The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Perhaps the worst thing, amid all this loss and tragedy, was that for many hours following M1, none of the people in a position to aid the survivors, from the President through General Frazetta and on down the chain of command, were in a position to understand the full scope of the catastrophe, or to mitigate its destructive power in any way.

  “We’re fine, General. Shook up, but fine.”

  Jessica felt the tension in her neck ease as the words crackled out of her cellphone. The Kentucky Dam, holding back the combined waters of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, was intact. If it had gone, pouring both Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley into the Ohio, it would have created a colossal wall of water that would have turned the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys from Evansville to Memphis into one long, blank, lifeless smear of mud.

  “I want the dam surveyed for damage,” Jessica said. “And every other dam in the area.”

  “Yah. I’ll get right on it.”

  “I need to make some other calls right now. But let me give you my number—call me only if you’ve got bad news, understand? If things are fine, I don’t want to hear from you.”

  “You betcha. Guess you’re kinda busy down there, yah?”

  Jessica grinned. That you betcha, spoken in a classic Red River of the North accent, was far from a proper military response. But the Army Corps of Engineers, though operated by the military, was not entirely a military outfit. Most of the people who worked for Jessica in the Mississippi Valley Division—engineers, inspectors, architects, and lock masters, surveyors, boat captains, equipment operators, and managers—were civilians, and not subject to military discipline. Entire Corps districts saw a person in uniform only rarely.

  A clash between military and civilian cultures was a constant possibility. Jessica preferred to think of this not as a disadvantage, but as a stimulating opportunity for cross-cultural discourse. Jessica disconnected and batted moths away from her flashlight. She was squatting on the lawn in front of her headquarters building, looking at maps and lists of phone numbers spread out on the grass. Flashlights and the head-lights of vehicles were the only illumination.

  She called the Clarence Cannon dam again, and received no reply. “Fuckingskunksuckingsonofabitch,” she muttered rapid-fire. Too many critical installations were out of communication.

  “General Caldwell?” The voice came out of the darkness. Jessica looked up to see a man approaching. He wore civilian clothing and his eyes glittered strangely from behind thick glasses.

  “I’m General Frazetta,” she said as she rose to her feet. Caldwell had been the name of her predecessor, a tall, burly man who looked more like a sandhog than an engineer.

  “I brought this, General. I knew you’d need it.”

  He held out something that glittered in the headlights. Jessica reached out a hand and something metal and heavy was placed in her palm. A heavy double-ended chrome-plated wrench.

  “Took me a long time to find it,” the man said. “But I knew you’d need it.” He gave a serious nod, then faded back into the night. Jessica looked down at the wrench in her hand, then at the dark silhouette of the spectacled man as he vanished into the night.

  The earthquake had shaken people up. She had met relatively few people since the quake, but a disturbing number of them weren’t behaving rationally. It was as if the disaster was so far outside their experience that they had no way of reacting to it logically; the scale of the thing had unstrung their minds. Something had to be done for these people, she thought. There were probably thousands of them. But she had other things to do first.

  She squatted down into the light of the headlights and began to press buttons on her cellular phone. An aftershock woke Charlie some time after midnight. The BMW trembled on its suspension as the earth shivered for a good three minutes.

  Earthquake, he thought. It was an earthquake.

  How strange. Earthquakes were only in California and Japan.

  He could still see downtown Memphis glowing red on the horizon, beneath a spreading gloom of smoke. Charlie blinked and stroked the stubble on his chin. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. He felt feverish.

  More than the earth was moving, he knew.

  Prices were moving.

  He needed to get a grip, he thought. Prices were moving. There was money to be made. He needed to get to his desk and make some sales.

  Stocks were going to plummet, he thought. Which meant there were going to be all sorts of cheap bargains to be picked up.

