The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Cudjo held up a fist, crooked a thumb. “Took,” he chirped. And laughed.

  “You come visit the camp, cracker, and we’ll make you real welcome.” For a long, long heartbeat, Omar stared at the radio set in his office. All his people at the camp were dead, he thought. The Klan, the Crusaders, all of them. He could hear refugees howling and yelling over the radio until the signal abruptly cut off.

  “Omar! Omar!” Eddie Bridges called. He was one of the deputies at Clarendon, trying to keep order amid all the sick people. Not a Klansman, not involved with the A.M.E. camp at all. “What the hell was that about?” Eddie demanded. “Did he say he was an Army general?” Omar didn’t have an answer for him.

  He was almost thankful when the earthquake began to shake the world.

  Nick walked to Cudjo, embraced him as fervently as he’d embraced Arlette. Moments of soaring relief floated through his mind, alternating with unreasoning jagged bolts of adrenaline lightning. “You saved it, man,” he said. “You saved the damn plan. You saved fifty lives.” Cudjo seemed a bit taken aback. “You did the hard work, you fellas,” he said. “You make the claymore, you fight the Kluxers vis-a-vis. I make the shoot from ambush, me.” He shrugged. “That not hard, no. Not for hunter.”

  Nick stepped back, looked at Cudjo. “I need you to guide most of these people someplace safe.”

  “Mais oui, I do that, yes. Take you-all down bayou, me, take you across on batteau. Small batteau, my batteau, take all night cross that bayou, but you-all on south bank by morning. Lord High Sheriff can’t follow you there, no, you be safe.”

  “Good. Good.” Nick nodded. He glanced over his shoulder. “Is there a place in town I can take some of the fighters? Some place defensible. I figure the best chance of covering your withdrawal is to go right into Shelburne City and seize the most public building I can find.”

  Cudjo was surprised by this idea, but as he considered it an approving light began to glow in his eyes.

  “That sho-nuff gon’ put the weasel in that chicken house, for true,” he said admiringly. “But the Lord High Sheriff, that Paxton, he got his sheriff’s men in the courthouse.”

  “Any place other than the courthouse?”

  “There’s Clarendon. Big ol’ plantation house, that Clarendon, and that Miz LaGrande who live there, that Miz LaGrande, she hate Sheriff Paxton. Big refugee camp at Clarendon, that big house, all the white people go there.”

  Nick shook his head. “I don’t think we’re going to get any of these people to walk back into a refugee camp. Do we have anywhere else?”

  Cudjo thought for a moment. “Carnegie Library. Big ol’ place, that library. She got big lawns, that library, nice fields of fire, yes.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “You go down highway, that highway, you turn left Jefferson Davis Street.” Nick gave a weary smile. “I’m not likely to forget the name of that street,” he said.

  “How Trout the wounded?” A stout middle-aged woman came up to Nick. “We got some people shot up and no doctor. Some can’t walk. These people gonna die if they don’t see a doctor.” Nick bit his lip. “I don’t suppose there’s a hospital?” he asked Cudjo.

  “No hospital in this parish, mais non. But they put sick people in Clarendon, that big house, there.”

  “And you say the lady who owns Clarendon hates the sheriff?”

  “Mais oui. But your people there, they no be safe. Lord High Sheriff find them.” Nick turned to the woman. “I’m afraid we’ll have to take the wounded with us. That’s bad for them, but they won’t be safe if they’re not with us.”

  “Some of them are bad hurt.”

  “Yes, I know, but—” He stopped as he saw a bright, incongruous blond head crossing his line of vision. The white man he’d talked to that morning, walking across the grass with his black wife and three kids. Wild inspiration struck Nick. “Hey!” he called. “Hey!” For the life of him he couldn’t remember the man’s name.

  Jack Taylor stopped, turned, gave Nick an inquiring look.

  “Yes! You!”

  Taylor told his family to wait, walked toward Nick. Nick looked at him.

  “Your family get through okay?”

  “Yeah.” Taylor seemed surprised by being singled out this way.

  “You have a car? You still want a job?”

