The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Nick didn’t want to leave the bodies unburied, to leave the house open. But his duty was to the living, and every moment might count.

  There was decay in Toussaint’s general store, and for a moment Nick felt faint, expecting more bodies. But then he realized that the smell was coming from dead minnows in the galvanized bait tanks that lined one side of the store. The bayou hadn’t reached high enough to wash the minnows out. Toussaint consisted of about a dozen buildings grouped around a crossroads, most of them owned by the David family. People’s farms and private residences spread for miles up and down the roads, and they all gave “Toussaint” as their address, but what passed for the village itself was tiny. It was tinier now than it had been. The brick office building had been wrecked, along with its post office, and so had the brick filling station. The David family, who between them owned all these properties, had taken a couple big hits.

  The general store had come off its foundations in the quake and had collapsed to one side. The roof sagged. Clapboards and shingles were missing. The flood had risen to the middle of the doorframe. Nick tied the boat to one of the supports of the sagging porch, then dropped into the cool water. He felt ahead with his feet as he carefully made his way into the store’s interior.

  When he returned he was armed with weapons that had been stored high above the flood. He had a Winchester Model 94 lever-action 30-30, a pump shotgun, and a couple of revolvers, a pair of .38s, one large and one small. He hadn’t handled firearms since he’d left high school, and they felt heavier than he’d remembered, solid and purposeful. The weight of them in his hands didn’t make him nervous, but he found they didn’t give him an increased sense of security, either.

  In a rucksack he carried boxes of ammunition, holsters for the pistols, a cleaning kit, and a sling for the rifle. Holding all this over his head, he waded back to the front porch and put it all on the speedboat’s foredeck.

  Jason looked down at the pile of weaponry with a stunned expression, as if he was trying to work out what horrible, apocalyptic movie scenario he’d just wandered into. “Jeez,” he said. Nick hoisted himself onto the boat. Water sluiced from his soaked clothing. “Can you take the boat down the bayou?” he asked. “Back the way we came? I’ve got to sort out these guns.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  Nick untied the boat and then carried his gear into the cockpit. He loaded the larger of the two pistols, put it in the holster, and clipped the holster to his belt in the back. He practiced drawing it a few times, but he saw Jason looking at him, and he quit. It’s not like he was going to turn himself into a gunfighter overnight.

  He worked the action of the rifle, dry-fired it a few times, then loaded it and the shotgun, leaving the chamber empty in each instance so that the gun couldn’t fire accidentally. He left the long guns on one of the bench seats that ran the length of the cockpit, then moved forward to sit in the bucket seat next to Jason.

  “Have you ever used firearms?” he asked.

  “No. My parents just didn’t—don’t—have them around. Muppet and I were going to go shooting over the levee when the water dropped but—” Jason swallowed. “We never got to it.”

  “In that case, I don’t want you touching the guns.”

  “No problem.”

  “I really don’t want you touching them.”

  “Okay!” Jason said, his voice loud over the roaring engine.

  “I need to confirm this, Jason. Because your record at following orders isn’t very good.” Jason glared at him, his cheeks reddening. “I won’t touch your guns, okay?” Nick took a long breath. Maybe his insistence on this would just make Jason mess with the guns out of sheer contrariness, but he thought he needed to make his point. “Maybe I can teach you how to use them when we get the time,” he said, conciliating, “but until then I want you to take this very seriously.” Jason nodded again. Then he turned to Nick and said, “What are we doing, exactly?” he said. “Are you trying to get into a fight or something?”

  Nick looked at Jason in surprise. He had been so absorbed in his own grim thoughts that he hadn’t considered how this would look to the boy. Finding his in-laws murdered, loading the boat with guns, then heading down the bayou, all without a word of explanation.

  Jason probably thought that Nick was involved in some kind of gang war and bent on vengeance.

  “No,” Nick said. “No, not at all. I’m trying to get to Arlette and her family, and protect them from the robbers who killed her relations. Those robbers might still be around, and I don’t want Arlette to be without help.”

