The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Hilkiah met him on the way. The big man looked grim. “Brother Frankland, I just heard something.” Frankland didn’t break stride, made Hilkiah walk after him. “Yeah?” he snarled. “If it’s trouble, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You know old Sam Hanson? The farmer, from out Baxter Road?”

  “Yeah? He’s here, ain’t he?”

  “Well, sure. And he’s with his friend Jack MacGregor.”

  “So?”

  Hilkiah hesitated. “Well, according to Brother Murphy, y’know, their guide, he heard the two of ’em makin’ out in their tent last night.”

  Frankland stopped dead in his tracks and swiveled on Hilkiah. “You’re telling me what, Hilkiah?” Hilkiah seemed embarrassed. “Well. You know. They’s queer.”

  Frankland looked at Hilkiah in astonishment. Sam Hanson was just an old soybean farmer, past fifty, and his friend Jack wasn’t much younger. Neither of them were the slightest bit—the slightest bit of whatever homosexuals were supposed to be, effeminate or lisping or whatever. Granted, the two had lived together for longer than Frankland had been in Rails Bluff, but there hadn’t been the slightest hint that there was anything deviant going on, everyone just assumed they lived together because they shared so many hobbies.

  They tied flies, Frankland remembered, they’d won a prize at the county fair.

  “Is Brother Murphy sure?” Frankland said.

  “Oh yeah. He said they were kinda noisy. And it wasn’t just Murphy who heard it, neither.”

  “Lordamighty,” Frankland said, stunned. “I can’t have this going on in my camp!” A new determination seized him.

  I know evil when I see it. You don’t need to be a Catholic priest to know when Satan was among the people.

  Frankland took off at a brisk stride toward where Dr. Calhoun was finishing off the morning service.

  “Wait up there!” he shouted. He reached around his back, took out his Smith & Wesson, waved it over his head.

  “We got one more item of business!” Frankland shouted. “Sam Hanson, Jack MacGregor, get up here!” Judge me, will he? Frankland thought. I’ll show him judgment!

  They were going to have themselves some righteous atonement, by God. And they were going to have it now.

  Later on, after Hanson and MacGregor had been exposed, after they had wept and crawled and begged God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of their neighbors, after they’d been separated and sent off to work with two different parties, Frankland heard from the guard he’d put over Robitaille that the priest had died in his sleep.

  “Dang it!” Frankland wanted to hit something, but there was nothing nearby, so he kicked the ground instead.

  Robitaille had slipped away, had escaped Frankland’s jurisdiction. Before Frankland could argue him around to his way of thinking, before he could get Robitaille to denounce the Catholic church and join his own.

  Before he could save Robitaille’s soul.

  “Dang it!” Frankland said again.

  If only he’d had another few more days.

  “I have some preliminary figures, sir,” said Boris Lipinsky.

  “By all means,” said the President. Lipinsky turned up in the Oval Office, every morning at ten a.m., to bombard his president with numbers. The President had gotten used to it by now. He was staring out the Oval Office windows at the White House grounds. A light rain was falling, spattering the glass with tiny drops. He turned and sat himself behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk.

  “Please sit down, Boris,” he said. “And if you can, try to keep it brief. I have to attend Congressman Delarue’s funeral.” Delarue, a party stalwart, had died of a heart attack during an aftershock while on a visit to his home district in Arkansas. Being what the government termed a “Vietnam-era veteran”—without, however, actually having served in Vietnam—Delarue would be buried in the military cemetery at Arlington, after a service in the capital.

  Lipinsky spoke without referring to the notes in his hand. The President, who usually needed his briefing books to remind him of the reasons behind his positions on the issues, could only envy Lipinsky this ability.

  “We believe the quakes in the New Madrid region have killed between fifteen and twenty thousand people. Almost two hundred thousand have injuries serious enough to require hospitalization. There are approximately three million homeless people in the New Madrid seismic zone, of whom over fifty percent are now living out of doors for lack of a safe structure to house in, and a further five million in need of one form of assistance or other, either food aid, ice, medical aid short of hospitalization, or emergency financial aid in order to purchase food or other basic necessities.” He blinked behind his thick spectacles. “These figures are very preliminary, sir.”

