The Rift (86 page)

THIRTY-ONE

Our voyage was from various causes tedious and disagreeable, we being 28 days from St. Louis to this place, Mr. Comegys has fared worse, being two months. Our progress was considerably impeded by an alarming and awful earthquake, such as has not I believe, occurred, or at least has not been recorded in the history of this country. The first shock which we experienced was about 2 o’clock on the morning of the 16th Dec. at which time our position was in itself perilous, we being but a few hundred yards above a bad place in the river, called the Devils Race Ground: in our situation particularly, the scene was terrible beyond description, our boat appeared as if alternately lifted out of the water, and again suffered to fall. The banks above, below and around us were falling every moment into the river, all nature seemed running into chaos. The noise unconnected with particular objects, was the noise of the most violent tempest of wind mixed with a sound equal to the loudest thunder, but more hollow and vibrating. The crashing of falling trees and the loud screeching of wild fowl made up the horrid concert. Two men were sent on shore in order to examine the state of the bank to which we were moored, who reported that a few yards from its summit, it was separated from the shore by a chasm of more than 100 yards in length. Jos. Morin, the patron, insisted on our all leaving the boat which he thought could not be saved, and of landing immediately in order to save our lives:
—
this I successfully combatted until another shock took place, about
3
o’clock, when we all left the boat, went on shore and kindled afire.

Extract from a letter by John Bradbury, dated Orleans January 16th

“Sir! Sir! Mr. President!”

The President blinked awake, trying to adjust his eyes to the sudden glare of the overhead light. He had been dreaming so very nicely, too, a warm dream about— was it bread? Yes, bread. UFOs, it seems, were really loaves of bread, and the blinking lights were just the LEDs on the bread machines that made them .. . You could
eat
UFOs if you spread butter on them, that was the point.

“Sir? Are you awake?”

“Yes, Stan. What is it?”

There were a limited number of people who could wake the President. The names were on a list: the Secretary of State, the ambassador to the U.N., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whoever was on duty at NORAD ...

A relatively small list. The President very much regretted that he had ever put his Press Secretary on it.

“Calm down, Stan. And tell me what it is. And if it's the results of some kind of poll, I want you to march right out of here and—”

“It's not that, sir! It's General Frazetta! She's gone berserk!”

The President sat up in bed and frowned at Stan. “Berserk? My little Jessica, berserk? What's she done—” He smiled. “Gone and built another island?”

“She's conducting a renegade military operation in Arkansas! She's using Army Rangers and helicopters to attack some kind of church group!”

The President frowned. “Sounds serious.”

“The Attorney General tried to reach you earlier, but he's not on the list to get you out of bed. He's mad enough to spit. He called me—I was in my office in the Executive Wing— and he practically chewed my ear off. Civil rights violations, abuse of power, separation of Church and State— my God, what a fiasco. I came right over.”

The President considered Jessica Frazetta. Energetic, enthusiastic, overachieving. Sexy in a spunky, girl-next-door sort of way. And short. Really short.

He pictured her in a helicopter, spewing leaden death upon the citizens of Arkansas. He pictured her grinning as she did so. The thought of it made him smile.

“Any casualties?” he said.

“Several dead, both Army and civilian. My God, sir, how do we spin this?”

The President lay back in his bed and pulled his covers up to his chin. “It's a no-brainer,” he said.

“Sir?”

“We absolutely and categorically support General Frazetta's actions.”

“
Sir
!”
Stan was flabbergasted.

“Think about it, Stan. I appointed her to her present position. I was with her on her island, just a few days ago, shaking her hand and telling the world how wonderful she was. Implying that she'd saved the entire South from radiation poisoning. She's in an absolutely critical position— she's made herself damn near indispensable. I
have
to support her.”

“But— this fiasco—”

The President closed his eyes. “It's not a fiasco
yet.
Right now it's a brave and courageous action taken in defense of civilian lives.” The President smiled. “If it turns out to be a fiasco
later,
if she's really bungled it, then we'll say she misled us and cut her off at the knees.”

There was a moment of silence. “Yes, sir,” Stan said.

