The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “In Queens…” Jessica’s mind whirled as she tried to understand the scope of it all.

  “The TV says they can’t raise anyone in St. Louis or Memphis. None of their, what d’you call ’em, affiliates. Chicago got shook up, and Kansas City. And this place that’s named after the syrup, you know…”

  Jessica looked at the phone in disbelief. “Syrup, Ma?”

  “Kayro! That’s it.”

  “Cairo.”

  “They said they got a radio message from someone in Kayro, wherever that is, and the town got knocked down and flooded.”

  Well, it would be. Cairo was at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio and practically surrounded by water. Protected by flood walls, but an earthquake would breach those easily enough. Jessica paused in front of the headquarters’ glassed-in front. Most of the glass was broken or shattered. Jessica’s mother began complaining about the incompetence of the Korean family that had just bought the grocery on the corner.

  “I gotta go, Ma,” she said. “I got work to do.”

  “Call when you can.” Jessica’s mother sounded resigned. “You know how we worry.”

  “Love you. Bye.”

  She closed the cellphone, clipped it again to her belt. Her staff were looking at her.

  “The earthquake was big enough to break crockery in New York City,” she said. “St. Louis and Memphis are out of communication, and that leads me to suspect that it was the New Madrid fault that slipped.” Jessica looked up into their eyes, and wondered why every person she’d ever served with was so much taller than she. “This means, gentlemen,” she said, “we’re going to be coping with a three-hundred-year event. Maybe even a thousand-year event. Which means that we are involved in a calamity akin to that of a major war, with bloodshed, property destruction, and damage to communications all on a similar scale.”

  Colonel Davidovich, her second-in-command, blew out his cheeks in surprise at this notion. Jessica spoke on.

  “We’re going to have to assume significant damage to Corps installations throughout the MVD. As soon as we get into communication with the outside, I want to check the dams first—I want a complete list, however many hundred there are.” Walls of water pouring down river valleys from broken dams was the vision that frightened Jessica most.

  “We’re in Vicksburg,” she went on, “which is built on a bluff—reasonably solid ground, even if there’s no bedrock. But most of the Mississippi Valley is built on goo. We’re going to have to assume that the damage we’ve seen here is probably on a lesser scale than has been inflicted elsewhere.” Her staff looked at the building behind them, with its shattered windows and ominous-looking cracks, and for the first time looked intimidated.

  “What I need now is an evaluation of the buildings here—HQ in particular. I want to know if it’s safe to reoccupy the building. And even if the building is safe, we’re still going to have to break some tents out of stores. So who’s qualified to do an assessment?”

  Davidovich and a couple others raised hands. She looked at Davidovich, said, “Right, you take charge of the survey party. Report to me when you’ve reached a conclusion about HQ.” Davidovich drew the others off for a quick briefing. Jessica looked at the wreckage of the porch.

  “I’m going to go to my office,” she said, “and get some maps and phone numbers.” She felt a presence hovering behind her and turned to see her husband. Pat wore an expectant look.

  “Once the battery’s charged,” she said, “I guess you can head on home.” He looked dubious. “Not much for me there,” he said. “And I’d as soon not have to make that drive alone.” He rubbed his face. “Maybe I can make myself useful.”

  Jessica thought about it. “Right,” she said. “In the absence of proper communications protocols, I hereby appoint you my message-runner.”

  “Jeb Stuart,” Pat reminded, “had a banjo player on staff.”

  “He was in another army,” Jessica said, “but I’ll take that suggestion under advisement.” The Situation Room was still filling up. The Vice President’s helicopter would be landing at any time. The National Security Advisor was in the building but had not yet arrived. The Secretary of the Interior was in Alaska, and the Secretary of Defense was on a tour of the Balkans. The Secretary of Labor was on his way from West Virginia. The head of the Forest Service and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were stuck in traffic on the Alexandria Bridge, but hoped to be present within the hour. But Boris Lipinsky, the Ukrainian-born head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had arrived at the same time as the President, and he and the President had a lot to talk about even without the others.