  “Ice?” the President said. “Why are we providing people with ice?” He had pictures of cocktail parties at the government’s expense.

  “To preserve food, Mr. President. The victim areas range from temperate to subtropical zones, and—”

  “I understand now, thank you. Continue.”

  Rain tapped on the Oval Office windows as Lipinsky licked his lips and continued. “Much of the area is still without electric power, particularly rural areas. The lack of electricity means that other utilities, such as water, gas, and sewage treatment, may be difficult if not impossible to restore. Lack of safe water and proper sanitation will almost inevitably result in epidemics of disease ranging from dysentery to cholera and typhoid.”

  The President sat up in his chair. “Those diseases are in the United States?”

  “I fear so, sir. Particularly on a major waterway such as the Mississippi.”

  “You are taking—”

  “We are taking every possible precaution, yes. Ranging from urging people to boil their water to preshipping the necessary medical supplies to centralized points within the victim areas.” He shook his head. “But there are entire districts—all rural—where we have been unable to do anything. We lack the assets to put into the victim areas, and even if we had the assets, the infrastructure no longer exists to put them in place.” Lipinsky solemnly shook his head. “Hundreds of thousands of people—maybe over a million—are entirely dependent on their own resources in this crisis. It is an ongoing tragedy to which we cannot even bear witness.”

  Ongoing tragedy… For a moment the President was outraged. Lipinsky spoke about tragedy in the same pedantic manner he spoke of assets and infrastructure.

  These people are not statistics, the President thought in fury. But then the fury passed, and he sighed. He was slowly growing used to his own impotence. He looked up at Lipinsky.

  “The—the nuclear plant in Mississippi? This situation is being dealt with?”

  “I am informed that General Frazetta will implement a—rather novel—plan at Poinsett Landing. An artificial island will be built around the reactor to stabilize it.”

  They can do that? the President wondered. Well, he concluded, why not? “I want that problem neutralized,” he said. Meaning the political problem as much as any other. “The full resources of the government, you understand?”

  “Indeed, sir.” Lipinsky, the President knew, understood the political dimensions of a nuclear catastrophe as well as anyone.

  “And…” The President hesitated. “General Frazetta’s other problem? The water supply?” Lipinsky paused, the moment of silence adding gravity to his words. “Our HAZMAT teams are still testing the water, Mr. President. Any information is exceedingly preliminary.”

  “And the preliminary reports indicate what, exactly?”

  Another pause. Then Lipinsky just shook his head. “Preliminary reports are not at all encouraging, sir.” So, the President thought, it would get worse. Three million homeless, and it will get worse. Worse.

  Charlie woke with a start in the middle of the night to the sound of the telephone ringing in his ear. He clawed for the receiver on the passenger seat, clutched at it, raised it to his ear.

  “Hello?” he said. �
�Hello?”

  He heard nothing, not even a hiss. Charlie looked at the phone in growing surprise. No one had called him. The cellphone had rung only in his dreams.

  Charlie threw the receiver back on the seat. “Got to get a grip,” he advised himself, and opened the door to let some of the wine fumes out of the car.

  He had been drinking the wine pretty steadily. It was the only food he had left. That and some hard liquor in a cabinet.

  “Got to get a plan,” he muttered to himself.

  He stepped from the car to let the cool evening clear his head. Pain stabbed at him from his injured leg. He wandered over to his oak tree, split right up the middle, and looked at the world from between its two halves.

  He was a trader, damn it. He needed some way he could do his job. There had to be ways he could take advantage of this situation. He dealt in commodities all the time, and what everyone lacked at the moment was commodities. There had to be a way he could take advantage of that.

  If only he had a place to start. A place where he could start trading. A market. When the idea came to him, it was so beautiful that he could only gaze in wonder at the picture that unfolded in his mind.

