The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Thanks,” Joe said. He had barely slept in the two days since Beluthahatchie had got off its sandbar in the Lower Mississippi. He was the only crewman aboard certified by the Coast Guard, and he wanted to be on hand at every moment of the treacherous passage.

  The bowman, who shared his watch, dropped the coffee cup into its waiting holder, and put the plate of beignets within Joe’s reach. Joe reached for one of the beignets, but they were fresh from the deep-fryer and burned his fingers. He dropped the beignet and licked confectioner’s sugar from his fingers. And then the water began to dance around him, thousands of little wave-crests criss-crossing the river’s still surface in the light of Beluthahatchie’s floodlights. He could feel a trembling run through the towboat, shiver through the wheel beneath his fingers. To port and starboard, whole forests waved madly in the darkness.

  “Aftershock,” he said to his bowman. He had seen this before.

  But the aftershock didn’t die. Instead the wave peaks grew taller, and Joe could see foam forming in streaks along the surface. The vibration increased. The plate of beignets threatened to slide onto the floor, and Joe’s heart beat like the Argonauts’ kettledrums. His hand hovered over the engine throttles, but he didn’t know whether it would be safer to throttle up or down, so he decided not to make a change.

  “Go get the other watch,” he told the bowman. “I want as many pair of eyes up here as possible.” The aftershock could stir up all kinds of crap in the channel.

  The bowman nodded and left the pilothouse in a hurry. Spray bounded over Beluthahatchie’s blunt bow. And then the pilothouse door slammed, and the bowman was back, his eyes wild.

  “Big wave!” he shouted, one finger pointing aft. “Just behind us!” Joe’s hand slammed the throttles forward before he looked over his shoulder. The turbines roared to a higher pitch as Joe craned his neck aft, searching the leaping water for sign of the overtaking wave. Joe’s heart gave a lurch. There it was, a big black wall moving across the leaping, foam-flecked water. It had to be at least fifteen feet high, and it was about to climb right up Beluthathatchie’s ass. Tsunami. The great sea-wave caused by an earthquake.

  Joe had never heard of a tsunami on a river before.

  “Sound the collision alert!” Joe yelled. He didn’t want to take his hands off the controls, but the off-duty watch needed to be ready for what was going to hit them. The other watch, plus any other human being within hearing distance of the signal.

  The bowman threw himself across the pilothouse and the alarm blared out. White water boiled under Beluthahatchie’s counter as the turbines redlined. Joe peered at the great wave rising astern, tried to judge its speed relative to the boat.

  Still overtaking. Damn it.

  The bridge telephone rang. The off-duty watch, trying to find out what was happening.

  “Answer that!” Joe snapped. Calculations leaped through his mind. If the wave rolled over the towboat’s stern, it could sweep Beluthahatchie from stern to stem, bury it beneath tons of water. The boat might survive that, he reckoned, or it might not. And if the wave caught the boat broadside, Beluthahatchie would almost certainly capsize.

  There was one possible escape, Joe thought. And that was to keep forward of the crest, by using the wave’s own power.

  He gripped the wheel with one hand, the throttles with the other. The bowman, shouting into the bridge telephone, was looking aft with eyes wide as saucers. “Hoo-aaah!” Joe shouted in a voice intended to be heard on the other end of the telephone. ” Hang on! We goin’ surfing, podnah!” Joe pulled the throttles back, saw the wave loom closer. He let it come till he felt the wave just begin to lift Beluthahatchie’s stern, then throttled forward again. Turbines shrieked. The boat rose, and Joe felt a flutter in his stomach, panic rising in his throat.

  Joe throttled way back. The boat continued to lift. The foaming curl at the wave top loomed closer, then stopped, hanging over the stern. Exultation screamed through Joe’s veins.

  “Yeeow! Hang ten, baby!”

  He adjusted the throttles so that he was neither climbing the face of the wave, nor dropping forward. The power of the wave itself was doing most of the work.

  Joe’s inner ear swam. There was a sense of movement swirling on the other side of the pilothouse windows, and Joe felt panic burn along his nerves. He threw the wheel over, shoved the throttles forward. The boat straightened.

