The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  A golden beam of sunlight suddenly illuminated the camp. Jason looked up, saw that the pall of cloud that had covered the world was beginning to break up. A modest wind stirred the humid air. He saw that Arlette was walking away from him, heading toward three boys who looked a few years older than she and Jason. They were all taller and bigger, dressed like almost everyone else in an assortment of ill-fitting, ill-judged clothing. Their hair was uncombed and stuck out in tufts, and thin, youthful beards shadowed their cheeks. Reluctance dragged at Jason’s heels as he followed Arlette toward the three.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m Arlette.”

  “Sekou,” one of the young men said. “This is Raymond.” He did not bother to introduce the third.

  “We just got here,” Arlette said.

  Raymond flicked Jason a glance from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. “Who’s your friend?” he asked. Jason figured he could speak for himself. He told them his name. The other boys ignored him. “How you get here, baby?” Raymond said to Arlette. “You come on a boat, or they open a road?”

  “We were all on a boat.”

  “Come through that storm, huh? That must’ve been hard.” He put an arm around Arlette. “You get all wet, baby? I dry you off.”

  Jason’s hackles rose at Raymond touching Arlette. He didn’t much like Arlette’s acceptance of the touch either. “What we wanted to know,” Jason said, “was what’s going on here.” Sekou sniffed. “What’s it look like, man? One-eighty-six.”

  Arlette stiffened. The third boy, the one whose name hadn’t been mentioned, looked amused. He shifted his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Boy’s never been stomped by a cop before,” he said.

  This didn’t seem much in the way of credentials to Jason. “I’ve been arrested, if you think that’s important,” he said, exaggerating somewhat. “I’ve come a thousand miles down the river in my boat. And this is the second camp some nut-case has stuck us in. We got out of the first one, and we’ll get out of this.”

  “Shi-it,” Sekou said, drawling the word out.

  Jason decided he was not about to impress these guys no matter what, so he decided he might as well keep silent. Arlette flashed Raymond a smile—jealousy burned through Jason like a blowtorch—and then she shrugged out from under his arm. “Nice meeting you,” she said. “I got to Audi.”

  “See you later,” Raymond said. Jason followed her another thirty feet, and then she stopped under one of the old pecan trees and turned to him. He was surprised at the drawn look on her face.

  “What’s the matter?” he took her hands. “One of those guys say something?”

  “One-eighty-six,” Arlette said. “Sekou said that.”

  “And…?” Jason said.

  An inscrutable look passed over her face. “Don’t listen to hip-hop much, do you? One-eighty-six—that’s a police call. It means murder.”

  That’s where Manon found them, clutching each other’s hands beneath the pecan tree, and she took them aside and—her voice halting, tears welling slowly from her eyes—she told them what Miss Deena had told her.

  What else we got to make weapons with? Nick thought. He could feel pain throbbing through the veins in his temples, a new viselike grip with each beat of his heart. There had to be more than sticks and stones. More than three guns. There had to be something.

  Miss Deena was surprised when he burst into the cook-house while she and some others were preparing the noon meal. “Gotta be something here,” he said. “Ammonia, something.”

  “What do you want, Nick?” Deena demanded. “We are busy here.”

  “What do you use for a cleaner? Ammonia? Anything?”

  Deena pointed with one bony finger. “Back there, boy. In the chest.” The chest was a heavy thing, tin nailed over a wood frame, probably used as a cooler for milk or drinks or bread in the days before light plastic coolers were invented. Standing next to it was a fifty-gallon metal drum with the red-and-yellow Civil Defense symbol on it. Inside were wrapped stacks of crackers, like the ones Nick had eaten for breakfast.

  My God, he thought, those crackers have probably been sitting in some basement since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Someone had found them and shipped them to the camp to feed refugees. No wonder they’d tasted rancid.

  Nick rummaged through the bottles in the cooler, read yellowed old labels on bottles that had sat here for, probably, decades.

  Methanol. Oh, thank God. Somebody had been traditional in their choice of solvents.

  “What else you got?” he demanded. “You got any fuel? Gasoline, oil?”

