Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic
The next gust of wind brought a strong chemical sting to his nostrils. What was
in
these barges?
He looked up, saw the short mast planted on the barge in front of him. The mast’s red flag, he saw, was metal, so it would always stay rigid whether there was wind or not. The flag had lettering on it. Jason jumped onto the barge— the chemical smell was stronger now— and approached the flag.
NO SMOKING
NO OPEN LIGHTS
NO VISITORS— EVER
A chill finger touched Jason’s neck. Now he knew why
Michelle S.
had been abandoned by its crew.
The gusting wind backed around to the southeast, and the chemical smell blew strong at him. Fumes raked the back of Jason’s throat. He ran to the side of the barge and peered over the side, into the gap between this barge and the next.
A foul chemical lake lay beneath the barge.
One or more of the barges had broken open during the quake, or when the tow went aground, and had been leaking its cargo ever since. Until this morning the river had carried the stuff away, whatever it was, but now the river had dropped and the noxious mess was pooling on the surface of the tow’s little mud island.
Jason whirled, looked again at the red flag through eyes that stung in the chemical reek.
NO SMOKING
NO OPEN LIGHTS
The barges’ cargo
had
to be explosive. Otherwise the barge wouldn’t be flying the red danger flag. Otherwise the crew wouldn’t have abandoned ship.
NO VISITORS— EVER
Horror ran through Jason’s veins as he thought of his breakfast bacon sizzling in a skillet over a blue propane flame.
He scrambled aft, the southeast gusts blowing the chemical smell past him. He cleared the gap between barges without breaking stride, then leaped from the barge onto the
Michelle S.
in one bound. He dodged around the superstructure and dived into the first door.
He heard the sizzling sound of bacon. Never had he found an ordinary, homely sound so terrifying.
Jason dashed into the galley, past a surprised Nick, and turned off the stove burners. The blue flames fluttered and vanished with a
whuff.
Nick stared at Jason’s terrified expression.
“What is it? What’s going on?”
“We’re going to blow up!” Jason shouted.
“What—?”
Words exploded through Jason’s gasps for breath. “Barges leaking! Chemicals! That’s why the crew ran away!”
Horrified comprehension snapped into Nick’s eyes. “What chemicals?” he asked.
“
Who cares
?”
Jason cried. “Just go outside and
smell
.”
While Nick went out to investigate, Jason ran aft to where
Retired and Gone Fishin’
sat on the mud aft of the towboat. He untied the line securing the bass boat to the stern, and flung it over the side. He lowered himself over the rail, felt the mud squelch to his ankles as he landed. Nearby birds broke for the sky, a fleeing black cloud. Jason slogged to the bows of the bass boat and yanked away the extension cord that was recharging the boat’s batteries. Acrid fumes drifted over him in waves.
Nick appeared on the deck above. “Catch,” he said, and swung out a plastic garbage bag filled with emergency supplies.
Three more bags followed. Jason tossed each into the bass boat. Then Nick rolled over the towboat’s side, tried to lower himself to the mud on the rope, and lost his grip. He tumbled helplessly into the soft ooze. Jason jerked his head away as mud sprayed over him.
“Shit!”
Nick pulled himself free of the sucking mud and staggered to his feet.
Dragging the heavy aluminum boat over the mud flat was a nightmare. Getting traction in the soft mud was nearly impossible, and Nick and Jason often fell. Both were soon covered with ooze. Black birds swarmed around them and mocked them with their calls. Jason gasped for breath as sweat tracked mud over his face. His arms, legs, and back ached, and his brain reeled from chemical fumes.
Finally the bass boat slid into the brown water. Jason and Nick flung themselves aboard. The boat spun lazily as the current caught it. Jason crawled forward to the bow, dropped the trolling motor over the side, and started it, heading directly across the current to get as far away from the tow-boat as he could.
The wind blew fresh air over the boat, and Jason sucked it down gratefully.
Retired and Gone Fishin’
made its way down the river, drifted around a bend. Jason and Nick lay gasping on the fore and afterdecks.
Michelle S.
disappeared behind a screen of trees.
“God damn, God damn,” Nick repeated. “And we had clean clothes an’ shit.”
