The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  The President rolled toward the phone on the nightstand. “Get me the First Lady,” he said, “the Vice President, and whoever’s in charge at the CDRG.”

  And then he looked at the clock. Five minutes after two.

  He felt a panicked throb in his chest. That was a quake, he thought. His experience in the National Cathedral, and the days he’d spent touring the disaster areas in the Midwest, had sensitized him to earth tremors. The first temblor that shivered up through his mattress had awakened him from sound sleep. And he had felt it here, in the White House, which meant it was another big one. He kicked off the covers, felt for his slippers with his toes. And then a woman’s voice spoke in his ear.

  “Mr. President? This is Beverly Maddox at the CDRG. May I help you?”

  “Did you feel that quake? Do you have any information?”

  There was a moment’s pause. “I felt no quake, sir, but I’ll check.” And then, before the President could say anything more, heard the click, and then syrupy music. She had put him on hold.

  “Jesus Christ!” the President barked in amazement. Nobody ever put the President of the United States on hold.

  There was another click, and then the voice again. “Nobody here felt a quake, sir. I take it you’re not calling from D.C.?”

  “Don’t ever put me on hold again!”

  Stunned silence filled the line.

  “I will remain on this line,” the President said. “You will find out about the quake and report to your commander-in-chief as soon as you have the information.”

  “Yes, sir. Uh… sorry.” And then he heard her put down the phone and shout to someone else in the office.

  There was a click as another call came through. The President changed over and immediately heard the voice of the Vice President, calling from Jackson, Mississippi, where he’d been based in his current round of Compassion Duty.

  “Did you feel the quake?” he said. “That was a big one.”

  “You’re all right?” said the President.

  “Just shook up. The bed was jumping around, and the drawers jumped right out of the bureau. Secret Service came rushing in to see if I was all right, and they could barely keep their feet.” The President found himself wondering if they’d tried to wrestle the earthquake to the ground.

  “I felt it here,” the President said. “That’s why I’m calling.” And for once, he thought, I’m ahead of the curve. I know more than FEMA does. And then it occurred to him that this, more than anything else, was frightening.

  The first large May quake, M1, had been followed over successive days by thousands of aftershocks, four of which were deemed strong enough to deserve numbers of their own, causing damage rated at 7 or better—out of a possible 12—on the Mercalli Scale. But the M6 shock, ten days following M1, was a major earthquake in its own right.

  M6 began at 1:02 A.M., Central Daylight Time, as an eleven-meter right-lateral strike-slip motion on the Blytheville Arch, a fifty-mile-long fault structure running more or less under the Mississippi, and centered on Blytheville, Arkansas, just south of Swampeast Missouri. M1 had loaded the Blytheville Arch with tectonic energy which the Arch now discharged. On the Richter scale, the quake reached a force of 8.5, one-quarter the size of M1 at 8.9, but still the equivalent of the Alaskan quake of 1964, one of the greatest quakes of the twentieth century. As during M1, the solid structure of the North American continent transmitted the destructive force of the quake hundreds of miles. The Arch directed most of its energy toward the south and west, into Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kansas, which suffered greater property loss than they had during M1. These powerful shocks in turn released additional energy stored along the Oklahoma Fault, resulting in significant destruction as far west as Oklahoma City and Wichita Falls. But the directional nature of the temblors meant that northern Missouri, including St. Louis, Illinois, and Iowa, were spared a repeat of the leveling caused by M1, though destruction there was certainly bad enough.

  Memphis, close to the river and the center of the Blytheville Arch, received another pounding. The slippage of the Blytheville Arch transmitted to other subterranean fault lines via the Bootheel Lineament, which connects all other fault structures in the area. All the faults suffered further slippage, though a particularly severe shock was created along the Reelfoot South seismicity trend. This fault hammered western Kentucky and Tennessee—shaking unlucky Memphis from north as well as west—and created a pair of tsunamis, one that roared up the Ohio River, another that launched itself up the Mississippi, destroying the old river town of Cairo, which fortunately for its inhabitants had been evacuated due to flooding.

  Other effects of M6 were similar to M1: ground liquefaction and geysering, widespread destruction to timber and other natural resources, and significant infrastructure damage. Buildings, levees, bridges, and other structures weakened by M1 and its aftershocks now collapsed. Damage in Mississippi, southern Arkansas, Kansas, and Louisiana exceeded that suffered in M1.

  In some respects M6 was more merciful than its predecessor. Most of the population were asleep, not on the highways returning from work. The people had been suffering quakes for ten days and knew how to react; they knew to avoid weakened structures, and had evacuated lowlying areas subject to flood. A survivable satellite-based communications network was in place throughout the area. Emergency rescue and medical teams were deployed and already in the field. Loss of life was in the hundreds, not in the thousands. There were fewer catastrophic fires, and none that leveled whole areas of cities. But in other respects, M6 was a social catastrophe. It struck in the middle of the largest evacuation in the history of North America. Tens of thousands of people were caught somewhere in the process of evacuation, and though most of these people were not injured, they were isolated, unable to leave the areas where the quake had stranded them.

