Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic
His mom’s car, he saw, was just turning off the highway on its way to their house.
He turned again and climbed steadily to the top of the mound. An old pumpkin oak stood on the mound’s verge. Jason saw that it had been struck by lightning. Part of the trunk was scorched black, limbs were splintered and bare of leaves, and much of the crown had burned away, but the oak had somehow survived the sky’s onslaught. New shoots were sprouting out of the burned part, looking frail in the sunlight, but waving their leaves proudly.
There were some bundles of dried flowers laid before the tree, Jason observed, among the tangled roots, and the remains of incense cones. His mother had made offerings here, though he could not say whether they had been to the tree’s burgeoning life or to the spirits of dead Atlanteans.
The mound was thoroughly forested, and the view was largely blocked by the crowns of trees that grew on the steep slopes. Jason made his way to a little cleared space, where he found trampled grass and a used condom. Courting couples, he guessed, came up here to watch the sunset. He felt a sudden flush of distaste for the latex object, and he kicked it away, then reached into his pocket for the eyepiece to the scope.
There was nothing to rest the Astroscan on, so Jason just let it hang from the shoulder strap while he put his eye to the rubber eyepiece. He turned the scope on his own home, and through the back window he could clearly see his mother in the light of the kitchen, drinking a glass of energized water while frowning and contemplating something beyond the edge of the windowframe— Jason realized after a few seconds that she was looking into the open refrigerator, presumably trying to make up her mind what to have for dinner.
And then Jason realized that the image was, for a change, rightside-up. He wondered about that, until he realized that he was standing with the telescope under one arm and he was bending over it, head hanging down, to put his eye to the eyepiece. The image seemed rightside-up because his
head
was upside-down.
The ripping engine noise of an ATV sounded in the distance. Jason took his eye from the scope, and saw Muppet’s little green vehicle racing down the levee with Muppet bent over the handlebars. Behind, throwing up dust, was a Cabells Mound police car, lights flashing. Though Muppet had cranked the ATV’s throttle as far as it would go, the car, following behind, seemed only to be loitering.
“Asshole Eubanks,“ Jason said. “You’re not even in your jurisdiction, damn it!“
He bent his head and tried to focus the scope on the top of the levee. With more luck than skill he managed to catch Muppet in the scope’s image. He saw the green helmet turn, look over his shoulder at the car following so easily behind, and then glance down the slope of the levee, toward the cotton field below.
Yeah,
Jason thought. He could almost read his friend’s mind.
Go for it.
He saw Muppet’s gloved hand twist the throttle, heard the change in engine pitch that came with the shift in gears. And then the ATV rolled off the top of the levee, accelerating for the field below, where the car might not follow.
“Go!“ Jason shouted. “Run for it!“
The ATV raced down the levee’s flank. The police car slowed, hesitated. Above the chainsaw rip of the ATV’s engine Jason heard an eerie, collective howl, as if all the dogs in the world were crying in pain. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.
And then the world rose and hit him on the chin.
NINE
A report prevailed in town yesterday, that a part of the town of Natchez had been sunk by an Earthquake, and that four thousand persons perished.
—
We trust that this report will prove to be unfounded; but if such a deplorable circumstance has taken place, it could not have been on the morning of the 16th December, as a letter dated on that date at Natchez, and published some time since at the city of Washington, says “A considerable shock of an Earthquake was felt here last night,” without adding anything further...
Charleston, Jan. 24, 1812
They were late in getting started because Viondi needed to pick up something to deliver to one of his relatives in Mississippi. What the object turned out to be was a large silver samovar, over two feet tall, tossed casually in a cardboard box in Viondi’s trunk, next to another cardboard box that held Viondi’s clothes and toilet articles. Nick put his soft-sided suitcase and his satchel in the trunk next to the boxes.
“A samovar?” Nick said. “What’s your family doing with a samovar?”
“Is that what it’s called?” Viondi shrugged. “No idea how we got it, brother. You can ask Aunt Loretta when you meet her. We use it to make tea and shit.”
“And what happened to your suitcase? Why’s your stuff in a box?”
“I loaned my suitcase to Dion.” Dion was one of Viondi’s sons. “But he was living with his girlfriend, and when she moved out, she packed her stuff into the suitcase and never gave it back. And she and Dion don’t talk to each other no more, so odds are I won’t ever see my suitcase again.”
Nick looked at Viondi. “It’s a complicated family you’ve got, Viondi.”
Viondi grinned at him through his bushy beard.
“All
families are complicated.”
He slammed the trunk with his big hands, mashing the cardboard box of clothes. “You want to drive?”
Nick shrugged. “Might as well.”
“She won’t bother.” The loud voice of a well-dressed white businessman cut across from the sidewalk, talking to another businessman. “The nigger who’s right? No way.”
Nick hunched for a moment, anger kindling in his soul at the slur that just flew in from nowhere, and then he realized that what the man had actually said was, “She won’t bother to figure who’s right.” And he tried to relax, but the carefree moment was gone.
He looked at Viondi, and could tell from his expression that he had processed the random words the same way Nick had, and had then made the same correction.
