’t turn into a shriek that she’d felt bottled up in her throat as the world shattered around her, as she felt their new house try to shake itself to bits, and then she shouted out, “Pat! You okay in there?”

  From the room that Pat had designated as his workshop came the sound of something heavy shifting, of things tumbling to the floor. “Think so,” came the mumbled answer. Jessica crawled from beneath the table, noted as she rose to her feet that her house had been ruined, and then made her way through the wrecked living room and hall to Pat’s room. Pat was trying to get his lanky body from beneath one of his worktables that had fallen across him. Jessica helped to lever the table back upright—tools and bits of fragrant wood clattered on the floor—a fallen mandolin sang a plaintive chord—and then Pat got cautiously to his feet, brushed dirt off his shanks.

/>   “Nothing broken, I think.” He gave a ragged grin. “Thanks for the warning. Gave me time to duck.” Jessica had recognized the quake’s initial strike—the primary, or P wave—the jolt that felt like a giant fist punching the house from underneath, that set the plates and saucers leaping on the kitchen shelves. She knew that the P wave was only the fastest of an earthquake’s many weapons to travel through the earth, that the P wave would be followed by the shearing force of the slower secondary, or S waves, and then by the madcap dance of the Rayleigh and Love waves that could churn the earth like ocean breakers or spin objects in wild circles like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the fair.

  And she knew, as soon as she felt the incredible force of that first jolt, the P wave that lifted her from the floor of the house and almost threw her through the kitchen window, that within seconds she would be experiencing all four kinds of movement at once. And so she dived beneath the solid dark wood shelter of the dining room table while shouting at Pat to take cover, that the big quake had come at last. Only to have her words devoured by the express-train sound of the quake, by the shattering of glass and the crashing of shelves.

  The mandolin sang again as Pat rescued it from the floor. “I’ve got to get to headquarters,” Jessica said.

  “The road is likely to be a mess. It might take two of us to get through—can you drive me in the Cherokee?”

  “Sure.”

  She looked at her watch, passed a hand over her forehead. It was just after five-thirty, and the quake had lasted more than ten minutes. My God, she thought, the quake hit during rush hour. Millions of people caught on the roads, on or beneath bridges and overpasses as they fell… And with all the rivers in spring flood, too.

  “Go start the Jeep,” she said. “Put the chainsaw in it. I’m going to chaise—put on my BDUs.” Damned, she thought, if she was going to confront a major national emergency in torn pantyhose. The earthquake must have gone on at least ten minutes.

  Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch still stood above the Mississippi. If the old man had still been alive, Marcy Douglas would have kissed him.

  One of the Frenchmen had suffered a heart attack. Everyone else had been so preoccupied during the quake that no one had noticed him until after the arch shivered to the quake’s final tremor. The Frenchman was pale and glabrous and his lips were turning blue. Marcy’s colleague Evan was giving him CPR. The victim’s friends milled around loudly explaining the situation to each other in French. Hot prairie wind blasted through broken windows, and only partially cleared away the smell of vomit. Several people had come down with motion sickness, including one little boy who had thrown up what looked like an entire bucket of popcorn. The arch did not normally move much—it would sway less than an inch even in the highest wind—but things were obviously different when bedrock was jumping around.

  Marcy crawled to the station from which she controlled the tram, and used the telephone to call Richards, her superior, down on the ground level.

  “We need to get paramedics up here,” she said. “We’ve got a medical emergency.”

  “Good luck,” Richards said. His speech was fast and breathy, as if he’d just run several miles. “There must be hundreds of casualties in town. The ambulance crews will have plenty of people to treat without climbing the Gateway Arch.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Get your casualty down here. Our generators have kicked in—the trams’ll work. Then get everyone else down to ground level as soon as you can.”

  “Can you send some people up to—”

  “No. I’m not sending anyone up there!”

  “But—”

  “Besides, you can’t believe how many people we’ve got hurt down here.” Marcy replaced the phone receiver, gripped the console, and carefully steered herself to her feet. A powerful wind blew through the shattered windows, flooding the observation deck with heat and dust. She walked with care—it felt as if she were stepping on pillows, expecting the floor to leap at any instant—to where the Frenchman was lying in the midst of a group.

  “How’s he doing?” she asked Evan.

  Evan was in his late twenties, a white guy who had lived in Missouri all his life. “He’s breathing all right,” he said. “I think he’ll be okay if we can get the parameds here.”

