Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic
One container was connected by rubber hoses to the engine, and the other was free. Jason took the free container and heaved it onto the gunwale, then lowered it to balance it precariously on the trailer fender. He jumped off the boat and managed to catch the jerrican just as it started to topple over. He took it in both hands and waddled across the yard with his knees banging into the container at every step.
He was happy to be distancing himself from the clatter of the alarm.
While Jason had been exploring, Samuel had finished cutting the padlock free, and he and Arlette had hooked the trailer to the van. “Here’s some gas,” Jason said as he brought the gas to the gate. He tried to squeeze it between the gate and the upright to which it was chained, but failed.
“It’s too heavy to boost over the fence,” he said. “Can you cut a hole in it?”
“I’ve got some wire cutters,” Samuel said.
“There’s another gas can where I found this one. I’ll go get it.” Jason trotted back to the powerboat. While the alarm bell blared through his nerves, he disconnected the gas can from the outboard by feel, lowered it out of the boat, and began to carry it across the equipment-filled yard.
Samuel had cut a modest hole in the wire of the gate, and he was bent over, dragging the jerrican through the gap. He was brightly lit by the headlights of his van. Arlette stood by, watching him. The clamor of the alarm filled the night.
And then a small car— its headlights were off— lunged out of the darkness by the road. Samuel sensed the car’s approach at the last second and turned to face it just as the car drove him into the chain link. Samuel’s arms were thrown out wide as the gate bulged inward beneath the thrusting force of the car, but the chain held and Samuel’s legs were pinned against the mesh by the car grill. He pitched forward from the waist and sprawled across the car’s hood. Arlette watched in stunned surprise, her mouth open in a cry that went unheard beneath the clanging alarm.
Then the driver’s door flung open, and a crop-haired man lunged for Arlette and seized her arm. She tried to wrench free, but he brought his other hand up, with a small pistol. He shoved the barrel into Arlette’s throat, and she froze, her mouth still wide in a frozen scream.
Jason stared at the scene, the heavy plastic container still hanging from his arms. The ringing alarm filled his skull. He couldn’t seem to move. Astonishment and terror froze him to the spot.
The driver was one of the deputies, Jason saw. He remembered seeing the little man during the deputies’ attack yesterday.
The little deputy was shouting at Arlette. Jason couldn’t hear the words over the urgent alarm. But when the deputy swiped Arlette across the face with his little pistol, hot rage surged through Jason’s veins. He dropped the heavy container on the ground and ran for the gate.
The deputy backed Arlette to the side of the van, was pressing her against the driver’s door. Jason crouched behind an old Allison-Chalmers tractor parked near the fence. He saw headlights reflect off the little black gun in the man’s hand, felt helplessness jangle through his mind like the clap of the bell. He looked for a weapon, saw nothing in the darkness.
Jason saw a violent movement, the deputy punching Arlette with the pistol, and he heard Arlette scream over the clamor of the alarm. Jason’s nerves wailed. He clenched his fists. All he had to do, he thought, was get the man to let go of her for just a second.
He climbed the tractor, crossed over the seat and stood on the big rear tire next to the fence. The wind flurried at him, whipped his hair. The deputy was twenty feet away along the fence. He had Arlette pinned to the van with his left hand around her throat; the right hand brandished the pistol in her face. He was turned away from Jason. “Where are they, bitch?” The demand was barely audible above the clattering alarm. “Where are they all hiding?” Arlette cringed away from the pistol. There was blood on her face.
Jason took a giant stride into space, landed on the top rail of the fence. For a moment he balanced wildly, pigeon-toed on the rail, arms spinning like windmill blades, and then he managed to shift one foot and gained a firm purchase. Weird triumph sang through his soul.
Clicked in!
He took one step along the pipe, then another. Then a third. The deputy kept howling questions, prodding Arlette with the barrel of the gun.
Landfakie,
Jason thought as he took another step.
Landfakie and mule-kick the son of a bitch.
The deputy must have seen Jason out of the corner of his eye, because he turned and looked up just as Jason took his last, swift step. Jason pivoted on the rail, saw little pebble irises in the wide, astonished eyes as he hurled himself into space. Jason saw the little gun swing toward him as, spinning in the air, he lashed backward and downward with both feet.
