The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Moss-shrouded cypress floated past, tall in the water. Stars glittered at their feet. Jason leaned on the side of the cockpit and tried to breathe.

  The library smelled of dust and decaying book paper. It was a better fortress than Nick had expected—there were iron grills over the windows, which would certainly keep out unwanted visitors as well as the larger munitions, like tear gas grenades. The front door was solid cypress wood and so invulnerable that the Warriors had been unable to break it down: they’d had to pry off one of the iron grills, go in through a window, and open the door from the inside. The walls were thick concrete, covered with plaster that had partially peeled away in the quakes.

  “Keep a lookout,” Nick said. “Two to each window. Nobody show a light.” He took his own station behind the reassuring oaken solidity of the reference librarian’s desk. In front of him, on the desk, he propped the radio handset he’d taken from the deputy Jedthus. Carefully, wary of the pains in his stiffening body, he lowered himself into the librarian’s padded swivel chair. He picked up the phone. Nothing. Just as Cudjo had said, the phones were out. He sat in the chair and glanced around. There had been surprisingly little quake damage to the building. The shelves were metal and bolted to the floor and still standing. A great many books had spilled to the floor, and papers from the librarians’ desks. All the windows were shattered—probably in earlier quakes—but the iron grills would work better than glass to keep out whatever needed keeping out. There were three different channels on the police radio, which Nick could reach with pushbuttons. He shifted from one to the other, but the sheriff’s deputies kept all their calls on Channel One. There were calls about earthquake damage and injuries, all of which the sheriff relayed to other emergency services, most of which seemed amateurish and improvised. There was chatter about putting up roadblocks around the library, about evacuating people who lived in the neighboring buildings. Nothing whatsoever about sending deputies after the refugees that had fled from the camp.

  Nick heard nothing about sending in a negotiator, nothing about trying to find out what Nick and the Warriors actually wanted. Nick wasn’t particularly surprised.

  Darkness slowly fell. The library grew full of shadows. Flickering on the wall behind Nick was firelight reflected from the burning police vehicle that Nick had driven onto the front lawn of the library, then set on fire.

  Nick didn’t know whether it was a signal, or bravado, or something else. It had just seemed the thing to do.

  The other cars were parked closer, nestled right against the library, in case the Warriors decided they needed a fast exit.

  “Anyone have a watch?” Nick asked. “What time is it?”

  It was after ten thirty. Cudjo, he hoped, had got the refugees well into cover by now. Nick rose from his chair and winced at the pain that shot through his kidney. He hobbled to the front window, but stayed well under cover as he shouted, “We’ll talk! Send somebody to talk to us!”

  “What you doing?” said Tareek Hall from somewhere from the depths of the library. “We want to kill those crackers, not talk.”

  “Send someone to talk!” Nick shouted out the window. “We want to talk!”

  “The fuck we do,” said Tareek.

  At least he wasn’t shouting out the window.

  Nick turned to Tareek and limped toward him. “I’m going to try to get other people here,” he said.

  “Someone from the Army, the Justice Department. Major network media.”

  “Shit, they’re all part of the conspiracy anyway,” Tareek said.

  “If the Army’s part of the conspiracy,” Nick said, “we’ll be dead in an hour or two no matter what we do. We can’t match their firepower for a second. But you don’t know the Army, and I do. I grew up in the Army. And I do not believe they are a part of this.”

  “Shit,” said Tareek in disgust. “You still don’t get it, do you?” Jedthus’s radio began to chatter. Nick limped back to the librarian’s desk to listen. Nick’s offer to talk had been heard and was being reported to Omar, the sheriff. Omar just acknowledged with a “ten-four” and otherwise made no comment.

  That was all right, Nick figured. He could wait.

  Omar looked across the lawn at the Carnegie library from the relative safety of Georgie Larousse’s living room. The smell of the lasagne that the Larousse family had eaten for dinner made his stomach turn over. His head throbbed. He had no idea what to do.