  “Richards wants us to get him down on the trams,” Marcy said. “He doesn’t think the parameds will get here for some time.”

  Evan pushed his glasses back on his nose. “That’s gonna be tough,” he said. “Can they send us somebody beefy to help carry—”

  “Richards says no.” She looked up in alarm. “Stay away from the windows, please!” One of the children was bellying up to one of the shattered windows. He pointed out into the air. “Busch Stadium fell down!” he said.

  Marcy pulled him back from the broken window, but she couldn’t quite resist looking out herself. The view made her heart lurch.

  Busch Stadium hadn’t fallen down, exactly, but the roof had collapsed, and the rest was clearly damaged. City Hall looked as if a giant had gone over it with a hammer. Some of the older buildings—brick office buildings and hotels—had collapsed to rubble. There didn’t seem to be a single intact window in the entire city.

  Above the shattered cityscape, a few thin columns of smoke were beginning to corkscrew into the sky. As the strong wind batted at her face Marcy thought about her apartment, the comfortable old brownstone she’d felt lucky to find and be able to afford. It was brick, and she wondered if all her belongings were now buried under piles of rubble.

  She was lucky, she thought. She was lucky she was working the swing shift, lucky to be in the most solid structure in all Missouri.

  “Marcy,” Evan reminded. “We’re in a hurry.”

  Marcy walked to Evan’s station controlling the north tramway and thumbed on the microphone. She took on a breath.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “we’re sorry about the delay. We have a visitor who has fallen ill, so we ask you will be patient while he is loaded aboard a tram. After he has been sent to ground level, we will start regular boarding, and we’ll get you all to the surface as quickly as possible.” Evan recruited one of the other Frenchmen to link arms beneath the sick man, forming support beneath his back and knees in a two-man carry. Marcy was relieved that she hadn’t been requested to support half the man’s weight on her skinny frame, but wondered if she should be insulted that she hadn’t even been asked.

  The casualty was carried gingerly down the stairs until an aftershock slammed the arch. The French rescuer lost his grip, and the invalid spilled to the metal stairs. His friends clustered around and began shouting at each other in French.

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” Evan muttered. Marcy shoved her way through the crowd and tried to restore order. Evan and his partner lifted the victim again, shuffled him to the first tram, then laid him inside. Evan, the other Frenchman, and one of the women—the victim’s wife, possibly—got into the tram car with him.

  Marcy closed the tram doors and heard the rumble recede as the little train began its long trip to the ground.

  “Excuse me?” The speaker was the young Japanese man. He was shy, and his voice was so low that Marcy could barely hear him above the blast of wind. “We are going down elevators?”

  “Yes,” Marcy said.

  “Is not safe on elevators,” the man said. “Is earthquake.” A number of the visitors had clustered around to listen to this exchange. “That’s right,” one man said. “We could get stranded.”

  “The Gateway Arch has its own emergency power supply,” Marcy said. “I’ve been up here during two power failures in the city, and the emergency power cut in both times, and the people in the trams never even noticed.”

  “Is earthquake,” the Japanese man insisted. “Must take stairs.”

  “There are over a thousand stairs,” Marcy said. “We’re twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. It’s a long way down.” The man seemed unconvinced, and Marcy wondered
if she was at all urging the right thing. There were earthquakes in Japan all the time, and maybe the Japanese man knew what he was talking about.

  She summoned as much authority as she could, squared her shoulders, looked at everyone from under the brim of her Smokey Bear hat. “It’s much safer on the trams,” she said, and hoped her voice was steady.

  The phone buzzed. She picked it up, heard Evan’s voice.

  “We’ve got him down. I’m sending the tram back up.”

  “Good. I’m going to need your help to—”

  “No way, Marcy. I’m gone.”

  Surprise took Marcy by the throat. “What—?” she managed.

  “I’ve got a pregnant wife and two small kids in Florissant. That’s my priority. I’ve got to be with them.”

  “Evan,” Marcy said. “This is an emergency. We’ve got to get these people to the ground. You can’t leave.”

  “The Park Service can sue me. See you later, maybe.”

  The telephone clicked off. Marcy felt her skin flush with anger, not simply at Evan’s desertion but at the futility of his decision. Florissant was miles away, right through the inner city, and there was no way Evan could hope to get there in the horrid ruin St. Louis had become. All he had done by running off was to make himself useless, to his family and the tourists and everyone else.