  “We have less than three thousand employees in FEMA, sir,” Lipinsky said. “We depend for the most part on volunteers, and on personnel supplied by other agencies.”

  “What can you do now?” the President said.

  Lipinsky spoke slowly, with a pronounced Ukrainian accent. His blue eyes were vaguely focused on empty space, as if he were reading his words from an invisible TelePrompTer.

  “Normally we act only in response to requests from the governors of individual states,” he said. “But when I felt the shock earlier this evening, and received confirmation from the National Earthquake Information Center that a major quake had occurred, I alerted the staffs of the Catastrophic Disaster Response Group and the Emergency Information and Coordination Center.”

  “We have to assume,” he continued, “that any emergency services in the affected areas will have been swallowed up by the catastrophe and be able to achieve very little of substance. The citizens can count on no help from the police, from National Guard, from hospital and ambulance services, or from electrical, transportation, or sewer workers unless they are sent in from outside the area.” Any emergency services swallowed up by the catastrophe… The President found the thought stupefying. He was a modern man, and the thought of existence without any of the most basic modern comforts—shelter, police and fire protection, electricity, running water, the telephone, television—it was almost beyond his conception.

  Surely, he thought, it couldn’t be that bad.

  “Therefore, Mr. President,” Lipinsky went on, “on my own authority, I began the process of alerting all response teams concerned with Urban Search and Rescue, Firefighting, Transportation, Health and Medical, Public Works, Hazardous Materials, and Mass Care. Such elements as Energy, Food, and Public Resource Support can wait until the full scope of the emergency is better determined. I also took it upon myself to alert the Public Health Service.” Lipinsky raised his bushy eyebrows. “I hope this display of initiative meets with your approval, sir?”

  “Yes,” said the President, happy to finally have a chance to speak. Lipinsky plodded on. “Most of our response teams will be ready to deploy into the affected areas within six hours. The deployment will be through MARS, so we will need to coordinate with DOD, U.S. Transportation Command as soon as possible. I hope that my staff will have recommendations for deployment within a few hours.”

  MARS was shorthand for military units under the authority of the Department of Defense. The President nodded and said, “Very good.”

  “We are contacting the regional phone companies. During a disaster of this scope, the phone lines are often jammed with calls from outside the area trying to discover if their friends and relatives are all right. This can prevent genuine emergency calls from going through. So we are asking the phone companies to close down long-distance service from outside the area. People in the disaster area will be able to call out, and they will be able to call each other and emergency services, but those from outside will not be able to call into the area unless they are calling on official business.” The President nodded again.

  “My office has been trying to contact General Breedlove, our Defense Coordinating Officer, who is the military gentleman responsible for coordinating FEMA’s teams with those of MARS. But he is on a fishing vacation in Arkansas, which is one of the affected areas, and may be out of c
ommunication for some time. Perhaps you, Mr. President, or some other person in a position of authority, will take it upon yourself to appoint a Supported Commander-in-Chief to manage the deployment of our civilian/military Joint Task Forces?”

  There was a moment before the President realized that this was his cue to speak. Lipinsky’s labored rhythms had a certain hypnotic effect, and the President had been lulled into a near-trance.

  “I’ll consider that when General Shortland arrives,” the President said. “I want his advice on any military matters.”

  Lipinsky nodded. “Very good, sir. I must also ask you to appoint a Federal Coordinating Officer for each affected state. The FCOs will travel to each state and coordinate state, local, and federal disaster response.”

  “I presume you have recommendations?”

  Lipinsky signaled to one of his aides, who came forward and opened a briefcase. “I have taken the liberty of making up a list of candidates that I consider suitable.”

