The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “I’ll be along in a minute, sweetie,” Sheryl said. “I want to finish this horn first.” Frankland rounded up some of the Christian Gun Club and put his block and tackle over the last, untouched concrete bunker. He lifted up the slab and looked at what lay there. The others stood in sober respect.

  And when he had opened the seventh seal, Frankland thought, there was silence in heaven… M26A1, read the stencils on the box, Fragmentation, 30. Two cases at thirty per case. Hilkiah had acquired them two years ago, and Frankland had been careful not to ask how.

  “Let’s take the grenades out,” Frankland said, “and then the .50 caliber Browning.” Midmorning, the bass boat drifted at last into the Mississippi. The great river was sluggish, but at least it moved faster than the Arkansas. The amount of debris had increased, if anything, but on the wider, larger river it was possible to steer around it. Nick started the outboard but kept speed and fuel consumption low.

  He kept a wary eye on Jason, who shared with Arlette the duties of standing on the foredeck and fending off debris. Jason had turned cooperative—he was obedient, cheerful, helpful, and had kept to himself his endless supply of smart remarks.

  Nick found this ominous. That and the way Jason was relating to Arlette—the shared glances, the giggles, the way their arms or legs brushed together, as if by accident, as they worked on the foredeck. Nick knew damn well what was going on. It was right there in front of him. But there was nothing he could object to, no inappropriate behavior, not so much as a kiss.

  Just two young people falling in love. It made Nick grind his teeth. He ground his teeth so much that it made his neck ache.

  There was no traffic on the river. None at all. The huge cypress and cottonwood trees coming down with the flood apparently provided too great a hazard to navigation.

  At De Soto Landing, they gave a wide berth to a docking platform that thrust a hundred yards or so into the river. The facilities were big enough for tankers. Some of the big oil tanks on shore had burned. There was no sign of a living human being.

  The boat floated downriver alongside the shimmering ribbon of oil that stretched out from the landing. The stench of the oil sank into the back of Nick’s throat, a foul rasp he couldn’t cough out even though he tried.

  The river slowed to a crawl. The boat drifted, bumped aimlessly against debris, because Nick wanted to conserve fuel.

  Hunger settled into Nick’s stomach, became a part of him, a steady ache he carried always with him like a woman carries a child. He found himself thinking nostalgically of Brother Frankland’s greasy fish and mixed vegetables. Food occupied his thoughts almost every minute. Not just for himself, but for his family. Rescue needed to come very soon.

  A cooling breeze fluttered the surface of the water, brought light dancing on the river’s skin of oil. The breeze was refreshing at first, the first real weather change in two weeks and a relief in the sweat-drenched, smothering tropical heat. But as the sky darkened and the breeze strengthened, flying into their faces from the south, Nick began to look for a way to shelter from the storm that was obviously building. Lightning flashed in the oncoming clouds, suggesting it would be unwise to remain in the main channel as the tallest electric conductor for half a mile in any direction. A gray chop rose on the river, tossing debris against the boat’s chine.

  It was clearly time to take a chance on the falling timber in the flood plain. The treeline on the east bank looked far too dense to safely enter, so when Nick started the Johnson, he maneuvered toward the western bank, crossing the track of the oil that had been draining from the broken tanks upstream. Oil-flavored spray spattered Nick’s face as the bass boat shouldered into the chop. Thunder boomed from the sky like the bootsteps of God.

  The bass boat reached the trees just as the rain cut loose, a drenching rainstorm that came down in floods all at once, without preamble. Within seconds it was too dark and wet to see more than a few feet. Wind howled through the broken tops of the trees, bringing a gentle drizzle of small branches and willow leaves. Nick and the others huddled in the little cockpit, stretching over themselves the orange plastic sun shade that they’d taken from Frankland’s guards. Rain rattled on the plastic, little bright concussions like gunshots next to Nick’s ears. Thoughts of cold drove thoughts of food from his mind. He was cold and hungry and wet, and as he shivered he could feel the others shivering, too. The rain ceased around midnight, and with stiff limbs Nick and the others bailed out the boat. No stars were visible overhead. The downpour started again an hour later, as fierce as before, and continued intermittently past the gray, uncertain dawn.

