The Rift (47 page)

Ironically, by the time the evacuation got under way, the danger had largely passed. Unlike mustard gas, Lewisite, or some nerve agents, phosgene does not persist in the environment. But Helena’s surviving civil authorities were in shock from Ml and easily panicked; they had no way of identifying the gas or assessing the danger; they gave the orders and hoped for the best.

Days later, half-starved families were still dragging themselves out of the countryside.

*

On the second morning after the quake, Charlie took a bucket of water from his swimming pool and used it to flush his toilet. Then he threw some chlorine in the pool to keep it drinkable— he didn’t know how much to use, he had a company who normally took care of this job, he just guessed. Then he looked in his refrigerator.

All that remained was Friday night’s
canard a l’orange
in its foam container, and a can of Megan’s diet drink, and the anchovies. He took the diet drink from the shelf and opened it.

Vanilla. He
hated
vanilla.

He drank it anyway, and then ate the anchovies, which made a horrid contrast with the vanilla drink. Possibly, he thought, he should get some more food.

But the nearest supermarket was on the other side of the chasm in the street, and he couldn’t cross the chasm. He just couldn’t. His heart staggered at the thought of it.

And then he remembered the little grocery store. It was maybe a mile away in the other direction.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. There seemed to be something wrong with the way he was putting things together.

Had to get a grip, he thought. He was Lord of the Jungle.

Charlie made sure his wallet was in his pocket, and then he put on his St. Louis Cardinals cap and began his walk.

No chasms blocked Charlie’s way, though broad cracks ran across the road here and there. The neighborhood had been tidied somewhat: some of the fallen trees had been cut up and hauled out of the road, some of the broken glass swept up. Charlie heard the constant sound of chainsaws.

There was almost no traffic. Charlie saw only a few trucks moving, carrying supplies apparently, and a flatbed truck with a bulldozer on it. He saw no official vehicles at all, no police, no fire trucks, no National Guard.

As he left his prosperous Germantown neighborhood, he saw clumps of ill-kempt people standing on street corners, people who watched him in silence. Children and babies were everywhere, the children unbathed, the babies crying.

The store shared a little strip mall with a furniture store and a place that sold office supplies. All the windows were gone: the office supply store was boarded up, but the furniture store was wide open. As Charlie walked past the furniture store he saw people inside, apparently living there, sleeping in the bedroom displays. Two unshaven, shirtless men in baseball caps carried a chest of drawers across the parking lot. It didn’t appear to Charlie that they were employees.

The windows of the convenience store were gone, but a rusty old Dodge van had been parked along the side of the store, blocking most of the broken windows. The broken glass had been swept into the gutter. Charlie saw figures moving in the darkened interior, and he heard a radio blaring, so he stepped in.

The inside was still a wreck. The quake had knocked practically everything off the shelves, and items hadn’t been replaced, just swept into crude piles.

new polisy, said a sign just inside the door, cash only. The sign was written in black felt marker on the back of another placard.

“If you came for milk,” said the man behind the counter, “we ran out yesterday.”

“No,” Charlie said. “Not milk.”

“Beer’s gone, too,” the man said.

The man was a white man in his fifties who wore a baseball cap and a dirty white T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved since before the quake, and he carried a long pump shotgun propped on one hip. CIGARETTES, said another sign over his head, $10 PACK, MARLBOROS $12.

The man was a profiteer, clear enough. Charlie wasn’t bothered. It wasn’t anything more than what he, Charlie, planned to do. Besides, he could buy and sell the whole store.

Behind him was a battery-powered radio on which quake victims were being interviewed. “It was a true miracle that I lived through it,” a man said. “A true miracle.”

All the canned goods had been piled in one area of the store, LITTEL CANS $7, the sign said, BIG CANS $20. The cans were all sizes, and it was difficult to say which of the medium-sized ones were big, and which were little.

“You want some flour?” the man said. “I got a little left, but not much. And some cornmeal. Sugar’s gone.”

“Flour?” Charlie said. “No.” He wouldn’t know what to do with it, had never baked anything in his life.