Jason sat up, turned down the speed of the trolling motor, and tried to wipe mud from his face.
Then a perfect sphere of fire rose from beyond the trees, and burst like a bubble over
Michelle S.
and its barges.
EIGHTEEN
At the Little Prairie, (a beautiful spot on the west side of the Mississippi river about 30 miles from New-Madrid), on the 16th of December last, about 2 o’clock, a.m., we felt a severe concussion of the earth, which we supposed to be occasioned by, a distant earthquake, and did not apprehend much damage. Between that time and day we felt several other slighter shocks; about sunrise another very severe one came on, attended with a perpendicular bouncing that caused the earth to open in many places
—
some eight and ten feet wide, numbers of less width, and of considerable length
—
some parts have sunk much lower than others, where one of these large openings are, one side remains as high as before the shock and the other is sunk; some more, some less; but the deepest I saw was about twelve feet. The earth was, in the course of fifteen minutes after the shock in the morning, entirely inundated with water. The pressing of the earth, if the expression be allowable, caused the water to spout out of the pores of the earth, to the height of eight or ten feet! We supposed the whole country sinking, and knew not what to do for the best. The agitation of the earth was so great that it was with difficulty any could stand on their feet, some could not
—
The air was very strongly impregnated with a sulphurous smell. As if by instinct, we flew as soon as we could from the river, dreading most danger there
—
but after rambling about two or three hours, about two hundred gathered at Capt. Francis Lescuer’s, where we encamped, until we heard that the upper country was not damaged, when I left the camp (after staying there twelve days) to look for some other place, and was three days getting about thirty miles, from being obliged to travel around those chasms.
Narrative of James Fletcher, 1811
The black pillar of smoke that marked the burning
Michelle S.
slowly fell astern. The river was slow and lazy: having spread itself wide beyond its banks, it seemed intent on staying awhile. The surface was less crowded with debris than it had been the previous day: much of the wreckage and timber had caught in the cottonwood and willow tangle that grew in the flood plain between the levees and the river. But there was still enough flotsam in the water to be dangerous, and Jason and Nick kept a watchful eye. When he had scavenged food and other useful supplies from the towboat, Nick had equipped the bass boat with a pair of proper boat hooks, which made it much easier to fend off wreckage.
Jason’s breakfast consisted of some canned pineapple rings from Nick’s emergency cache. He tilted his head back, drank off the sweet syrup, and tossed the empty can over the side. The river received it with a dull splash.
Jasonwatched the can pace the bass boat on its way downstream. The river was his fate, he thought. He kept being thrown up on the shore, but then the river would take him again. He was beginning to develop a superstition about it.
Nick, he saw, sat on the stern deck, his hands dangling over his knees. The older man looked once again like a refugee, borrowed clothes soaked or splashed with mud, face and hair spattered, the newly acquired sandals ruined.
Edge Living, Jason thought. This was
real
Edge Living— no resources, no help from outside, and every second on the brink of extinction. There were people, he thought, out in the Third World he supposed, who lived their whole lives this way. What he had
thought
was Edge Living, the kind he’d celebrated on his posters, was a sick joke compared to the real thing.
Jason managed a grin. “So how’s our
morale
now, General?”
Nick looked up, gave a rueful laugh. “Don’t imagine it can get much lower,” he said. He looked at the emergency supplies, then began to stow the cans and jars in the boat’s cooler compartments.
“So what’s the plan?” Jason asked.
Nick shrugged. “Find a place that doesn’t blow up?” he offered, then sighed. “I wish I’d contacted my family when I had the chance,” he said. “They’re gonna be worried. They knew I was driving down to Toussaint.”
“You have a daughter, you said? In Arkansas someplace?”
“Yeah.” Nick’s hand went to his shirt pocket, then fell away. “She’s having a birthday tomorrow— today, I mean.” Discouragement lined his mud-streaked face. “Guess I won’t be there.”
“Is she at school, or what?”
Nick looked down at his work as he answered. “She’s with her momma. We’re divorced.”
Sadness drifted through Jason at the word, at the timbre of failure he heard in Nick’s voice. It suggested that the divorce hadn’t been Nick’s idea.
Jason nodded. “I know divorce, all right. And birthdays. That telescope we’re using— that was a birthday present from my dad. But I think his new wife picked it out for him.”