  He couldn’t seem to think. That was the trouble. All the careful fences he’d built were breaking down, and he didn’t know how to rebuild them.

  All Omar had managed to do so far was choke off any attempt to talk to the people inside. But he didn’t know how much longer he could do that. The parish council could decide to overrule him at any time, and he suspected that the only reason they hadn’t was that they were distracted by earthquake repair work.

  And he had called in as many local Klansmen that he could get ahold of, people like Ozie Welks, who hadn’t been directly involved with the business at the A.M.E. camp because they’d been looking after their businesses and families in the wake of the disaster. They were armed, reasonably committed, and dangerous so long as they stayed sober, but Omar knew perfectly well that he couldn’t launch them at the library without getting them all massacred.

  I had no idea about the deaths at the A.M.E. camp, he said to himself. Rehearsing his defense. That must have been Jedthus Carter and those skinhead friends of his. I had no idea who those people were, but Jedthus said they were private security guards and I was so short-handed that I had to employ them.

  “How about we gas ’em?” Merle suggested. “Shoot some tear gas in there, then gun ’em when they come out?”

  “Grills on the windows,” Omar said.

  “Oh.”

  Merle seemed surprised. Probably he hadn’t been inside the library since he was in grade school. An aftershock rattled the shelves in the Larousse kitchen.

  Did anyone see me at the A.M.E. camp after the second day following the quake? Omar thought to himself. None of your witnesses can put me there. I was dealing with the epidemic at Clarendon that whole time and didn’t have any time to spare to deal with the situation anywhere else. He considered this defense to himself. It was possible he could get away with it, he thought, if he had the right jury.

  Maybe, he thought, maybe it was just time to run for it. Keep things going here as long as he could to guarantee David time to escape, and then follow him over the bayou and away.

  “Is there a back door or something?” Merle said. “Is there a basement and a way into it? If we could get someone in there, he could gas the place out before they knew anything about it.” Omar thought about that one. “Let’s see if we can get the keys from the librarian,” he said. Nick listened to the plot developing over the police radio. He didn’t know whether the sheriff had completely forgotten that his radio security was compromised, or just figured that the car radio Nick used had burned up with Jedthus’s car. In any case it seemed not to have occurred to him that Nick might have taken Jedthus’s handset.

  A party was going to creep up to the rear of the building, let themselves into the back door, and start flinging tear gas grenades up the back stair into the library. Then another group would charge the building and shoot down the Warriors as they came staggering out.

  It was easy enough to counter the scheme. But as Nick placed his soldiers in the windows and told them to keep alert, he felt sadness drift across for the poor fools who were going to try to storm his stronghold.

  They’d even waited for moonrise, so that they could be spotted all that much more easily. His people saw three figures slipping across the back lawn, aiming at the rear door, and held their fire until they couldn’t miss. A volley of shots boomed out, echoing in the wide space of the library. Nick felt his ears ring. One of the party fled, and the other two lay stretched out on the lawn. The larger storming party never left their assembly area behind one of the residential homes across fr
om the front of the library. Instead they swarmed into whatever cover they could find and started shooting, a truly impressive amount of fire that crackled through the night, but all completely useless, most of it going into the air or thwacking solidly into the library’s concrete walls. Poor fire control, Nick thought. The Warriors fired back, increasing the racket. It required some effort for Nick to get his own people to stop shooting. Eventually the deputies’ fire dwindled away.

  No one inside the library had been hurt. The sharp smell of gunpowder stung the air. Nick asked someone for the time. It was a little after two in the morning.

  “We want to talk!” he shouted out a window. “Send someone to talk to us!” Warm night air drifted through the Larousse house. Return fire from the library had knocked out most of the front windows, letting out the air-conditioning. Omar’s headache beat at his temples. Merle had been killed trying to sneak into the library. Omar felt as if he’d just had his right leg shot out from under him. He didn’t know what to do. Those people in the library, under their… their general… were just too heavily armed.

  “What I want to do, Omar,” said Sorrel Ellen of the Spottswood Chronicle, “is volunteer to talk to those people.”