“Like I said, a no-brainer. Turn out the lights when you leave, Stan.”

“Yes, sir.”

The President heard Stan's feet crossing the room, and then the lights went out and the door swung softly shut.

The President sighed and tucked the covers up to his ears. He tried to remember the dream he was having.

Bread, he remembered. It was about bread.

*

A pair of Hueys throbbed away into the rising sun, carrying Rails Bluff's wounded. Including the Reverend Dr. Calhoun, who had been gut-shot two days ago, who had been in a coma for some time, but for whom— incredibly— no one in charge had ever thought to call a physician. Crazy, Jessica thought. The man would rather die than let anyone know about his little operation here.

Fanatics. Jessica and her people were going to have to be very careful.

“Everyone gets patted down for weapons!” Jessica ordered. “When each is done, line them up on the road. Tell them rations and fresh water are coming!”

“O Lord!” cried a gangly red-headed man among the refugees. “O Lord, let me die with Brother Frankland! Let me pay for my sins!” The other refugees had cleared a space around him, looked at him with sidelong glances.

“O Lord! Take me now! I can't be saved without Brother Frankland!”

“Who the hell is that?” Jessica asked. “Another preacher?”

One of the grim-faced Ranger officers looked up. “He's been like that ever since the shooting. He keeps saying he was a pornographer and that he should die.” He gave the man a grim look. “I think the others are good and sick of listening to him, but we can't shut him up.”

Jessica rubbed her forehead over her injured eye. “Just make sure he doesn't try to kill himself,” she said.

The camp was going to be a colossal administrative nightmare. Sorting Frankland's henchmen from the mere bystanders, and sorting the henchmen who had broken the law from those who hadn't, and in the meantime feeding the hungry and doctoring the sick— the legal issues alone, she suspected, were enough to keep several grand juries busy for years.

Officers hopped to carry out her instructions. Jessica rubbed her forehead over her damaged left eye while she reached into a pocket to pull out her Iridium cellphone.

She dialed Pat.

“Yes?” he answered at once. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I came through it.”

“We were listening to the radio. Frankland had just started this new rant, but it went on for only a couple minutes, and then we lost the signal. So I figured that the Rangers showed up right then. How'd it go?”

“It went about...” She looked around at the stunned refugees, the burning radio station, the dead Rangers in their body bags. “About as well as we could rationally have hoped,” she finished.

“That doesn't sound too good,” Pat said.

“No,” Jessica said. “No, I wouldn't call it good. It was the smallest and least destructive of a whole series of possible catastrophes, and that's all the good you can say about it.”

“I'm glad you came through it okay.”

Jessica turned, pulled her rain cape over her head, hunched away from the nearest soldiers. “Pat,” she said, “I need you to make a phone call for me. I need you to call an ophthalmologist— probably one in Jackson— and make an emergency appointment. ASAP.”

“Okay.” Uncertainly.

“I need for you not to be overheard doing this.” She bit her lip. “Pat— the appointment's for me.”

Concern rasped Pat's voice. “Was there a fight? Did you get hit?”

“It's that shiner you gave me. I've been seeing flashes and ...” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I've lost some vision in my left eye. I think it was the helicopter ride, it must have shaken something loose.”

“My God, Jessie.” Pat was thunderstruck. “My God, you've got to get here
now.”

“I can't. Things are a mess, and— look, you just make that appointment and let me know when I have to be there. And
don't tell anyone.
Because if the Army finds out, they're going to pull me off this job faster than you can spit.”

There was a pause before Pat replied. “Are you sure that wouldn't be a good thing?”

Jessica clenched her teeth. “Everything's fucked up, okay?” she said. “Everything I've done has been destroyed or compromised or made a mess of. All I've been able to do is
watch.
I'm not leaving this job till I have a win, okay?”

“Yes,” Pat said. “Yes. I understand.”

“Make that call, okay? Take care of this for me.”

“Right away.”

“Good. Good. Because I need this.”

“I love you, Jessie.”

Jessica felt some of the tension ease from her taut-strung body. “I love you too, Pat.”

She turned off the cellphone and pulled the rain cape off her head. The air smelled sweet, of rain and the grassy meadow.

