The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “You think I care if you grab me?” Nick demanded. The snake tightened on his arm. Nick held the snake’s head with his left hand while he smashed at it with the club in his right. The cottonmouth’s head darted left and right to the limits that Nick would permit, seeking escape from the blows. Then Nick lunged forward and smashed the snake’s head into the bole of the tree with all of his strength. The snake’s body spasmed on his arm. He smashed again and again.

  “You want a piece of me, cottonmouth?” he demanded. “You come and take it!” He smashed the snake’s head against the tree until the snake hung in loose coils from his arm, until Nick’s hand was scraped and bloody and the snake’s forked tongue hung limply from its mouth. Then he wearily uncoiled the snake from his arm, held it over the water, and let it fall.

  The Mississippi received it with barely a splash.

  “My tree!” Nick shouted. “My damn tree!” His cries echoed in the empty grove. Birds shrieked in answer.

  He slapped ants from his hands, from his legs. Snapped off another leafy branch, began to sweep the ants from his limb, from what remained of their nest.

  The tree was his, and he was going to keep it.

  He touched his shirt pocket, felt Arlette’s necklace.

  He would give it to her, see the sparkle in her eyes. He knew that now. Hours passed. The day grew hot, and the ants grew torpid. Perhaps they’d found something to eat, or lost interest after the destruction of their nest. The insects that drove him crazy now were mosquitos, dancing around him in swarms.

  Farther out on his limb, the mother opossum rustled its way through leafy branches and squawked at its babies. Every so often it would peer out to see if Nick had left. It always seemed disappointed when he hadn’t.

  The water level seemed to be dropping a little. The sodden tops of bushes were more visible. The water had ceased to run with its earlier swiftness, now lay still and dark, its surface reflecting the bright rays of the sun.

  After sitting on his limb till his body felt like a giant cramp, Nick decided to climb a little higher and discover what might be seen. He clambered higher, heaving and sweating as he pushed his way through tightly woven branches.

  This was really the sort of thing the snake would have done much easier.

  The tree began to sway under Nick’s weight. He was panting for breath, and he decided he had climbed enough. He planted his feet carefully and looked around.

  Leaves still obscured much of the view. He pressed branches down, tried to clear the sight lines. North and south stretched trees as far as he could see. West he could see an opening, a flat space covered with water, but he couldn’t tell whether it was the river, a field, or a clearing. He turned east, and a chill shivered through his blood. There, across a flooded field, was the shattered Mobil station where Viondi had died. Its white, blue, and red sign still swung above the brown water. The Mobil station was no more than a half-mile away. Nick thought he’d wandered much farther in the dark. He must have been tracking in circles once he got among the trees.

  There was no sign of the cop or his car. Or of Viondi. Or of any other human being. He was king of the tree and all he surveyed. He gave a bitter laugh.

  The sun was hot on his head.

  Nick slapped at a biting ant and decided he might as well climb down. He found it harder to force his way down through the vegetation than it had been to climb up through it. He drove his way between branches, using his weight to force branches aside. He paused as he discovered the opossum below him, heading upward. They stared at each other for a moment, and then the opossum opened its mouth in a snarl, showing a surprising number of very sharp teeth, and then scurried off onto a side limb, its rat-tailed babies still clinging to its fur.

  Nick felt like grinning for the first time that day.

  He dropped back down to his old limb, then paused a moment to stretch, carefully testing his muscles. The wound on his left arm had stiffened, and the climb had set it bleeding again. Standing in the tree, testing his muscles one by one, he almost missed the kid in the boat. He would have missed him, if he hadn’t seen the white script, Retired and Gone Fishin’, through a gap in the leaves. He knelt on his bough, looking at the boat in surprise. It had passed him in near silence, a big black aluminum boat with a shattered windscreen and no motor. In another few seconds, it would disappear into the flooded grove. A white kid stood in the stern, shoving the boat along with a long pole. His back was turned to Nick, and he clearly hadn’t seen him.

  “Hey,” Nick said, and then, louder, “Hey!”

  The kid jumped and spun around, and Nick felt a sudden knock at his heart.