  The President ground his teeth as he took a copy of the list and reached for his reading glasses. Bureaucracy, he thought. You couldn’t do anything without the bureaucracy. Everything had to be crammed into organization charts, boxes, lists, accounts, departments, labeled with acronyms, staffed by bureaucrats who used other acronyms as their titles.

  A major disaster would take all those neat organizational charts and tear them into shreds. But he had to deal with them anyway.

  What was the choice? Particularly now? The President could stand on his desk and scream, “Everyone help those people!”, and people would probably try to do their best, but unless the efforts were organized and directed by all those people with the acronyms, little good would result. And so the President resigned himself to his duty. He consulted with Lipinsky, appointed his FCOs, and once General Shortland appeared, the President appointed a Supported CINC to handle MARS deployments via the AMC and USTRANSCOM. Then SAAMs could be tasked to deliver US&R teams and other JTOs to affected areas. USACE personnel trained in Basic and Light US&R were placed on alert. Attempts were made to contact SCOs in their individual states. DOMS established a CAT in the Army Operations Center. USTRANSCOM SAAMs were tasked to deliver FCOs into the field.

  And all along, information kept arriving as to the scope of the crisis. Memphis and St. Louis had been, apparently, flattened. Parts of Chicago were on fire. Little Rock was hard hit. Bridges, roadways, airports, and railroads were out. Even large military units seemed to have dropped off the map. Millions might well be homeless.

  And almost all the military air missions had to be rescheduled. All airfields in the quake areas had been destroyed, and fixed-wing aircraft couldn’t land. SAAMs—Special Airlift Assignment Missions, for those who lived outside the world of acronyms—had to be landed at the nearest intact airports, and the rescue teams, and their equipment, reassigned to helicopters.

  Selected Reserve units were mobilized—engineers to rebuild runways and other vital transport, signal units, logistics commands, supply, transport, plus ground units to provide them with security. National Guard had already been called up by the governors of the quake-ravaged states. At the insistence of the National Security Advisor, the entire U.S. military was put on alert. Terrorists or other enemies, he warned, might try to take advantage of the situation.

  In the end, the President was thankful for the acronyms. They kept him from thinking about the people, the people trapped in rubble or cringing from the flames or watching the flood waters rise slowly above their children’s knees…

  “We have the word from the Earthquake Information Center, sir,” Lipinsky said around midnight. “The quake tops out at eight point nine on the Richter scale.”

  The President blinked. “That’s not so bad, is it?” he said. “I gave a speech in Monterey in ’98, I think it was, and there was a five point five. Just a big bang and it was over. And eight point nine, that’s, what, not even twice as large.”

  Lipinsky’s bland blue eyes didn’t so much as twitch. “The Richter Scale isn’t numerical, sir,” he said. “It’s logarithmic. A three on the Richter scale isn’t half again powerful as two, it’s ten times as powerful. And a four isn’t twice as powerful as two, it’s a hundred times the size of a two. So the 8.9 in Missouri is therefore—” the blue eyes turned inward for just a half-second “—one thousand four hundred times the strength of the quake you experienced in Monterey.”

  Numerals swarmed through the President’s mind. One thousand four hundred times… Lipinsky went on. “In fact, Mr. President, the Information Center told me that the earth probably can’t hold enough energy to deliver a quake larger than eight point nine.” He looked solemn. “This is the worst the geosphere can do to us, Mr. President. There’s only one earthquake in human history that compares with it, and that was in China four thousand years ago.”

  The worst natural disaster since the Bronze Age, the President thought. And on my watch.

  “I need to get out there,” he said. “I need to get into the field myself.” And, as his press secretary would no doubt remind him, he would need to be seen in the field. The Secret Service would go nuts. The presidential bodyguard wouldn’t want the President anywhere near a catastrophe on this scale. Assassins were the least of their worries, not when an aftershock could drop the Gateway Arch on him.

  “Sir.” One of his aides, holding a phone. “The chairman of the Federal Reserve would like a meeting with you tomorrow, as early as possible.”