  America, he further considered, was going to need to rebuild. Which meant that they would need dollars. Which meant that Charlie needed to buy dollars right now, because lots of investors were going to panic when they heard about the quake, and they would try to sell their dollars. So Charlie would buy, because the Federal Reserve was going to have to buy billions of dollars to finance the reconstruction, so the dollar would eventually go up, and he would profit. Which would result in depressed prices in places like London and Tokyo, as American dollars came home, so he’d have to start shorting those markets. And bonds. He needed to talk to his bond traders. Because the Fed would be loaning out its dollars at very low interest rates to finance reconstruction, and that would mean higher bond prices. He considered other side effects. He would buy oil, lots of it. Refinery capacity would be reduced, and the price would be up. And foodstuffs, because a lot of agricultural land had just got trashed, so food prices would be rising.

  He needed to move right now, because the whole situation could change by the time the markets closed tomorrow.

  He picked up the cellphone again, tried to call Dearborne. Nothing. He called some of his traders. Nothing but a hiss.

  Move! he thought, and pounded the car wheel in front of him with his fists. Nothing moved in the still night. Nothing but the drifting cloud of smoke overhead. As dawn approached, the news from the quake zone only grew worse. Huge fires raged out of control, both in cities and national forests. Communication and transportation were shattered. Millions in need, and no way to get aid to all of them.

  “Mr. President,” Lipinsky said finally, “I am afraid that the limits of our efforts are very rapidly being reached. There are large sections of the country—mostly rural—that will be on their own for some time. We cannot get help to them, not with our efforts concentrated in the cities.” The President licked his lips. “We can put more soldiers in the disaster area,” he said. “Call up more reserves. Bring the National Guard in from other states…”

  Lipinsky shook his head. “We can’t put in more soldiers until there’s a way to move them into the field, and to supply them once they get there. Right now we can only move our people into the badly damaged areas with helicopters, and we only have so many, and they have to divide their limited time between rescue, supply, and delivering our rescue teams to their objectives. Helicopters are also very delicate—they spend more time in maintenance than in the air.” He gazed into the President’s face. “Sir, I recommend that you address the American people. Tell them frankly that many of them cannot expect our assistance for some time to come. I think they will be safer for that knowledge.” The President clenched his teeth. “It is not my job,” he said, “in the midst of the worst disaster in history, to tell the taxpayers of the most powerful nation in the world that their government can’t help them!” He realized he was shouting, that the Situation Room had fallen silent.

  He looked at the crowd of people for a moment, then realized how tired he was.

  “Five-minute break,” he said, turned, and left the room.

  He went to one of the rest rooms, moistened a towel in cool water, and applied the towel to the back of his neck. His kidneys ached. He closed his eyes, then had to open them because he began to sway with weariness. He stared into the hollow-eyed scarecrow that stared back at him from the mirror.

  “Let Lipinsky be wrong,” he said.

  He was the President, his mind protested. The President of the most powerful nation on earth. So why was he feeling
more helpless than any other time in his life?

  The water rolled into St. Louis with the dawn. Farther upstream, just below where the waters of Mark Twain Lake had broken Lock and Dam No. 24, the flood had become a literal wall of water, foaming, eight feet high, that obliterated everything in its path like a bowling ball rolling down a pipe. But by the time the water reached St. Louis, it had moderated into a series of steep rollers, each one higher than the one before.

  Most people were able to head for higher ground as the waters rose, but still thousands drowned. These were trapped in collapsed buildings and unable to flee, others were injured, caught in areas away from high ground, caught in the flood when they were caught behind uncrossable fissures, or caught in floating debris that carried them to their deaths.