  A look of relief crossed Jason’s face. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

  “Good.”

  Jason looked ahead and steered the boat around a tangle of cypress trees that the quake had cut off just above water level.

  “Faster,” Nick said, and Jason looked surprised again. “We need to go faster.” They found the place where Toussaint Bayou opened out onto Lopez Bayou, then instead of turning left, to retrace their path, they turned right, following Arlette’s map. Nick kept wanting Jason to go faster. Jason didn’t mind: he liked standing in the cockpit as he boomed up the quiet bayou, scattering ducks and herons and sending the boat’s big wake surging out among the trees.

  Nick was nervous and had a hard time sitting still in the passenger seat, and eventually he took over the driving.

  Jason went to the back of the boat and ate his lunch out of cans, and looked thoughtfully at the guns that sat on the bench seat opposite his own.

  In the movies, he thought, there were a number of things that happened during every big disaster. And one of these involved some bad people with Really Great Hair, who, the very first thing broke into biker stores and stole all the cool leathers. And then they got some guns and some wheels and went on a general rampage until the good guy chilled them out in the last reel.

  Something like those bad guys had happened to Nick’s in-laws. The cinematic prophecy seemed to be coming true.

  Jason looked at the guns and wondered if Nick was the hero who was destined to destroy the bad guys at the end.

  No, he thought. He knew who he and Nick would play in the movies. We’re the bad guys’ victims, he thought. The people the bad guys kill on their way to dying at the hands of the hero. That’s who they were. Corpses.

  He turned away from the guns and looked ahead, at the still, silent bayou ahead. He didn’t want to think about the guns anymore.

  It proved fairly easy going up the bayou. The obstructions had been cleared away by chainsaws and axes, presumably by the David party, and for the most part this left a channel wide enough to take their craft upstream. On occasion Jason was called to shove some piece of wreckage out of the way, and Nick tapped the steering wheel impatiently until the obstacle was clear and he could gun the engine ahead.

  By late afternoon they came to a two-lane road that dead-ended on the bayou. This, Nick said, was where the David party had turned south, and turned south himself.

  The road was narrower than the bayou, and choked with debris. Some of the debris had been cleared by the Davids, but some had just been shoved aside and drifted back, and other debris had floated into place since the Davids had passed. The road, though flooded, was elevated several feet above the surrounding country, and Nick tilted the Evinrude forward to keep the propeller from striking the roadway.

  It was hard going. Jason stood on the foredeck and tried to clear away the obstructions with his pole. Within minutes he was bathed in sweat. Nick detoured off the roadway and around the obstructions where possible, but often this just led them into dead ends, or areas where the trees were too thick to permit passage.

  When Jason was exhausted, Nick took his place on the foredeck, and Jason steered. The sun was far to the west when they came to a debris field, hundreds of tree trunks piled over and across each other into a huge lumber raft that stretched as far as they could see. It looked as if a thousand beavers had labored on the dam for a thousand years.
There was no way through the mass, and no indication that anyone had ever tried.

  Nick looked at the obstruction in despair. “Did they go around?” he asked. “Or did they turn back?” Jason looked left and right in the fading light. “Let’s see if we can go around.” They tried, but every attempt to leave the roadway was blocked, either by falling or standing timber. It didn’t look as if anyone had tried to get through.

  “Where did they go?” Nick moaned. Shiny cables stood out on his neck, and sweat made big blotches on his T-shirt. “Where did they go?”

  “They had to have turned back from here,” Jason said. “They probably went farther up Lopez Bayou, then tried to cut south on another road.”

  Nick bit his lip. “If they’d gone the other way, to the White, we’d have run into them,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “Turn the boat around, then.” Anger entered his voice. “We’ve wasted the whole day.”

  “It’s getting dark, Nick.”

  “Just go!”

  The return journey began. Jason turned the boat around, banging into the trailing bass boat in the narrow passage, and crept forward toward the first obstacles. Nick stabbed furiously with his pole at the floating debris until it was completely dark and he couldn’t see it anymore.

  “Flashlight!” he called. “Give me a flashlight!”

