The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Omar looked down at the little bouncing crop-haired man and he felt his insides clench in hatred. “No survivors,” he agreed, and narrowed his eyes as he looked at Knox from behind his shades. And this means you, he thought.

  I remained at New Madrid from the 7th till the 12th, during which time I think shocks of earthquakes were experienced every 15 or 20 minutes—those shocks were all attended with a rumbling noise, resembling distant thunder from the southwest, varying in report according to the force of the shock. When I left the place, the surface of the earth was very little, if any, above the tops of the boats in the river.

  Matthias M. Speed (Jefferson County, March 2, 1812)

  The camp was strange at night, almost eerie. No one dared to show a light, no one dared to speak in a normal tone of voice. Sometimes Jason heard a child’s cry, or hushed voices, or the slithery sound of someone moving in a sleeping bag. Sometimes the sounds reminded him of the noises that Deena Robinson had made when she was dying, and he shivered. Aftershocks rumbled on the northern horizon, though most were barely felt in camp. The chain link gleamed silver in the light of the spotlights that were trained on the lanes cleared along the sides of the fence. It was difficult to see anything beyond those lanes of light. All detail seemed to vanish into an exterior darkness, and the camp seemed to exist in its own world, a dark island afloat on a midnight sea.

  Jason sat with Arlette in the warmth and anonymity of the night. He leaned against one of the camp’s concrete picnic tables, and Arlette sat with her back to him, reclining against his chest with his arms around her while they whispered to one another. Jason was glad he didn’t have to do more than whisper, because his bruised throat ached whenever he spoke.

  “I’m almost sorry that I got talked out of going over the fence,” Jason said. “Our boat might still be where we left it, and I could be on the river by dawn. I could do all right living on water and some of those biscuits till I got to Vicksburg or someplace with a telephone.”

  Memories of being hunted through the camp made him shiver. He had almost run for the fence even then, terror making him want to disregard the deputies’ guns.

  “The roads are patrolled,” Arlette said. “And our boat might not be there.”

  “I can avoid people in a car,” Jason said. “And if the boat isn’t there, I’d try to find someone friendly.”

  “The people here aren’t friendly. That’s what everyone says. People here shoot anyone they think’s from the camp.”

  Jason hesitated and wondered how to frame his answer. The local crackers might well shoot a black man who they thought was some kind of dangerous escapee, but Jason suspected that they wouldn’t kill an unarmed white boy. But Jason wasn’t certain how to phrase that suspicion, not to Arlette. He didn’t know how to talk about race. He didn’t know the words that were permissible.

  “They wouldn’t shoot a kid,” he said finally. “Not if it was just me.”

  “I trust my daddy,” Arlette said. “He’ll get us out of here.”

  “If it were anyone but Nick,” Jason said, “I’d be out of here by now.” He remembered the fevered way that Nick labored in the cookhouse, the way his jaw muscles clenched as he worked with his primitive materials. It was as if nothing existed but the deadly task at hand. He hadn’t even been disturbed by the moans of Miss Deena, sounds that had Jason nearly crawling up the walls. It was that fierce, exclusive concentration on the work that gave Jason a degree of strange comfort. He knew that Nick would not rest until he had accomplished everything that was possible.

  “At least you and I are together,” Jason said. He tucked his chin into the warm notch between her clavicle and jaw, and heard her give a little giggle at the sensation. She reached up a hand, touched his cheek, stroking the down along his jawline.

  “Soft,” she remarked. “You don’t really have to shave yet, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “That’s cute, that hair you got there.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” His mind whirled at her touch. He kissed her cheek. She turned and her moist lips touched his. He kissed her avidly, dreadfully aware that they might have no time at all, that this could end any second. He wanted to melt into her, bury himself in her muscle and nerve. He yearned to obliterate himself in her.

  He touched her hair through the kerchief, began to pull it down her hair in back so that he could caress her. Gently her fingers carried his hand away, rearranged the kerchief on her head. Jason felt a baffled amusement at this strange modesty. “I want to touch your hair,” he said.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “I haven’t looked after my hair in over a week.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s a mess. Every day’s a bad hair day for me.”