  “They’s a tractor,” an old lady said. “Out in the tool shed.” Nick grabbed the methanol and ran out the door. The tool shed was thirty feet away. The lock had been broken during the previous night’s rainstorm, so that the place could be used for shelter. The tractor—actually a lawn tractor with a 42-inch mower blade—had been shoved out onto the grass. There were some blankets and clothing inside on the soggy, oil-soaked wooden floor, but no one was in the shed at the moment.

  Nick ran inside, saw the pair of five-gallon red plastic jerricans standing against the wall. His heart leaped. One was filled with gasoline, and the other was half-full. On a wooden shelf at head-height were three dusty cans of motor oil.

  Pain beat a wild tattoo in Nick’s skull. Madly he sifted through the contents of the shed. Insecticide and a sprayer for fire ants. Gas-powered weed trimmer. Miscellaneous garden tools—from the selection remaining, Nick figured that the ones that could be used for weapons had already been taken. Bases for the Softball field and fielders’ gloves—the bats and helmets were gone. Cleaning rags. A piece of canvas so oil-soaked and rotten that no one had yet been desperate enough to use it for shelter. Wildflower seed. A twenty-pound sack of Scott’s lawn fertilizer, half-used.

  Nick pounced on the bag of fertilizer like a parched man lunging for a fountain. Ammonium nitrate. He wanted to hold the dusty old bag to his chest and dance a waltz.

  He stood, looked around the musty-smelling shack. It was a simple equation. Petroleum products plus ammonium nitrate equaled boom.

  Boom, he thought.

  Boom.

  Carrying his bag of fertilizer and his plastic jug of methanol, Nick went to the Escape Committee, still in permanent session beneath the pecan tree, and told them he could make explosive.

  “But explosive isn’t any good without a way to detonate it. We need blasting caps, or something like them. I can make them, if we’ve got the right ingredients.” He waved his bottle of methanol.

  “Bombs?” one of the older men said. “Want to blow down the fence?”

  “I had something else in mind,” Nick said. He wiped sweat from his face. Pain beat through his head.

  “Antipersonnel weapons. Claymore mines, command detonated.” He looked over his shoulder at the gate. “We kill them. Kill a lot of them, all at once. And then we take their weapons and we fight.” The seven men of the Escape Committee looked at him, silent for once.

  Boom.

  Nick made list after list. There was so much to do. Get the battery from the little tractor, so that he could boil the contents down to make sulfuric acid. Get Miss Deena to put out a call for aspirin, which could be used to make picric acid as a booster explosive for detonators. Chip bits of lead off the well pipe and the pipes in the cook shed, to make Lead monoxide, which was a preliminary step necessary to make lead picrate as a primary explosive in detonators.

  But the first thing on the list was to collect buckets of human manure from the piles behind the outhouses. Because that could be turned into saltpeter, which was necessary for just about everything.

  “You want your sand buggers?” one of the old men on the committee asked him.

  “Hm?” Nick said.

  “You want your sand buggers, you best get in line.”

  Nick looked up and saw that a line was forming at the dining tent, and he decided that though he had no idea what a sand bugger might be, he knew he was probably
hungry enough to eat one. He rose from his crosslegged position under the pecan tree, and walked to the end of the line, still carrying his notes. Manure, he thought, quite a bit of it. He hoped there was enough methanol to do all the work he needed it to do.

  He looked up, saw Manon walking toward him. Her long hands rested on the shoulders of Jason and Arlette. From the solemn look on their faces, Nick could tell that Manon had told them what had been happening here in Spottswood Parish.

  “Nick,” Manon said as she approached. “Tell Jason that he’d be a fool to try to escape tonight.” Nick hesitated before answering. The objections he’d given to the Escape Committee in regard to their planned mass escape might not all apply to a single individual.

  But the single individual could still get himself killed.

  “I wouldn’t leave without Arlette,” Jason said. “But I think it could be done.” Arlette’s name set alarms jangling along Nick’s nerves. There was no way that Nick would let his daughter go over the wall before he could make it absolutely safe. “I’m working on something else,” he said.

  “What else?” Jason asked.