  When they finally shook the last drops off the orange plastic and looked around them, they found themselves in a flooded stand of cypress. The sun was invisible behind dark cloud, and they had no way of telling direction. Soon little wisps of mist began to rise from the water. The wisps thickened, then closed overhead like interlaced fingers.

  The boat bobbed silently in the fog, lost and alone in the forest of silence. The rain hammered down. Omar had set out pails and crockery for the leaks—his roof had not done well in the quakes.

  Wilona was standing a night shift at Clarendon—probably sitting down to a session of tea and heartfelt gossip with Mrs. Ashenden as the rain drummed on the rooftop—so Omar was home alone, lying on the sofa with his shoes off and listening to Johnny Paycheck on the radio.

  It was the endgame that he worried about. He’d isolated the A.M.E. camp. He’d made certain that no one but certain of his own people had access. Jedthus and Knox both told him that things were going well there, though they volunteered no details, and Omar asked for none.

  But at the end, when the camp was empty, what then? He couldn’t tell everyone that two hundred refugees had just flown away.

  Timing, he thought. If the Bayou Bridge could be repaired soon, and he could know the date in advance, he could just claim that everyone had left of their own accord as soon as they could. He heard booted feet stomping on the porch, kicking off the raindrops, and then David came in, banging the screen door and moving with the slow, over-elaborate deliberation that gave Omar to understand that he was drunk.

  David wore a plastic rain slicker over his deputy’s star and one of Omar’s spare uniforms. That morning, Tree Simpson had ruled that his shooting of the refugee was justified, and David had returned to duty as a special deputy.

  Omar had made a point of assigning David to patrolling the highway between Shelburne City and the fallen Bayou Bridge, on the other end of the parish from the A.M.E. camp. He didn’t want David near the place. When David asked him why, Omar said, “because if you turn up at the camp, we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

  Which was not the real reason, but it was a reason that would have to serve for David.

  “Hi, Dad,” David said. He hung up the rain slicker and his baseball cap on the pegs by the front door.

  “How was your evening?” Omar asked.

  “Went out with the boys.”

  “Which boys?”

  David went into the refrigerator without answering, got a beer, returned to the front room to sit in Omar’s easy chair. Omar looked at him from his reclining position on the sofa. “Which boys?” Omar repeated.

  “Knox and them.”

  “I thought—” Omar was about to repeat his instructions to stay away from Knox, but then he saw David’s knuckles bruised and swollen, and he sat up.

  “You been in a fight, son?” he asked.

  David looked at his battered fists, then shrugged. “A little ramshagging, that’s all.” Anger snarled in Omar’s veins. “You just survived an inquest, sonny boy!” he barked. “Now you want to start getting into fistfights and maybe having people start thinking second thoughts about that killing you did? Who were you fighting with, anyhow?”

  David gave a slow, drunken grin. “Nobody that’ll complain. We was down to Woodbine Corners.” Omar stared at him in shock. David took a swig of his beer.

  “We decided, hell, we
’ll save some bullets,” he said. “We’ll kill this batch with our bare hands. So we had a few drinks and got to business.” He looked at his free hand, flexed the fingers meditatively. “It was a lot more work than we thought. It takes a long time, you know, to kill someone like that.” Omar’s head swam. Revulsion squeezed his stomach, brought the tang of vomit to his tongue. He bit it down.

  Then the anger hit, and he stood over David and slapped the beer from his hand. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Just what in hell do you think you’re doing?” David stared up in amazement. Omar slapped him across the face. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from Knox?” he demanded. “Didn’t I?”

  The beer bottle gurgled as it emptied itself onto the floor. “What’s the problem?” David demanded.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Knox is crazy,” Omar shouted. “Isn’t that enough?” He clenched his fists and marched an angry circle around the room. Spilled beer soaked his socks.

  “But Daddy,” David said, “Knox believes the same as you. He believes the same as what you’ve always taught me.”