  Taylor gave a little incredulous laugh. “Now?” he said.

  “I want you to go to Clarendon and talk to the woman who owns it—” He looked at Cudjo.

  “Miz LaGrande,” Cudjo said. “LaGrande Shelburne Ashenden, she.”

  “Mrs. LaGrande Ashenden,” Nick repeated to Taylor. “I want you to follow us to Shelburne City in your car—not with us, see, but later. And then I want you to go to this plantation house called Clarendon and talk to Mrs. Ashenden.”

  “What do I say?” Taylor asked, wide-eyed.

  “Tell her what’s happened here. She’s part of the local power structure, and she hates the sheriff. She’ll be able to get word out.” Another thought occurred to him. “No,” he said. “Wait till after midnight. Make sure all our people can get clear.”

  Taylor considered this. “Okay,” he said. “But I have to know someone will be looking after my family.”

  “We’ll do that,” Nick said. “We’ll—”

  Bang! The ground picked Nick up and dropped him again. “Incoming!” Cudjo yelled, and threw himself flat.

  Nick dropped to the ground himself, hugged the long moist grass, but not because he thought the sheriff had somehow trained a howitzer on them.

  It was the primary wave of another big earthquake. Nick knew quakes well enough by now to know that, at least.

  He heard the secondary waves coming, a roaring sound like a great wind passing through a forest, and then the earth began to dance.

  He had been dreaming more and more of New Mexico. The busier he got, the more demands his job made on him, the more his mind seemed to need that anchor, that sense of home. He woke in the morning to the scent of mountain flowers, to a memory of high meadows shimmering gold in the sun. And then rose to a day of heat, sweat, and Mississippi mud.

  It was time to go home, Larry thought. As soon as he got things set up here, as soon as Poinsett Landing would relax its grip on him.

  “I’ll be with you in an hour or so,” Larry said into his satellite phone. “Just as soon as we get this ol’ barge tied up.”

  “I’ll have something hot waiting,” Helen said. “We just got electricity restored today, so I can actually cook.”

  The second barge of spent nuclear fuel was ready to start its journey to Waterford Three. This one contained several of the hot, partly melted fuel assemblies from the reactor’s last unloading, and thus its mooring merited Larry’s particular attention.

  Larry watched as the barge eased its way out of the short canal from the auxiliary building to the west side of Poinsett Island. A pair of crewmen stood on the barge, minding the steel mooring and tow cables, while an Army backhoe drew the barge slowly to the Mississippi.

  The barge would have to moor alongside the flank of the island overnight. There was supposed to be a towboat here to take the barge downstream, but some last-minute hitch with insurance had resulted in a delay. Larry didn’t understand the problem: the last load had traveled to Waterford without special insurance, but now, somehow, things were different.

  Larry explained this to Helen over his cellphone while he watched the barge slide into the Mississippi and swing with the current.

  “A typical screwup,” he concluded.

  “Isn’t it good,” Helen said, “to deal with a typical screwup for a change? Instead of something new and completely unprecedented?”

  Larry grinned and tipped his hard hat back on his head. “Waaal,” he said, “I guess you’re right.” He watched the current swing the barge to its mooring place.

  “Looks like we’re going to be finished here in just a few minutes,” Larry said. “I’ll call for my helicopter.” Helen g
ave a chuckle. “Just listen to yourself,” she said. “‘I’ll call for my helicopter.’ You sound like Donald Trump.”

  “I’m still the same cowpuncher you married,” Larry said. “And I’ll prove it if we can ever get back to New Mexico.”

  “The company owes you a long vacation,” Helen said.

  “It surely does. And I’m planning to collect it as soon as I make sure this operation is working.”

  “See you in an hour.”

  “Bye, sweetie.”

  Larry clicked off his cellphone and stood watching the barge. The backhoe cast off the tow cable, and the cable was made fast to a tall steel stanchion that had been sunk and cemented into the close-packed rubble of Poinsett Island. The backhoe spun nimbly on its wheels, gravel flying, as it began its journey to shift an empty barge into the auxiliary building canal in order to take on another load of spent fuel. Larry thought of horses. Low Die, sitting low on its hocks as it prepared to cut to the left. The backhoe, nimble as it was, simply was not an adequate substitute.

