The Rift (62 page)

“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 was 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 temblors 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 Ml.

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 had fallen, 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 Ml, 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 clapboards 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.

*

The President rolled toward the phone on the nightstand. “Get me the First Lady,” he said, “the Vice President, and whoever’s in charge at the CDRG.”

And then he looked at the clock. Five minutes after two.

He felt a panicked throb in his chest. That was a
quake,
he thought. His experience in the National Cathedral, and the days he’d spent touring the disaster areas in the Midwest, had sensitized him to earth tremors. The first temblor that shivered up through his mattress had awakened him from sound sleep.

And he had felt it
here,
in the White House, which meant it was another big one.

He kicked off the covers, felt for his slippers with his toes. And then a woman’s voice spoke in his ear.

“Mr. President? This is Beverly Maddox at the CDRG. May I help you?”

“Did you feel that quake? Do you have any information?”

There was a moment’s pause. “I felt no quake, sir, but I’ll check.”

And then, before the President could say anything more, heard the click, and then syrupy music. She had put him on
hold.

“Jesus Christ!” the President barked in amazement. Nobody
ever
put the President of the United States on hold.

There was another click, and then the voice again. “Nobody here felt a quake, sir. I take it you’re not calling from D.C.?”

“Don’t ever put me on hold again!”

Stunned silence filled the line.

“I will remain on this line,”
the President said.
“You will find out about the quake and report to your commander-in-chief as soon as you have the information.”

“Yes, sir. Uh ... sorry.” And then he heard her put down the phone and shout to someone else in the office.

There was a click as another call came through. The President changed over and immediately heard the voice of the Vice President, calling from Jackson, Mississippi, where he’d been based in his current round of Compassion Duty.

“Did you feel the quake?” he said. “That was a
big
one.”

“You’re all right?” said the President.

“Just shook up. The bed was jumping around, and the drawers jumped right out of the bureau. Secret Service came rushing in to see if I was all right, and they could barely keep their feet.”

The President found himself wondering if they’d tried to wrestle the earthquake to the ground.

“I felt it here,” the President said. “That’s why I’m calling.”
And for once,
he thought,
I’m ahead of the curve. I know more than FEMA does.
And then it occurred to him that this, more than anything else, was frightening.

*

The first large May quake, Ml, had been followed over successive days by thousands of aftershocks, four of which were deemed strong enough to deserve numbers of their own, causing damage rated at 7 or better— out of a possible 12— on the Mercalli Scale. But the M6 shock, ten days following Ml, was a major earthquake in its own right.

M6 began at 1:02 A.M., Central Daylight Time, as an eleven-meter right-lateral strike-slip motion on the Blytheville Arch, a fifty-mile-long fault structure running more or less under the Mississippi, and centered on Blytheville, Arkansas, just south of Swampeast Missouri. Ml had loaded the Blytheville Arch with tectonic energy which the Arch now discharged. On the Richter scale, the quake reached a force of 8.5, one-quarter the size of Ml at 8.9, but still the equivalent of the Alaskan quake of 1964, one of the greatest quakes of the twentieth century. As during Ml, the solid structure of the North American continent transmitted the destructive force of the quake hundreds of miles. The Arch directed most of its energy toward the south and west, into Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kansas, which suffered greater property loss than they had during Ml. These powerful shocks in turn released additional energy stored along the Oklahoma Fault, resulting in significant destruction as far west as Oklahoma City and Wichita Falls. But the directional nature of the temblors meant that northern Missouri, including St. Louis, Illinois, and Iowa, were spared a repeat of the leveling caused by Ml, though destruction there was certainly bad enough.

Memphis, close to the river and the center of the Blytheville Arch, received another pounding.

The slippage of the Blytheville Arch transmitted to other subterranean fault lines via the Bootheel Lineament, which connects all other fault structures in the area. All the faults suffered further slippage, though a particularly severe shock was created along the Reelfoot South seismicity trend. This fault hammered western Kentucky and Tennessee— shaking unlucky Memphis from north as well as west— and created a pair of tsunamis, one that roared up the Ohio River, another that launched itself up the Mississippi and destroyed the old river town of Cairo, which fortunately for its inhabitants had been evacuated due to flooding.

Other effects of M6 were similar to Ml: ground liquefaction and geysering, widespread destruction to timber and other natural resources, and significant infrastructure damage. Buildings, levees, bridges, and other structures weakened by Ml and its aftershocks now collapsed. Damage in Mississippi, southern Arkansas, Kansas, and Louisiana exceeded that suffered in Ml.