  Nick looked uncertainly at the people standing with him in line. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. It occurred to him that not all the people in the camp might be safe. He didn’t know how much contact they all had with the guards, or—as far as that went—which of them might just be too talkative, too inclined to boast to his captors.

  They stood in awkward silence in the food line till they received a sand bugger apiece—a patty of vegetable matter, fried like a hamburger and consisting mostly of potato with bits of onion and greens mixed in. With this was served a spoonful of baked beans and one of the strange, greasy crackers they’d had when they’d first arrived at the camp.

  It all tasted awful. Nick ate every bite, then licked the plate. Then he took the others aside and told them what he was going to do.

  Jason wanted to help, so Nick collected some plastic buckets and a shovel and went behind the nearest outhouse. Piled high was a decade’s worth of manure covered with bright green grass and blazing red pods of hearts-a-bustin’-with-love. Nothing like a shit pile, he thought, to make a fine flower garden.

  “Dig,” Nick said. “Slowly.”

  Jason gave him a thoughtful look, as if wondering if Nick had chosen this moment for some strange joke, and then apparently decided otherwise and began to dig. Jason turned a few spadefuls while Nick peered into the pile, and was rewarded with the sight of a line of dirty yellow crystals running through the soil.

  Yes, oh yes, he thought. Potassium nitrate. Saltpeter.

  Boom.

  Jason filled three buckets with crystal-laced dirt, then he and Nick carried them to the cookhouse, where Nick filled another bucket with wood ash from one of the campfire circles. He took a fifth bucket and punched holes in the bottom, put the bucket in a big saucepan, put a towel in the bottom of the bucket, and poured in a layer of wood ash. Then he put another cloth on top of the wood ash, filled the rest of the bucket with night soil. He told Jason to go into the cookhouse and asked them to boil some water, and when the water began to boil he poured it into the bucket a little at a time while Jason watched.

  “What in heaven’s name are you doing?” Miss Deena asked from the shadow of the cookhouse.

  “Making saltpeter.”

  “You going to add that to our food? Think we’re getting too sexy around here?”

  “I’m going to do a magic trick.” He looked up at her from his position hunkered by the bucket. “I’m going to make guards disappear.”

  Deena gave him a cold look. “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “You’ll see,” Nick said.

  “I got that aspirin you wanted.”

  “I’d like to take a couple. For my head. I won’t need the rest till later.” She gave him some aspirin. Nick swallowed them and poured hot water into the bucket. He repeated the procedure until he was out of earth.

  When he was done, he poured the hot liquid from the saucepan to a clean saucepan, throwing away the dark sludge left behind. He went into the cookhouse and put the saucepan on a burner. Miss Deena and the other cookhouse crew watched him with suspicion.

  “What now?”

  “Crystals will start forming in the water after a while. We want to scoop those out with something clean. A paper napkin, or filters from a coffeemaker.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m going to need another burner. You might want to clear out for this next bit.” He found a glass baking dish. He put on some rubber gloves and pulled the caps off the battery he’d taken from the little tractor. He poured battery acid into the dish and turned on the burner beneath it. Sulfuric acid fumes began to fill the cookhouse. Nick sent Jason outside. Nick’s eyes watered, and he tied a bandanna over his mouth and nose and stood outside the cookhouse till he saw white fumes rising from the baking dish. Then he dashed inside, turned off the burner, and took the baking dish outside and put it on the grass.

  “That acid’s concentrated,” he told Miss Deena.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  He looked at Jason. “Wait for it to cool, then pour it into a clean bottle. Make sure you’ve got rubber gloves on, and that your eyes and nose are protected. Put the bottle in the chest in the cookhouse, and don’t let anyone touch it.”

  “When can I use my cookhouse again?” Miss Deena demanded.

  “Use it now, if you like.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Whatever Nick did next depended on having sulfuric acid and potassium nitrate, so he washed his implements, then left Jason watching the boiling saltpeter water while he went to report to the Escape Committee.

  Leaves rustled overhead. Awnings in the camp crackled as the air snapped at them. The wind that had sprung up since the morning was growing brisk, providing the only relief from the day’s sledgehammer heat.

  “Things are coming along,” Nick told the committee.

