The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  He threw the branch into the boat in disgust and heard it land in the water that splashed ankle-deep in the bottom. He was going to have to try kicking the boat northward.

  He took off his sneakers and socks, then carefully lowered himself off the back of the boat. A shiver ran through him at the water’s chill. He hung onto the metal plate to which the outboard was usually bolted, and he began to kick. Water splashed as his heels broke the surface.

  He kicked steadily for a few minutes, but from behind the boat he couldn’t tell if he was on the right course, so he stopped kicking and pulled his head above the gunwale to take a bearing on the red glow of Cabells Mound. He seemed to be aimed more or less in the right direction, so he dropped into the water once more and began to kick.

  That was the way it went for a long time. Kick for several minutes, take a bearing while he panted for breath, kick some more. The glow seemed to be getting a little nearer.

  The air rasped in and out of Jason’s lungs. His hands were numb on the metal plate. His head spun, and he felt the beginnings of a cramp threatening his left calf. He paused, hanging off the end of the boat, and tried to massage the cramp out of his calf with a half-paralyzed hand. He could feel his teeth chattering in the cold. There was an ache in his throat from his labored breathing.

  A brief gust of wind flurried the surface of the water. The boat swung to the right, and Jason tried to kick to correct his course. He failed, and the boat swung farther.

  He saw the Indian mound looming up close on his left. It shouldn’t be there, he realized. It should be farther astern.

  A flame of panic brightened in Jason’s heart. He pulled himself above the boat’s counter, tried to get a bearing. The fires of Cabells Mound seemed more distant. He looked frantically at the mound again, tried to get a bearing on it. The clouds above the mound were breaking up, with stars visible here and there, but the clouds were moving swiftly, and it was difficult to gauge motion relative to the water. The boat swung to another gust. Jason’s pulse throbbed in his ears as he turned his head to view the mound. He fixed his gaze at a star just visible above the tree-topped mound, tried to see how fast it was moving relative to the mound…

  The star seemed to be flying in relation to the mound. Which meant that neither the star nor the mound were moving, it was Jason that was moving, Jason and his boat… The lazy current had picked up speed and intent, and was carrying him swiftly away from the wreckage of his home, away from any chance of rescuing his mother.

  Jason gave a frantic yell and dropped back into the water, kicking furiously to get the boat back on its proper course. Heaving the boat’s slab side against the wind was difficult, and by the time he got the boat pointed in the right direction again he was already breathing hard, and he could feel the cramp building in his calf again.

  He knew that he could not allow himself the luxury of weariness. He had to kick, and kick hard. So he kicked, and from the first minute it was torture. His hands ached, his lungs were agony. Blackness filled his eyes. The cramp came in his leg and he clenched his teeth and ignored it, tried to keep kicking despite the muscles that turned hard as iron, that tried to tear his tendons from the bone. He didn’t dare stop. The pain filled him and he became the pain, and the pain was in his heart and his mind and his body, and it filled the world and the night, and he kept kicking, because it would be worse pain to stop. He shook water from his eyes and blinked at the bulk of the mound—he could see it sliding past, could see he was losing ground to the current. Mad determination brought a scream to his throat, a cry of hoarse defiance. Fresh energy seemed to glow in his limbs. The pain was not gone, but somehow it didn’t matter now, he had managed to put himself somewhere else, to let the pain flow through him without touching him. He kept kicking, kept pushing the boat ahead of him, fighting the wind and the current, until he caught another glimpse of the mound again and saw that it was far away, far upriver, and he knew that all the effort had been in vain, that the current had him now and that the river was taking him away south, far from the fires of Cabells Mound, the floating wreckage that was his home, far from the muddy grave of his mother, who was, he knew, dead, a lifeless thing lying in the river mud, drowned or burned or broken, wreckage herself, flotsam, food for animals that swam or crawled in the muddy darkness… So he threw one arm over the boat’s stern and just hung there, legs dangling in the water, and let the pain claim him at last, the sobs tearing at his throat, as the boat turned slow pointless circles in the water that carried it to a destination that waited patiently somewhere to the south, concealed by the soft Mississippi darkness.