“Run!”
he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Run. Everybody run.
It felt like a giant hand slapping him out of the sky. Suddenly he was on the ground, amid moist grass, teeth rattling from the impact. He’d brought the deputy down, too, because the man was lying there with a half-dazed expression on his face. Arlette stood over them both, staring.
“Run!”
Jason screamed again. He saw the hand and the gun outflung on the grass and launched himself at the weapon, putting his weight on the deputy’s arm. He sank his teeth into the man’s wrist. The flesh had a strange, metallic taste.
The deputy gave a shout and punched Jason in the body with a fist. Agonizing pain crackled along Jason’s nerves. He tried to hang on, but he felt himself growing weaker, weaker with each clang of the alarm, with each impact as the man’s fist hammered into his side. When the arm and the gun slipped out of his grasp at last, it felt like trying to hold flowing water in his two hands.
Concussions slapped at Jason’s ears. He felt himself wince with each shot, felt tears squeezed from his eyes. He couldn’t seem to breathe. Couldn’t breathe at all.
Jason blinked tears away. To his surprise he was looking at the deputy again.
The deputy was lying on the ground. And he was dead, small blank irises staring at the sky from his white, startled eyes.
*
“Well, excuse me, then, General,” the towboat captain barked. “I was told to pick up a barge filled with nuclear waste that had got loose during the quake. Well that’s what I come for, so when I was directed to a barge filled with nuclear waste I picked it up. And now this guy says it was the
wrong
barge of nuclear waste, and acts like it’s my fault.”
The towboat captain was a red-faced man in a baseball cap. His chin bristled with gray unshaven whiskers. He glared at Emil Braun, the power company executive. Braun glared back through his thick spectacles.
“This is the
empty
barge,” Braun said. “Those containers haven’t been filled with waste yet.”
“Why is that
my
fault?” the captain demanded.
“Wait a minute,” Jessica said. “The radwaste is
still missing?”
Emil Braun had been sent by the company to take charge at Poinsett Island in the absence of Larry Hallock. The tow-boat and its captain had been near Poinsett Island before the quake, on their way to retrieve the barge of nuclear waste that had just been unloaded from the Auxiliary Building. On the night of the quake, when the few people remaining on the island had finally realized that the barge was missing, Jessica responded by sending out helicopter patrols to scour the river downstream from the power station. A drifting barge had been located toward morning, and remained in the choppers’ spotlights until the towboat could take it in charge.
Now Emil Braun, having checked the numbers, was assuring everyone that the wrong barge had been rescued.
“The captain picked up the wrong barge,” he told Jessica.
“I picked up the barge y’all
told
me to,” the captain said.
Jessica reached for her cellphone. “Can you give me the numbers of the barge we’re looking for?”
Braun looked at a clipboard filled with computer printout. “You bet,” he said.
Jessica gave the orders for a complete helicopter sweep of the river between Poinsett Island and Baton Rouge. Then she told the towboat captain to get his boat on the river and be prepared to undertake another rescue.
“I picked up the boat y’all told me to,” the captain said. “I don’t got to pick up another till my company gets another contract.”
“You picked up the wrong barge!” Braun insisted. “The contract wasn’t filled!”
“Enough!”
Jessica said in her major general voice.
There was silence. Jessica looked at Braun. “Okay,” she said. “What happens if this radwaste gets into the river?”
Braun licked his lips. “Well, that depends on whether the fuel assemblies get broken or not. The rods are full of little uranium pellets, and those could spill out. And
if
the pellets were from the really hot fuel assemblies that just got removed from the reactor, then there would be a steady source of contamination in the river until the pellets eroded completely. But,” he added judiciously, “that’s not
likely.
I don’t think. Quite frankly, I do not believe any studies have been done in regard to this eventuality.”
Jessica nodded. “So what could happen is somewhere on a scale between nothing at all to radioactive contamination of the lower Mississippi that could go on for years.”
Braun nodded. “Um. I guess.”