“My baby’s buried in there somewhere,” a woman on the radio sobbed. “We’re praying for a miracle.”

A door opened in the back of the store and a young man came in. He had long stringy hair to his shoulders and wore a baseball cap and a large revolver prominently strapped to his hip. He looked at Charlie. “C’n I help you?” he asked.

“Canned goods,” Charlie said, “and something to drink.”

“You want a bag?” the young man said.

Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Vienna sausages. Heinz baked beans. Spam. It was all dreadful, but Charlie filled his sack with it. When he could get real food again, he could give the extra canned stuff to the cleaning lady.

“It was a miracle that my father survived,” said a man on the radio.

Charlie put two plastic bottles of mineral water in another sack, then walked to the counter and gave the man his Visa card. The man looked at it with contempt.

“Can’t take this,” he said, showing long yellow teeth. “Cash only.” He pointed. “See the sign?”

“The card’s good, mate,” Charlie said. “It’s platinum.”

“Ain’t no way to call to prove that. Phone’s down.”

Charlie sighed, pulled out his Amex card, his MasterCard, his Eurocard, a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of credit all told. “They’re all good,” he said. “I can prove they belong to me.”

“Cash,” the man said, “only.”

Charlie eyed him. “Right, then,” he said. “Tell you what. Charge an extra hundred dollars to the total.”

The man thought about it for at least a half-second. Then shook his head. “Cash,” he said. “Radio says the economy’s gone crazy. I don’t know them banks are still around.”

“Of
course
they’re around!” Waving a card. “This is
Chase Manhattan Bank
.”
Waving another. “This is
American Express
!”

“You got a problem here, pop?” the young man said. He stood behind Charlie and to one side, hand placed casually on the butt of his revolver.

“Cash,” the older man said. “None of your funny foreign money, neither.” There was a sadistic glint in his eye: he was enjoying this, humiliating one of the rich he’d served all his life.
I’m working class, too
! Charlie wanted to say. But he knew it was pointless: Americans didn’t know one British accent from another, thought everyone was a lord.

“Charge me double, then,” Charlie said.

The man took the plastic bag of canned goods in one hand, moved it out of Charlie’s reach. “You got cash or not?”

“I thank God,” said a woman on the radio, “for the miracle that saved us.”

Charlie reached into his pocket, took out his money clip. It held a ten, two singles, some change. The older man reached into Charlie’s bag and took out a can of Vienna sausage. “This and one of the bottles, eleven dollars.”

Charlie gave him eleven dollars. The man added it to a thick roll he produced from his pocket. Charlie looked in anger at the single dollar remaining.

“Sell you a lottery ticket for that?” the older man asked, and laughed.

The laughter followed Charlie out of the store.

*

Charlie Johns paced back and forth before the chasm in the road. His heart thudded in his chest. “King of the Jungle,” he whispered to himself.

He needed to get
out
of here. He had eaten all the Vienna sausages at once, and they’d served only to make him more hungry.

He had a
car,
he thought, Megan’s BMW. He could just drive away, drive till he found some place that would take his credit cards or his checks. Someplace
sane,
where the phones worked.

But he didn’t have the keys to Megan’s car, he realized.

Megan had them. And Megan was dead and in the back of the house and lying under the tub dead in the part of the house where Megan was dead .. . His mind whirled. He felt the need to sit down, and he found the curb and sat.

The keys, he thought, were probably in her handbag. And her handbag was lying in the room somewhere. He might be able to find it without even
looking
at Megan.

Charlie rose from the curb, swayed, and walked back to his house. He felt he required fortification, so he went to the kitchen first, to the wine rack, and opened a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. He drank half of it from the neck— good things in wine, he thought, real nutrition there.

The wine’s flush prickled along his skin. With his stomach almost empty, the alcohol hit him quickly.

Get to the bedroom fast,
he thought.
Grab the handbag. Run.

In his haste Charlie stumbled over the water heater that sprawled in the back hall and almost went to his knees. He wrenched himself upright and kept on going, his shoes squelching on the wet carpet. Floorboards sagged under his weight.
Don’t look,
he thought. He lurched to the door and stepped into the master bedroom.