Helicopters throbbed on the horizon, bringing in a company of military police, who would over the next day or two replace the Rangers and Jessica's engineers, leaving them free for other duties.

Jessica hoped to hell she wouldn't be blind by then.

*

Jason rubbed Arlette’s arms, the friction of his palms warming the gooseflesh brought on by the clammy dawn. “Thanks,” Arlette said in a small voice, and shivered. Jason wanted to put his arms around her, hold her close, keep her warm against him. But though he had huddled with her through the storm, flesh to flesh, in the tiny cockpit, so close that he could feel the chill cold of her thigh alongside his, smell the warmth of her breath beneath the improvised plastic rain canopy, still he did not quite dare to put his arms around her.

Not with Nick and Manon there, looking at him with weary, half-resentful eyes, as if they were on the verge of politely asking him to leave.

“Come here, baby,” Nick said to Arlette. “Let me get you warm.”

Arlette shifted across the little cockpit to sit on the edge of the cockpit next to her father. Nick began rubbing her bare arms, her back. Arlette sighed gratefully against his warmth. A pang of envy throbbed through Jason’s heart.

Arlette sneezed. “Scat,” her mother said.

“Thank you, Momma.”

Arlette sneezed again.

“Scat,” her parents said in unison.

Nick caught Jason’s puzzled look. “‘Scat’ is Arkansas for ‘Gesundheit,’” he said.

Jason nodded. “I kind of figured that out.”

He rose stiffly to his feet from his perch on the edge of the cockpit, and gazed about at the fog-shrouded morning. Drops of water pattered down from the dark cypress trees, almost a rainstorm in themselves. The trees, standing on their thick stilt-legs and hung with vines and moss, were ungainly shadows barely visible through the mist. Some had fallen in the quake and lay like dead giants in the water, and elsewhere cypress roots, shorn off by tectonic force, stood in clumps like forlorn soldiers lost on a battlefield. Jason stepped up onto the wet front deck, looked down at the still, dark water, at his reflection fragmented by ripples. All the ripples were from the falling water, he realized. There wasn’t so much as a breath of wind.

Hunger burned in his stomach. “What do we do?” he said.

“Get some
food,”
Manon said. “It’s been two nights since we ate.”

“We need to figure out where we are,” Nick said. “The river’s to the east of here, generally— maybe north or south is closer, but east will get us there— but in this fog we can’t tell where east is.”

“So we just
sit
here?” Manon said. “In the fog? And starve?”

“If you have a better idea,” Nick said, “I would like to hear it.”

“You should have planned better,” Manon said. “You should have made sure that we had food with us when we got away from the camp.”

“I wasn’t the one who worked in the kitchens,” Nick said. “You didn’t put anything away?”

“Can we not argue over this?” Arlette demanded in a loud voice. “Can somebody tell me why we’re arguing?”

The argument had the bitter taste of familiarity to Jason.
They sure sound like a family,
he thought.
Arguing about all the things they can’t change.

That was his family, too. What he remembered most about his family was the arguments. That and the long, terrible silences that followed the arguments, and the long absences when his father would vanish for weeks at a time, working eighteen hours a day in his office.

Nick’s family seemed to be entering one of those familiar glacial silences. Jason rubbed the chill out of his upper arms.

“We could try to find some cattail,” he said. His voice had a strange, hollow ring in the clammy mist. “Or some— what is it?— pokeweed?”

His voice vanished into the mist. The silence enveloped him. No one bothered to acknowledge his words.

He dropped to sit on his heels on the foredeck, hunkered against the tendrils of misery he felt floating around him, dank and clammy, like the mist.

Jason looked up for a moment as he noticed that one of the strange-looking cypress trees, standing tall on its knees in the flood, was moving along his line of vision. He looked up and found himself staring at the range of twelve feet or so into the beady eyes of a cormorant, one of a dozen who occupied the tree’s lower branches— black, sinister silhouettes that sat in the trees as motionless, and as alien, as Easter Island statues, sentinels standing guard over unknown country.

Surprise brought an exclamation to Jason’s lips. The cormorants didn’t react, didn’t even blink.