Jessica turned to the towboat captain. “This river is under martial law,” she said. “You can contact your company and tell them to generate a new contract if you have to, but contract or not, you’re going after that barge.”
The captain began to speak.
“Don’t make me put a guard on your boat!” Jessica snapped. “And don’t think you can just sail away, because I’m going to be flying right above you, in my own helicopter, until that barge is found and brought under control.”
The captain hesitated, then spoke. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
*
THIRTY-SIX
Previous to my leaving the country I heard that many parts of the Mississippi river had caved in; in some places several acres at the same instant. But the most extraordinary effect that I saw was a small lake below the river St. Francis. The bottom of which is blown up higher than any of the adjoining country, and instead of water it is filled with a beautiful white sand. The same effect is produced in many other lakes, or I am informed by those who saw them; and it is supposed they are generally filled up. A little river called Pemisece, that empties into the St. Francis, and runs parallel with the Mississippi, at the distance of about twelve miles from it, is filled also with sand. I only saw it near its bend, and found it to be so, and was informed by respectable gentlemen who had seen it lower down, that it was positively filled with sand. On the sand that was thrown out of the lakes and river lie numerous quantities of fish of all kinds common to the country.
Narrative of James Fletcher
Jason sat in the cockpit of the bass boat. Midnight-black water hissed along the boat’s chine. Jason had turned his body to port because he’d been wounded in the back and he couldn’t sit properly in the seat, not without agonizing pain. He rested his chin on his left shoulder and upper arm. He tried to breathe, but it wasn’t easy— he had to take shallow, rapid breaths, because deep breathing had become impossible. He just couldn’t seem to expand his diaphragm far enough to take a full breath.
Cypress floated across his line of vision, alien shadows reaching for the sky with moss-wreathed fingers. Stars floated overhead, shone in the still waters of the bayou.
He had been shot, it seems, when he’d jumped onto the deputy. The bullet had gone into his lower back on the right side and come out near the top of his right shoulder. The entrance wound was smallish and the exit wound not much bigger. From the murmured, half-overheard conversations of the grownups, the chief question concerned what the bullet had hit on the way. Probably it had struck a few ribs. The chief question was whether or not it had punctured a lung. Jason’s inability to breathe properly seemed an ominous symptom, though the fact he wasn’t spitting blood seemed cause for optimism.
He could feel Arlette’s hand stroking his head. She was kneeling behind him on the afterdeck. Barring a few cuts and bruises she was all right, had come through it all unharmed.
Her voice came into his ear.
“Ça va?”
“Ça va,”
he said. “Okay.”
The deputy was dead. Still lying on the grass, probably, starlight reflecting in his startled eyes. Samuel had shot him. Samuel hadn’t been killed when the car hit him, he hadn’t even been badly hurt. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, that was all. The chain link had absorbed the force of the hurtling car.
When Samuel had got his wits and breath back, he’d seen Jason fighting with the deputy on the ground. He’d reached for the pistol he wore and got it free of the holster and taken aim and shot the deputy as soon as the little man had wrestled his own gun away from Jason and stood. It gave Samuel a clear shot.
Samuel had got his breath back, but Jason hadn’t. He was in pain and the muscles of his back had swollen hard as iron and he could barely breathe.
And maybe he’d been shot in the lung. Was Jason dying? It was a question that seemed of great interest to the grownups. Jason himself was past thinking about it, though.
The grownups had put the boat in the water. Manon was piloting, and Arlette was aboard, and a man named Bubba who said he’d worked on towboats as a bowman and knew the Mississippi.
They were going to Vicksburg. They were going to Vicksburg to put Jason into a hospital and get help for the refugees in Spottswood Parish.
Moss-shrouded cypress floated past, tall in the water. Stars glittered at their feet.
Jason leaned on the side of the cockpit and tried to breathe.
*
The library smelled of dust and decaying book paper. It was a better fortress than Nick had expected— there were iron grills over the windows, which would certainly keep out unwanted visitors as well as the larger munitions, like tear gas grenades. The front door was solid cypress wood and so invulnerable that the Warriors had been unable to break it down: they’d had to pry off one of the iron grills, go in through a window, and open the door from the inside. The walls were thick concrete, covered with plaster that had partially peeled away in the quakes.