  Charlie Johns, he thought to himself, you are a genius.

  Charlie was back at the convenience store. In the twenty-four hours since he’d left with laughter ringing in his ears, the pile of canned goods had been reduced by about two-thirds. The cans remaining weren’t the most desirable: they were things like cranberries and pickle relish sauce.

  The young man was behind the counter this time, his gun still at his waist. Behind the counter Charlie saw television sets, stereo systems, boom boxes, a few home computers. “You found some cash?” the young man said. “Or you got a TV set or something, we’ll take that, too.”

  “What I’ve got, friend,” Charlie said, “is a way to get rich. What we need to do is establish a market.” The young man looked at him. “This is a market. Don’t you comprendo no English where you come from?”

  “This is one kind of market,” Charlie said. “But what’s going to happen, mate, is that you’re going to run out of food soon. And then how are you going to make money?”

  The young man shrugged. “We’ll get a delivery sooner or later.”

  “But when?” Charlie said. “And how much is it going to cost you? See, the weakness is that you don’t know the answers to those questions, so your market isn’t stable.”

  “Junior? What’s going on here?” The older man emerged from the back room, buttoning his jeans. He looked at Charlie, then scowled. “Oh,” he said. “The Limey.” Charlie turned to him. “I was explaining to your partner here—” he began.

  “My son.”

  “Your son,” Charlie said, “that the market for your goods is unstable, because you don’t know when you’re going to get a delivery, or how much it will cost.”

  The older man reached into a back pocket, took out a round tin of Red Man, and put snuff in one cheek.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “So what you do in order to regain stability,” Charlie said, “is establish a market in contracts to purchase goods when they’re delivered. Or contracts to deliver goods, if people have goods that they can sell to you.”

  The two men squinted at him. “And how do I do that exactly?”

  Charlie wiped sweat from his forehead. Hunger growled in his belly. “See, mate, what happens is that somebody comes in and wants to buy some bread. But you don’t have any bread, and you won’t until you get a delivery, so what you sell the man instead is a contract to sell him bread on a certain date, at a certain price. And then—”

  “Wait a minute,” the old man said, “they give me money for this contract?”

  “Right, mate. Yeah. The man gives you money, or—” glancing at the electronics behind the counter

  “—something else of value. And then, once he has the contract, he can keep it or sell it. And if the price of bread goes down by the time you’re supposed to deliver, you’d lose money on the physical transaction, but you could make money by buying an obligation at the lower price to deliver the same goods…”

  “This ol’ drunk’s crazy,” the young man said.

  “No!” Charlie said. “This really works! See, if the price of bread goes up…” A young, very pregnant woman came into the store. She was badly sunburned on her forehead and shoulders. She pushed a shopping cart that held a portable television set. “How many cans can you give me for this?” she said.

  “Just let me set up this market for you,” Charlie said. “I know how to do it. We can all make money.”

  “We got a customer here,” the older man said. He walked to the pregnant woman, picked up the television set, looked at it. “Five cans,” he said.

  Charlie looked at them in annoyance. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry to interrupt the workings of this primitive system of finance you’ve developed here, but I’m talking big money here. This is the futures market I’m talking about.”

  The older man looked at Charlie from under the rim of his baseball cap and put the TV set on the counter. “Pay me cash money for something,” he said, “or get out of here. I got business to transact.” Charlie couldn’t believe this stupidity. “Just listen to me!” he said. “Millions of dollars are made every day in just this way! I’ve made millions of dollars just like this! It’s easy! All you have to do is listen!” The older man slapped Charlie across the face, hard. His hand was large and rough. Charlie stared in shock at the man, at the incredible red violence in his glare. The man grabbed Charlie’s collar and rushed him through the door, shouting get out get out get out. Charlie caught a heel on the threshold and went over backward. Asphalt bit his hands, and his teeth rattled. The older man stood over him, red-faced and shouting.