  “Joseph here hacksawed some lead for you.”

  “Thank you, Joseph.” He took a handkerchief from Joseph that held bits of lead pipe.

  “That enough?”

  “I think so. We don’t need much.” Nick put the handkerchief in his pocket, and the movement sent blinding, unexpected pain knifing through his kidney. He gasped, took his hand out of his pocket, and waited for the pain to ebb.

  “You best hope you’re not pissing blood tomorrow,” Joseph said.

  “Anything else you need?” said another man

  Nick blinked away the tears that had sprung to his eyes. “Okay,” he gasped, “okay.” He blinked again.

  “I’m going to need an electrician or someone who can string wire without blowing us all up.”

  “We’ll ask around.” But Nick saw his audience craning to look past him, and felt a stir in the camp. He looked over his shoulder toward the gate and saw a line of vehicles moving along the road toward the camp: a sturdy old five-ton truck, a sheriff’s department car, and a civilian pickup truck.

  “Some kind of trouble,” one of the old men said. “They’s not bringing food.” Sudden anxiety for Manon and Arlette sang through Nick’s heart. He looked over the camp, saw a young woman in a kerchief silhouetted briefly between two of the miserable cotton wagons, and trotted uneasily in that direction.

  The little convoy pulled up before the camp. The larger of the two trucks backed up to the gate. A big, burly man in a deputy’s khaki uniform got out of the police cruiser and raised a bullhorn to his lips.

  “Our new camp is ready,” he said. “The one your men were building. And we’d like to move the first families over there this afternoon.” He consulted a clipboard. “Jerry Landis and family. Connie Conroy and daughters…”

  Nick’s mouth went dry at the thought that his own name might be called, but then he recalled that he had never been asked for his name, he was on none of their lists. He reached the area where he thought he’d seen Arlette and saw a completely strange girl wearing a kerchief. He stop
ped dead and peered around. The camp inmates, instinctively drawn by the announcements, but fearful of the deputies’ firearms, had formed a kind of half-circle at a respectful distance from the gate. Nick thought they would be better advised to be digging themselves into slit trenches. Somewhere a woman shrieked when her name was called; Nick could hear her sobbing and calling on Jesus to help her. Nick stayed well behind the mass of people, trotted along in hopes of catching a glimpse of Manon or Arlette.

  Miss Deena was walking from the crowd toward the gate. She was absolutely erect, her white-haired head held high.

  Admiration for Deena warred with anxiety in Nick’s soul.

  Nick finally saw Arlette and Manon together, with Jason, who was standing on top of a concrete picnic table peering over the heads of the crowd. Nick accelerated, caught up with them, put his hands on Arlette’s shoulders. “Let’s get out of sight,” he said. “Miss Deena’s going to tell them we’re not going along with them anymore. This could be nasty.”

  Manon cast him an anxious look. “All right,” she said.

  “Jason. Get down from there.”

  Jason clambered down with a show of reluctance. His face was swelling where the deputy had kicked him. Nick shepherded them toward the back of the camp. “Let’s get under one of the cotton wagons,” he said. He wished he could hide them all in a trench. Pain knifed his kidney as he crouched down, and he gasped in pain.

  Crouching in cover, Nick didn’t see the deputies’ reaction to Miss Deena’s announcement. He didn’t see the argument, or the little red-haired runt of a man who led a group of deputies sprinting for the gate. But Nick saw and heard the crowd’s reaction, saw them fall back with a kind of collective cry, then saw them run as shots began to crack out.

  Nick’s heart hammered. He clutched at Manon and Arlette, held them to his breast while Jason crawled restlessly left and right, trying to get a view of what was happening. “Get your head down!” Nick told him.

  Then the crowd parted, and he saw deputies with shotguns at port arms running right for him. “This way!” he yelled. “Run!” He pulled Manon and Arlette away from the deputies, from beneath the far side of the cotton wagon, then urged them to run between a pair of tents. Shots cracked out. He heard a man scream. He remembered the flash as the shotgun went off in Viondi’s face, the way the warm, bloody body had fallen into his arms. He remembered fleeing into the night, running from the light, to wherever the light would not find him.