Shit, Nick thought. You were always ready for it. Always braced for bigotry until sometimes you heard it where it didn’t exist. No wonder so many black people die of hypertension.
“Give me the keys,” Nick said.
The keys to the Buick spun glittering through the air. Nick caught them on his palm, opened the door, slid into the leather seat.
The car still smelled new.
Viondi jumped into the shotgun seat and picked up a satchel of tapes. “What you want to listen to?”
Nick narrowed his eyes as he gazed over the wheel at the busy street in front of him. “The blues,” he said.
Viondi looked at him. “You got some more bad news?” he asked.
“Heard from Lockheed on Friday,” he said. “I didn’t get the job.”
“Sorry, man. That’s bad.”
Nick started the car.
“You got any more places to apply?”
Nick shook his head. “Not for the kind of work that I do.”
“There’s all sorts of engineers, though, right? I mean, you can get a job in another field?”
“Yeah. Maybe. But I’m about fifteen years out of date for anything but what I’ve been doing.”
Viondi thought for a moment. “You get back from seeing your girl,” he said, “we’ll talk. I’ll get you some work.”
“I don’t know anything about plumbing.”
Viondi’s laugh boomed out in the car. “Nick, you an
engineer
! You don’t think you can learn
plumbing?
Only two things you got to know about plumbing. The first is that shit runs downhill, and the second is that payday’s on Friday.”
A reluctant laugh rolled up out of Nick. “Yeah, okay,” he said.
“A man sends his daughter to France, that man needs a job.”
Nick sighed. “I know,” he said.
“Professor Longhair’s what you need,” Viondi said. He slotted in a tape. “Let’s hear a little of that N’Yawlins music, get that Louisiana sound in your soul.”
So they listened to Professor Longhair on their way out of St. Louis, and as they headed south on I-55 they followed it with Little Charlie and the Nightcats, Koko Taylor, and Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows. They avoided the Swampeast by crossing into Illinois at Cape Girardeau, the silver bridge vaulting them over a brown, swollen Mississippi that was packed high between the levees and walls. Even from high above, on the bridge, the slick, glittering river looked fast, deep, and dangerous.
The old town of Cairo was decaying gently behind its tall concrete river walls. Viondi took over the driving because he wanted to stop at a barbecue place he remembered, and he drove around the shabby downtown area for twenty minutes, but the restaurant had closed or he couldn’t find it, so they got some burgers and crossed the Ohio into Kentucky. They followed Highway 51 through Fulton into Tennessee, and then south through Dyersburg and Covington. And as they approached the homeland of the blues, Viondi’s music drifted back in time, a connection to the heat and toil and sadness of the Delta, all the horrible old history, shackles and cotton fields, mob violence and the lash. Lonnie Johnson. Son Seals. Victoria Spivey. Robert Johnson.
“My granddad came north up this road,” Viondi said. “Highway 61 out of the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, then 51 north on his way to Chicago.”
“That’s the way a lot of people went,” Nick said. “My mother’s people came north that way.”
“North to the Promised Land. Get away from the Bilbos and the coneheads. And what they got was South Chicago.” Viondi shook his head. “I remember driving down with my family during the summers to see all the relatives we left behind. All the old folks, still in Friars Point. The backseat all packed with kids and packages and the smell of food.”
They carried their food, Nick knew, because black people could never be sure if restaurants would serve them. And even after segregation ended, the habit of carrying food along continued.
Nick’s stomach rumbled. He found himself wishing there was a full hamper on the backseat.
“You still got people there?” Nick asked.
“A
few. All working for Catfish Pride.”
“And one of them owns a samovar.”
“Aunt Loretta isn’t a relative, she’s a used-to-be in-law. She’s kin to Darrell’s momma.” Viondi smiled. “She’ll put us up tonight. You’ll see.” He lifted his sunglasses, looked at Nick out of the corner of one eye. “You getting hungry?”
“Yeah. That burger didn’t last. Maybe we can get something in Memphis.”
“I know a place that’s closer.”
Nick sighed. “Sure we can find it?”
Viondi dropped his sunglasses back on his nose and laughed. “Let’s check it out. You don’t want to eat now, we’ll get some takeout.”
The restaurant was open, an old ramshackle seafood place that loomed above the Hatchie north of Garland, gray weathered clapboards and mossy shakes on the roof. Nick and Viondi ate fish, cole slaw, greens, a bottle of Bud apiece, then stepped out onto the dense heat of the late afternoon and looked down at the thick, slow river, swollen by the backwash of the Mississippi. Nick felt an unaccustomed contentment easing his strung-wire muscles, and he touched the little box in his shirt pocket, the diamond necklace he had bought for Arlette.
Tomorrow he’d give it to her. He imagined her eyes shining.
Tomorrow.
*
Shadows were starting to lengthen. Nick got behind the wheel and crunched away down the gravel drive. “I can get us to Memphis from here,” Viondi said. “We don’t have to backtrack. Just turn right.” He slotted a Lonnie Mack tape as Nick made the turn. “My token white guy,” he said.
They drove down a winding two-lane blacktop. There were few buildings, and no people. Pines clustered thick on all sides.