  He let his hand fall from her hair, clasped it around her waist instead. “Okay,” he said. “But I can still kiss you, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could you lean on my other shoulder? My throat hurts if I turn that direction.” Arlette shifted her position. “It’s okay if I kiss you from here?”

  “Yes. And you can touch my cute little sideburns all you like.”

  Arlette giggled. “Okay.”

  She touched his cheek, then brought her lips to his. They kissed again in the clinging darkness. Then Arlette gave a cry of alarm and Jason’s heart leaped; he turned to see a strange figure silhouetted against the stars, standing above them.

  The man was burly, dressed in a long coat and a broad-brimmed hat. Jason saw a long beard silvered by starlight, hair tumbled over the shoulders, strange yellow eyes that gleamed in his black face. The man brought with him an earthy smell that Jason tasted on the night air.

  “I come from outside, me,” he said, in an accent so thick that Jason could barely make out the words. “I need talk the man in charge, eh?”

  Nick sat in the cookhouse, making bombs. He had the overhead light on, but he kept the doors shut so he wouldn’t attract attention. It was hot and stifling in the cookhouse, and his head swam with the scent of fuel. He worked slowly and deliberately, not daring to make a mistake.

  Nick took one-pound coffee cans from the camp’s meager stores, then packed them two-thirds full with an explosive made from fertilizer and motor oil. He put all his weight into compressing the explosive, because he wasn’t sure if the picric acid he was using as a booster explosive would be “fast” enough, when exploded, to detonate the fertilizer, and the more fertilizer hit by the shock wave of the detonator, the better. He pushed his finger into the compressed explosive, and then in the hole he made he placed a homemade blasting cap. Each cap was made from one of the spent pistol cartridges that the deputies had scattered in the camp on their raid that afternoon, a fact that Nick considered poetic justice. Nick had punched the used primer out of the bottom of each cartridge with a nail and inserted an electric fuse put together by Armando Gurule, the electrician’s apprentice who had been stranded in Shelburne City on his way to look for a job in California. Once the fuse was in place, Nick then packed in charges of lead picrate and picric acid, the primary and booster explosive.

  Nick put in some scrap paper to hold the explosive in place, then began packing in pieces of metal. Nuts, screws, bolts, nails, bits of pipe, old hacksaw blades, coins, more of the spent cartridges—everything the Escape Committee could scrounge, including their own wrist watches. Anything that might make a hole in a deputy if it was shot at him with sufficient force.

  When he was done, he’d created homemade claymore mines, a more primitive version of the notoriously effective antipersonnel weapon that U.S. forces had used in Vietnam. Each mine, when planted in the ground with its open mouth pointed toward an enemy, would spray out its scrap metal in the direction of the foe like a huge shotgun, shredding flesh with hundreds of small projectiles. Nick had no certainty that any one mine would work—there were too many variables in these homebuilds, too much improvisation in the formulae, too many things that could have gone wron
g in the assembly—but Nick hoped that enough mines would actually work to blanket the area occupied by the deputies when they next came into the camp.

  There was a soft knock on one of the cookhouse doors. “Nick?” Manon’s voice. “You in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “I’ll come out. Just a minute.”

  He finished packing explosive into a coffee can, then rose and switched off the light. Blinking dazzled eyes, he groped for the door knob. He opened it carefully, then slid out of the cookhouse and closed the door behind him.

  Fresh air. He took in a few deep, grateful breaths. He couldn’t see Manon in the starlight, but he felt his flesh prickle as he sensed her nearness.

  “Nick, I’m worried about the children,” Manon said. “I haven’t seen Arlette since nightfall.”

  “Where can she go?” Nick said.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she whispered. “What if that boy’s talked her into going over the fence?” Nick breathed in the fresh air and considered this. “We haven’t heard shots, right?” he said. “So if they’ve gone, they’ve got clean away. We should be grateful they won’t be here for what will happen tomorrow.”