  The boy’s face and hands were striped with black and red, as if they’d been horribly burned. The man’s voice, coming out of the empty cottonwood grove, nearly scared Jason out of his skin. He turned wildly, almost losing his grip on the pole, and stared out into the trees. He couldn’t see anyone.

  “Where are you?” he blurted.

  “Over here.” The voice was a bit more gentle. Jason shaded his eyes and looked in the direction of the sound, and he saw a disheveled black man crouched in a tree, a kind of horror in his staring eyes.

  “Can you turn that boat around?” the man asked. “And get me out of this tree?” Reluctance tugged at Jason’s heart. “I guess,” he said.

  A stranger. An adult. A black man. Any of these would be reason to be wary.

  He poled the boat around while he argued with himself. What were the odds that the guy was some kind of criminal or pervert? Here in the middle of a disaster, stuck up a tree in a flood?

  It shouldn’t matter, he argued, that the guy was black. It wasn’t that he didn’t like black people, he thought, he got along with the black kids at school just fine, even though they tended to keep to themselves. It was just that he didn’t know who the hell this guy was.

  Jason sighed. The stranger was a man needing help in the middle of a disaster. What more did Jason need to know?

  As Jason poled the boat closer, the details of the stranger’s appearance grew less encouraging. The man was splashed with mud and, maybe, blood; his clothes were dirty and torn, and his hair was sticking up in weird tufts. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and his skin was covered with lumps. Well, Jason thought, the guy’s been chased up a tree, none of that is necessarily his fault. But he found himself poling more warily, watching the treed man as the boat turned a circle and drifted slowly toward the cottonwood.

  And the man, Jason saw, was watching him, with a peculiar intent pop-eyed stare that made Jason nervous. And then the man’s expression eased, and he laughed.

  “Boy,” he said, “what you got on you?”

  Jason looked down at his arms. “Mud,” he said. “I was getting sunburned on the river, so I covered my skin with mud from a mudbank.” The man laughed, and Jason felt self-conscious. “I saw it in a movie,” Jason said.

  “I saw your face covered with that stuff, I thought you’d been burned in a fire,” the man said. “Scared the hell out of me. I was afraid I was going to have to get you to a hospital.” Jason smiled. “Sorry.”

  “We don’t find any shade, I’ll have to find a mud bank myself.”

  It was news to Jason that black people got sunburn—how could you tell?—but he supposed the man knew best.

  The bows of the boat floated up beneath the treed man, and he carefully lowered himself onto the foredeck. The boat bobbed under his weight, and Jason took a step to keep his balance. Jason’s passenger walked in a crouch across the foredeck, then dropped into the cockpit.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “’S’okay,” Jason said.

  The man brushed mud off the passenger seat, then sat. He moved his left arm with care, as if there was an injury. And it looked like blood.

  “I’m Nick,” the man said. “Nick Ruford.”

  “Jason Adams.”

  Nick Ruford nodded. “Glad you got me out of that tree. I was afraid I was going to starve up there.�
�� He licked his lips, looked down at the plastic bottles rolling in the bottom of the boat. “Is that drinking water?”

  “It’s from the river. It’s all I’ve got to drink.” He hesitated. “I drank some, and I didn’t get sick.”

  “Guess I’ll stay thirsty a little longer. Got any food?”

  “No.” Jason pushed with his pole, swung the boat around. The leaves of submerged bushes scratched against the boat’s bottom.

  “What’s this stuff?” Indicating the broken boards that Jason had piled in the cockpit.

  “Things I picked up out of the river,” Jason said. “To paddle with.” And then he added, “Do you know where we are?”

  The stranger seemed surprised at the question. “In Tennessee. Not too far north of Memphis.” That far, Jason thought. That far in one night. It took over an hour to drive a car from Cabells Mound to Memphis.

  “You look surprised,” Nick Ruford said. “Where do you come from? Kentucky?”

  “Missouri,” Jason said. “Cabells Mound.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I must have come sixty miles overnight.”

  The stranger looked dubious. “As the crow flies? The river doesn’t move that fast. Not even if it’s in flood.”

  Jason looked at him. “It moves that fast now. I went through two stretches of rapid, and moved real fast the rest of the time.”

