The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Sometimes, Mr. President,” Stan said, “you can’t negotiate. You just do what you’ve promised to do.” The President looked at him. “Are you suggesting that a politician should keep his promises? How unlike you. I’m almost shocked.”

  Stan frowned. “Only when your back’s to the wall, sir. And then when someone calls your bluff, I think that person, or his followers, should be swiftly and efficiently reduced to smoking debris. If you pick your target properly—if it’s someone you can reduce to smoking debris—it will make an impression on other like-minded individuals.”

  A smile drifted across the President’s face. “I was just thinking how much I would welcome not having to be the head of the world’s only superpower. And now you want me to start blowing things up.” Stan gave a tight little smile. “It should be a very controlled explosion, sir.”

  “Ah. Battling on the symbolic plane, but with live ammunition. Always a delicate business.” The President walked for a while in silence. Bluebirds flickered through the trees like bits of the sky fallen and blown about like snow.

  “We shall have to try to strengthen our international institutions. NATO, the UN, the various regional alliances. I’ll have to send Darrell abroad to talk to them all. Tell them we can lead, but that they will have to follow with more willingness and more force than we’ve seen heretofore.” He shrugged. “Maybe it will work. I don’t have a lot of hope, since nations tend to be run either by cowards or psychopaths, and we’ve mostly got the cowards. But it seems the best we can do, and if anyone can wring commitments out of them, it will be Darrell the Happy Warrior.”

  “He can be persuasive, Mr. President.”

  “He has the advantage of actually believing what he is saying.” He stopped, frowned at the sight of hawks rising on the afternoon thermals. “And our national institutions could use some strengthening, as well. When I flew over the Mississippi Delta the other day, I saw nothing but islands. Everything that holds a people together was severed—communications, commerce, community. Boris Lipinsky tells me that large parts of the country will go for six to nine months without basic services—not even electricity. Not even telephones. And hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, will be living in refugee camps for much longer than that. You can’t expect them to be civil forever, not under that sort of pressure.

  “How many will fall through the cracks?” the President wondered. “How many thousands can just disappear without anyone noticing they’re gone? That Arkansas pastor and his private refugee camp—that man had a radio station broadcasting across the whole Delta, and nobody noticed he was there. I wonder how many others are setting up in their eerie little tribal habitats without anyone seeing them? It was sort of like the Balkans, in a way. Except,” he conceded, “that the Balkans are mountains and this was a river, but it was the same, almost. Everyone cut off from everyone else. In the Balkans, they’ve been hating and fighting each other for thousands of years, as far back as history goes. And in the Mississippi Delta—well, who knows? They’re all on islands.”

  He looked at Stan. “How are you going to spin your messages to them, Stan, when there’s no way to find your audience?”

  Stan Burdett looked pensive. “There was a way once. People lived out there before there was electricity or radio, and they were still a part of the republic.”

  “They had a ruling class. All those planters. The people did what the planters told them.” He smiled. “Like Judge Chivington’s family. They could deliver fifty thousand votes; they ran that part of Texas like they were little kings. But nobody can deliver those votes anymore, not consistently. It’s still corrupt there, but it’s nothing like it was.” He shrugged. “But now, who knows? Who knows what’s out there?” The President gave a big smile, then laughed. “If you spin a message but there’s no one to hear it, is there a message? That’s what we should be considering.”

  Stan seemed glum. “If you say so, sir.”

  “I had a dream about bread yesterday. Did I mention my dream about bread?”

  “No.”

  “UFOs are made of bread. It’s a true fact.”

  Stan just looked at him. The President clapped Stan on the shoulder. “Oh, never mind,” he said. “Let’s just walk along and enjoy the country.”

  Islands, the President thought, the Balkans. He was finding equivalencies everywhere. The previous day’s breeze had died away entirely, leaving a sultry, expectant stillness in its wake. Nick slept the latter part of the afternoon away beneath the pecan tree used by the Escape Committee. Aftershocks shivered the leaves over his head. The camp was quiet in the moist afternoon heat, everyone trying to stay cool, and the deputies didn’t come. Nick’s thoughts drifted like the distant clouds, remote from the world.