  Joe took a gasping breath. He had almost lost the boat. If he’d let the wave push him to one side or the other, he’d have swung broadside to the wave and been rolled under.

  Debris boomed on the bottom of the hull. The boat swayed: Joe corrected. The bowman was standing in the pilothouse staring aft, his knuckles clenched around the telephone.

  “Put that down and call the Coast Guard!” Joe said. “Tell them we got a tsunami on the Ohio heading for Golconda! Move it, there, podnah!”

  The bowman lunged for the radio. Joe’s head lashed back and forth, peering behind to make certain the tsunami wasn’t about to fall on them, staring forward into the night to see if the wave was going to run them right onto an island.

  “Careful baby baby careful just a little more a little more juice gawdamn…” Words burbled from his lips in accompaniment to his thought. The blackness off the port bow was broken by light. Joe peered at it, trying to make certain the light wasn’t a reflection on the pilothouse glass… Golconda. Already. He didn’t dare think about how fast they were going. Whoah. He juiced the throttle, swung the boat to starboard. He’d almost lost it there. And if that was Golconda, he thought, that meant he was coming up on a big island that sat smack in the middle of the river. And if he made it past the island, the river was going to make a sweeping ninety-degree curve to the right, and that meant the big wave was going to get complicated… Adrenaline screamed through his veins. He goosed the throttle, shaved the wheel just a little. Joe wanted to steer down the face of the wave, moving laterally to port as the wave kept rolling down the channel. He needed to get well clear of that island before he impaled the boat on it…

  “Whoah whoah whoah you cochon just a little baby there you go…” He was inside the wave’s curl, heading slantwise down the wave. Golconda was dead ahead. Now if he could just head the boat a little to port, get it moving straight again…

  “There you go baby there you go aiaaah surfin’ USA careful there goose her yaaah…” The boat swayed, the wave crest looming on over her, and then Beluthahatchie leaped down the wave, picking up speed. Joe’s laugh boomed in the pilothouse.

  Golconda was past and the island flashed up to starboard. Joe heard the grinding, grating, booming noise as the tsunami pounded over the island, ripping it and its timber to shreds.

  “Roi de la riviere! C’est moil” Joe felt like pounding his chest in triumph. The island caused the wave to lose cohesion, caused ripples and back-eddies to build under the crest. Joe twitched the wheel and throttles to keep Beluthahatchie on course. And then the island was astern, and the tsunami shuddered as it met its twin, the wave that had creamed along the Kentucky side of the island. Joe felt sweat popping on his forehead as the boat surged beneath him.

  “Yah, baby, roi de la riviere! Surf’s up!”

  He tried to decide what to do about the upcoming bend. He didn’t want to be where he was, near the north bank of the river, when the river turned to the right—he would get caught between the bank and the tsunami and pounded to bits against the timber in the floodplain. So what he needed to do was cross over the front of the wave again and get as close to the south bank as he could…

  “Here we go here we go on t’udder side…”

  He was traveling along the front of the wave again, the turbines carrying him to starboard, white water creaming behind. The wave’s curl hung overhead, looming over them like a white-fanged monster about to drop on them from above.

  “Skip! What are you doing?” the bowman demanded, staring at the curl in horror.

  “Hang on podnah.” Joe skated right across the
front of the wave, speed building. Then he turned the wheel, got the wave behind him, felt the boat lift…

  He could see the silver surface of the water curving to the right. Damn they were going fast. Water boiled white to port as the tsunami slammed into the outer bank of the river bend. There was a rending, crashing, as if the wave was trying to tear the riverbed itself from the earth. But the part of the wave pushing Beluthahatchie seemed to be speeding up, going faster as it skiddered around the inside of the river bend. The boat swerved violently, and Joe steadied it just in time, a bellow of terror and exultation rising in his throat.

  The roar to port continued. Joe worked the throttles. “Yah baby you go papa say you go…” The wave kept going, rolling across the curving river to smash into the north bank in a fountain of white foam. Trees went down like ranks of soldiers before machine-gun fire. But Beluthahatchie was flung away, across the river’s inner curve and into the calmer upper river, like a watermelon seed squeezed between the fingertips.