“Keep a lookout,” Nick said. “Two to each window. Nobody show a light.”
He took his own station behind the reassuring oaken solidity of the reference librarian’s desk. In front of him, on the desk, he propped the radio handset he’d taken from the deputy Jedthus. Carefully, wary of the pains in his stiffening body, he lowered himself into the librarian’s padded swivel chair.
He picked up the phone. Nothing. Just as Cudjo had said, the phones were out.
He sat in the chair and glanced around. There had been surprisingly little quake damage to the building. The shelves were metal and bolted to the floor and still standing. A great many books had spilled to the floor, and papers from the librarians’ desks. All the windows were shattered— probably in earlier quakes— but the iron grills would work better than glass to keep out whatever needed keeping out.
There were three different channels on the police radio, which Nick could reach with pushbuttons. He shifted from one to the other, but the sheriff’s deputies kept all their calls on Channel One. There were calls about earthquake damage and injuries, all of which the sheriff relayed to other emergency services, most of which seemed amateurish and improvised. There was chatter about putting up roadblocks around the library, about evacuating people who lived in the neighboring buildings. Nothing whatsoever about sending deputies after the refugees that had fled from the camp.
Nick heard nothing about sending in a negotiator, nothing about trying to find out what Nick and the Warriors actually wanted. Nick wasn’t particularly surprised.
Darkness slowly fell. The library grew full of shadows. Flickering on the wall behind Nick was firelight reflected from the burning police vehicle that Nick had driven onto the front lawn of the library, then set on fire.
Nick didn’t know whether it was a signal, or bravado, or something else. It had just seemed the thing to do.
The other cars were parked closer, nestled right against the library, in case the Warriors decided they needed a fast exit.
“Anyone have a watch?” Nick asked. “What time is it?”
It was after ten thirty. Cudjo, he hoped, had got the refugees well into cover by now. Nick rose from his chair and winced at the pain that shot through his kidney. He hobbled to the front window, but stayed well under cover as he shouted, “We’ll talk! Send somebody to talk to us!”
“What you doing?” said Tareek Hall from somewhere from the depths of the library. “We want to kill those crackers, not talk.”
“Send someone to talk!” Nick shouted out the window. “We want to talk!”
“The fuck we do,” said Tareek.
At least he wasn’t shouting out the window.
Nick turned to Tareek and limped toward him. “I’m going to try to get other people here,” he said. “Someone from the Army, the Justice Department. Major network media.”
“Shit, they’re all part of the conspiracy anyway,” Tareek said.
“If the Army’s part of the conspiracy,” Nick said, “we’ll be dead in an hour or two no matter what we do. We can’t match their firepower for a second. But you don’t know the Army, and I do. I grew up in the Army. And I do not believe they are a part of this.”
“Shit,” said Tareek in disgust. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
Jedthus’s radio began to chatter. Nick limped back to the librarian’s desk to listen. Nick’s offer to talk had been heard and was being reported to Omar, the sheriff. Omar just acknowledged with a “ten-four” and otherwise made no comment.
That was all right, Nick figured. He could wait.
*
Omar looked across the lawn at the Carnegie library from the relative safety of Georgie Larousse’s living room. The smell of the lasagne that the Larousse family had eaten for dinner made his stomach turn over. His head throbbed. He had no idea what to do.
He couldn’t seem to
think.
That was the trouble. All the careful fences he’d built were breaking down, and he didn’t know how to rebuild them.
All Omar had managed to do so far was choke off any attempt to talk to the people inside. But he didn’t know how much longer he could do that. The parish council could decide to overrule him at any time, and he suspected that the only reason they hadn’t was that they were distracted by earthquake repair work.
And he had called in as many local Klansmen that he could get ahold of, people like Ozie Welks, who hadn’t been directly involved with the business at the A.M.E. camp because they’d been looking after their businesses and families in the wake of the disaster. They were armed, reasonably committed, and dangerous so long as they stayed sober, but Omar knew perfectly well that he couldn’t launch them at the library without getting them all massacred.
I had no idea about the deaths at the A.M.E. camp,
he said to himself. Rehearsing his defense.