  The longer before the deputies came, he thought as he lay beneath the tree, the more time the deputies had to make plans. Nick didn’t like to think about that.

  His father, he thought, would have a quote from Sun Tzu that was appropriate to the occasion. If you have a clue, let the enemy think you are clueless. Let the enemy believe you are wise on the occasions when you don’t know shit from Shinola.

  Or something like that.

  The westward-drifting sun shone hot on his eyelids. He shifted beneath the tree, put the shadow of a branch over his face. The leaves rustled pleasantly overhead.

  What is of the greatest importance in war is to strike at the enemy strategy. Sun Tzu’s words, in the accents of General Jon Ruford, floated into his mind. So, he thought, what was the enemy strategy?

  Obviously, to keep the refugees in the camp, and to keep the world from finding out what they were doing.

  Escaping from the camp would strike at the first object of the strategy. But what would strike at the second?

  Making phone calls to the media and the authorities, he supposed. But both were far away, and the locals phones supposedly didn’t work, and even if the state police or the Army heard of the horrors in Spottswood Parish they might not be able to respond quickly.

  There were a couple dozen deputies involved with what was happening in the camp, and some of them, like the sheriff, hadn’t been seen in days. This suggested that the other inhabitants of Spottswood Parish—and there had to be thousands—either knew nothing of what was happening here, or were taking good care not to know. The Klan sheriff, or someone, was managing events so that it was difficult to find out what was happening here.

  Nick wished he could grind the whole sordid scene right into the faces of the world. Then he sat up suddenly. The sun shining through tree limbs blinded him for an instant, and in the flash of unexpected light he knew how to proceed.

  “We go to Shelburne City,” he said aloud. Two members of the Escape Committee looked at him.

  “I take the Warriors to Shelburne City,” Nick said. “Just like Sun Tzu.” Nick remembered the details only vaguely. Back in ancient China, Kingdom A had been on the verge of defeating Kingdom B. Sun Tzu, who commanded the army of Kingdom C, was ordered to go to the aid of the beleaguered Kingdom B. But instead of reinforcing Kingdom B, he took his whole army and marched straight for the capital of Kingdom A, which forced the enemy to retreat from Kingdom B to defend their own country. Sun Tzu caught the army on the march and destroyed it, winning the war. Nick had planned for the Warriors to stay in the area of the camp as a rear guard while the rest of the refugees evacuated to a more defensible area. But that was surrendering initiative to the enemy. It would allow them all the time they needed to gather their forces and respond.

  What Nick needed to do was to force the issue by attacking Kingdom A. He needed to take the Warriors right into Shelburne City and seize a big, defensible building in as public a place as possible. The people in the parish couldn’t ignore that. They would have to start asking questions. The enemy would have to respond to that first, they couldn’t go haring off into the countryside looking for escaped refugees. They would have to meet Nick on their own ground.

  Stumbling over wor
ds in his haste, Nick told his plan to the Escape Committee. Reaction seemed divided.

  “Running into town like that, you could get surrounded by a thousand crackers,” said one. “It could be like John Wayne at the Alamo.”

  “The Alamo was a success,” Nick said. “The Alamo delayed things long enough for the rest of the Texans to get their act together and win the war.”

  In the end, Nick got his way. The others had no better plan to offer.

  The shadows had grown long. People began to line up for dinner. “Best go get our sand buggers,” one of the men said, and the Escape Committee rose to their feet and began to trudge toward the cookhouse. The silence of the early evening was broken by the sound of truck engines, revving as they rolled along the broken roads from the direction of town.

  There was sudden stillness in camp as everyone paused, frozen in the midst of their motion, to listen. Nick’s pulse was suddenly loud in his ears. “They’re coming!” someone said, and suddenly everyone was moving.