  Joe throttled up, intending to get clear of the turbulent water behind him and the reduced reflection of the tsunami as it bounced off the north bank. He looked into the terrified eyes of his bowman and gave a wild laugh.

  “The Argonauts ain’t got nothin’ on me!” he shouted, and reached for the horn button so that Beluthahatchie could trumpet his joy, send the sound ringing from Kentucky to Indiana and back again, the triumphant cry of the old river man who has beaten the elements, and is bringing his boat safely home…

  About 2 o’clock this morning we were awakened by a most tremendous noise, while the house danced about and seemed as if it would fall on our heads. I soon conjectured the cause of our troubles, and cried out it was an Earthquake, and for the family to leave the house; which we found very difficult to do, owing to its rolling and jostling about. The shock was soon over, and no injury ivas sustained, except the loss of the chimney, and the exposure of my family to the cold of the night. At the time of this shock, the heavens were very clear and serene, not a breath of air stirring; but in five minutes it became very dark, and a vapour which seemed to impregnate the atmosphere, had a disagreeable smell, and produced a difficulty of respiration. I knew not how to account for this at the time, but when I saw, in the morning, the situation of my neighbours’

  houses, all of them more or less injured, I attributed it to the dust and soot, &c which arose from the fall. The darkness continued till day-break; during this time we had EIGHT more shocks, none of them so violent as the first.

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

  As soon as the first jolt wakened her from sleep, Jessica was moving. She wasn’t sure whether she’d rolled off her cot as she intended, or whether the tremblers kicked the cot out from under her. No sooner had she landed than the ground rose and punched her in the ribs. She reached blindly for the helmet she’d placed on the ground by the cot, felt it under her fingers, and jammed it on her head. And then pain rocketed through her skull as something lunged under her helmet rim and smacked her in the eye. Sparks shot through her vision. She lay back, stunned, the helmet partly fallen from her head. There was a strange corkscrew motion to the earth this time, something that she didn’t remember from the last big quake, and nausea rose in her throat.

  Arms came around her. She felt herself being drawn protectively against Pat’s shoulder. That hadn’t happened in the last quake, either. She huddled against him like a soldier in a bombardment sheltering against a basement wall.

  The earth roared like a wounded bull. Pain throbbed through Jessica’s injured eye with every shudder. She heard cracking and snapping sounds, and then rough canvas covered them like a blanket. Their sleeping tent had come down around them.

  Which was not unexpected. Though her home had come through the first big quake reasonably intact, she had slept under canvas every night since, and she’d advised everyone else to do the same until the danger of a major aftershock was long over. Being draped by canvas, and at the worst getting hit by a falling tent pole, was a far more preferable fate than having a wall fall on you. Jessica could hear Pat’s teeth rattling next to her ear. The earth rolled under her in waves, giving her a little toss at each peak.

  This was not, she thought, a mere aftershock. This was another major quake, one that felt at least as strong as M1.

  The earth’s roaring faded. The temblors gradually decreased, although from the way her inner ear still reeled, Jessica suspected they hadn’t diminished entirely. She pushed her helmet back onto her head, began to shift in Pat’s arms, aiming toward the front flap of the tent.

  “Sorry I hit you,” Pat said.

  “You hit me?” she said.

  “With my elbow. I was reaching for you, and the quake just picked you up and threw you at me.” Jessica blinked her wounded eye. Sparks flashed in her vision. “I’m going to get a shiner at least.”

  “Sorry.”

  She kissed his unshaven chin. “That’s okay. Worse things have happened in earthquakes. Let’s get out of here.”