  The President stared, a new realization rolling through his mind.

  He had completely forgot that all this was going to have to be paid for.

  Jason could feel the speed of the boat increase, hear the roaring ahead. He had been drowsing in the front seat, leaning forward on the boat’s useless wheel, but the grinding of the boat over some debris had woken him, and once awake he sensed a change. The wind was blowing much more steadily, a cool fresh breeze with the scent of spray in it. The black river was moving fast, raising a chop that slapped water against the sides of the boat. In the fitful starlight Jason could see debris crowding the water, boxes and bottles and lumber, limbs and whole trees. In the dark Jason couldn’t tell where the bank was, but he sensed it was close.

  It was as if the river had spread itself out into a lake. And now someone had pulled a cork on the bottom of the lake, and it was all draining out at once.

  The roaring sound increased. Water sloshed around his ankles as Jason stood on the pitching boat, holding on the wheel for support as he peered downriver.

  A cold fist clamped on Jason’s throat.

  Ahead, even through the darkness, he could see the white water, the white-crested chop leaping higher than his head.

  A gentleman who was near the Arkansas river, at the time of the first shock in Dec. last, states, that certain Indians had arrived near the mouth of the river, who had seen a large lake or sea, where many of their brothers had resided, and had perished in the general wreck; that to escape a similar fate, they had traveled three days up the river, but finding the dangers increase, as they progressed, frequently having to cut down large trees, to cross the chasms in the earth, they returned to the mouth of the river, and from them this information is derived.

  Extract from a letter to a gentleman in Lexington, from his friend at New Madrid, dated 16th December, 1811

  In the hot Tennessee night, Nick could see the lights of Memphis glowing on low cloud ahead, an angry red. At least Nick hoped they were lights and not fire.

  He hoped, but hope was fading. He’d already seen too much.

  As he and Viondi trudged toward Memphis, they began to pass into areas with a larger population, but they passed nothing but ruin. Every house was flattened. Sometimes the homeowners stood numbly in front of their shattered dwellings, or made vague attempts to fetch belongings from the fallen structures. Some of them waved as Nick and Viondi passed. Some were injured, but most of the injuries seemed light.

  The badly injured ones, Nick figured, never
made it out of their houses. Once Nick and Viondi heard someone calling from a shattered storefront, some kind of clothing store. They dug into the ruin, throwing bricks and ruined clothes behind them into the street, and found an elderly Asian man with a beam fallen across his legs.

  There was no way to move that beam. All they could do was promise that they’d contact the police or somebody to help him.

  At least the storefront wasn’t on fire, Nick thought. Many of the buildings were in flames. Nick didn’t want to think about people who might have lain in those ruins waiting for the fire to reach them, calling for help that never came. By the time Nick and Viondi passed by, the buildings were already blazing. Anyone inside was already long dead.

  The road was often blocked by fallen trees or by crevasses, and every vehicle on it had been abandoned. Furious rain-storms pelted down on them, and they plodded on wearing windbreakers dug out of their luggage. Lightning boomed overhead even when it wasn’t raining. When night came on, there were no traffic lights, no street lights, no lights at all but the stars and the flare of burning structures. Nick saw no police, no fire engines, no ambulances. Everyone out here was on his own.

  And then, just ahead, Nick saw the lights of a police cruiser, its flashers illuminating the rubble that was once a brick Mobil station. The Mobil sign, dark, was still intact on its metal pole, and pulsed faintly, blue and red, in the flashing police lights. The Mobil station was a pile of rubble. Standing by the open door of the car was a state trooper talking into a microphone.

  “Hey,” Viondi said, and took a closer grip on his soggy cardboard box. He squinted ahead at the state trooper. “And the man’s a brother, too. Looks like we finally got lucky. I’d sure as hell hate to walk up to a cracker cop on a night like this.”

  The dead boy kept staring at him with a face that looked like Victor’s. And the old man—he didn’t want to think about the old man.