  “No, Sorrel,” said Omar. “No way.”

  Sorrel gave his high-pitched laugh. The grating sound sank into Omar’s head like a sharp knife.

  “I’m a trained interviewer,” Sorrel insisted. “I can find out what they’re up to.”

  “I know what they’re up to,” Omar said. “They’re a bunch of killers. They killed my deputies, and if—” He gave up. “Sorrel, I’m too busy to talk to the press right now,” he said. “I need you to leave the building.”

  “But this is your headquarters! Your nerve center! I want to be present at your decisions!” Omar firmly took Sorrel’s arm and led him to Georgie Larousse’s kitchen door. “Keep your head down as you go,” he said. “Those people are killers.”

  And there, as he saw to his deep surprise, he saw Miz LaGrande crossing the lawn and heading in his direction.

  “Mrs. Ashenden!” he said.

  Even in the predawn darkness Miz LaGrande looked frail, not quite recovered from the dysentery. But she was dressed finely in a linen summer dress, with her hair done and a straw sun hat pinned in place, even though there was no sun. She carried a little clutch bag, and she was crossing the Larousse back lawn with precise steps of her sandaled feet.

  Omar’s special deputies, the heavily armed locals he’d summoned to his aid, stepped back to permit the old woman to pass.

  “What are you doing here at this hour?” Omar asked. “You’ve been ill—you should be in bed.” Mrs. Ashenden walked to the back door, looked up at Omar. “May we speak, Sheriff Paxton?” he said.

  “I’m very busy, Mrs. Ashenden. We have a bad situation here.”

  Her lips pursed. “So I gather. That is the situation we need to discuss.” Omar’s head whirled. He drew back from the door. “I hope we can make this brief,” he said. Mrs. Ashenden entered, and Sorrel Ellen, damn him, turned around and followed her. “This is not a safe place for either of you to be,” Omar said. “We’ve got a bunch of cold-blooded killers in the library, and—”

  Mrs. Ashenden carried with her the scent of talc and rose water. “I have had a visit, Sheriff,” she said crisply. “From a refugee who had been at the A.M.E. camp.”

  Omar stood in astonished silence. Think! he told himself.

  “The gentlemen described some of the activities inflicted on the people in the camp,” Mrs. Ashenden said.

  “The shootings, the riots. The—the activities that provoked this violent response.” Sorrel blinked for a surprised moment at Mrs. Ashenden, then reached for his notebook.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Omar said. His voice seemed to be coming from another place, from far away. “I haven’t been to that camp in days. You know that. You know I’ve been at Clarendon.” She looked up at him, eyes glittering in the moonlight. “That’s possible,” she said. “But in any case I fear that the situation has gone beyond our ability to cope with it. We shall need to open negotiations with those people in the library, and also summon aid from the emergency authorities, perhaps the national government. They can send in soldiers, FBI men, trained negotiators.”

  Keep the fence up, Omar thought. Keep it up till dawn, at least. Then get over the Bayou on Merle’s boat and get out of here.

  “They are murderers, ma’am,” Omar said. “They killed my deputies. They killed Merle out on the lawn not two hours ago. I am not negotiating with them.”

  Mrs. Ashenden gave a precise little nod. “That is precisely why you should not negotiate,” she said. “That is why I want someone else to talk with those people in the library.”

  “You know it will be a black eye for Spottswood Parish if we have to call in help. I think my department is capable of dealing with this once the sun comes up and we can get a better look at the situation.”

  “Excuse me,” Sorrel said, his pen poised on his notebook. “Could I have some clarification regarding these shootings and riots that Mrs. Ashenden mentioned?”

  Omar felt sweat breaking out on his throat, on his forehead. “You know two people got killed when we fenced the camp,” he said. “You know there was a riot when Dr. Patel and the Red Cross came to inspect the place. If anything else happened down there, Jedthus didn’t tell me about it.”