  Jason passed forward one of the two flashlights. They kept going down the roadway, while Nick juggled his pole and the flashlight. Jason could hear Nick cursing under his breath as the bow ground against debris. Finally Jason saw Nick’s shoulders sag in the fading light of the flash.

  “God damn it!” Nick jabbed at a floating tree trunk as if it were an enemy to be impaled on his spear.

  “This is useless!”

  Jason said nothing. Nick’s pole clattered on the foredeck.

  “Eat,” Nick said. “Sleep. We’ll get an early start at first light.” Nick stalked aft, the flashlight reflecting the fury in his eyes. Jason pulled the bass boat up close and climbed aboard to get access to the stores.

  When he had stowed away, Jason thought, he’d expected to spend the summer in some big farmhouse, with Nick’s daughter and in-laws. Instead he’d been thrown back into the river again, and he was trapped on a small boat, in a dead-end waterway, with a heavily armed man who was in a bad mood. To put the icing on the cake, there were a bunch of murderers loose in the area. It occurred to Jason that leaving the Beluthahatchie might not have been the smartest thing he’d ever done.

  After their meal Nick didn’t insist they continue their journey to the bayou, but he was too agitated to sleep. He paced up and down the short length of the cabin, pausing occasionally to pick up one of his guns or drum his hands on the steering wheel.

  Eventually exhaustion claimed Jason, and he fell asleep despite Nick’s restlessness. He woke with a full bladder hours later. Nick was asleep on the bench seat opposite. Jason rose stiffly from his bed, stepped aft, leaned against the fiberglass hull, and relieved himself into the water. He looked up and saw past the overhanging branches of the trees the stars wheeling overhead. He looked for M13—a million stars—and found the cluster easily enough, a bright smudge against the hard, brilliant light of the stars. Twenty-five thousand light-years away. No matter what happened here—no matter what catastrophes, horrors, anguish—whatever lived in M13 wouldn’t know about it for twenty-five thousand years, not even if they were interested.

  He finished and zipped his pants, but he still stood gazing skyward, looking into the silent beyond. And then the night’s darkness faded. Suddenly the entire country began to glow, as if hidden floodlights had suddenly switched on, bathing the still waters and the trunks of the trees in golden radiance. The suddenness and silence of this ghostly flourishing was breathtaking.

  “Nick!” Jason called. “Look!”

  “Wha?” came Nick’s sleepy voice.

  “Look!” Jason could see leaves outlined perfectly in the glow, the patterns on tree bark, the vines coiling up the trunks.

  “Oh my God,” Nick breathed in awe.

  And then the quake struck, and the world again turned dark.

  A roar filled the air like the earth moaning in pain. Spray spilled into the boat as the water turned white around them. The air filled with leaves and twigs. Debris ground against the hull, and Jason fell, heart hammering, into the bench seat next to him.

  “Get into cover!” He heard Nick shout, but all he could do was cling to the side of the boat as it leaped up and down to the music of the quake. Tearing sounds filled the air as tree limbs began to crack and fall. Nick’s strong hand grabbed Jason by the arm and pulled, and suddenly Jason was able to move. He crawled forward, past the driver’s seat, and wormed into the damp space below the foredeck. Nick crawled in after him. A falling limb dropped onto the bulwark where Jason had been lying, then ground against the hull as it slid into the water.

  “It’s a bad one!” Nick shouted in his ear. Jason knew that already. Jason clamped his eyes shut. The boat vibrated, banging up and down on water that seemed hard as concrete. His inner ear spun as the boat slewed to the push of the water. He could feel his teeth chattering.

  Something heavy mashed the boat’s canvas top, and he gave a cry at the thought of being killed here, in the darkness. The cold waters pouring in as he struggled, trapped, in the close little space under the forepeak. He gulped down a sudden flood of stomach acid that had poured into his throat.

  “It’s okay!” Nick chanted. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay!” But Jason knew it was pretty clearly not okay. He heard the shriek of wood as a tree limb tore free, and then the limb thundered off the gunwale as it splashed into the water next to the boat. The boat tilted alarmingly to port. Jason gave a shout as Nick rolled onto him, squeezing the breath from his lungs.