  One gentleman, from whose learning I expected a more consistent account says that the convulsions are produced by this world and the moon coming in contact, and the frequent repetition of the shock is owing to their rebounding. The appearance of the moon yesterday evening has knocked his system as low as the quake has leveled my chimnies. Another person with a very serious face, told me, that when he was ousted from his bed, he was verily afraid, and thought the Day of judgment had arrived, until he reflected that the Day of Judgment would not come in the night.

  Extract from a letter to a gentleman in Lexington, from his friend at New Madrid, dated 16th December, 1811

  The Reverend Noble Frankland rose from his knees. His clothes were soaked with rain, and his knees with mud, but he had not felt that this was any moment to cease raining prayers and praise back to heaven.

  Despite the downpour, the air still smelled agreeably of brimstone.

  He reentered the radio station, walked across the littered floor to the control room. Though power had been restored, the station was mostly dark. Very few lightbulbs had survived the quake. The dials on the control panel—the ones that hadn’t shattered, anyway—showed that he was still on the air. He fetched his old metal wheeled chair from across the room, dusted some broken glass off the green plastic seat, then sat before the microphone. His wet pants squished beneath him, and he gave a tug to one trouser leg. He put on his earphones, then spoke.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he intoned, “the Last Days have begun. These are the days of lightning and brimstone and shakings of the earth, the prophecies of the Bible coming true. We praise you, Lord Jesus, for letting us see this day.” As he spoke his hands automatically worked the potentiometers. During the lengthy time he’d spent praying on his knees he’d had time enough to plan what he was going to say once he returned to the mike.

  “If anyone in the Rails Bluff area can hear me, the first thing I want you to do is thank the Lord’s mercy for allowing you the opportunity to build His kingdom here on earth during the next seven years of Tribulation. And the second thing I want you to do is see to the safety of your family and your neighbors. And the third thing I want you to do, if your home is destroyed or damaged, or if you are afraid to be alone in this difficult time, or if you are in need of spiritual aid, I want you to come here—here, to the Rails Bluff Church of the End Times here on Highway 417. We will see that everyone is cared for and fed. We have enough supplies to support a large number of people, and we have the organization to make sure that everyone is cared for.

  “If you don’t have transportation, or if you’re injured and can’t move, try to call emergency services. If you can’t get through, try to care for yourself as best as possible, and we will find you.

  “If anyone from the Family Values campaign can hear me, I want you to look after those children and return them to their families if you can. If that’s impossible, I want you to bring them here, to the Church of the End Times, where we will care for them till their parents can come for them.

  “To any Christians in the Rails Bluff area—if you have no other duties, come here now. We need you at the church! We know how to organize you for survival here in the End Times—we have studied this problem for years!”

  Frankland took a breath. “And now, let us all give thanks…”

  He spoke a lengthy prayer, and then he found a sixty-second cart—a
tape cartridge looped so as to repeat itself infinitely, usually intended for announcements or advertisements—and then Frankland broadcast his message again, recording it this time on the cart, making certain that it lasted a precise sixty seconds. Then he slapped the cart into the player and set it on infinite repeat. He listened to it once to make sure that it sounded all right, and then he took his ear-phones from his head. It was only then that he heard the noise in the outside office. Someone had come into the station. He could see a large, shadowy form moving in the outer office.

  Frankland’s mouth went dry. In a movement that seemed to take forever, he reached into the drawer next to his chair and put his fingers securely around the custom grip of his P38 semiautomatic pistol. He eased the wheeled chair back from the control panel, but the wheels crunched over broken glass, and swift, angry reproach flashed through his mind at the sound.

