The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Sure.” Nick reached for another fistful of cattail, pulled it from the river bottom. “I’ve eaten cattail plenty of times. When we visited my great-aunt in Mississippi, she’d fix us lots of wild greens. If we had some wild onion and poke-weed, we could have a salad.” He looked red-eyed over his shoulder at Jason.

  “Poor folks’ salad,” he said, making his point. “Hold the boat steady, now.” Now it’s my fault I’m not poor, Jason thought. Listen asshole, I’m a lot poorer than you are. Bet you anything.

  Jason put his weight on the pole and swung the boat left and right until Nick had pulled up a whole armful of plant matter. Then he poled off while Nick resumed his seat, rinsed off a cattail, and started eating the shoot near the root. “You can eat the soft part, see,” he said.

  Jason nursed his hiccups and watched Nick warily. Nick tossed overboard the part of the cattail he wasn’t going to eat, then reached for another.

  “We going upstream or down?” Jason asked. “What do you think?” He did not want to go back to the Mississippi. The river had destroyed his home, drowned his friend and probably his mother, had flung him down rapids and tried to kill him. He didn’t want to see that river again.

  “If we go inland,” Nick said, “we don’t know where we’re going. We know what’s down the Mississippi. There are bound to be people there who can help us. If we go inland, we could wander around forever and never find anyone in better shape than we are.”

  “The Mississippi’s full of rapids,” Jason said. “And we’d have to stick close to the bank because this pole won’t reach too far.”

  Nick looked at the cattail in his fist. “I’ve got a daughter downstream, in Arkansas. I’d like to get to her.” Jason looked at him. “You’re not planning on going all the way in this boat, are you?”

  “Well,” eating the cattail, “before we decide, maybe we should take stock of what we’ve got.”

  “I’ve got a telescope,” Jason said. ” That’ll get us to Arkansas all right.” Nick gnawed on his cattail stalk as he began looking under hatch covers. “What’s this red thing?” he said, looking at the Astroscan.

  “That’s my telescope.”

  “Really? It’s funny looking.” He opened another hatch, pulled out a heavy metal box, and opened the lid. It was filled with fishing tackle.

  “Well, there we go,” Nick said.

  Jason looked at the tackle box in surprise. He hadn’t seen it there last night, not in the dark. “No fishing poles,” he said.

  “Don’t need ’em. There’s spare line—we can just hang it over the end of the boat and troll.”

  “Okay.” Jason felt annoyance creeping round his thoughts. Why was Nick messing around with his boat?

  He should have found that stuff.

  “So we catch a fish,” Jason said, “how we gonna cook it?”

  “Maybe we’ll have sushi.”

  “Gaah.” Jason made a face. He wished Nick would just sit down and let him pole. He had done fine before Nick came on board.

  Nick grinned. “No, we shouldn’t eat freshwater fish raw. Not unless it’s a choice between that or starvation. We could get flukes that would eat our liver.”

  “Get what?”

  “Flukes. Little worms.”

  “So we don’t get to eat raw fish,” Jason said. “It breaks my heart.” Nick opened more hatches. Water sloshed. “We can keep fish alive in these cages till we’re ready to eat them.”

  Another hatch. “Batteries,” Nick mused. “Why batteries?”

  “To start the motor? Run lights at night?” Jason wasn’t quite able to keep sarcasm out of his voice. Nick bent over, tracing the cables from the batteries. He looked under the boat’s front casting deck, then gave a grunt. He reached beneath the deck, grunted, pulled something from brackets. What lay in Nick’s hands looked like a little outboard, a tiny motor at one end, a propeller at the other. And an electric cord wrapped in a neat coil and tied.

  Nick jumped up on the front deck, connected the motor to a bracket right on the bow. Plugged the cord into an ordinary electric socket sitting flush on the deck. Then turned a switch. There was a kind of a muffled thud, and Jason felt the motion of the boat change. It straightened its course and picked up speed.

  “We’ve got a little electric motor, see,” Nick said. “It must be for trolling.” Jason let the pole hang from the end of his arm. “You mean we’ve had power all along?” he said.