  “It’s okay!” Nick said. “It’s okay!” The boat righted itself, and Nick’s weight fell away.

  “It’s okay!” Nick said.

  Jason bit his knuckle to keep from screaming.

  The earth roared on, and the boat danced to its anguished tune.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  During the day there was, with very little intermission, a continued series of shocks, attended with innumerable explosions like the rolling of thunder; the bed of the river was incessantly disturbed, and the water boiled severely in every part; 1 consider ourselves as having been in the greatest danger from the numerous instances of boiling directly under our boat; fortunately for us, however, they were not attended with eruptions. One of the spouts which we had seen rising under the boat would have inevitably sunk it, and probably have blown it into a thousand fragments; our ears were continually assailed with the crashing of timber, the banks were instantaneously crushed down, and fell with all their growth into the water. It was no less alarming than astonishing, to behold the oldest trees of the forest, whose firm roots had withstood a thousand storms, and weathered the sternest tempests, quivering and shaking with the violence of the shocks, whilst their heads were whipped together with a quick and rapid motion; many were torn from their native soil, and hurled with tremendous force into the river; one of these whose huge trunk (at least 3 feet in diameter) had been much shattered, was thrown better than an hundred yards from the bank, where it is planted into the bed of the river, there to stand, a terror to future navigators.

  Narrative of Mr. Fierce, December 25, 1811

  Captain Jean-Joseph Malraux hummed Bernard Herrman’s theme music to the film Jason and the Argonauts as he steered Beluthahatchie down the channel of the Ohio River. The pilothouse was dark around him except for the glow of the instruments. The lights of Bay City were falling astern, and the mass of the Shawnee National Forest loomed dark and silent off to port. Joe kept one eye cocked on the depth indicator as he steered, making certain not to run onto any more unexpected sandbanks looming out of the river’s channel.

  His company had given him permission to moor his tow of fifteen barges to the St. Francis reve
tment, where it could be picked up when the river was safer, and so he had only the fast and highly maneuverable Beluthahatchie to worry about. He was happy to be out of the Mississippi with its shifting channel, its hidden reefs, and its masses of saw-toothed debris. The Ohio was in bad shape as well, with the bridge at Cairo lacking a span and Locks and Dams No. 52 and 53 both broken. But the Corps of Engineers had been clearing the wreckage, the river was high enough so that the dams weren’t necessary to keep the channel full, and all the wreckage was heading to where Joe had been, to the Mississippi. And now that he was above the intact Smithfield Lock and Dam, the Ohio was smooth sailing. The worst part of the last two days, though, had been calling Frank Adams on the marine band to tell him that his kid had gone missing. Frank had reamed him up one side and down the other. He had used language that would make a longshoreman blush, as Joe, who had known plenty of long-shoremen in his time, could testify.

  And then, when Joe had refused Frank’s demand to turn his boat around and head back to conduct a search for his missing son, Frank’s language had grown even more violent, and Joe’s temper had finally snapped, and he’d given Frank the company’s phone number, and told him that the company had lawyers who were paid to take that kind of abuse.

  Joe felt kind of bad about that. Frank had just been looking for someone to blame, which was understandable enough.

  But it wasn’t Joe’s fault. He had looked after Nick and Jase as well as he could. It wasn’t his fault that they had left Beluthahatchie. And damned if he was going to let some Los Angeles shyster tell him that it was.

  Cincinnati, he thought hopefully, in the morning. And then a lot of downtime, while barge traffic languished and the Mississippi was made safe again. Time in which Captain Joe would probably not be employed.

  At least it would give him a chance to get his video collection in order.

  Bernard Herrman kettledrums boomed through his mind. He pictured the Argonauts’ galley moving up the river, drums beating time to the oars, while invisible gods and goddesses bickered overhead. The door to the pilothouse opened, and his bowman came in. “Coffee, skip. And some beignets.”