  “Calm, people!” It seemed to Nick as if the reluctant words had stuck to the inside of his throat, and he had to peel them off with an act of will and throw them into the air. “No running! No shouting!” Guards surrounded the camp. What they saw had to be refugees milling around, not fighters taking their posts.

  Nick made himself walk carefully to the cookhouse, where Armando Gurule had set up the master control for the claymores. He felt strangely lightheaded, as if he might topple over at any minute. At one point he realized he’d forgotten to breathe, and when he let the breath out and took in another the air was sweeter than anything he’d tasted in his life.

  He found Armando standing by the control board in the shade of the cookhouse. People were running madly through the camp, parents scooping up their children and trying to find cover. Nick hoped that to the guards this looked like a normal reaction to an approach by the deputies. Nick stood in silence. Just let them get close, he thought.

  Two five-ton trucks pulled off the road in front of the camp, and began backing toward the gate. Over intervening heads, tents, and awnings, Nick saw some other vehicles and some Caucasian heads bobbing around. Nick didn’t see the crop-haired runt who had Gros-Papa’s watch, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. He glanced left and right and behind and saw, glimpsed through trees and tents and awnings, deputies taking up station on the perimeter.

  To Nick’s right, wrapped in plastic and blankets, were the bodies of Miss Deena and the other gunshot victim. Nick felt a chill brush his spine as he saw them. Just behind him an old woman was flipping sand bugger patties on the big outdoor grill. She frowned at her work in a business-like way and wielded her big spatula as if there weren’t a pair of bodies within thirty feet of her, and as if all hell wasn’t about to break loose any second.

  “Maybe it’s a food delivery,” Armando said.

  “Maybe,” Nick said. He didn’t think so.

  One of the trucks backed right up to the entrance. A big, thick-knuckled uniformed deputy—the man who had made the announcements yesterday—got on the back of a truck and raised a bullhorn to his lips.

  “The other camp has been completed,” he said. “And we’re moving you-all there, so that the A.M.E. can have their property back and get this mess cleaned up. I hope there is not a repetition of what happened yesterday. So what I want y’all to do is get your needcessities, make a nice line on your side of the gate, then just set there and wait for your name to be called.”

  There was silence in the camp. No one showed any sign of gathering their belongings or getting into line. Then, from somewhere out on the right, Nick heard someone begin to boo, as if he was protesting a decision by the umpire at a baseball game. The voice was deep and resonant and rumbled through the air like thunder. More people began to take up the call. The sound rose from the camp as if the earth was mocking the sky. Catcalls and jeers filled the air. Some people began banging on pans or other metal objects. The clattering noise echoed from the trees, causing startled birds to take to the air. Somewhere, someone started blowing on a whistle.

  Nick saw the deputy using the bullhorn again, but beneath the defiant tumult heard nothing of what the man said. He saw the man look down at someone else, lower the bullhorn, give a shrug. They’ll move now, Nick thought. He craned for a view, saw little over the intervening obstacles. He looked behind him, saw the old woman still minding her vegetable patties. “’Scuse me, ma’am,” he said, and stepped up onto the brick wall of the grill, balanced between air and the gridiron. An irregular line of deputies was moving toward the front gate carrying weapons. Last time, Nick thought, they came in shooting into the air, tried to stampede everyone.

  He licked his lips, looked down at Armando. “Better get ready,” he said. Armando looked down at his control board, flipped one of the two switches that would trigger the mines. The deputies were standing by the gate waiting for the big man, who had dropped off the gate of the truck, put down his bullhorn, and picked up a shotgun. Nick couldn’t tell if the gate had been unlocked yet or not. The leader approached the gate with a lazy stride, then made a gesture with one arm and moved his shotgun to port arms.

  Any second now, Nick thought. Waves of heat rose from the grill, almost smothered him. He could feel sweat popping out on his forehead. The catcalls from the refugees rose to a crescendo. The gate swung inward behind a line of hustling deputies. The big leader pulled trigger on his shotgun once, firing into the air. That boom triggered more noise from the camp, cat-calls mixed with a rising defiant screech. The hair on the back of Nick’s neck rose at the sound, at the primal challenge that must have first sounded in Africa a million years ago, when one prehuman clan first challenged another for mastery of the savanna.