  One of the men on the barge tossed a mooring line to one of the men on shore so that the barge would be moored more securely, bow and stern. Larry looked at the cellphone and began to punch in the number that would summon the helicopter pilot to carry him home to Vicksburg. There was a crash as Poinsett Island jumped into the air. Larry felt his mouth drop open in surprise. Not again.

  He heard the chuffing sound of the quake coming toward him and figured he wasn’t going to be standing much longer, so he lowered himself to his knees on the gravel surface. When he looked north he could see Poinsett Island heave up in a long traveling wave that flung plumes of dust from its crest like foam. The wave rolled under him, and he felt himself picked up, then dropped face-first to the ground in a spill of gravel and dust. Pain shot through his broken collarbone. Grinding and booming sounds slapped against his ears. Then another wave lifted him bodily—the feeling of that awesome force pressing him upward was at once breathtaking and terrifying—and then again he spilled downward in a slide of gravel. His hard hat tumbled off his head.

  The air was full of dust. Larry glanced left and right through the sudden gray-brown haze and saw the barge vibrating in a sea of white water, the backhoe sliding backward as it fell off the crest of an earth-wave. He could see the operator’s arms flailing inside the machine’s roll cage. And then the backhoe toppled backward, its front scoop flying into the air. Larry watched in surprise. The machine was stable, and he didn’t understand why it would somersault like that.

  He found the answer when another wave lifted him, and with the advantage of height he saw that the sides of the canal leading to the auxiliary building had collapsed, and that the backhoe along with its operator had been tumbled into the water. Got to help that poor man, Larry thought, before he’s buried alive, and he tried to rise to hands and knees and scramble across the gravel toward the canal. But the island kept jumping out from under him, and then he felt the ground under him start to slide, and water splash his face.

  Poinsett Island was coming apart. It was rubble, and it was sitting on nothing but soft river mud, and the quake was shifting the rubble around. He needed to head toward the middle of the island before he slid into the Mississippi. He couldn’t help the backhoe operator unless he first helped himself. He tried belly-crawling away from the water, but he had no traction—the ground under him was shifting, sliding toward the river—sharp-edged stone and concrete cut his knees and hands. He gulped in air as the river boiled up around him, as the water took him and his view turned white. Larry lunged upward, felt his head break the surface. Breath burst from his lungs and he gasped in foam-flecked air. The air filled with grinding sounds as the rubble island slid away into the river. He blinked through water-splashed spectacles, his booted feet kicking as he trod water. He sensed a shadow behind him and turned his head just in time to see the laden barge swinging toward him, its black, rust-streaked sides looming tall as a house. It must have come unmoored.

  Oh hell, he thought.

  Larry raised his hands and pressed them against the side of the barge, as if he could hold it off him by strength alone. He knew it was futile, but it was all he could do.

  The barge carried him back to the island, and crushed him against the merciless stone with all the weight of the steel hull and the big container flasks and the nuclear fuel.

  Larry felt his rib cage cave in. Pain roared like a lion in his skull. He thought of plains and mountain flowers and the way Low Die shifted under him, all the powerful muscle and tendon under his control. Stupid, he thought, a stupid way to die.

  The barge rebounded from the island, releasing Larry to slide below the surface. As water poured into Larry’s unresisting lungs, the barge spun on down the foam-flecked river, trailing on the end of its cable the mooring stanchion that had torn free of Poinsett Island.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Messrs. Miner & Butler,