  She belly-crawled beneath the fallen canvas, found the flap, made her way out into the night. Cool drops of dew anointed her bare feet as she helped Pat emerge from beneath the canvas. The camp was in an uproar, a babble of voices rising up on all sides, orders and curses mixed with shouts of bewilderment and cries for help. Almost all the tents had fallen, and fresh fissures had gouged themselves across the landscape. Jessica saw that the satellite transmitter/receivers were down, and she ran across the stretch of ground and rounded up soldiers to set things up again. If any of them saw anything unusual at the sight of a major general helping to wrestle satellite dishes into place while dressed only in her helmet, olive-green boxers, and tank top, they did not venture to say so. Once she had the receiver dishes up again, Jessica wouldn’t have to spend the first three or four hours trying to find a way of communicating with the rest of the country. All key personnel, throughout the area affected by M1, had by now been equipped with modern satellite-based communications gear, ranging from Iridium cellphones to the state-of-the-art Army mobile communications center here in Vicksburg. They could be in contact in a matter of seconds.

  Generators coughed into life. Lights flashed. Tents were raised, and communications techs manned their stations.

  Jessica was back in touch with the world.

  Dams first, she decided. If dams had broken, then alerts would have to go out fast. After that, she would contact district levee superintendents. Then transportation, check as many bridges as possible. And then…

  Horror struck her. The evacuation, she thought.

  There were tens of thousands of people on the road. Maybe not all in their automobiles when the earthquake hit—maybe they were in motels or campgrounds, sheltering in churches or other refugee centers, or just sleeping in their cars—but they were all in transit, between their homes and the areas that had been set up to receive them.

  They were cut off, without any way to call for help.

  The evacuation, she thought again. My evacuation.

  She may have just sent thousands of people to their doom.

  The first shock bucked Omar up off the mattress, then dropped him down again. The house shook as if an explosion had gone off just outside. Wilona screamed, and adrenaline rocketed through Omar’s veins. For a moment he groped for the gun he kept on the nightstand, and then he heard the express-train roar of the onrushing quake and knew what was coming.

  When the express train hit, it had a sideways snap to it that sent the bed crashing against the wall. There was a crash of shelves falling. Wilona screamed again. Omar was terrified that the chifforobe on the far side of the room would walk across the floor and fall on them. “Get under the bed!” he shouted, but the bed was traveling in wild corkscrew circles, and to get off was only to be run down. He felt Wilona clutching at him. Glass smashed. Omar heard the doors of the chifforobe slapping back and forth. In the darkness he saw a flash
of white as one of the ceiling panels swung down like a trapdoor, and he rolled partly atop Wilona to protect her in case the ceiling came down. Her nails dug into his skin. The mirror on the wall exploded, sending shards over the room. The crazy corkscrew motion was making Omar sick to his stomach. Wilona wept and shrieked in his ear. Another ceiling panel fell, bounced off Omar’s shoulders. There was a roaring crash as one of the magnolias shed a limb onto the roof. He just held on, for long minutes, until the motion faded. And then he got unsteadily to his feet, and rushed across broken glass to David’s room. He hadn’t heard anything from his son at all, and that seemed ominous.

  When he looked at the empty bed he remembered that David, now a special deputy, was on duty tonight, on call at sheriff’s headquarters.

  Omar began to check the damage. When the old double shotgun home had been jacked back up onto its foundation after the first quake, it had been supported by new brick pilings and hardwood wedges, and this time the foundation held. But otherwise the damage was far worse: half the clap-boards were shaken off the walls, almost all the shingles were gone from the roof, the ceiling and wall panels were torn away, and parts of the floor buckled or caved in.

  And none of it insured, Omar knew.

  He went back to his bedroom and began pulling on his uniform. He knew that Spottswood Parish was going to have a long night.

  Charlie Johns lay asleep in Megan’s BMW, a bottle of wine near his hand. The earth rumbled—the car leaped and shivered—but Charlie stirred for a moment, only a moment, and then slept on. Earthquake, he thought vaguely. Ridiculous. They only happen in California. The shock faded, and night sounds resumed.

  Next to Charlie, on the passenger seat, the cellphone gave an almost-silent purr. Its batteries were too exhausted to ring loudly; the sound was only a whisper, the barest touch of sound to Charlie’s ear. Charlie slept on. The phone purred again, and again, and again. And then fell silent. When Charlie woke, he thought he heard Megan’s voice.