The Rift (81 page)

Olson and his family had to leave the safety of that catfish pond embankment sooner or later. And when they did, Frankland and his people would follow. Olson would find he wasn’t the only person with a high-powered hunting rifle.

Frankland cocked his head up as he heard the sound of a rattling little motor echoing from across the road. A dirt bike, he thought, or an ATV. That was how Olson was making his getaway.

Olson didn’t even have a proper vehicle. He’d found a gun in a ruin somewhere, and some little Japanese scooter, and that was as far as his luck would go.

Frankland felt his lips turning in up in a grim smile. Spoke the words that the angels sang into his mind.

“Vengeance is mine,” he said.

That was one quote he was sure of.

*

Nick put Arlette and Manon behind some bushes by the roadside near the broken bridge. “You wait till I call,” Nick said. “Jason and I will talk to the guards.”

And maybe kill them,
Nick thought,
if they don’t do what’s needed. Kill them with my bare hands.

He could do it, he realized. He could do exactly what was necessary. And he found that he was not surprised by this knowledge.

Jason dropped out of the cab to let Manon and Arlette out, then climbed back in. The telescope swung into his lap on its strap.

“Whatever happens,” Nick said, “I need you to back my play.”

Jason licked his lips. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to tell them they’re needed at the camp.” Which, he considered, had the virtue of being true.

He rolled the truck to the top of the bluff near the broken bridge, turned off the engine, set the parking brake. He could see the jetty down below him, boats bobbing in the water.

“Let’s go.”

He made his way down the red-clay path with Jason at his heels. It was still early morning and the Rails River gorge was deep in shadow.

“Hey there,” a man said from the bushes that lined the Rails.

Hey there,
Nick thought with sudden scorn. He could imagine what his father would have said if a sentry had ever hailed him with
Hey there.

“Hey there,” Nick answered. “Hey. We got some trouble at the camp.”

Two men emerged from where they’d been sitting beneath the bushes. The speaker was a stranger, a grizzled white man maybe fifty years old, but the other was Conroy, the brother who had driven Nick and Jason to the camp on their first day.

“Hey there, Conroy,” Nick said.

Conroy’s unshaven face was uncertain under his baseball cap. “What’s happening at the camp?”

“Reverend needs you back there,” Nick said. “That Olson came back, with a gun.”

Conroy and the guard exchanged glances. Hesitated.

“Better get moving,” Nick said. “There’s a bad situation there.” He heard his father’s voice in his head, tried to echo the commanding tones.

The guards’ eyes snapped to Nick at the sound of command. Then Conroy looked down at the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.

“Can’t call from here,” he said. “Have to go to the top of the bluff.” The two guards looked at each other again. “I suppose we ought to check it out.”

“The keys are in the truck,” Nick said. “The boy and I will look after the boats for you. Hurry!”

Nick watched, heart throbbing, as Conroy and the other man labored to the top of the bluff. Conroy lifted the walkie-talkie to his ear, then Nick saw a shock run through his frame. He and the other guard hustled into the truck, started the engine, and drove off.

Nick turned to Jason. “Fetch Manon and Arlette. I’ll get a boat ready.”

There were a half-dozen or more boats, either tied to the plank jetty or drawn up on land, but only one boat actually possessed a motor. The rest of the outboards had apparently been taken to the camp and put into storage.

The one boat with a motor was
Retired and Gone Fishin’,
Jason’s battered old bass boat.
American Dream,
the speedboat Jason had got at the casino, wasn’t even there.

For a moment Nick considered shifting the outboard to another boat.
Retired and Gone Fishin’
was small for four people, and there was no canvas top as there had been on
American Dream.

But then he thought of the delay. It would take time to shift a heavy motor from one boat to another, along with its fuel. The bass boat, whatever its other disadvantages, would be fast under power. He could probably stay ahead of any pursuit. And the bass boat had built-in storage compartments, and the silent electric motor that could be rigged to the bow.

And then it occurred to Nick to wonder where Olson would go once he got his wife and children free of the camp.

He would come
here,
Nick realized. Olson would have to get a boat and flee. It was the only way he would escape Frankland’s revenge.

