The Rift (29 page)

MARS was shorthand for military units under the authority of the Department of Defense. The President nodded and said, “Very good.”

“We are contacting the regional phone companies. During a disaster of this scope, the phone lines are often jammed with calls from outside the area trying to discover if their friends and relatives are all right. This can prevent genuine emergency calls from going through. So we are asking the phone companies to close down long-distance service from outside the area. People in the disaster area will be able to call
out,
and they will be able to call each other and emergency services, but those from outside will not be able to call into the area unless they are calling on official business.”

The President nodded again.

“My office has been trying to contact General Breedlove, our Defense Coordinating Officer, who is the military gentleman responsible for coordinating FEMA’s teams with those of MARS. But he is on a fishing vacation in Arkansas, which is one of the affected areas, and may be out of communication for some time. Perhaps you, Mr. President, or some other person in a position of authority, will take it upon yourself to appoint a Supported Commander-in-Chief to manage the deployment of our civilian/military Joint Task Forces?”

There was a moment before the President realized that this was his cue to speak. Lipinsky’s labored rhythms had a certain hypnotic effect, and the President had been lulled into a near-trance.

“I’ll consider that when General Shortland arrives,” the President said. “I want his advice on any military matters.”

Lipinsky nodded. “Very good, sir. I must also ask you to appoint a Federal Coordinating Officer for each affected state. The FCOs will travel to each state and coordinate state, local, and federal disaster response.”

“I presume you have recommendations?”

Lipinsky signaled to one of his aides, who came forward and opened a briefcase. “I have taken the liberty of making up a list of candidates that I consider suitable.”

The President ground his teeth as he took a copy of the list and reached for his reading glasses.

Bureaucracy, he thought. You couldn’t do anything without the bureaucracy. Everything had to be crammed into organization charts, boxes, lists, accounts, departments, labeled with acronyms, then staffed by bureaucrats who used other acronyms as their titles.

A major disaster would take all those neat organizational charts and tear them into shreds. But he had to deal with them anyway.

What was the choice? Particularly now? The President could stand on his desk and scream, “Everyone help those people!”, and people would probably try to do their best, but unless the efforts were organized and directed by all those people with the acronyms, little good would result.

And so the President resigned himself to his duty. He consulted with Lipinsky, appointed his FCOs, and once General Shortland appeared, the President appointed a Supported CINC to handle MARS deployments via the AMC and USTRANSCOM. Then SAAMs could be tasked to deliver US&R teams and other JTOs to affected areas. USACE personnel trained in Basic and Light US&R were placed on alert. Attempts were made to contact SCOs in their individual states. DOMS established a CAT in the Army Operations Center. USTRANSCOM SAAMs were tasked to deliver FCOs into the field.

And all along, information kept arriving as to the scope of the crisis. Memphis and St. Louis had been, apparently, flattened. Parts of Chicago were on fire. Little Rock was hard hit. Bridges, roadways, airports, and railroads were out. Even large military units seemed to have dropped off the map.
Millions
might well be homeless.

And almost all the military air missions had to be rescheduled. All airfields in the quake areas had been destroyed, and fixed-wing aircraft couldn’t land. SAAMs— Special Airlift Assignment Missions, for those who lived outside the world of acronyms— had to be landed at the nearest intact airports, and the rescue teams, and their equipment, reassigned to helicopters.

Selected Reserve units were mobilized— engineers to rebuild runways and other vital transport, signal units, logistics commands, supply, transport, plus ground units to provide them with security. National Guard had already been called up by the governors of the quake-ravaged states.

At the insistence of the National Security Advisor, the entire U.S. military was put on alert. Terrorists or other enemies, he warned, might try to take advantage of the situation.

In the end, the President was thankful for the acronyms. They kept him from thinking about the
people,
the people trapped in rubble or cringing from the flames or watching the flood waters rise slowly above their children’s knees ...

“We have the word from the Earthquake Information Center, sir,” Lipinsky said around midnight. “The quake tops out at eight point nine on the Richter scale.”