Lonnie Mack’s voice grated from the car’s speakers.
Viondi adjusted the seat to recline more, leaned back with his hands pillowed on his stomach. The bottle of beer had made him drowsy. “So,” he said, “what do you call a whore with a runny nose?”
Nick looked at him suspiciously. “What?”
“Full.”
Viondi’s laugh boomed out in the car. Nick shook his head. “That’s the third most disgusting joke you’ve told today,” he said. Lonnie Mack’s guitar stung the air.
The car took a leap, left the road for a second, and Nick’s eyes shot to the road, his hands clenching on the wheel. Had they just blown a tire? Hit something?
Nick looked into the rearview mirror to see if there was a dead animal in their wake, but there was nothing.
The Olds made a sudden lurch to the left, then to the right. Blown tire, then. Nick’s foot left the accelerator.
“What happened?” Viondi said, sitting bolt upright.
Nick looked up in surprise as he saw that the pines on either side of the road were leaping, branches waving madly as if in a high wind. Then one of the trees ahead on the right
exploded
— there was a puff of bark and splinters partway up, as if it had been hit with an artillery shell, and the top half of the tree tipped, began to fall toward the road.
“Lookout!”
Viondi shouted, one big hand reaching for the wheel.
Nick flung the Olds to the left and stomped the accelerator. He felt himself punched back in his seat as the car took off. Splinters spattered off the windshield. Viondi gave a yell and leaned toward Nick as he tried to get away from the tree that was about to crash through his window. Nick’s heart pounded in his ears.
Boughs banged on the trunk as the tree crashed to the ground just behind the car.
“She’s a natural disaster!”
sang Lonnie Mack.
“What’s going on?” Viondi shouted.
Nick tried to get the car into the middle of the road. Trees shot by on either side, and suddenly they were in a clear space, green soybeans in rows on either side of the road. Nick took his foot off the accelerator. Nothing could fall on them here.
And then the earth cracked across, right in front of them, a crevasse ten feet across. Nick yelled and slammed on the brake.
The last words he heard were
natural disaster,
and then the Olds pitched into the crack.
*
The choir mourned softly in the great space of the National Cathedral. Judge Chivington lay in state in his great mahogany coffin, and around him was a golden pool of light cast by floodlights overhead. Television cameras hunched inconspicuously in the cathedral’s darker recesses. The President sat in the front pew, with the First Lady on one side and the judge’s daughter, her husband and children, on the other.
The stock market, he was given to understand, was going to hell in a handcart. The Fed chairman’s bizarre smile of the previous week had been analyzed and, probably, laid down to indigestion. The G8 summit was going to fall flat, all the President’s initiatives going the way of
all
the President’s initiatives, and his mark on history would be that of a caretaker, a Grover Cleveland or a Gerald Ford, someone fated to occupy the President’s Office in between the crises that made or tested greatness.
Damn it, Chivington,
he mentally addressed the coffin,
why did you have to leave? Why now?
A
shudder ran through the pew beneath him, and the President looked up, wondering if a big truck had just passed. He felt an unease in his inner ear.
The voice of the choir dimmed— the President saw chorister eyes glancing around—and then the choral director gestured emphatically, getting his crew back in hand, and the massed harmonies strengthened. The President felt a strange vibration in the palm of his hand where it was gripping the pew.
From overhead there was a chime. It hung in the air for a long moment, producing a discord in the choral sound below. Another chime rang out, a deep metallic bellow.
The President felt the First Lady’s gloved hand close on his arm, and he heard her whisper in his ear. “What’s going on?”
He shook his head. Another peal sounded. The choir’s voice faltered again.
The President looked up in surprise. The cathedral bells were ringing, softly at first, then with greater and greater insistence.
“Can they turn those off?” the First Lady hissed.
The President shook his head again. This wasn’t a regular bell peal, the sounds were too random. Something else was happening.
Another shudder ran through the building. Near the catafalque, a stand of media lights tottered and then fell with a crash. The choristers were singing as loud as they could to cover the growing chaos.
In wonder the President gazed upward as the bells sounded, ringing as if they were mourning the end of a world.
*
The fairest opportunity that was presented (to our knowledge) of judging of its force and direction, was from an ostrich egg which was suspended by a string of about a foot in length from a first floor ceiling, which was caused to oscillate at least four inches from point to point.
We
are informed that the steeple of the State House, which is supposed to be 250 feet in height, vibrated at least 6 or 8 feet at the top, and the motion was perceptible for 8 or 10 minutes. A number of clocks were stopped, and the ice in the river and bay cracked considerably. Some persons, who were skaiting, were very much terrified, and immediately made for the shore. In the lower part of the city it appears to have been most forcible, some people abandoning their homes, for the purpose of seeking safety in the open air.
Annapolis, Jan. 23,1812
Marcy, in response to the tourist’s question, was about to explain that the Westward Expansion Memorial was an international competition open to everybody, but at that moment she heard a strange roaring sound, like all the cattle in the stockyards had broken loose and were climbing the monument’s stairs. She gave a look to Evan, her colleague, to see if there was something wrong with the north tram. No, the sound wasn’t coming from there.