The Rift (46 page)

NINETEEN

On Wednesday, in the afternoon, I visited every part of the island where we lay. It was extensive, and partially covered with willow. The earthquake had rent the ground in large and numerous gaps; vast quantities of burnt wood in every stage of alteration, from its primitive nature to stove coal, had been spread over the ground to very considerable distances; frightful and hideous caverns yawned on every side, and the earth’s bowels appeared to have felt the tremendous force of the shocks which had thus riven the surface. I was gratified with seeing several places where those spouts which had so much attracted our wonder and admiration had arisen; they were generally on the beach; and have left large circular holes in the sand, formed much like a funnel. For a great distance around the orifice, vast quantities of coal have been scattered, many pieces weighing from 15 to 20 lbs. were discharged 160 measured paces
—
These holes were of various dimensions; one of them I observed most particularly, it was 16 feet in perpendicular depth, and 63 feet in circumferences at the mouth.

Narrative of Mr. Pierce, Dec. 25,1811

Nick was eating his breakfast— Campbell’s Chunky Beef, straight from the can— when they motored free of trees and wreckage, and there was the bridge dead ahead, the span between its three great towers glittering like a spider web in the morning sun. Mouth full of soup, he nudged Jason, but Jason had already seen it.

The boy turned to him with a grin. “All right!” he said. “We’re rescued!”

Don’t be too sure,
Nick thought, though his heart grew lighter for all his caution.

Jason looked down at his can of food. “Creamed corn,” he said. “Couldn’t you find something in the pantry that doesn’t suck?”

Nick looked in their bag of supplies. “Want some olives?” he said.

After escaping from the
Lucky Magnolia,
they had motored south till nightfall, then cut the engine so as not to run onto debris. Morning found them out of the main channel and somewhere in the flood plain, surrounded by tall trees, with a bluff hard by the west bank. Or perhaps this
was
the main channel now. It was impossible to tell.

They started the Evinrude and motored carefully southward through the trees, the engine turning at low revs to keep the boat away from obstacles. A brisk wind blew through the trees overhead, but at the water’s surface the air was almost still. Jason steered while Nick prepared their unappetizing breakfast.

“Hey look!” Jason said, excited. “Look! It’s a city!”

Through his own rising excitement, Nick paged through mental road maps. A town on the west bank, built up on a bluff, with a highway bridge crossing the Mississippi.

“Helena,” he said. “That’s Arkansas over there.”

He could see towboats and rafts of barges moored along the waterfront. Maybe one of them would let him use their radio, he thought.

Jason put his bowl of half-eaten creamed corn on the gunwale. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand,” he said, and reached for the throttle.

As they neared Helena, Nick saw the place had suffered in the quake. Parts of the bluff had spilled downward into the lower town, and all of the buildings he could see over the town’s big floodwall were damaged. Some of the older brick buildings had collapsed. From the marks of soot, it looked as if other buildings had burned.

“That way!” Nick said, pointing, as a lagoon opened up on the right. He saw piers, masts, small boats. Jason turned the wheel and the boat heeled as it roared for the marina entrance.

The moored pleasure boats, rising on the flood, had suffered little damage, though some, parked on trailers, had been knocked over, and sat now half-full of water. Jason cut the throttle as he entered the lagoon, and the speedboat slid over glassy water. Silence enveloped them. Nick could hear wire halyards rattling in the wind against aluminum sailboat masts, the cawing of the flocks of crows that massed overhead, the hiss of water under the keel. There were no sounds of traffic, no footsteps, no sounds of voices. Beyond its floodwall, Helena was strangely silent.

There were buildings close in sight, though. Nick could see what appeared to be a regular residential neighborhood between the bluff and the big half-collapsed warehouses near the marina.

Nothing moved there. Nothing moved anywhere. Nick wondered if the town had been evacuated.

“No point in mooring here,” he said. “Flood’s cut us off from town.”

The bass boat bobbing behind on the end of its tether,
American Dream
idled past the Terminal & Warehouse Co., moved along Helena’s floodwall until it found a gap, a gate torn open by the quake— the river must have
poured
through here, Nick thought, though now the waters were gentle enough— and then Jason steered the speedboat through the wall into the town beyond. Frame buildings rose on either side, many of them leaning, knocked off their foundations. The boat’s muttering exhaust echoed strangely from houses and trees. Crows gazed down at them from peaked rooftops, from black windows that had lost their glass.