  Omar lunged across the room to stand over his son again, hand raised to strike. David flinched but didn’t raise a hand to defend himself. Omar didn’t bring the hand down; he left it in the air, in case he changed his mind.

  “Knox is out of his head!” Omar shouted. “He’s been wandering around the country stealing and killing!

  If you hang around him, you’ll get killed or spend the rest of your life in jail! Did I raise you for that?” Omar demanded. “Did I, Davy?”

  “He’s a soldier!” David said. “He’s fighting a war against ZOG. Just like you!”

  “ZOG, shit! Ain’t no ZOG and never was!”

  Bewilderment shone on David’s face. “I don’t get it. If you ain’t fighting for the white, why are you doing what you’re doing?”

  Blood flamed in Omar’s heart. He panted for breath. He looked at the hand he’d raised, and let it fall.

  “It’s for you, son,” he said. “You did a killing. Can’t let no witnesses testify or they’ll hang us both.” He took a breath. “I’m not doing this so you can get drunk and beat niggers to death! I’m doing it so you’ll stay out of prison!”

  David licked his lips as he tried to comprehend this. “Knox says we’re going to be famous. Knox says we’re going to liberate all America starting with Spottswood Parish.”

  Omar straightened wearily from his crouch over David’s chair, turned, slopped through the spilled beer back to the couch. He sat down heavily, staring at the wall opposite with the blue flowered wallpaper that he and Wilona had put up when David was still in grade school.

  “Do you really think a dozen killers are going to turn this country around?” he said. “Do you really think that?”

  “You’ve always stood up for the white man,” David said. “That’s all I’m doing.”

  “I’ve done what I can for myself in this place,” Omar said. “Our family has been here for seven generations and we’ve never had anything to eat but shit from the people who run the parish. The Klan’s the only answer for a man like me. But you—” He looked at his son. “You’re in college. You’ve got what it takes to make it outside Spottswood Parish. You can leave this used-up old place. And that’s what I want you to do.”

  David was still bewildered. “I ain’t never heard you talk like this.” Omar felt cold beer seeping up his crew socks. “I want you to go away!” he shouted. “I want you to save yourself!”

  “There’s no way out of town, Dad.” A reasonable tone had crept into David’s voice. “The bridges are down. Besides, I don’t want to leave. Not when we’re all going to be famous!” Omar stared at his son. “Famous?”

  “With our pictures on TV and everything!” There was a drunken glow in David’s eyes. “Then we’ll disappear into the underground, like Knox does after he rescues some Jew money from a bank, and we’ll wait to strike again. And then after the Liberation—”

  “After the what?” Omar repeated.

  “After we win. After the white man’s in charge again.”

  Omar’s heart beat sickly in his temples. His head whirled. He couldn’t quite seem to catch his breath.

  “My God,” he said, half to himself. “My God in this world.” Micah Knox would pay for this, he thought. Would pay and pay.

  David reached out, patted Omar in a comforting way on his knee. “Don’t worry about me,” he said.

  “Everything will be fine. You’ll see. We’ll come through, and maybe you’ll even be President.” He laughed. “Won’t that be something! You and me in the White House.”

  Omar threw his head back and felt anguish twist in his heart like a knife. He wanted to howl his pain aloud. “I wanted you to be better than me,” he said.

  David looked at him with drunken amiability. “Nobody’s better than you, Dad,” he said. “Nobody in this world.”

  Jessica’s helicopter lurched as wind shear tried to fling it into the invisible Arkansas Delta below. Water coursed over the windscreen in streams, and blinking red and green navigation lights reflected off the slanted raindrops like a thousand distant stars. The command radio channel hissed in Jessica’s ears, then crackled to the sudden flashes of lightning that lit the strange, featureless gloom in which the Kiowa traveled.

  The rescue mission to Rails Bluff was underway. It was a little after two in the morning. Rivera’s Rangers, with units of Jessica’s engineers in support, were scheduled to be in position around the camp by five. The camp was due to be under new management, as Colonel Rivera had put it, by dawn. Brightly colored star shells flashed in Jessica’s left eye as the helicopter gave another lurch. She blinked, tried to will the flashing lights away. Gravity clutched at her stomach.