  They were dependent, for every basic necessity, on the kindness of strangers. Frankland spent the quake praying. On his stomach, because the temblors would not let him stay on his knees. There was a nasty whiplike snap to the movement of the earth this time, something calculated to take the world off its feet.

  Frankland prayed that the Lord’s will be done, that His kingdom would soon come. As the quake went on he prayed that his sins would be forgiven, that his wife’s life would be spared. He could hear the metal-framed church shrieking and rattling, and he prayed that the church roof wouldn’t fall in on the women and children.

  He prayed that the Lord would be merciful on the hundreds of deserters who had left the camp, who had abandoned the faith of their fathers and accepted the false comfort of the godless government. He prayed that the Lord not drop these faithless, worthless, miserable people in crevasses, or strike them with his lightning, or break their bones, or cause buildings or trees to fall on them, or permit the ground at Hot Springs National Park to crack and release the magma that lay beneath the surface, so that the faithless deserters who had not remained true to Christ would not burn forever in God’s righteous hellfire.

  Finally, as the shaking went on and on, and every thought was driven from his head, he just repeated Lord Lord Lord to himself, until suddenly the earth had ceased its groans and the world rang with silence.

  And then the silence was broken by the screaming of children. Hundreds of them, wailing out of the night.

  He spent the next few hours ministering to the hysterical children, who had been shaken from their dreams by a repeat of the trauma that had cost so many their homes, their belongings, and their loved ones.

  Afterward Sheriff Gorton came to report. He had not deserted his faith; Gorton stayed in the camp and had been driving every day to his job at the county seat. But now he seemed in shock, pale, his watery eyes wide. “The Bijoux’s gone,” he said.

  The sick people who hadn’t been able to evacuate were in there, along with the National Guard medic who had been detailed to look after them. And now they were dead.

  “God’s mercy upon them,” said Frankland. �
�I guess we’re on our own, now.” Which was not, he considered, a bad thing at all.

  It was fifty minutes after the quake that the President—pacing up and down in the situation room while he waited for senior staff to arrive—finally heard from the First Lady’s party.

  He did not hear from the First Lady herself, but from one of her advance people in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where the First Lady had gone to present awards to members of a local radio station. After the quakes, people had begun to swarm into the disaster area to help with the business of rebuilding. Contractors, lumber dealers, homebuilders, roofers, heating and cooling specialists, hauling and freight companies, dealers in foodstuffs and fuel, all planning on making a profit at helping the victims of the quake to rebuild.

  They were all, in some sense, profiteers. They did not leave their homes in safe parts of the country and travel, over dangerous roads, to hazardous areas without the intention of being rewarded for their services. If they wanted to make a normal profit, they would have stayed at home. Services out of the ordinary, they reckoned, deserved profits a little out of the ordinary. But the devastated areas had been so thoroughly destroyed, leaving such total damage, that repair and restoration very swiftly became a sellers’ market. Price gouging had become common. The suffering population had become enraged at the newcomers’ attempts to milk them for the few remaining pennies in their pockets.

  There had been a move to freeze prices in the affected areas at pre-earthquake levels. But all that meant was that the people who had come to repair earthquake damage, deprived of the hope of extra profit that had caused them to leave home in the first place, would return home.

  What the Jonesboro radio station had done was simply to start reporting prices in the area. All they did was quote numbers. Basic foodstuffs, lumber, roofing supplies, all the necessities for surviving the Year of the Earthquake. If a foodstore or a contractor was demanding unreasonable prices, that was reported, too, and people knew to avoid them. The radio station had restored a buyers’ market. Price-gougers were left without customers.

  The Jonesboro program had been such a success that other stations began to imitate them. Essential supplies and services were still available, but prices had fallen all across the earthquake zone. It was one of the great successes of the recovery effort.

  And so the radio station was deemed worthy of a visit from the First Lady, who was still shuttling about the devastated area on Permanent Compassion Duty. She was scheduled to appear on the radio station the next morning. Her plane had been landing on the repaired runway at Jonesboro at the very moment when M6 struck, and a crevasse had opened directly in its path. The plane’s nose wheel had dropped into the fracture, the plane rolled and burst into flame.

  The First Lady and everyone aboard had been killed.

  “Do you understand, sir? Mr. President?” The aide who had called the President was crying.

  “Yes,” the President said. “Yes, I heard you.”

  Softly, he put the phone in its cradle. And sat behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk, hands on his knees, and listened to the slow, inexorable ticking of the casement clock on the wall. He waited in that posture for twenty minutes, until an aide appeared to remind him that the emergency working group was waiting in the Cabinet Room.

  “I’ll be along in a minute,” the President said.

  But he didn’t move. He sat there, behind the big desk, and listened to the clock as it ticked away the seconds of his life.

  Larry’s helicopter circled around the brightly lit spectacle of Poinsett Island. That was good, he thought, at least they hadn’t lost power.