  A new light dawned in Nick Ruford’s eyes. “Rapids, huh,” he said. “Bet you’re glad you’re out of it now.”

  “The rapids were scary, yeah.” He remembered that second rapid, swirling close to a bank just as it began to cave in, a hundred feet of Mississippi mud falling into the river at once… the splash had been enough to knock the boat back into midstream, out of danger, but if he’d been there a second earlier or later, the boat would have capsized.

  In the morning, when the speed of the river began to slow, he’d found some plastic soft drink bottles floating in the river, and he’d used them to bail. It was slow, waiting for each bottle to fill before emptying it overside, but he had nothing else to do.

  Eventually Jason had come aground on the left bank of the river. He was beginning to get sunburned by then, and he’d covered his exposed skin with red mud. He’d found the pole—it was stuck in the crown of a broken levee, just standing there, he didn’t know why—and he’d used it to pole the boat along until he came to a break in the levee big enough to pole the boat through. Which he’d done, hoping he’d find civilization on the other side, but he’d found nothing but wilderness.

  Nothing but wilderness, till he found Nick Ruford up a tree.

  The stranger licked his lips. “This your boat?” he asked.

  Jason shook his head. He didn’t offer any further explanation. He didn’t want to think about Mr. Regan right now. There were a lot of things he didn’t want to think about.

  He pushed, felt the pole dig into the Mississippi ooze, pushed the boat ahead. Let the pole fall back into his hands, not grabbing at it.

  “How about your parents?” Nick asked.

  “Well,” Jason said, “my dad’s in China.” He felt defiance rising in him, looked down at his passenger. “My mother’s dead,” he said. He could feel his jaw muscles tighten. “She died last night.” The stranger held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Not your fault.” Cold anger clenched at Jason’s stomach, and he looked up at the sky as he poled the boat forward.

  “You know this area?” Jason asked. “Anyplace we can go?”

  The stranger shook his head. “I’m from St. Louis. I was just passing through.”

  “Well.” Jason shrugged. “Guess we might as well keep on.” Jason kept the boat’s bow pointed south. Insects whined.

  The sun lifted toward its zenith, and moist heat smothered the world.

  FIFTEEN

  Between the first shock and daylight, we counted 27. As day broke we put off from the shore, at which instant we experienced another shock, nearly as violent as the first, by this the fright of the hands was so much increased, that they seemed deprived of strength and reason: I directed Morin to land on a sloping bank at the entrance of the Devil’s Race Ground, intending to wait there until the men should be refreshed with a good breakfast. While it was preparing, we had three shocks, so strong as to make it difficult for us to stand on our feet; at length recovered from our panic we proceeded; after this we felt shocks during 6 days, but none to compare with those on the memorable morning of the 16th. I made many and minute observations on this earthquake, which if ever we meet, I will communicate to you, &c.

  Extract of a letter from John Bradbury, dated Orleans, January 16th

  The sun woke Charlie, and as he opened his eyes he realized how thirsty he was. He opened the car door and stepped out. His wounded leg was stiff and it ached. The air still reeked of smoke, and the world was lit only dimly by the bloated red sun that sat cloaked on the dark horizon. He needed to get to work, he thought. He needed to be at his desk the second the markets opened. Charlie limped to the house, crossed the listing portico, and then hesitated as he looked through the open door into the interior. He thought of Megan lying inside. He didn’t want to go in. But he needed something to drink, something to eat.

  He needed to use a toilet.

  He would stay out of the back hall, he decided. He’d just go to the kitchen and get some food, and then use the toilet off the living room, not the one in back.

  As he stepped into the front hall, he felt reluctance dragging at his feet. He really didn’t want to go inside. The Moet bottle still sat in the front hall. The champagne bucket lay in a puddle of melted ice in the front room. Charlie’s shoes crunched on broken glass as he went to the telephone, picked up the receiver. Nothing. Still nothing.

  He went to the kitchen. The quake had walked the refrigerator into the middle of the kitchen, and its door had been open all night. Some of the kitchen cabinets had fallen, and most of the glassware had jumped onto the floor or counters and shattered.