  “You’re right out of your mind! Get out of here before I blow your brains out!” Charlie wiped tobacco juice off his face. “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “I know a drunken derelict when I see one! Now clear out!”

  Charlie got cautiously to his feet, keeping his distance from the man. “I’m not a derelict!” he said. “I’m a millionaire!”

  “You’re a derelict now, rich man! You’re a bobtail flush that ain’t got nothing to sell but bullshit!” Charlie backed away. His cheek stung. Bewilderment whirled through his mind. What was wrong with the man, he wondered.

  He had to stop three times on the way home and sit on the curb to rest. He was rich, he protested to himself. He had guessed right about the market. So why couldn’t he buy anything?

  Cable snaked through the block hung below the triangle. The electric winch whined, and the great concrete lid rose from the bunker.

  Below Frankland saw packaged food. Flour, beans, rice, condensed milk, baby formula, canned fruit and vegetables, vitamins. Two years’ supply for two people. Plus seed corn and fertilizer so that crops could be raised after the food ran out.

  The Rails Bluff area had finally run out of food. What had been plundered from the Piggly Wiggly, the Wal-Mart, and the cupboards of the residents would be gone within a day or so. Frankland decided to open the bunkers of the Apocalypse Club. These were supplies laid aside for the End Times by his followers, people who had answered his radio appeals and who had intended to join him here in Rails Bluff when the end of the world was clearly nigh.

  But they hadn’t arrived, not one of them, and hundreds of refugees had come instead. He had to feed the people who were here, no matter who the food actually belonged to.

  The Apocalypse Club had thirty sealed caches behind Frankland’s home. Some belonged to the Elders, who had three months’ supplies in their bunkers, and others to the Lions of Judah, with six months’

  supplies. Some belonged to the Roots of David, who had a year’s supplies, and others belonged to the Seventh Seals, who had purchased supplies for two years or more.

  Actually there were only three Seventh Seals: Frankland, Sheryl, and Hilkiah. Response to Frankland’s radio
appeals had not been as great as Frankland had hoped. Hilkiah had bought his supplies on credit from Frankland and was slowly paying off the debt a few dollars at a time.

  If necessary Frankland would open them all. But he would set a personal example and start with the Seventh Seals, with his and Sheryl’s own personal supplies, and work from there down the list. Things were moving along too well for material considerations to impede progress now. It was just as he had written it down in his Plan, years ago. Day 7—all unite in love and praise of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Everyone was pulling together. Everyone was praising God. Sin had been vanquished, in the persons of people like Magnusson and Hanson and MacGregor, and everyone had rejoiced in their repentance.

  The only thing that Frankland regretted was the death of Robitaille. If he’d had a chance to work with the priest a little more, he’d probably have been able to bring him around.

  Frankland bent and helped Hilkiah move the heavy concrete lid to the side. “There,” he said. “Let’s get it moved to the kitchens.”

  “Brother Frankland?”

  Frankland turned to find Sheriff Gorton approaching, along with a well-dressed, white-haired man in a coat and tie. Other than for Frankland and the other pastors, who wore ties for services, ties had been pretty rare since the End Times had begun.

  The stranger looked somewhat familiar, though Frankland couldn’t place him.

  “Brother Frankland,” the Sheriff said, “this is Gus Gustafson, from the County Council.” Frankland wiped the soil from his hands and shook Gustafson’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Brother Gustafson,” he said.

  Gustafson glanced around the camp with ice-blue eyes. “It’s quite a place you have here, sir,” he said.

  “Quite an accomplishment.”

  “Thank you. But all glory goes to Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit.”

  “Ye-es.” Gustafson’s blue eyes darted from one place to the other. “When I tell the rest of the council members what you’ve done here, I’m sure they’ll be impressed. I think the county owes a vote of thanks to you for helping so many of our people.” He cleared his throat, and his voice turned brisk. “But what I’ve come to tell you, sir,” he said, “is that the state is now able to take some of this burden off your shoulders. We’ve managed to open a road through the piney woods east from the county seat, and from there to Pine Bluff and points south.”