  “Damn it, Nick!” Manon flared. “I want you to help me look! This is your family—this isn’t an army, this isn’t some soldier you’ve sent away on a mission; this is our baby we’re talking about.” Nick looked at her. “If they’ve escaped, it’s a good thing. Jason knows enough about survival and the river to get away if he can find a boat. If he can get to the authorities, he may be able to save our lives.” Nick’s eyes were adjusting slowly to the darkness. He saw Manon outlined before him, her tall, proud figure standing by the corner of the cookhouse. “And what if they haven’t tried their escape yet? What if they didn’t try to escape?” Manon demanded. “What if they’re together somewhere? Off in the night doing what they shouldn’t?”

  Nick took in a breath of night air. “Good,” he decided.

  “Good? Good? Is that what I heard you say?”

  Nick licked his lips. “I wouldn’t want either of them to die without knowing love.” There was a moment of silence, and then Manon moaned. “Oh, my God.” He could hear the keen-edged grief suddenly enter her voice. “Oh, my God, that you would say they will die.” Nick’s head swam. “I’ll do my best to see that they don’t,” he said. He was tired, far too tired, to offer any degree of false reassurance.

  “You’re blaming me. I know you are.”

  Nick looked at Manon in surprise. “Why would I do that?” he asked.

  “I know it’s true.”

  “Daddy! Daddy!” Arlette’s urgent whisper cut through the night. “We found someone! Someone from the outside!”

  Nick looked up in surprise as Arlette and Jason came out of the darkness followed by a strange figure, a bizarre bearded apparition, as if a scarecrow dressed in second-hand clothes had come suddenly to life. To his astonishment, Nick saw that the scarecrow was carrying a gun over one shoulder.

  “Bonsoir,” the man said. “I am Cudgel, me. I come see how you get along.” Nick took Cudgel to the Escape Committee, and they set out to round up as many of the absent members as possible, along with any from the Camp Committee who could be found. Rumor spread swiftly, and a small crowd gathered, murmuring in the darkness as speculation spread among them. Cudgel seemed taken aback by all the sensation. Nick urgently whispered for everyone who didn’t have business here to get away, that such a crowd would only attract attention and, maybe, bullets. Reluctantly, the crowd melted into the darkness. Jason and Arlette remained, and Nick saw a defiant look in Jason’s eye. Nick decided he might as well let them stay. They’d found the man, after all, or he’d found them.

  Manon stayed as well. Nick suspected that he would have a hard time prying her away from Arlette tonight, even if he were willing to try.

  Cudgel sat down amid the remaining people, slid the rifle off his shoulder into his lap. He wore a bartered wide-brimmed hat decorated with feathers, and his long hair was so tangled that it hung down his back like a wiry horsehair mat. His beard, spread over his chest, looked like Spanish moss, and his eyes glimmered yellow in the night. He smelled as if he’d been wrapped in newspaper and buried for twenty years.

  “How’d you get here?” someone on the committee asked. “How’d you get past the guards?”

  “I move quiet, me,” Cudgel said. For all his outlandish appearance, his voice was soft, and he seemed a little intimidated by the presence of all these curious people. “You go hunting, you, you want nice goose pour le diner, you sho-nuff creep that goose. You no let that bull-goose see you, that goose, so you creep him goose.”

  There was a moment of bewildered silence. It took Nick a moment to work out that “creeping the goose” was some-thing done while hunting, slipping past the sentinel geese to get within shooting distance of the flock.

  “I’ve been in your house!” Jason said suddenly. “Down in the floodway, that treehouse!” Cudgel looked at him. “I live there sometime, mais oui. In spring I go for crawfish, me, in fall for shooting.” He smiled, yellow teeth flashing in the starlight. “Plenty birds there, come autumn.”

  “Can you take some others out?” Nick asked. “Can you take some of the children to safety? Or some messengers who can try to find help?”

  Cudgel thought about this for a long moment. “I consider that could be hard, me,” he said. “You got a man can creep the goose for true?”

  That looked like to set off an argument about who in the camp was qualified, and who not, and since Nick doubted that anyone in the camp had ever crept a goose or was likely to try, he wanted to cut the discussion before it got started.

  “Why did you come here, Mr. Cudgel?” he asked.