  “More or less. We shouldn’t use it too much, though, we don’t have any way of recharging the batteries.” Jason felt despair wrap around him like a black cloak. If he’d known the motor was there—if he’d just had the brains to search the boat until he’d found it—he could have got the boat moving last night and saved his mother. Or if he’d accepted any of old Mr. Regan’s offers to take him fishing, he would have known the motor was there, and he could have used it right away.

  And his mother would be alive and they would be on their way back to Los Angeles and he wouldn’t be on this stupid boat with a stupid stranger.

  “Shit!” he shouted. He raised his pole and threw it as far as he could. The water received it with a splash. Nick looked at him in surprise. “Something wrong?”

  Jason threw himself onto one of the cockpit seats. “Nothing,” he said. He put his head in his hands. He was an idiot, he thought. A total fuckdroid. If he’d just known the motor was there… The boat made almost no noise as Nick edged it toward the floating pole. He shut off the electric motor as the pole bumped against the side, and then he reached for it, pulled it in, held the pole dripping in his hands.

  “Maybe I’ll pole for a while,” he said. “That okay with you?”

  “Sure.” Jason edged away to give him room.

  Nick looked at him. “Would you rather go inland, Jason? Is that what you’d rather? Because I’ll go where you want—it’s your boat.” He sounded as if he grudged that fact.

  “I don’t care,” Jason said.

  “I think it’s safe enough on the big river now,” Nick went on. “We can use the electric motor to get out of trouble.”

  “I don’t care,” Jason insisted. The river, he decided, was his fate. It had destroyed his whole existence; if it wanted to take his life as well, along with that of the stupid stranger, then it was welcome to do so. Jason moved forward, slouched in the shotgun seat. “I’m going to take a nap.” He closed his eyes and tried to get comfortable.

  He could sense Nick hesitating, on the verge of saying something more, but then came the splash as the pole dipped, and a surge as the boat began to move. Water chimed at the bow. Then there was a series of frantic splashes as Nick tried to adjust the boat’s course, but the boat was traveling too fast for the pole to get a purchase on the bottom, so Nick had to wait for it to slow down before he could pole again.

  Jason smiled to himself. The boat was heavy and awkward to move with a pole. It had taken him a long time to work out the proper procedure—give the boat a push, then let the pole hang over the stern and use it like a rudder to keep the boat on the right course until the boat began to run out of momentum. Jason saw no reason why he should instruct Nick in this procedure. Let him discover it on his own. More poling, more splashing. Shuddering and a grinding noise as the side scraped bark from a tree. And what’ll you do, Jason thought at Nick, when the pole gets stuck in the mud?

  This had happened to Jason. Suddenly the pole stuck fast, but the boat kept moving out from under him, and as the adrenaline surged through his veins he had to make an instant decision whether to hang onto the pole, or stay in the boat. Fortunately he’d made the right decision and stayed with the boat instead of hanging above the flood atop the pole. And when he did that, when he let go of the pole, it had fallen and clattered into the boat on its own accord. And that’s what had happened every time since. Push, surge. Push, surge. Nick seemed to be getting the hang of it, and faster than Jason had. Insects whined about Jason’s ears. Go bite the cows, he told them mentally. Then he heard an al
armed cry from Nick. The boat swayed. There was a clatter as the pole bounced off the stern, and then muttered curses as Nick picked up the pole. Obviously the pole had got stuck in the mud, and Nick had been forced into the same split-second decision that Jason had faced earlier. Nick had chosen correctly. Jason didn’t know whether he was sorry about that or not. Strange kid, Nick thought. Alone on the river with a bass boat, a telescope, and an attitude. Nick watched Jason’s head slumped down on his chest. The boy was exhausted.

  Mother dead and father in China. Nick didn’t know whether to believe it or not. But he wasn’t going to challenge the kid’s story—if it was true, if Jason had just lost his mother in the quake, then Nick wasn’t going to intrude on the kid’s feelings.