“Oh God,” he said, and closed his eyes. He turned and lurched blindly for the door. He ran into the door frame and felt a cracking blow to his head. He staggered through the door and down the hall, and then he fell across the water heater and vomited up his Vienna sausages and red wine.

Because there were flies now, a black cloud of them, and maggots, so many maggots that they crowded on each other and leaped a foot in the air and fell to the floor with the sound of soft rain.

Charlie staggered to the kitchen and his bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape, and he rinsed his mouth with the wine and then gagged and went to his knees as his stomach convulsed.

He went out of the house to the BMW and lay down across the two front seats. He still had the wine bottle clutched in his hands.

He could still detect Megan’s scent hovering in the car.

After a while, he took another drink of wine.

*

The Comet has been passing to the westward since it passed its perihelion
—
perhaps it has touched the mountain of California, that has given a small shake to this side of the globe
—
or the shake which the Natchezians have felt may be a mysterious visitation from the Author of all nature, on them for their sins
—
wickedness and the want of good faith have long prevailed in that territory. Sodom and Gomorrha would have been saved had three righteous persons been found in it
—
we therefore hope that Natchez has been saved on the same principle.

The Louisiana Gazette and Daily Advertiser

(New
Orleans), December 11,1811

“Remember to bring in the food! All the food!” Brother Frankland called after the little convoy he was sending down into the Arkansas Delta. “Bring all the survivors, but bring as much food as you can!”

The trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles crunched gravel as they rolled out of the church parking lot and onto the highway. Frankland’s people— conspicuous in their official-looking white armbands— were doing a good job of bringing in survivors from isolated farms, along with as many supplies as could be scrounged from wrecked buildings or dug out of collapsed cellars. It turned out that Frankland would need as much food as his scavengers could provide.

They’d managed to plunder the Piggly Wiggly, though, of everything edible that had survived the quake. The sheriff’s department hadn’t interfered, being told that the people in the white armbands were relief workers, and Piggly Wiggly management were nowhere to be found. Sheryl was salting down as much of the meat as hadn’t gone directly into the stewpot, and storing the flour in plastic garbage barrels, along with bay leaves to discourage the weevils from eating more than their fair share.

Not that weevils weren’t a good source of protein in themselves.

Protein was also available in the local catfish farms. Since the catfish farmers couldn’t get their fish to market, Frankland reasoned, they might as well donate their harvest. But he hadn’t spoken to any of them other than his parishioner Joe Johnson, who was willing to contribute his income for his soul’s sake.

The food issue aside, things were going well. By now, the second day following the quake, the Church of the End Times had turned into a regular encampment, encompassing half the ten acres that comprised Frankland’s property. Tents marched in disciplined rows. Latrines had been dug and screened with canvas or plastic sheets that crackled in the brisk wind. Reverend Garb had brought in his own parishioners to help out, and now there were black hands working alongside the white in getting the camp ready.

It was laid out like an army camp. The Army of the Lord.

Hilkiah was out on the fields planting a series of poles in the ground— planting them deep in quick-setting concrete, so that they’d stay upright during any future tremors. Then he’d string them with loudspeakers, so that everyone, throughout the growing compound, could have the benefit of the Good News simultaneously being broadcast on the radio station. Frankland, Dr. Calhoun, and the Reverend Garb took turns broadcasting, varying their message between urging refugees to make their way to town, asking listeners to donate supplies, and lengthy sermons on the End Times.

Near the church, a portable drilling rig— one Frankland had bought fifth-hand years ago— was putting in a new well. The quake had sheared the pipes from Frankland’s two old wells, but he’d been prepared for that, and his cisterns would be sufficient till they could get new wells dug.

Things were much better organized here than in town. Rails Bluff had long since run out of emergency supplies, personnel, food, and fresh water. All Sheriff Gorton could do when refugees straggled in was to advise them to continue up Highway 417 to the Reverend Frankland’s place. He was shuttling them on Dr. Calhoun’s bus, along with as many of Rails Bluff’s own inhabitants as he could persuade to go.