  “Sheriff Paxton,” Mrs. Ashenden said, “you’ve lost control of the situation. Will you call for assistance, or will you not?”

  Omar drew himself up, and hitched his gun belt higher on his hips. “Mrs. Ashenden,” he said. “You have no official standing in this parish. You can’t give me orders. Now, why don’t you go home and go to bed?

  You’ve been ill and should get your rest.”

  “I will speak to members of the parish council,” she said.

  “We have just had a major earthquake. I imagine they’re very busy.”

  “I will use the nice satellite phones the Emergency Management people gave us.” Omar looked down at her. Exasperation and headache beat each other to a standstill in his skull.

  “Just let me alone to deal with this situation, Mrs. Ashenden,” he said. He reached out and took her arm.

  “I would appreciate it if you would leave and let me get on with my business.” Mrs. Ashenden seemed a little taken aback as Omar took her through the kitchen to the back door—perhaps none of her inferiors had ever laid hands on her this way. Omar dropped her arm, then held the screen door open for her to pass out of the house.

  “Just a moment, Sheriff,” Mrs. Ashenden said. “I have something here for you.” She reached into her little clutch bag.

  “Watch out for those killers, now,” Omar said. “I don’t want you to get shot.” For a brief, hopeful moment he considered shooting the old lady himself—why not finish off as many of the people he hated as he could before vanishing over the bayou?—then concluded it wouldn’t be wise. Not in front of the press. Not in front of the boys, who might well understand eradicating a bunch of niggers, but maybe not an old white lady.

  But the press, now, he thought. Why not send Sorrel Ellen off to the library like he wanted? Not as a negotiator but as a hostage? Hell, they’d probably cut his head off.

  Now that was a happy thought.

  Omar reached out, took Mrs. Ashenden’s elbow again. “Ma’am?” he said.

  “Just a minute, Sheriff. It’s a thing I brought for you specially.” Her little bag didn’t have much room for anything, but she seemed to be taking her time finding it.

  A silver teaspoon? Omar wondered. Some porcelain knick-knack?

  “Ah,” she said brightly. “Here we go.”

  It was a gun, Omar saw in surprise. It was small and silver and had two barrels, both of which were very large.

  And when it went off, it made a very large noise.

  Dawn rose over the water, turned the wavelets pale. The bass boat picked up speed, headed
downriver as if those aboard knew where they were going.

  But they didn’t. They were lost.

  Bubba, the former bowman, thought they were in the Mississippi. Certainly the body of water in which they traveled was grand enough to be the great river. But the river had changed its course, he thought, and he wasn’t sure where the Mississippi was in relation to anything else.

  They should have seen Vicksburg by now. They had been making fairly good time, at least for a small boat. Bayous were usually still, slack water, but there had actually been a perceptible current in the bayou as they’d set out, rainwater pouring off the land with two or three knots of force. The current alone should have carried them to the Mississippi by morning.

  But there was a lot of lowlying back country in Louisiana, with many bayous and horseshoe lakes and chutes that had once been part of the Mississippi system. Bubba was inclined to think that the Mississippi had swallowed these old channels again, at least temporarily, and that they’d traveled along these during the night. They may have bypassed Vicksburg entirely.

  In that case, however, they should have crossed an interstate highway and a line of railroad tracks. They hadn’t seen any such thing.

  Though, if the highway and the railroad had been washed out over enough of its length, they might have passed through the gap at night without noticing.

  Manon and Bubba debated this possibility as Manon headed downstream. The only map that either of them possessed was an AAA road atlas that one of the refugees had in his car, and the road map was singularly lacking in navigational data for inland waterways. Jason lay inert in his seat, turned to the port side, his body swaying slightly left and right as Manon turned to avoid debris. Since the river had broadened to its current magnitude the once-brisk current had grown sluggish, almost undetectable. The river was wide and gray and still, full of rubbish and timber. Sometimes whole rafts of trees moved downstream with their tangled roots uppermost, like floating islands overgrown by strange, bare, alien vegetation.