He was probably on his way. Conroy and the other guard wouldn’t be able to stop him: Olson would riddle them before they even got out of the truck.

Nick’s heart lurched in his chest. He turned to Jason, shouted,
“Hurry!”
and jumped into the bass boat.

The oars that the
Beluthahatchie
had provided were still there. There were plastic jugs of water in one of the boat’s coolers, but the compartments were empty. The fifty-horse Johnson had two plastic jerricans full of fuel. Nick wondered if he could find more.

He ran from one boat to the next, checking each in turn. Nothing. Then he turned to the bank and was luckier— four more plastic jerricans sat in the shade under the bluff, ready to be placed aboard any boat that was running low. Next to the jerricans were a pair of box lunches intended for the guards’ midday meal, a plastic jug of water, a roll of actual toilet paper, a blanket, and a bright orange plastic sun-shade held in place with rope and tent pegs.

Nick gave a breathless laugh at the sight. He carried the jerricans two at a time to the boat. By the time he finished his second run, Jason and the others had come down the bluff, and they brought the food and other supplies aboard, including the awning.

Nick got everyone on the bass boat, then cast off. The boat drifted gently down the Rails River as he readied the engine, primed the fuel, worked with the clutch and choke, then pressed the self-start.

As the outboard boomed into life, Nick looked at the joy and relief in the eyes of the others. His heart thrilled. It was the most glorious sight he’d seen in his life.

He moved forward into the cockpit and took the wheel. Spun the wheel to correct the boat’s course, pushed the throttle forward.

They were on their way.

“Daddy!” Arlette’s arms came around him from behind. “That was brilliant!”

“Man, Nick,” Jason said. “The way you gave orders, you sounded just like a general.”

Joy sang through Nick. He kissed one of the brown arms that embraced him.

“Next stop,” he said, “civilization.”

The bluff parted before them, opening like a curtain sweeping left and right over the stage, and they coasted into the Delta. The still, brown waters of the Arkansas floodplain were littered with wreckage, and Nick had to keep his speed down. He took comfort in the thought that pursuit couldn’t go any faster. He put Jason on the front deck, with one of the oars, to pole off such of the flotsam as he couldn’t avoid.

Retired and Gone Fishin’
glided slowly and cautiously through perhaps three miles of maimed, flooded forest before catching a glimpse of the main channel of the Arkansas River through the trees.

It was then, just as Nick’s heart was lifting, just as he was about to throw his head back and laugh his triumph to the sky, that he heard the sound of a big outboard booming into life just ahead.

Nick’s pulse thundered louder than the engine. He stood in the cockpit to stare ahead, and despair fell upon his heart like rain as he saw a familiar shape easing out from between the trees. It was
American Dream,
with its hundred-fifty-horsepower motor that could run down the bass boat without even trying. And inside the boat’s cockpit Nick saw at least three silhouettes.

One of Frankland’s river patrols out looking for refugees, the same sort that had brought them to the camp in the first place.

Plans flailed through his mind. He didn’t think, in this instance, the “Brother Frankland sent me to tell you to come back to the camp” ploy was likely to work.

“Oh, hell,” Jason murmured. “It’s Magnusson.”

“The porno guy?” Nick said. He cut power as the other boat approached. Fleeing at top speed was a futile idea, and therefore reserved for the moment when everything else had failed. The other boat throttled back, then reversed briefly to check its momentum.

“Heaven-o there, Adams,” Magnusson said. “What’s going on?”

“There’s shooting in the camp,” Nick called out. “A war almost. Olson came back with friends and guns. Hilkiah was shot dead in front of the whole camp, and so was the Reverend Calhoun.”

The others looked at each other in surprise. Whatever they’d been expecting to hear, this clearly wasn’t it.

“So what are you-all doing?” Magnusson said.

Nick stood straight, squared his shoulders. You are
telling
them, he informed himself, you aren’t asking their permission.

“We’re getting to safety,” Nick said. “We’re not armed, and there’s nothing we can do. If you’ve got weapons, you should go back to the camp and help restore order. But otherwise I advise you to stay away.”

The other two men seemed uncertain, but Magnusson returned an answer quickly.