  The deputies came into the camp at a run, weapons carried high. The crowd fell back, yelling and whistling. The attackers moved fast, faster than Nick had expected. Another second or two they would run right over the mines.

  “Jesus!” Nick said in a burst of terror. “Fire!”

  Armando threw the second switch. The mines went off with a deep concussion that staggered the earth like an aftershock—Nick swayed on his perch—and then the air was filled with weird whirring, yowling sounds, airy demons unleashed, as the mines flung their strange munitions, the screws and stones and bits of jagged metal, the nails and cable and used razor blades. Nick heard a sound like a’ tortured animal as something flew past his head.

  There was an instant of silence. Nick couldn’t see anything—there was dust and debris in the air—and then there was a shot, another deep shotgun boom.

  “Go!” Nick shouted. “Go! Now! Go, go!”

  A sudden howl rose from the camp, a song of triumph and blood and vengeance, and Nick saw a wave of people charging forward into the murky air. Nick’s nerves answered with a mad song of berserk joy. There were more shots, and Nick heard a crack close to his ear like someone snapping his fingers. With a sudden jolt of fear he realized that a bullet had just flown by his head, and that standing on the grille made him a perfect target. He swayed for a moment in sudden vertigo, then jumped to the ground to see Armando carefully turning both the switches on his control.

  “If there was a misfire,” he said, “we don’t want them going off now.”

  “Gotta get up there,” Nick said, as much to himself as Armando. There were a lot of shots now, including the sustained, stunning clamor of at least one of the deputies’ machine pistols. Nick looked around for a weapon—he hadn’t thought to provide himself with one—and saw the old lady carefully crouched down behind the brick walls of the barbecue grille, clutching her spatula as if it were a spear. It was probably the safest place to be in the whole camp.

  Nick didn’t want to wrestle the old lady for her spatula, so he gave up his search for a weapon and ran forward into the melee. The dust in the air had dispersed, and Nick saw a dozen bodies lying in the dirt. Most were deputies, but some were not. The bodies of the deputies were surrounded by clumps of refugees st
ripping them of their weapons. A pair of deputies retreated through the gate, a wave of club-waving refugees close behind. One of the deputies was wounded and had his arm around the shoulders of the second, who was supporting him in his withdrawal while firing back into the advancing crowd with a pistol. One of the pursuers sprawled to earth, and then with a series of triumphant cries the two deputies were engulfed by the wave of attackers. Nick saw knives and cudgels rising and falling, heard bone-chilling screams from one of the fallen.

  He kept going. Don’t stop except to pick up a weapon. That’s what he’d told everyone. The heavy air labored through his lungs. “Keep moving!” he gasped. “Keep moving!” The air was full of gunfire, but Nick couldn’t see who was shooting, or at whom. He burst free of the gate—a yell of defiance rose to his lips—and then he was in the parking lot. Some of the cars had suffered cracked windshields from the claymores’ munitions. Shotguns boomed. Nick crouched low between two cars.

  Gather in the parking lot where there’s cover. Take your car keys. Start your cars and get ready to move out on a signal.

  That’s what he’d told his army. But he didn’t have any car keys, he didn’t have a car; he’d have to wait for others. He leaned his back against one of the cars, tried to catch his breath, mopped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve.

  “Warriors!” he shouted. “Warriors! This way!”

  He wondered what was happening in the camp. Bullets snapping overhead convinced Nick that it wouldn’t be wise to stick his head up and find out.

  Whoever was firing the machine pistol had stopped. That was good, at least.

  Nick heard a car door slam, then the grind of a starter and the roar of the engine. Bent in a crouch, he began moving in the direction of the sound.

  And then he turned around the front end of a Chevy pick-up and came face-to-face with the enemy: the big deputy who had been giving the orders.