  A very singular phenomenon took place near Angelica, in the country of Allegany, on Monday morning the 16th of December, which I will state, as related to me by one of the eye witnesses. Early in the morning, about sunrise as sitting at breakfast, he had a strange feeling, and supposed at first that he was fainting, but as his sight did not fail, he then concluded that he was going into a fit, and removed his chair back from the table. —He then had a sensation as though the house was swinging and observed clothes hanging on lines in the room were swinging, as also a large kettle hanging over the fire. He observed that his wife and family appeared to be greatly alarmed, and still supposing that it was in consequence of his apparently falling into a fit, but on enquiry found that all felt the same sensation. This continued as he supposed for at least 15 minutes. There was no noise or trembling, nor any wind, but only an appearance of swinging or rocking, as he supposed, equal to the house rocking two feet one way and the other. —One of his neighbors felt the same, and on the opposite side of the river, at the farmhouse and dwelling house of Phillip Church, the same motions and sensations were felt. Mrs. Church was in bed, and when she first felt the motion, and a strange sensation as if suffocating, she jumped out of bed, supposing the house was on fire. The motion was so considerable as to set all the bells in the several rooms a ringing, and an inside door was observed to swing open and shut. The same motions were felt up the river, about eight miles above, at a house near a small brook; the people ran out of the house, and observed the water to have the same motion. Accounts state, that the same motions have been felt at sundry other places 30 miles distant. I could relate many other similar motions felt and perceived at the same time, but leave it for the present. How to account for it I know not. If you think it worthy of notice, you may make it public, and if the same or similar motions have been felt at other places, doubtless it will be communicated. I should like to hear it accounted for on rational principles.

  Christopher Hurlbut, Arkport, (N.Y.) Jan. 6

  “God damn, not again!”

  Jessica sat with Pat beneath the kitchen table and listened to the house bang around them. They had moved back into their house only hours before—Jessica, her head echoing with the President’s bizarre call, concluded that the emergency had ebbed to the point where she didn’t need to be physically present at headquarters every minute of the day—and the quake struck just as they were eating their first home-cooked meal since before the emergency. Jessica had prepared tagliarini verdi ghiottona, lovely green pasta noodles with a sauce of onions, tomatoes, carrots, chicken livers, veal, and ham—the recipe called for prosciutto, which was not precisely available, but one of the civilians she’d helped in the early days of M1 had given her a smoked Cajun ham, which proved an effective substitute. When the P wave hit and the house gave a sudden leap, Jessica and Pat slid neatly beneath the table before the S waves had a chance to reach them. Each kept a firm grip on priorities, and therefore retained both plate and fork.

  “Right in the middle of fucking dinner!” Jessica muttered as the moaning quake envelop
ed them. Platters bounced loudly over her head. Something went smash in the bedroom. She was beginning to miss her helmet.

  “At least there aren’t any operations going on right now,” Pat commented. His voice was as conversational as the circumstances permitted, shouting over the banging furniture and moaning earth.

  “I hope I don’t lose an eye,” Jessica said. Rayleigh waves rattled her teeth as she spoke.

  “I was hoping to keep your mind off that.”

  “That was good of you.”

  A wineglass walked off the edge of the table. Jessica snatched for it in midair, but the earth took a lurch at that instant and robust red wine splattered over the dining room floor. The solid Baccarat crystal, the sort of glassware out of which a major general was expected to serve her guests, didn’t so much as chip. She closed her right eye and peered out with her damaged left, tried to determine if she was losing any vision. But the earth was heaving and leaping too much for her to keep her eye focused on anything long enough.

  The earth thrashed a few last times and then the vibrations died down. In the precarious silence, Jessica took a defiant bite of her dinner, handed the plate to Pat, and cautiously ventured into the front room to find her cellphone in the corner, having leaped from where she’d placed it on the coffee table. It was already ringing.

  She was in communication with her headquarters immediately, and with Washington in a few minutes. Her staff were well practiced by now; they smoothly gathered information and fed it to her as it arrived. Jessica had time to scarf her dinner before Sergeant Zook arrived with her car. Pat stayed behind to get the house in order. On her way to headquarters in the Humvee, she hit the speed dialer number for Larry Hallock, but didn’t get an answer.

  She tried three more times over the next hour, then tried some other numbers. She was unable to raise anyone at Poinsett Island. Then she got absorbed in her work, in the information flooding in and the deployments that needed to be made, and didn’t try calling again.