“Man, this is weird,” Jason said. “Where is everybody?”

“Maybe they all went up the bluff to get away from flood.”

“I didn’t see anyone moving up there.” Jason looked thoughtful. “Maybe we can scrounge supplies out of some of those houses. Shall we check it out?”

Nick thought about it, decided he had no real moral objection to this course of action. The food was doing no good where it was. “Find a house that won’t fall down on us,” he said.

Jason motored up to a two-story frame structure with a broad portico. The building’s gabled design suggested it had been built before World War II, perhaps well before that. Jason nudged the boat’s bow right up to the porch. Nick pulled up his trouser legs above his knees, jumped into the flood, moored the boat by its bow to one of the white pillars. Goose flesh crept over his skin at the touch of the cold water.

Water washed back and forth through the screen door. The front door with its knocker stood open, and broken windows gaped. Nick opened the screen and ventured inside.

“Hello?” he said. “Anyone here?”

There was a rustling sound on the second floor, but no voice answered. Nick stood in a living room flooded to a depth of two feet or so, with a high-water mark on the flowered blue wallpaper twelve or so inches above the current level. Plastic articles, papers, and paperback books floated in the water. White lace curtains trailed in the current. A steep carpeted stair led to the floor above.

Jason sloshed into the room. “Guess we’re not going to do much cooking here, huh?”

“Maybe we should have gone up to one of the towboats. They’re bound to have a watch on board.”

“We’ll try that next. But if we bring the towboat some food, they’re more likely to help us out.”

Jason sloshed toward the kitchen, then gave a yelp as he banged his shins on a submerged coffee table. As if in answer to Jason’s cry, Nick heard the rustling sound again on the floor above. He waded to the bottom of the stair. “Hello?” he called.

More rustling. Crows cawed.

“Maybe someone’s hurt up there,” Nick said. “Maybe they can’t call for help.”

“Might as well look,” Jason called from the kitchen. “The pantry’s empty. Maybe the food’s upstairs.”

Nick put his hand on the newel post, then took two cautious steps upward. All he needed was to get shot by some half-senile old lady. “He was
black,”
she’d say. “I knew he only wanted a white woman!”

“Anyone up there?” Nick called. “We’ve come to help.”

And then he added, “Me and the boy!” to let whoever it was know that he was okay, harmless, he had a kid with him.

“Me and the geek engineer,” he heard Jason mutter behind him. Nick concluded that Jason didn’t like being called “boy” any more than Nick did.

Nick climbed the stairs and stood at the end of the upstairs hall with water streaming down his legs. He heard rustling and flapping sounds, but by now he thought he could identify them.

“I think they’re just birds,” he said, and looked through the first doorway.

There was a mad rushing of wings, a cawing of panicked birds smashing into walls as they tried to escape through the shattered window. Nick’s blood turned cold. He took a shaky step rearward, turned away, took Jason by the shoulders.

“Don’t look,” he said, talking loud over the flutter of wings. “Go back to the boat.”

Jason looked up at him resentfully, and his mouth opened for a wisecrack, but something in Nick’s tone must have got through to him, because he turned in silence and began walking down the stair.

Nick’s pulse fluttered in his throat. There was a tremor in his knees. Then, slowly, he turned and looked into the room again.

A young black couple, he saw, and their baby. They looked as if they’d survived the earthquake but died afterward, in some kind of fit. Their mouths were open and their hands were bloody claws. The man’s fingernails had gouged tracks in the cheerful blue checks of the wallpaper. The woman had died with her baby in her arms. A bottle of formula lay where it had fallen in the middle of a throw rug.

The crows had got to their eyes. Despite the dark blood-flecked hollows in their faces, they seemed to have died with peaceful expressions on their faces. They had fought for life while the fit first came, but then died quietly, resignedly, when the time came.

Nick realized he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out. Softly he turned from the room, and closed the door behind him.