  Marcy Douglas watched the waves go by. She greeted the dawn from her post at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, standing below the soaring stainless steel Gateway Arch that marked the safe, high ground where neither floor nor fire had reached. Marcy had worked all night in the collapsed parking garage, pulling people free of the debris. She had seen men crushed in their cars, women trapped beneath falling concrete, children lying blue-lipped and cold, smothered beneath the arched bodies of the parents who died trying to protect them. She had helped to carry the bodies out as well as the survivors, but there was nowhere to lay them but on the grass of the Memorial park. There were a few doctors and nurses among the crowd of refugees that had fled across Memorial Drive, and these did what they could for the injured. There was no medicine, no supplies, no beds, no blankets. But the doctors and nurses and Park personnel and a thousand ordinary people did what they could, and over the course of the night they performed miracles, and saved scores of people who otherwise would have died.

  And so Marcy—with no sleep, no food, no rest—stood to greet the dawn, the red sunrise that gleamed on the Arch. She stood tall in her stained khaki uniform, her wide hat square on her head, and knew, through her weariness, that she had done everything possible for her tourists, for those caught in the parking garage, and for everyone else that had come within the boundary of the Memorial. As Marcy watched the sun rise, she saw the long foaming waves rolling along the channel of the Mississippi. The brown water mounted higher and higher, nudging at the groaning wreckage of the Casino Queen and the Tom Sawyer. Marcy knew that the day would be long, and that her part was not over.

  And a few miles south of where Marcy stood on the river, a man watched the waters rise and felt ice run up his spine.

  His name was Stewart DeForest, and he was fire chief of the City of St. Louis. When he felt the first tremors slam into his home, even as the glass shattered and the furniture leaped, as shingles spilled from the roof and the house rocked on its foundation, he knew that his place was in south St. Louis, by the River Des Peres.

  The Des Peres was a tributary of the Mississippi and formed the southern boundary of St. Louis proper. The Des Peres’s flood protection was inadequate, and everyone knew it. If the Mississippi backed up into the Des Peres, the area near the river was threatened with inundation.

  Mere flooding was not what frightened the fire chief. What terrified DeForest were the long white rows of liquid propane cylinders that crouched near the river. Each cylinder held 30,000 pressurized gallons of one of the most explosive substances on earth, and there were more than fifty of them, making for over a million and a half gallons altogether.

  One leak, one spark, was all it would take to ignite the greatest conflagration that Missouri had ever seen. The catastrophe had barely been averted in the flood of 1993. DeForest was determined that it would be averted now.

  Two characteristics of propane combined to make the situation dangerous. Propane was heavier than air, but lighter than water. When confined in its cylinders in a flooded area, propane would try to float to the surface. When released, it would lie atop the water in a dense cloud, caught between air and water. If the area was flooded to a sufficient depth, the 30,000-gallon propane cylinders would rise, float loose from their moorings, then break their cables and bob with the current, ramming into buildings, trees, and other obstacles. Leaks were probably inevitable, and leaks would create a dense, flammable fog that would float downstream to the Mississippi in search of a source of ignition.

  Against this danger, DeForest could do little. Over the course of the night he deployed his men on rafts and boats and temporary platforms. Fire hoses, nozzles set to maximum dispersion, played on the huge cylinders in hopes that this would diffuse any leaking propane. Propane was very slightly soluble in water, if DeForest could keep his artificial rain playing on the area, he might absorb some of the propane, and scatter the rest.

  By dawn it was working well. The area had flooded to a little over three feet, then receded slightly. Breaks in the levees upstream and down were keeping the pressure off the Des Peres. But then the water from Mark Twain Lake began rolling in—DeForest could see it, see brown waves rippling in from the Des Peres—and DeForest knew he was in a toe-to-toe battle with a holocaust. The waters rose. DeForest told his men to stay at their stations and summoned other units. He called in police to make certain the area was evacuated.

  The pumpers pulled flood water into their intakes, then spewed it out over the tank field. From his command post on a hill overlooking the tank field, DeForest could see the propane cylinders rising, straining at their moorings.

  The water just kept on rising. DeForest deployed more hoses and called for more backup. He ordered a fire boat to wait at the outlet to the Des Peres, ready to catch any cylinders that floated that far. He gave a start at the sound of a shot. One of the cylinders had broken a cable. There was another shot, another. DeForest felt sweat gathering beneath his helmet. He blinked salt droplets from his eyes and began to pray.