  The cleaning lady was due tomorrow, he remembered. He’d have to leave her a big tip. Charlie found one intact highball glass and went to the sink for a drink. He opened the tap and a third of a glass of water dribbled out. He looked curiously at the tap, then drank the water. He walked to the open refrigerator, and found that it contained two single-serving-size containers of Dannon yogurt, a couple cans of diet drink that Megan had put there, and some duck a l’orange left over from Friday night. The container of milk and a cardboard container of orange juice had tipped over in the quake and poured their contents out onto the floor.

  In the door racks he found a small bottle of cocktail onions, anchovies, some low-fat salad dressing, and a couple of green olives floating alone in their jar.

  He went to the pantry, which he had converted into a wine rack. Several of the bottles had been pitched from the racks and broken, but most of them were intact.

  He shouldn’t drink them, though, he thought. Not the reds. The quake would have shaken up the sediment.

  He found a clean spoon and ate one of the containers of yogurt while standing in the kitchen and staring out the shattered window at his swimming pool. Now he knew why the neighbor girl wanted some of his water.

  He’d have to remember to throw more chlorine into the pool, to keep it drinkable. He used the toilet, flushed it, and picked his way back to the front hall. He needed to get in his car and get to work. He imagined the legend he would create by walking into the office unshaven, in his shirt sleeves and his torn, bloody slacks. It would show everyone how determined he was, how determined to make money.

  But how was he going to get to Tennessee Securities? The garage had collapsed on his car, and he didn’t have the keys to Megan’s BMW, Megan had them…

  His mind skittered from the memory of Megan like a cat jumping away from a spray of water. He couldn’t call a cab, because the phones weren’t working. Maybe Charlie could get one of his neighbors to give him a lift.r />
  He looked down by his feet and saw the bottle of Moet. He was still thirsty. He unwrapped the foil, removed the wire, eased the cork from the neck of the bottle.

  He went outside and sat on the portico and drank the champagne from the bottle. I am still lord of the jungle, he thought. I guessed right. All I need to do is get to a terminal somewhere, and I can make millions.

  He put the half-empty bottle down, and set out to find a car.

  “Have you got a Web browser?” asked the man from NASA.

  General Jessica Frazetta blinked in the dawn light. “A what?”

  “Because the quickest thing we could do,” the man said, “is just put the pictures up on our Web site as soon as we get them. You’ll see them as fast as we do.”

  Jessica sighed. “What’s the URL?” she asked.

  In fact a Web browser was one of the things she possessed. One of her civilian employees had turned up, around midnight, with a laptop computer and an Iridium cellular modem. As soon as he arrived, his computer had been militarized for the duration of the emergency. Right now Pat was using it, trying to glean useful news off the Net.

  Jessica jotted the Web address in her notebook. “Thanks,” she said.

  “If you need any pictures in particular, let us know,” the NASA man said.

  “All I can tell you right now is that we need pictures of the Mississippi region between Hannibal and Natchez,” Jessica said. “And major tributaries as well, particularly the Missouri, Ohio, and the Arkansas.”

  “I’ll tell the boys,” the man said. “Keep looking at our Web page, we’ll put the pictures up there.” Jessica thanked him and closed her cellphone. She turned toward the military camp that was growing around the damaged buildings of the Mississippi Valley Division.

  The air rattled to the sound of portable generators. A tent had been pitched everywhere a tree limb or a building wouldn’t fall on it. Mess tent, communications, maps, hospital tent, clerical… A number of the tents were piled with furniture and equipment salvaged from the headquarters building, but which hadn’t been sorted out yet. Communications and data retrieval systems were being kludged together out of gear pulled out of damaged buildings. Ground lines were still out, but at least radio communications had been restored. All that had been required was the return of her communications specialists, who straggled in over the course of the night. And the Old Man had assured her that she’d be getting a mobile communications unit from Fort Bragg as soon as it could be packed onto a helicopter and flown out. Her command was sorting itself out, at least locally. What Jessica lacked was information on which to act elsewhere. Communications were wrecked in precisely those parts of the country she was trying to reach. The St. Louis and Memphis districts of the MVD were still out of communication, though Rock Island had finally reported in around three in the morning, and was loudly claiming that it was not a victim district. Jessica, whose insistence to her own superiors had been no less ardent, was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.