“I don’t think you’re thinking very clearly, sir,” he said. “There’s no safety on the river. It’s dangerous, and that’s why we’re supposed to bring in anyone we find here.”

“There isn’t any warfare on the river,” Nick said. “It’s a lot safer than the camp.” He nodded as calmly as he could at Magnusson, but he felt helplessness drain the strength from his knees, and he leaned slightly against the side of the cockpit in order to support himself.

A momentary aftershock shivered the tops of the trees. Twigs and leaves rained down on the water.

“Sir,” Magnusson said, “I can’t let you out on that river, okay? Not with your family. It’s too dangerous.”

“
People are dying at the camp
,”
Nick insisted. “You don’t believe me, you call them. You have a radio, don’t you?”

“It don’t work this far out,” one of the other men said. “Trees and water just eat up the signal, I guess.”

“I think you should come back with us, okay?” Magnusson said. “We’ll check out the situation, make certain that things are safe before we bring you into the camp.”

So here it was. Nick drew himself up, tried to summon his father’s authority.

“No,” he said.
“No.
We’re not going back.”

“I can’t permit you to leave, mister,” Magnusson said.

Nick narrowed his eyes. Looked at the pistol holstered on Magnusson’ hip. “What are your orders exactly?” he asked. “You supposed to shoot us or what? And what exactly gives you the authority to do that?”

And the question, Nick thought, was, Would they? Would they actually open fire?

The other two, Nick thought, probably wouldn’t. They seemed intimidated by the situation. He couldn’t see either of them raising a weapon against someone who wasn’t trying to harm them. They would look for excuses not to.

Magnusson, though, was more problematic. Magnusson was the strong-willed one, the one with the white armband that marked him as a leader. The one who wailed in front of a hundred and fifty people about the evil pornography he had sold, and how Frankland had helped him see the light.

“You’re coming back with us, okay?” Magnusson said.

“Calhoun is
dead.”
Nick barked out the words like his father dressing down a recruit. “Hilkiah’s
dead.
Other people died with them. And
Reverend Frankland’s dream is dead!
There’s nothing to go back to.”

Fury blazed in Magnusson’s eyes.
“That’s not true!”
he snapped. One hand touched the butt of his pistol.
“You’re coming back!”

Nick’s heart sank. He’d played it wrong. General Ruford had given too many orders. If Nick had stayed sweet and reasonable, he might have been able to talk his way out of this.

Now it was hopeless. General Ruford had failed, and it was up to Nick to make up for the general’s failure. The only thing for Nick to do was to try to talk his way onto the other boat, then knock Magnusson down and get a gun, hold them all off at gunpoint or go down blazing ...

Hopeless, but it was the only thing he could think to do.

*

Jason looked at Nick and
knew.
There was that resolution in Nick’s face, that hard resolve that Jason had seen before on the river when he was trying to get to Arlette and Manon ahead of the people who had killed Gros-Papa. Nick was going to try something desperate, jump onto Magnusson and his gun maybe. Do whatever he could to save his family, and probably die.

Jason’s head whirled. He needed to do something, he knew. Something ...

“No way!”
he yelled. He waved his arms and jumped from the foredeck down into the cockpit. The boat rocked under him. He had wanted just to distract Magnusson, to break the thread of tension he’d seen running from Magnusson to Nick. That, and maybe give Nick a chance to come up with a plan that wasn’t based on getting himself killed

And then his eye lit on the red plastic case of the telescope, tucked behind the passenger seat. Wild inspiration seized him. He grabbed the Astroscan in both hands and held it over his head.

“This is a nuclear reactor!”
he yelled.
“You hit this with a bullet, and we’re all blown to bits!”

There was a long, astonished silence broken only by the pounding of Jason’s heart. Magnusson’s eyes were wide and staring. Muscles worked on his unshaven jaw.

“Nick,” Jason said, still glaring at Magnusson, “let’s get this boat out of here.”

Nick slowly lowered himself into the driver’s seat and pushed the throttle forward. The Johnson rumbled and the bass boat began to move.

Looking over his shoulder, Nick saw Magnusson step forward, one foot on the gunwale. Then saw one of the others put a restraining hand on his arm.