The President blinked. “That’s not so bad, is it?” he said. “I gave a speech in Monterey in ’98, I think it was, and there was a five point five. Just a big bang and it was over. And eight point nine, that’s, what, not even twice as large.”

Lipinsky’s bland blue eyes didn’t so much as twitch. “The Richter Scale isn’t numerical, sir,” he said. “It’s logarithmic. A three on the Richter scale isn’t half again powerful as two, it’s
ten times
as powerful. And a four isn’t twice as powerful as two, it’s a
hundred times
the size of a two. So the 8.9 in Missouri is therefore—” the blue eyes turned inward for just a half-second “—one thousand four hundred times the strength of the quake you experienced in Monterey.”

Numerals swarmed through the President’s mind.
One thousand four hundred times
...

Lipinsky went on. He looked solemn. “This is the worst the geosphere can do to us, Mr. President. There’s only one earthquake in human history that compares with it, and that was in China four thousand years ago.”

The worst natural disaster since the Bronze Age, the President thought.
And on my watch.

“I need to get out there,” he said. “I need to get into the field myself.”

And, as his press secretary would no doubt remind him, he would need to be
seen
in the field.

The Secret Service would go nuts. The presidential bodyguard wouldn’t want the President anywhere near a catastrophe on this scale. Assassins were the least of their worries, not when an aftershock could drop the Gateway Arch on him.

“Sir.” One of his aides, holding a phone. “The chairman of the Federal Reserve would like a meeting with you tomorrow, as early as possible.”

The President stared, a new realization rolling through his mind.

He had completely forgot that all this was going to have to be
paid for.

*

Jason could feel the speed of the boat increase, hear the roaring ahead. He had been drowsing in the front seat, leaning forward on the boat’s useless wheel, but the grinding of the boat over some debris had woken him, and once awake he sensed a change. The wind was blowing much more steadily, a cool fresh breeze with the scent of spray in it. The black river was moving fast, raising a chop that slapped water against the sides of the boat. In the fitful starlight Jason could see debris crowding the water, boxes and bottles and lumber, limbs and whole trees. In the dark Jason couldn’t tell where the bank was, but he sensed it was close.

It was as if the river had spread itself out into a lake. And now someone had pulled a cork on the bottom of the lake, and it was all draining out at once.

The roaring sound increased. Water sloshed around his ankles as Jason stood on the pitching boat, holding on the wheel for support as he peered downriver.

A cold fist clamped on Jason’s throat.

Ahead, even through the darkness, he could see the white water, the white-crested chop leaping higher than his head.

*

A gentleman who was near the Arkansas river, at the time of the first shock in Dec. last, states, that certain Indians had arrived near the mouth of the river, who had seen a large lake or sea, where many of their brothers had resided, and had perished in the general wreck; that to escape a similar fate, they had traveled three days up the river, but finding the dangers increase, as they progressed, frequently having to cut down large trees, to cross the chasms in the earth, they returned to the mouth of the river, and from them this information is derived.

Extract from a letter to a gentleman in Lexington,

from his friend at New Madrid,

dated 16th December, 1811

In the hot Tennessee night, Nick could see the lights of Memphis glowing on low clouds ahead, an angry red. At least Nick
hoped
they were lights and not fire.

He hoped, but hope was fading. He’d already seen too much.

As he and Viondi trudged toward Memphis, they began to pass into areas with a larger population, but they passed nothing but ruin. Every house was flattened. Sometimes the homeowners stood numbly in front of their shattered dwellings, or made vague attempts to fetch belongings from the fallen structures. Some of them waved as Nick and Viondi passed. Some were injured, but most of the injuries seemed light.

The badly injured ones, Nick figured, never made it out of their houses. Once Nick and Viondi heard someone calling from a shattered storefront, some kind of clothing store. They dug into the ruin, throwing bricks and ruined clothes behind them into the street, and found an elderly Asian man with a beam fallen across his legs.

There was no way to move that beam. All they could do was promise that they’d contact the police or somebody to help him.

At least the storefront wasn’t on fire, Nick thought. Many of the buildings were in flames.