He found two more corpses. An older child, a boy, lying dead in his Air Jordans beneath a portrait of Jesus. He looked as if he had torn at his own throat in an attempt to breathe, though he, too, had relaxed at the end, had died with a strange soft air of tranquility. In another room was an older woman, probably the mother of one of the young couple, who had crawled under her bed to die.

The crows had gotten to them, whole flocks of them. Unless Nick wanted to find some lumber and plank over the broken windows, there was no way to keep them out.

He closed the door and walked in silence down the hall, then down the stair. Jason waited silently in the boat. Nick sloshed through the water to the portico, then unmoored the speedboat and pulled himself up on the foredeck.

Jason looked at him questioningly as the boat drifted away from the portico. “They were dead,” Nick said. “The whole family.” He licked his lips. “It looked as if they were poisoned or something.”

Apprehension twitched around Jason’s eyes. “Glad we didn’t take their food,” he said.

“It may not have been the food,” Nick said, and looked at the flocks of crows that circled overhead and perched on all the roofpeaks.

Jason seemed surprised. “What, then?”

Nick rubbed his chin, feeling the unshaven bristle scratching his palm. “I don’t know yet. I want to look in another house.”

In the next house Nick explored, the scene was even worse. The entire family had died in one upstairs room, clawing at each other as if they had been taken by a homicidal fit. There were a lot of children, at least half a dozen, but Nick didn’t want to count.

When he came back to the boat, Nick couldn’t speak, he just waved Jason to go back the way they had come. Jason motored back toward the gap in the floodwall and passed slowly through the open gate.

“Shall we try one of the towboats?” Jason asked.

Nick nodded. But, as they motored along the riverfront, Nick looked ahead to see the crows atop a shrunken mound of clothing on the afterdeck of the nearest boat, and he felt the hair on his neck stand on end.

“No,” he said. “No. Get back in the river. As far across as we can go. And don’t steer anywhere where you don’t see birds flying.”

Jason looked at him wildly. “Why? What
is
it?”

Nick licked his lips. “Gas. A cloud of gas killed all those people when the flood trapped them in their houses.”

Nick saw Jason turn pale beneath his sunburn. “
What kind of gas
?”
he demanded.

Nick searched his mind, shook his head. “There must be a dozen things that could do something like this. Chlorine gas. Arsine. Hydrogen cyanide. One damn barge is all it takes. We’ve got to hope it’s dispersed, that we haven’t been breathing it.”

Jason’s eyes widened. He raised a hand to his throat, and for a moment Nick saw an echo on Jason’s face of the horror that must have come to Helena, the realization that they had been poisoned and were going to die.

As soon as they were clear of the land, Jason opened the throttle and the speedboat roared east across the river. There they followed a series of bird flights south, past the silent city on the bluff. Past the broken houses, the silent boats and barges. Past a double row of gasoline storage tanks that had burned and died, past the flooded casting field, past the shattered, abandoned Arkansas Power & Light plant.

Past the circling, calling flocks of carrion crows that feasted on the city’s eyeless dead.

*

Helena died by phosgene gas. Two common chemicals, sulfuric acid and carbon tetrachloride, were mixed in the broken warehouse of a chemical company, and in sufficient quantities to generate a cloud large enough, by nightfall on the day of the quake, to cover the entire town below the bluff. The gas is colorless, and the characteristic scent of musty hay was not thought alarming by those who had already survived a major earthquake, and who were busy rescuing neighbors and taking shelter from a flood. Phosgene is fatal in small quantities, and often takes an hour or two to do its work: by the time its victims felt any symptoms, they had suffered enough exposure to assure their own fate.

Phosgene attacks the lungs, specifically the capillaries. The victims choked and gagged as their lungs filled with fluid, and then, as the characteristic euphoria of oxygen starvation took them, died in a strange, contented bliss.

A few survivors staggered or drove up the bluff to alert the town to what was happening. Helena, West Helena, and nearby communities were evacuated and cordoned off, but with communications so disrupted, and the roads so badly torn, the evacuation order in effect commanded the citizens to march into the wilderness and attempt to survive there for an indeterminate period. Thousands of people wandered lost in woods and fields for days, afraid to return home for fear of being poisoned.