  Cudgel frowned. “I see them kill, them trash,” Cudgel said. “Down Cattrall’s old cotton field, la has, by where I go fish sometime in bateau, that sixty acres down by the bayou. They line them up, them black boys, and—” He raised a hand, mimed a finger squeezing a trigger. Made a sound, psssh, like a shot being fired.

  There was a horrified cry from Manon. Stifled groans from the others.

  “C’est vrai,” Cudgel said. “So I think, why for them do that, them. Saw the Paxton boy, son of the High Sheriff, that Paxton boy, so I knew them be Kluxers. So I come the camp here, me, see what I find.” He smiled again. “Creep the goose, me. Talk you fellas.”

  “We need help,” said a woman on the Camp Committee. “Can you help us? You’ve seen what they do. Can you tell someone?”

  Cudgel looked thoughtful. “I pretty grand fella, me, down Plaquemines Parish. Everybody know Cudgel there. But here—” He shook his head. “Nobody know Cudgel. I don’t got but ten cents, me. Ain’t nobody listen Cudgel up here.”

  The woman persisted. “Can you take someone out to speak to the locals? Or phone for help?”

  “No phone here, no,” Cudgel said. “Not since the earthshake. But someone come out, some fella, come out the camp, I take him where you say, me.”

  “The A.M.E. people used to come here, bring food and look after us. Brother Morris and his family, other people from the community. Then they stopped coming. And the—the hateful things—began to happen. Can you get word to Brother Morris?”

  “Morris, he dead, that Morris.”

  There was another collective sound from Cudgel’s audience, another half-gasp, half-groan.

  “They say he been shot, Morris,” Cudgel said. “Say a man from the camp did the shooting, them. But I take a man wherever you say, me. I take him Morris wife, you want.”

  “Yes. To Mrs. Morris. Yes, that would be good.”

  Nick listened to this discussion with only partial attention. His mind was factoring Cudgel’s presence into his plans, this strange, stealthy swamp man who lived by his wits and by hunting, who carried a rifle over one shoulder and knew the country like the back of his hand.

  “Mr. Cudgel,” he said, “I think we may have to fight, whe
ther you get a chance to talk to Mrs. Morris or not. If we don’t fight to defend ourselves, we may have more people taken from the camp and killed before any help can come. You have a gun, you hunt and trap—can you help us fight?” There was a sudden silence in the small group. Cudgel considered Nick’s words, then nodded. “I do what you want, me. But if you can fight, what for you here? You got guns, you men, why never you shoot a mess o’ Kluxer ’long time back?”

  “We only have a few handguns,” Nick said. “Everything else was taken. But I’m making other weapons—claymore mines, if you know what those are.”

  “He quoi!” Cudgel said in surprise, and a moment later a sudden broad smile lit his face. He held up a hand, thumb crooked over his fist, and he pressed the thumb down. “Took,” he said, a little falsetto birdlike sound.

  Nick realized, to his astonishment, that Cudgel was miming his thumb pressing the button of a detonator.

  “I know them claymores, me,” Cudgel said. “I serve in Army, fight them V.C. I fight in Delta, me, I fight in Vinh Long, in Can Tho.” He raised his fist again, crooked his thumb. “Took. No more V.C. I creep them Congs, them V.C, just like I creep the goose. I get my name in Delta, me.” I get my name in Delta. Realization flooded Nick’s mind as he looked into Cudgel’s beaming face.

  “Your name isn’t Cudgel,” he said suddenly. “It’s Cudjo, isn’t it?” The man nodded. “Cudjo, c’est moi. I get the name in Vietnam, me.”

  “That’s an African name,” Nick said. “A warrior name.”

  Pride straightened Cudjo’s shoulders, glimmered in his yellow eyes. “C’est vrai,” he said. “I a warrior, me. Get in trouble down Plaquemines Parish, come here to live. Never touch them liquors and drugs no more, for true.”

  Astonished hope beat in Nick’s heart. “You can help us fight, can’t you?” he said.

  “Si, with them claymores.” He took the rifle gun from his lap and held it out to Nick. “You take my gun, you. Kill them Kluxers. I help.”