Nick didn’t want to think about people who might have lain in those ruins waiting for the fire to reach them, calling for help that never came. By the time Nick and Viondi passed by, the buildings were already blazing. Anyone inside was already long dead.

The road was often blocked by fallen trees or by crevasses, and every vehicle on it had been abandoned. Furious rainstorms pelted down on them, and they plodded on wearing windbreakers dug out of their luggage. Lightning boomed overhead even when it wasn’t raining. When night came on, there were no traffic lights, no street lights, no lights at all but the stars and the flare of burning structures. Nick saw no police, no fire engines, no ambulances. Everyone out here was on his own.

And then, just ahead, Nick saw the lights of a police cruiser, its flashers illuminating the rubble that was once a brick Mobil station. The Mobil sign, dark, was still intact on its metal pole, and pulsed faintly, blue and red, in the flashing police lights. The Mobil station itself was a pile of rubble. Standing by the open door of the car was a state trooper talking into a microphone.

“Hey,” Viondi said, and took a closer grip on his soggy cardboard box. He squinted ahead at the state trooper. “And the man’s a brother, too. Looks like we finally got lucky. I’d sure as hell hate to walk up to a cracker cop on a night like this.”

*

The dead boy kept staring at him with a face that looked like Victor’s. And the old man—he didn’t want to think about the old man.

Eukie James was trapped. He’d figured that out. He was trapped and he couldn’t help Victor or Emily or Showanda or anybody.

“Damn it?” he said into the mike. “What was that about Latimer Street?”

The whole damn city was on fire. That was clear enough. All a man had to do was look at that glow on the clouds.

He thought about Victor and tears came burning to his eyes.

“Where was that?” Eukie demanded of the mike. “Where was that damn looting?”

And the dead boy kept staring at him with his son’s eyes. Reminding him that there wasn’t anything he could do.

It was usually quiet on these back roads. The worst thing he’d ever seen since he’d been patrolling this area were some car accidents where nobody was badly hurt, even if a lot of metal got bent. His presence helped to keep the speed down, and people waved at him in a friendly way when he drove past.

And now this. Nuclear war or something, Eukie figured, somebody finally pushed the button. Some asshole shot a rocket at Memphis, and the whole place had gone up in fire.

And there was nothing Eukie could do to help his family, who were probably right smack in the middle of that— what was it called?—
firestorm.

He couldn’t get to them. A whole forest of trees had fallen across the road both in front of him and behind, and he couldn’t move the patrol car off this little piece of ground. He’d barely avoided a power pole that tried to fall right on the car— there was a big scar on the trunk where it had bounded off. He’d never before thought a public utility would try to kill him.

All that seemed to exist on his little strip of state road was the collapsed Mobil station with its little population of dead people. Eukie had heard the screams from the wreckage as soon as he pulled over to the side of the road after the nuclear strike, or whatever it was. He’d dug through the fallen brick Mobil station, gashing his hands on broken glass, till he’d found the kid, the little black boy with the staring eyes, no more than six years old. But even after he’d dragged the boy out of the rubble and wiped the brick dust from his face and tried to revive him with mouth-to-mouth— even after he’d pounded on the kid’s chest and breathed for him and shouted at the kid to wake up— even after all that, the screams went on, and so Eukie finally worked out that there was someone else trapped in the building.

And then, digging farther into the wreckage, he found the old man, an old white-haired black man in overalls. Maybe he was the kid’s grandpa. All the man could do was stare up with his yellow eyes and scream. He wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t answer Eukie’s questions, all he could do was take another breath and yell. So Eukie grabbed him under the arms and put his back into hauling him out of the wreckage. The old man gave one last full-blooded shriek and then fell limp.

And as soon as Eukie got him clear, he knew why.

The old man had left his legs in the wrecked station. Sliced off by falling glass or something. Eukie fell to the ground in shock when he saw the stumps spurting blood. The man just rolled his head to the left and died. Eukie’s hauling him out had completed the partial severing of his legs. Had sliced the arteries and killed him.