  The earthquake had sent his bed careening into the bedroom wall shortly after one in the morning. He and Helen had clutched at each other while the earth thundered at them. At the penultimate jolt, the house had given a huge lurch as it fell off its foundation. Furniture and kitchenware crashed. None of the shelves fell over, even as their contents spilled to the floor. Helen’s anchor bolts held. As soon as the quake died, Larry groped for his clothes, his boots. He knew he had to head for Poinsett Landing.

  Helen was going to be left with home cleanup again.

  There weren’t many people who stayed at Poinsett Landing overnight. All of them, under the direction of Meg Tarlton, were safely on the Indian mound when Larry landed and staggered out of the aircraft into an aftershock that kept trying to buckle his knees. He pursued his path grimly until he saw Meg walking toward him beneath the light of the floods, swaying as the ground jounced beneath her with every step.

  “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  The two of them lurched like inexpert dancers to the rumbling music of the aftershock. “I can’t get near the plant, sir,” Meg said. “The piers and the barges are too dangerous. Some of the barges got loose, and a couple of the others were sunk.”

  “Dang it,” Larry said.

  “No radiation releases, though. First thing we checked.”

  The aftershock faded. Larry stood on the edge of the mound and shaded his eyes from the nearby floodlights. He looked out over the water and could plainly see the damage to the little port that the Corps of Engineers built around the nuclear facility.

  The portable harbor was lightly built, made of material that could be hauled or towed into place, and the morning’s earthquake had chewed it up considerably. Some of the barges had drifted off, still lashed to broken chunks of quay, then come aground on partly submerged ruins. Others had, seemingly, disappeared downriver. Bits of the quays were tilted up on edge. Others had disappeared. One towboat, ablaze with light, was heading away from the plant with deliberate speed, turbines whining loud in the still night. Larry wondered if it was going after lost barges or simply fleeing the scene.

  “Lucky it happened at night,” Meg said. “Nobody’s out there now.” Larry said nothing, just turned and began to walk back to the helicopter.

  He was going to have to radio Jessica and tell her that her little harbor, of which she had seemed so proud, had just been shattered.

  It took Omar and Wilona over three hours to get from their home to Shelburne City, a journey far more difficult than it had been following the first big quake. Chasms or sudden upthrusts were scored across the highway, and the parish road crews had to attend to them before Omar could move onward. The traffic was another problem. The quake had struck with the evacuation in full swing, and the road was filled with cars from the southern part of the state. Hundreds of them, filled with families and possessions, pets and paintings and the family silver, all stuck on the road, unable to move on because the quake had gouged rents across their path. When one fissure was filled in, the cars would all surge along to the next chasm, then clump up in another disorderly mass. And when these people saw a police car moving along, they naturally tried to flag it down, or crowded around it, to ask Omar what to do, where they could stay, how far to the next town.

  Nor were the refugees the only folk who needed help. This quake had caused significant damage to the area’s lightly built homes. Omar suspected that half the parish was homeless, at least for the present. It was fortunate that Omar had his radio, and he was able to deploy his department as well as conditions permitted, and also to contact other parish officials.

  He also contacted his son David, who had come through the quake just fine, and was now involved in driving the injured to Dr. Patel’s clinic.

  When Omar got to Shelburne City, he was shocked at the damage. Ozie Welk’s bar, south of town, was a pile of ruined lumber, with several pickup trucks parked out front, and Omar wondered if the roof had dropped on Ozie and his customers. Half the storefronts on Shelburne Street had collapsed. The Commissary’s roof had fallen in. All the black-jack oaks in front of the courthouse were down. The Mourning Confederate had pitched head-first off its broken plinth. The courthouse itself displayed some jagged cracks in its load-bearing walls.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Wilona asked as they entered.

  Omar only shrugged. He ha
d too much work to do to worry about whether the courthouse was going to fall on him.

  Information came in. Electric power was restored, at least to the courthouse and a couple of blocks around. The injured were brought to Dr. Patel’s clinic, but because the building was unsafe, they were put on areas of lawn or side streets where nothing was likely to fall on them. No one quite trusted the churches or the schools not to fall down, and indeed some of them already had. It was toward dawn that the worst piece of news came in, passed on from the state police. “The staties say that the District Levee’s gone, right at the Parish Floodway.”

  Omar reached for the radio that sat behind his desk. “This is Omar,” he said. “Says which?”

  “District Levee’s gone. A two-hundred-foot crevasse, they said. The highway’s cut.” On the south end of the Parish Floodway, the highway ran for almost seven miles along the top of the District Levee. With the levee broken, the evacuation route to Arkansas had been cut off, and much of the land behind the levee would have been flooded. This also cut them off from the northern third of the parish, with about a third of the parish’s population of seven thousand. There was only one sheriff’s car out there to help police all those people. Omar guessed that meant they had become Arkansas’ problem. And with refugees continuing to pour up the highway from the south, that meant that Spottswood Parish had become a bottleneck on the evacuation route, a trap for everyone who entered. A random bunch of Louisianans, Omar thought. Mostly from the cities. And bringing city problems with them—crime, disorder, and negritude.

  Jesus, he thought. Inner-city niggers. They’d probably start selling crack to the kids on the playground. Omar had to get those people turned around, get them out of his parish before they ate the place out like a swarm of locusts.