  His own feelings were screwed up enough, he figured, without his trying to cope with someone else’s. Push, withdraw, steer. Push, withdraw, steer. His wounded arm ached at each thrust of the pole, but the pain eased as the muscle worked at the simple, repetitive task. Nick tried to let the motion relax him, but sometimes he saw the trees tremble in an aftershock, or his memory flashed on Viondi dying, or he saw a thick creeper that reminded him of the water moccasin, and a wave of rage would shake his body like a terrier shaking a rat. He found himself standing on the boat’s afterdeck with his hands clenched around the pole, his jaw muscles working, his eyes glancing left and right for an enemy… He told himself to relax.

  And he would relax. He was too exhausted to stay tense every second. But then he would hear echoing in his mind the voice of the crazy cop, Stay away from my family, motherfucker, and next thing he knew he would be panting like a wounded animal desperate for shelter.

  Relax, he told himself. Relax. Just push the damn boat. That’s all the situation calls for. He felt something wet run down his left arm. He must have reopened the wound. He kept moving and tried to ignore the sensation.

  Gold shimmered on the water’s surface like light on the rippling scales of a snake. He kept the levee on his left. At one point he came across an area where the levee had been washed away for a hundred yards or so. It looked, from the cross-section, as if it were made of little more than sand. And suddenly the trees opened up, and there was the Mississippi, framed by hulking levee banks on either side. The sight took Nick’s breath away, and in an instant he deeply regretted his notion of heading toward the big river instead of inland.

  Too late now, he told himself. Got to get to Arlette. And he drove on, to the wide, debris-strewn river that opened up before him.

  Jason awoke as the bass boat took the chop of the Mississippi. “Whassup?” he said as the bow grated against a torn, leafy bough.

  “We’re in the big river now,” Nick said.

  Jason blinked sleepily at the wide expanse of water. “Well,” he said, “I told you it was a mess.” Nick had to agree. The Mississippi was enormous, a mile or more across, a swollen gray mass covered with debris but utterly without life. He couldn’t remember ever looking at the Mississippi below Cairo without seeing traffic—usually there were towboats upstream and down—but now there wasn’t a single boat on the river. The only trace of humanity was wreckage: barges that had come aground here and there, stacks of lumber that had once been parts of buildings, cushions and foam boxes and an entire grain silo—one of the modern all-metal types, with the flattish conical roof—that rolled along the river like a seal with its nose above water.

  Navigation lights were half-submerged or toppled. Stone piers and groins, built out into the water to help control the current, had collected colossal amounts of debris and turned into menacing obstacles studded with broken branches and roots as sharp as knives. Buoys bobbed in the water, but Nick had no idea what they could be marking.

  Most alarming was the amount of timber. Trees covered the surface of the river, like an entire forest taking a holiday swim. Tangles of timber piled up in drifts on the shore and on hidden reefs. Twisted roots threatened like black fangs. A lot of the timber seemed very old—it looked as if it had lain on the bottom of the river for centuries until the quake had thrown it to the surface. The river might have looked like this two hundred years ago, Nick thought. Before anyone ever tried to tame it.

  “Hey!” Jason was pointing ahead, downstream. “Look! Is that a towboat right there?” Nick’s heart leaped at the sight of a boat’s superstructure standing against the treeline. Food! he thought. Safety. A bed. And communication—surely they had a way he could reach Arlette.

  “All right!” Jason said. “We’re out of this!” He stood, jumped on the foredeck, began waving his arms and shouting. Nick felt a grin break out on his face. My God, he thought, maybe I can take a shower. Suddenly a shower seemed the most desirable thing in the world.

  And then, as he looked at the boat over Jason’s shoulder, he felt his joy begin to fade. That boat didn’t look right.

  Jason’s shouts faded. He lowered his arms.

  The river brought them toward the towboat. It wasn’t even a boat anymore, it was a wreck come aground on a shoal of debris. It looked as if the river had rolled the boat completely over at least once. The stacks were gone, and the roof of the pilothouse punched down on top of the superstructure as if a giant had sat on it. The boat was wrapped in steel cable and covered with river mud, and timber and debris were piled up on its upstream flank.

  Defeat oozed through Nick’s veins. Jason stood staring at the boat, and Nick could see all the vitality go out of his body, the shoulders slumping. “I thought we were rescued,” he said.

  “Soon,” Nick said, his voice sounding hollow. “Soon.”