Nick nodded. “Divorce is hard on the kids. I always been thankful my parents had a good marriage.” He reached into his pocket, took out a box covered in muddy velveteen. “Here’s what I got for Arlette.”
He opened the box. Jason leaned close and saw gold glowing bright, the glitter of diamonds and rubies. Some kind of flower thing. “That’s pretty,” he said.
Nick had probably picked out the necklace and earrings himself, too. Jason could tell by the pride in his face.
Nick closed the box and returned it carefully to his pocket. “I wanted to give it to her today,” he said.
“Well.” Jason glanced around at the river, the dense ranks of trees that lined the channel down which they traveled. “We’re heading in the right direction.”
Nick rubbed his face, brushed at the drying mud. “They’re worried for me. I know they are.”
Jason felt an urge to be supportive. “We’ll get there,” he said.
“I just wish I’d used the radio last night. But I was so tired…”
“We’ll find another radio. Or a telephone. Or something.”
Nick shook his head. “I wanted to call her at breakfast. I wanted to get her before she went to school.”
It didn’t seem like much, talk to his daughter before school. But it was very clear that Nick had counted on speaking to Arlette, and now that he hadn’t, he was so downcast that he couldn’t seem to get beyond his failure.
With something like a mental shock, Jason found himself wondering if his own father had been through similar agonies. His parents’ divorce had always seemed something they had chosen to inflict on him, yet another example of the random cruelty that adults imposed on their children. That his parents might have been in pain themselves was a new and surprising thought.
“Fend off, there,” Nick said.
Jason snatched up a boat hook and pushed away a large chunk of frame building, a shed or chicken house, that threatened to run aboard the bass boat. His shoulders flamed with sunburn as he shoved the building away. Once the boat was out of danger, Jason put down the boat hook and sat again on the foredeck. He was surprised to see Nick watching him with sober eyes.
“Yes?” Jason said.
“You did a good thing back there,” Nick said. “You may have saved our lives.”
Jason looked at Nick in surprise. He felt a flush mounting in his skin. He wasn’t used to adults finding reason to praise him.
“Thanks,” he said.
“A lot of people might not have figured it out. You knew how to put two and two together.” He looked down the river. “We’ll be okay if we just keep our eyes open.”
Jason nodded and felt awkward. He really didn’t know what to do when a grownup told him he was smart. It wasn’t as if it had ever happened before.
Nick brushed at his face again, knocking flakes of mud to the deck. He looked around at the smears of Mississippi ooze that covered the boat and its passengers. “Maybe we better try to clean up,” he said. “Wash off some of this mud. Clean up the boat.”
“Okay.”
“And then put on some sunscreen. I found some in the towboat.”
“We’re going to need to fend off first.”
That frame building had come back, floating again toward the bass boat as if intent on climbing into the cockpit. Jason stood and picked up the boat hook. Nick’s praise made him feel stronger, more capable. Fired with purpose.
He leaned into the boat hook and drove the wreckage away.
*
Messrs
.
Cramer, Spear & Eichbaum Printers, Pittsburgh
Gentlemen:
Your being editors of the useful guide, The Ohio and Mississippi Navigator, induces me, for the sake of the western country traders to inform you as early as in my power the wonderful changes for the worse in some parts of the Mississippi river, occasioned by the dreadful earthquake which happened on the morning of the 16th of December last, and which has continued to shake almost every day since. As to its effects on the river I found but little from the mouth of Ohio to New Madrid, from which place to the Chickasaw Bluffs, or Fort Pickering, the face of the river is wholly changed, particularly from Island No. 30, to Island No. 40; this part of the river burst and shook up hundreds of great trees from the bottom, and what is more singular they are all turned roots upwards and standing upstream in the best channel and swiftest water, and nothing but the greatest exertions of the boatmen can save them from destruction in passing those places. I should advise all those concerned to be particular in approaching Island No. 32, where you must warp through a great number, and when past them, bear well over from the next right hand point for fear of being drawn into the right schute of Flour Island, Island 33, which I should advise against, as that pass is become very dangerous unless in very high water. Two boats from Little Beaver are lately lost, and several much injured in that pass this season. Boats should hug the left shore where there is but few sawyers, and good water and fine landing on the lower point of the island, from there the next dangerous place is the Devil’s Race Ground, Island No. 36.