  She enjoyed thrill rides, but this was absurd.

  Lightning dazzled Jessica’s eyes and thunder boomed through the cabin. “Jesus Christ,” her pilot murmured, and then, “Sorry, ma’am.”

  I want my high-pressure system back, Jessica thought.

  Suddenly the pounding rain ceased, and the remaining droplets were blown off the windscreen by prop blast. The Kiowa floated through cloud, a world of cotton-wool eerily remote from the rest of the universe. Enhancing the sense of unreality were the ghostly symbols on the heads-up display, navigation and other information projected onto the interior of the windscreen so that the pilot could read them without looking down at the instrument panel. Though the data from those displays, from the Inertial Navigation System and the Litton AHRS, tracking their location in the murk to within a hundred meters, kept the outside world a lot closer than it seemed.

  “We have reached Point C,” the pilot said. He touched the rudder bar with one foot while his hand made an adjustment to the collective. “Turning to course two-one-zero. Navigation lights—” A gloved hand reached for the instrument panel. “Off.”

  Jessica felt her mouth go dry as the night shadows closed in. The outside world was getting closer by the second.

  The late-afternoon Air Force overflight had revealed that the Rails Bluff camp had made defensive preparations. Sandbagged emplacements had appeared on the camp’s perimeter since morning, and some of the strong shadows inside the camp suggested that slit trenches had been dug here and there. And worst of all, there were two sandbagged outposts planted on the embankment of the catfish farm across the road. One of them showed a tripod-mounted machine gun that could dominate the flat country for a thousand yards in all directions.

  In the early evening Rivera, Jessica, and their officers made hurried revisions of their plan of operations. The machine gun had to be neutralized or taken out. Likewise the sand-bagged bunkers.

  “Good thing we’ve got bad weather coming in,” Rivera said. “Anyone in the camp’s going to be under cover, and that MG is probably going to be wrapped in plastic.”

  We hope, Jessica thought.

  The Kiowa gave another lurch, leaving Jessica’s stomach about two hundred feet above her
head. Jessica wondered if Rivera was still thankful for the rain.

  We own the night. Jessica hoped it wasn’t as empty a boast as We control the river turned out to be. Rivera’s voice crackled on the command channel. “Badger Team has landed and is taking position. All is copacetic.”

  “Roger that, Badger.” Rivera’s primary combat team had landed north of the catfish farm, out of earshot—it was hoped—of any sentries in the camp. That would mean a long slog through flooded fields to the camp, but that shouldn’t be a consideration to people who Owned the Night. Other reports came in as other teams landed. Jessica’s Kiowa reached its landing point and began to descend. The cloud cleared, and below, in the infrared light of the chopper’s FLIR, Jessica saw Rivera’s helicopters spread over several acres of mud. Little glowing figures, Rangers, were setting up a perimeter.

  Jessica’s own engineers would be in support, and would not approach the Rails Bluff camp unless the Rangers called for them, or when the camp was secured. Likewise Jessica would leave Rivera to take care of tactical operations and only intervene with the capture of the camp if it was absolutely necessary. Which meant only if things went terribly, terribly wrong.

  The Kiowa settled gentle as a dandelion seed onto the muddy field.

  Jessica sighed. It was going to be a long night.

  Rain drummed on Frankland’s rain hood as he tramped to the door of the radio station. He wiped his boots on the mat and prepared to step inside, then hesitated with his hand on the doorknob as he heard a throbbing sound, distant but clear in the waterlogged night. For a moment his nerves hummed—black helicopters!—but then lightning cut loose somewhere to the west, freezing the world as if in a photo flash, and he shook his head and opened the door.

  This weather was impossible. The black helicopters would come, he thought, but they could not come tonight.

  Sheryl looked up from the reception desk. The desk light pooled on the long linen Apocalypse spread out before her. When the storm had blown up, after dark, Sheryl’s magnum opus had suffered considerable damage from the wind before she and Frankland could rescue it and bring it indoors.