  The intruder halted at the sound, then moved down the corridor. Glass and wreckage crunched under his feet. Trying to breath in utter silence, Frankland thumbed back the hammer on the pistol and slowly raised the weapon. The intruder loomed closer. The pistol seemed heavy as sin.

  “Reverend?” Hilkiah’s voice. “You in there?”

  Frankland let his breath sigh from his throat. His head swam with relief.

  “Yes, Hilkiah. I’m here.”

  The big man groped uncertainly toward the doorway. “Are you hurt?”

  “No.” Frankland eased the hammer of the P38. “I’m just fine.”

  “Praise the Lord you’re all right! I can’t see a damn—whups, sorry, Brother Frankland—a dang thing in here.”

  Frankland put the pistol back in its drawer, rose from his chair, and shuffled through the rubble toward the door.

  “Were you in town?” he asked. “What happened there?”

  “Town’s wrecked,” he said. “The courthouse and the old Bijoux theater are the only buildings still standing, pretty much. A buncha houses caught on fire. Bet you we’ve got five, six hundred homeless people in this county, probably more.”

  The Bijoux was an old opera house from the nineteenth century, later converted to cinema, but abandoned now for years. It had a strong iron frame, and Frankland had once considered buying it for the site of his church.

  “God bless it!” Frankland said as he barked his shin on a fallen shelf. “How about my wife? Our kids?” meaning the Family Values picketers in front of Bear State Videoramics.

  “A few cuts and bruises, but they’re okay. We were all knocked down when it started, but it was safer in the parking lot than inside the buildings, and we were away from the store fronts and the flying glass.” He gave a chuckle deep in his throat, hugh hugh. “You shoulda seen them cars jump! Like they was trying to fly to the moon!”

  “And the Piggly Wiggly? The video store?”

  “Roof came down. We had to pull people out. Some busted legs and heads—I didn’t stay to take count, I just helped round up the kids and then Sister Sheryl sent me here to make sure you were okay.” They emerged from darkness into the gloom of the outer office. “Where are the kids now?” Frankland asked. “Did you hear my message?”

  “I don’t got no working radio in the pickup, pastor. But Sister Sheryl was going to try to get them back to their families, then come here. And Dr. Calhoun had his bus there, and he was going to take care of the kids that live out of town.”

  If the bus doesn’t break down somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Frankland thought. He sighed.

  “We’ve got to get ready,” he said. “I’ve told people to come here if they’re in need. We’d better be set for them when they come.”

  He opened the metal door, let murky sunlight flood the room. “We need to clean the glass out of the church, so people can sleep there. Hang some plastic sheets on lines inside so the women can have privacy.”

  He looked across the road and saw Joe Johnson with a blade on his tractor, trying to shore up his leaking catfish ponds. Those catfish, he thought, they could feed a lot of people.

  “Is it time to open the vault?” Hilkiah asked.

  Frankland stepped into the parking lot and savored the sulfur in the air. Even though there were a number of vaults, all containing supplies laid under concrete until the End Times, Frankland knew which one Hilkiah was thinking of. “Not yet,” he said. “We don’t want to scare people with all those guns before we have to.”

  Jessica rolled up to the headquarters of the Mississippi Valley Division in Pat’s red civilian Jeep Cherokee, with her husband behind the wheel, half her senior military staff either in the back or hanging off the vehicle’s sides, and Sergeant Zook, her driver, sitting on the vehicle’s hood brandishing a Homelite chainsaw.

  No one could say she didn’t know how to make an entrance.

  It had taken Jessica almost half an hour to get to her head-quarters, normally a three-minute drive. The roads were badly torn, blocked with fallen trees, power poles, and land-slides. The aftershocks that came every few minutes theatened them with further slides and falling trees. Only the Cherokee’s four-wheel-drive made the journey at all possible. Along the way she’d picked up most of her staff, who lived on the same road above the WES, and found Zook, who after the quake had tried to fetch her in her car, but had got bogged down trying to negotiate a landslide.