  God help those people, he thought earnestly. God help us all. More shots, a metallic shriek. One of the cylinders broke free, began bobbing on the tide. It floated up against one of the other cylinders with a metallic clang.

  “Can we corral it somehow?” One of DeForest’s deputy chiefs, with panic in his eyes. DeForest shook his head. “Do you know how much one of those things weighs? It will go where it wants. The only way we could move it around would be with motorboats, and I don’t want hot motor exhaust around any of those cylinders.”

  More bangs, more cables parting. Weary hopelessness washed over DeForest. People down in the tank field were reporting the smell of propane. They asked permission to evacuate.

  “Denied,” DeForest said. “Put on your respirators, and keep that water pumping.” The huge unmoored cylinders were spreading like oil on the surface of a pond. Some of them caught in a line of trees on the edge of the property. Others floated off into residential areas. DeForest didn’t have any way to chase them down. All he could do was hope that they would disperse so much that if one of them blew, it wouldn’t set off any of the others.

  But he knew too much about liquid propane to really believe in that hope.

  He had a daughter in college in Wisconsin. A son lived in Colorado. Both were safe. He began to mentally say goodbye to them. And to his wife, whom he had left in her housecoat on their front lawn, and whom he hadn’t been able to contact since. He hoped she would be out of the blast radius.

  Two of his men breathed in too much propane and collapsed. They were dragged to ambulances and replaced. The hoses continued to flood the area with gentle rain.

  Even on his little hill, DeForest could smell an occasional gust of propane. It was everywhere. The cylinders spread across the quiet inland sea. The waters were still rising. The city was very quiet. And then he saw the flame rolling in from the direction of the Des Peres, a little blue wavy line that fluttered and shifted in the wind, but that raced like lightning toward the huge leaking cylinders. DeForest turned to dive behind his car, and he thumbed the transmit button on his walkie-talkie and opened his mouth to tell his men to take cover.

  It was a futile gesture.

&n
bsp; The fireball, one and a half million gallons of liquid propane going up in an instant, was over a mile in diameter.

  Five or so miles to the north, Marcy Douglas felt the earth tremble. She was working to clear fallen trees from a part of the Jefferson Memorial Park so that the area could be used as a helipad. Army helicopters had soared in just after dawn, and were questing for a place to land.

  Marcy thought the tremor was just another aftershock, but then she saw the flash brighten the shining steel of the Gateway Arch, and turned south to watch in awestruck horror as the bright fireball rose over south St. Louis. Bright arching trails of flame shot out of the fireball, like Fourth of July rockets, as debris rose and fell.

  The sound came a few seconds later, the colossal concussion that drowned out the roar of the helicopters circling overhead. The copters spun dangerously as the concussion caught them. It is the Bomb, Marcy thought. It is the End.

  The bubble of fire rose into the heavens, and its reflection turned the Mississippi to the color of blood.

  Accounts from la Haut Missouri, announces a general peace among the Indians, it is said that the earthquakes has created this pacification.

  Pittsburgh, April 18, 1812

  “For then shall be great tribulation!” Frankland barked, “such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be!

  “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.” He glanced down at his notes to make certain of the citation. “Matthew,” he said, “chapter twenty-four.”

  Frankland looked from the pulpit at the crowded people in his church. People murmured and shuffled and grumbled, and a number of children were wailing. Frankland’s amplified voice had no problem being heard over the cries of the children, however. He shouted over the cries for at least an hour. He had begun his preaching at six o’clock in the morning, jolting the people awake with the sound and fervor of his call. He knew that the bellies of his audience were empty, that many had no rest. That was all to the good. It made them less likely to disregard his message. It was necessary to convince them, to terrify them, to make them want and need his guidance. Some of the grownups were weeping, he saw. Others stared up at him as if they’d been hit with sticks.