That must have been Jedthus Carter and those skinhead friends of his. I had no idea who those people were, but Jedthus said they were private security guards and I was so short-handed that I had to employ them.
“How about we gas ’em?” Merle suggested. “Shoot some tear gas in there, then gun ’em when they come out?”
“Grills on the windows,” Omar said.
“Oh.”
Merle seemed surprised. Probably he hadn’t been inside the library since he was in grade school.
An aftershock rattled the shelves in the Larousse kitchen.
Did anyone see me at the A.M.E. camp after the second day following the quake?
Omar thought to himself.
None of your witnesses can put me there. I was dealing with the epidemic at Clarendon that whole time and didn’t have any time to spare to deal with the situation anywhere else.
He considered this defense to himself. It was possible he could get away with it, he thought, if he had the right jury.
Maybe, he thought, maybe it was just time to run for it. Keep things going here as long as he could to guarantee David time to escape, and then follow him over the bayou and away.
“Is there a back door or something?” Merle said. “Is there a basement and a way into it? If we could get someone in there, he could gas the place out before they knew anything about it.”
Omar thought about that one. “Let’s see if we can get the keys from the librarian,” he said.
*
Nick listened to the plot developing over the police radio. He didn’t know whether the sheriff had completely forgotten that his radio security was compromised, or just figured that the car radio Nick used had burned up with Jedthus’s car. In any case it seemed not to have occurred to him that Nick might have taken Jedthus’s handset.
A party was going to creep up to the rear of the building, let themselves into the back door, and start flinging tear gas grenades up the back stair into the library. Then another group would charge the building and shoot down the Warriors as they came staggering out.
It was easy enough to counter the scheme. But as Nick placed his soldiers in the windows and told them to keep alert, he felt sadness drift across for the poor fools who were going to try to storm his stronghold.
They’d even waited for moonrise, so that they could be spotted all that much more easily.
His people saw three figures slipping across the back lawn, aiming at the rear door, and held their fire until they couldn’t miss. A volley of shots boomed out, echoing in the wide space of the library. Nick felt his ears ring. One of the party fled, and the other two lay stretched out on the lawn.
The larger storming party never left their assembly area behind one of the residential homes across from the front of the library. Instead they swarmed into whatever cover they could find and started shooting, a truly impressive amount of fire that crackled through the night, but all completely useless, most of it going into the air or thwacking solidly into the library’s concrete walls.
Poor fire control,
Nick thought. The Warriors fired back, increasing the racket. It required some effort for Nick to get his own people to stop shooting. Eventually the deputies’ fire dwindled away.
No one inside the library had been hurt. The sharp smell of gunpowder stung the air.
Nick asked someone for the time. It was a little after two in the morning.
“We want to talk!” he shouted out a window. “Send someone to talk to us!”
*
Warm night air drifted through the Larousse house. Return fire from the library had knocked out most of the front windows, letting out the air-conditioning. Omar’s headache beat at his temples.
Merle had been killed trying to sneak into the library. Omar felt as if he’d just had his right leg shot out from under him. He didn’t know what to do. Those people in the library, under their ... their general ... were just too heavily armed.
“What I want to do, Omar,” said Sorrel Ellen of the
Spottswood Chronicle,
“is volunteer to talk to those people.”
“No, Sorrel,” said Omar. “No way.”
Sorrel gave his high-pitched laugh. The grating sound sank into Omar’s head like a sharp knife.
“I’m a trained interviewer,” Sorrel insisted. “I can find out what they’re up to.”
“I know what they’re up to,” Omar said. “They’re a bunch of killers. They killed my deputies, and if—” He gave up. “Sorrel, I’m too busy to talk to the press right now,” he said. “I need you to leave the building.”
“But this is your headquarters! Your nerve center! I want to be present at your decisions!”
Omar firmly took Sorrel’s arm and led him to Georgie Larousse’s kitchen door. “Keep your head down as you go,” he said. “Those people are killers.”
And there, as he saw to his deep surprise, he saw Miz LaGrande crossing the lawn and heading in his direction.
“Mrs. Ashenden!” he said.