  The headquarters building was still standing, but Jessica suspected that this was going to be about the only good news. She bounded out of the Jeep before it quite pulled to a stop on Arkansas Road, and she headed for the group of soldiers she saw on the grass inside Brazos Circle. She was followed by a wedge of senior officers.

  To the poor junior MP lieutenant on duty, it must have looked as if the whole Pentagon was descending on him. All the soldiers were in battle dress, BDUs, and most were wearing helmets, a sensible precaution in an environment where things might fall on their heads at any second. The lieutenant had no good news. “We evacuated the building, General, because it’s damaged and we figured it was dangerous to stay inside,” he said. “Ground lines are down. Power’s out. Most of our communications gear is wrecked, inaccessible, or without power. We got a Hammer Ace radio out of stores, but the batteries were dead, so we’re recharging with the solar recharger…” Jessica looked at the radio. It had a segmented antenna with a metal flower at the end, meant to communicate via satellite. Now useless, until they could recharge the batteries that were sitting in the solar array next to the radio on the lawn.

  “How long is that going to take?”

  “Quite a while, General.”

  Jessica looked at the red Cherokee. “Recharge it with the vehicle engine.”

  “Ma’am!” The lieutenant looked happy for an excuse to leave the cluster of senior officers.

  “Just a minute, soldier,” Jessica said. “How many personnel do we have on station?”

  “You’re looking at most of us, General. Most of our people went home at five o’clock, just before the quake.”

  They should know to report back, Jessica hoped.

  No communication, no information. No information, no decisions. No decisions, no orders. No orders meant waiting. Jessica was not very good at waiting.

  “Have you tried cellphones?” she asked.

  The lieutenant looked embarrassed. “Didn’t think to,” he said. “I don’t happen to have one, and I guess nobody else here does, either.”

  “Right. Get that battery recharged.” Jessica’s cellphone was clipped to her belt. It was connected to the Iridium network: 66 satellites sent into canted polar orbits in the late nineties by a consortium headed by Motorola. The satellites were supposed to cover every inch of the globe, capable of patching into every active phone network in existence.

  The disadvantage was that, if the local cells were down, the phones had to be used out of doors, because buildings would impede the signal to and from the satellite. Jessica considered that the advantage of instant communication with Moscow, say, or Antarctica, outweighed the disadvantage of having a conversati
on during the occasional rainstorm.

  She unclipped the phone and turned to Sergeant Zook.

  “Report to the motor pool,” she said, “and sign me out a Humvee.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And I want a report on what you find there, particularly the earth-moving machines. I want to get the roads open around here so that our own personnel can report for duty.”

  She looked at the faces around her. “I hope some of you have experience in operating bulldozers and graders, gentlemen.”

  The colonels and majors looked at each other uneasily.

  Zook trotted off, then stumbled as the sudden shearing force of an aftershock almost took him off his feet. As the earth began to growl, Jessica stood in place, feet braced apart, knees bent slightly. The ground felt liquid below her feet, like Jell-O. Vertigo shimmered in her inner ear. There was a crash in the headquarters building as something very large fell. The aftershock faded, though the uneasy sensation in Jessica’s inner ear continued.

  “Come with me, gentlemen,” Jessica said, and began walking for the headquarters building. Jessica opened her cellphone, punched in her father’s number in New York, and was delighted to hear a ringing signal. Her mother answered: Jessica told her that there had been a severe earthquake, that she and Pat were fine, but that she was very busy and couldn’t talk.

  “I know,” her mother said. “It’s been on TV.”

  “What do they say, Ma?”

  “They don’t seem to know much of anything.”

  “Do they know what cities have been hit?”

  “We felt it here.”

  Jessica was horrified. “You felt it in Queens?”

  “Your grandfather’s Toby jug—the one he got in England during the war—it fell off the shelf and broke.”