Here I would advise boats never to pass to the left of the island and by all means to keep close to the right hand point, and then close round the sandbar on the lower end of the schute is very dangerous and the gap so narrow that boats can scarcely pass without being dashed on some of the snags, and should you strike one you can scarcely extricate yourself before you receive some injury. From this scene you have barely time to breathe and refresh, before you arrive at the Devil’s Elbow, alias the Devil’s Hackle, Islands No. 38 and 39 by far the worst of all; in approaching this schute you must hug close around the left hand point until you come in sight of the sand bar whose head has the appearance of an old field full of trees, then pull for the island to keep clear of these, and pass through a small schute, leaving all the island sawyers to the right, and take care not to get too near them, for should you strike the current is so rapid it will be with great difficulty you will be able to save, your boat and cargo.
Letter of James Smith, April 10,1812
The morning’s SITREP had a lot fewer unknowns on it. Information was starting to flow into Mississippi Valley Division headquarters. Most of the information was bad, but even bad news was better than waiting in suspense for the next horror.
In addition to gathering information, Jessica had largely assembled her Joint Division Team, which would coordinate civil works projects and disaster relief throughout her assigned area. She’d appointed the JDT’s Chief of Staff, Subordinate Command Liaison, the Chief of Operations, the Staff Engineer, the Counsel, Contracting Officer, the Chief of Public Affairs— who would coordinate press briefings from a tent reserved for the purpose, provided of course that the press could ever find their way to them through the disaster area.
As called for in the plan, Jessica had even appointed an official Economist. Rather more useful in the current situation was the Clerical Specialist, who was now assembling out of stores the inventory necessary for the JDT’s operation. The necessary inventory included Facsimile Machine (auto feed, programmable, plain paper); Binder Clips, large; Binder Clips, small; Correction Fluid, white; Forms, Tasking; and Rubber Bands, assorted sizes.
Jessica was pleased to observe a Pot, Coffee on the list. Before this emergency was over she planned to make a significant dent in the inventory’s Cups, foam, 8 oz.
Morning birdsong— the throb of helicopters— floated into her command tent, as it had been doing since before dawn. Jessica finished her second cup of breakfast coffee and threw the Cup, foam, into the trash. She rose from behind her desk and sought out her husband.
Pat was in the communications tent, helping the techs with their Computers, database for mission tracking. “Hey, runner!” she said.
Pat was gazing into the innards of an elderly machine and trying to fit a satellite modem card into the slot. He looked up. “Ma’am?” he said.
“Tell Colonel Davidovitch that I’ll be TDY for a few hours, okay?”
“Now?” he said.
“Yes,” Jessica said. “Orders generally mean
now
unless otherwise stated.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He returned the modem card to its bubble wrap. “You know,” he said, “Jeb Stuart had someone on his staff just to play the banjo.”
“If I need a banjo player, you’ll be the first one I’ll call.”
An aftershock bounced the ground as Jessica made her way to the helipad, one vertical jounce after another. Jessica weaved slightly as she walked and tried not to twist an ankle.
She had seen to the recovery of MVD headquarters, which was now capable of surviving without her for a few hours. Her new Helicopter (Transportation, for use of) waited for her. She wanted to make a personal inspection of her division.
And then, if things were as bad as she expected, she’d have to call her commander-in-chief and tell him what he needed to do.
*
“Sugar bear,” said Sheryl, “I think it’s time to put up my Apocalypse.”
Frankland paused, his hand poised with the razor to shave the dimple on his receding chin. He had tried to make certain that men remained shaved, and that everyone wash their face and hands before meals. Good for morale, he’d thought.
“Yes,” he said, “yes. I’ll help you in a minute.”
After he finished shaving, he helped Sheryl carry her linen scrolls from her workroom to the church. Frankland got Hilkiah and some of the others to drive wooden stakes into the ground, and Sheryl unrolled her opus and stapled the scrolls to the tall wooden stakes so that they formed a long, fabric wall, with occasional gaps so as not to provide a continuous surface that the wind could more easily damage.