  From the river, Jason could see surprisingly little. Above the flooded treeline to the east stood the Chickasaw Bluffs, forested slopes with little habitation. Landslides marred the bluffs, raw earth and rumbled trees. To the west were trees standing in the flood: there was a levee back there somewhere, but it was out of sight.

  Jason and Nick managed to keep the boat away from the obstacles without great effort. Nick hung fishing lines from the stern in hopes of catching supper. The sun began to fall away westward. In order to calm the pain of hunger, Jason tried some of Nick’s cattails. They weren’t bad, he decided. And there, suddenly, it was. Memphis. It emerged quite suddenly from behind the tail of a long overgrown island, a sudden panorama that sent relief singing through Jason. Memphis, perched above the river on Chickasaw Bluff Number Four, its glittering stainless steel pyramid in the foreground. A pang touched Jason’s heart as he saw the huge thirty-two-story pyramid. It was the pyramid that his mother had believed would summon cosmic forces to keep them all safe from the destruction that would wreck California.

  Whatever cosmic forces were summoned by the pyramid, they certainly hadn’t helped Memphis much. Many of the buildings were mere rubble, and those still standing had all suffered significant damage. Even modern buildings that had withstood the earthquake were blackened with fire. Bright tongues of flame still licked from some of the shattered windows. Pillars of black smoke rose from deep in the city. Northward, a blue-green water tower leaned at a desperate angle. Near the waterfront, grain elevators lay shattered and covered with soot. It looked as if they’d exploded.

  Jason’s gaze lifted to the M-shaped span of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which looked like a giant McDonald’s logo vaulting across the Mississippi from Memphis to Arkansas. Though the towers still stood, the approaches had partly collapsed, and pieces were missing from the main span. A part of the roadway dangled precariously from the span, tons of steel and asphalt that looked as if they were ready to drop into the water at the merest touch.

  Stay the hell away from that, Jason thought.

  “Let’s get to the shore,” he said. “Let’s get off this boat.”

  “Check it out with the scope,” Nick said, “and find us a place to land.” Landing, on examination with the Astroscan, was going to be hard to do. Between the boat and the broken bridge stretched a long line of wreckage scattered the east side of the river. And to Jason’s horrified surprise, he
recognized it as belonging to Mud Island—recently renamed Festival Island—the long island park that lay between the Mississippi and Memphis proper. The island where he and his mother had, a few weeks ago, spent a pleasant spring afternoon was now almost entirely covered by gray water.

  Emergency sirens sounded over the air. A helicopter throbbed overhead.

  The dam that controlled the Wolf River, which ran between Memphis and Mud Island, had broken, and the Mississippi had backed up into the Wolf River channel. The massive stone bulwarks that kept Mud Island secure from the high river were shattered, and Mud Island Park had been swept by river water from one end to the other. The monorail and bridges leading to the island were twisted wrecks; the World War II bomber Memphis Belle lay crushed under its shattered white dome; water drifted through the lower levels of the River Center. Debris had collected along every bit of wreckage, forming jagged driftwood islands. The river foamed along a hedge of wooden fangs.

  “We can’t land in that,” Nick said as he inspected the shore with the Astroscan. “We’d get stuck in the wreckage.”

  Jason looked at the ominous, shattered span of the DeSoto and suppressed a shiver. “That means going under the bridge.”

  “We’d better pick the safest part of the channel, then.”

  Which, they determined with the scope, seemed about a third of the way across the river from the east bank. The overhead roadway looked intact at that point, with no dangling slabs or girders. The river was moving sluggishly, and between the electric motor and paddling with pieces of lumber they’d pulled from the river, they managed to position the boat on the approach.

  The bridge came closer. Water roared around the piers. The air tasted sharply of smoke. Beyond the DeSoto Bridge, on a broad drive at the river’s edge, flashed the lights of a dozen emergency vehicles. Nick was concentrating on the bridge overhead, eyes narrowed as he scanned the roadway for anything that could fall on them. The hum of the little electric motor was obliterated by the roar of water against the bridge piers. The sound of water against the piers was very loud. Jason trailed his pole over the stern to keep the boat from swinging.