The Rift (55 page)

“Well, good!” Frankland said. “Can you send us some supplies? Because,” he confided, “the food situation is getting a little critical around here.”

“I believe what the government has in mind,” Gustafson said, “isn’t to send food here, but to send the people where the food is. You’ve heard about the President’s evacuation order, right? Well, a refugee camp is being set up in the Hot Springs National Park. The whole county is being evacuated to there.”

Frankland stared at Gustafson in amazement. “But the evacuation’s all about water, right? We don’t get our water from the river! We have wells— good wells!”

Gustafson cleared his throat. “The water’s only a part of the situation, as I understand it. This area is still subject to strong earthquakes that can cause casualties and damage the infrastructure. It took a road crew three days to bulldoze through the piney woods to get to Rails Bluff from the county seat! The Emergency Management people would have a lot of trouble shipping food into an area this remote, and so it makes more sense to pull people out of the area to a place where they can be fed more efficiently.”

Frankland gave an astonished laugh. “That’s the government for you!” he said. “They never think about the people at all!”

Gustafson cleared his throat again. “Well, that’s as may be. But tomorrow morning they’re sending a big convoy of National Guard vehicles to pull everyone out of here.”

Frankland shook his head. Poor old Gustafson just didn’t get it. “You don’t understand,” he said. “The people here are
happy.
They’re praising God. They won’t want to leave.”

Sheriff Gorton dug into the dirt with the toe of his boot. For the first time Gustafson looked surprised. “You’re sure about that, sir?” he said.

“Oh yes.”

“Well,” Gustafson nodded, “in that case, just to ease my mind, I’m sure you won’t mind if we ask them.”

*

Sweat poured down Charlie’s nose as he punched number after number into the cellphone. Nothing happened at all. Maybe he’d worn out the batteries.

He threw the receiver down, rubbed his unshaven face. He was
not
a derelict, he thought. Not.

*

Exhaust from the line of National Guard trucks blew over the camp. Frankland watched in black despair as the long line of people, clutching their small bundles and their children, began to move out of the camp, past the black walls of Sheryl’s Apocalypse, toward the waiting vehicles.

“This isn’t necessary!” Frankland called. “You can stay here! We have everything you need!”

“In the Year 70 a.d. the Temple was thrown down!”
Frankland’s own voice mocked him from the loudspeakers.

Uniformed Guard personnel helped the women and children into the trucks. Officers stood by with clipboards.

“Thank you, Brother Frankland, for all you’ve done.” This was Eunice Setzer, one of his own congregation, shuffling from the camp with her three children.

“You don’t have to leave, Sister Eunice,” Frankland said as he put a hand on her arm. “We’ll take care of you here.”

“Sorry, Brother Frankland,” she said with downcast eyes, and with a twist of her body slipped free of his grasp.

“Look at Sister Sheryl’s Apocalypse!” Frankland cried. “Lift your eyes and look at it! The Beast. The Woman of Babylon! That’s what’s waiting for you! That’s what’s waiting for everybody! We want to
prepare
you for that!”

They walked by in silence, past the angels with their vials and trumpets, past the Four Horsemen, past the City of God descending in glory. They walked as if none of it mattered, as if the End of the World was not at hand.

“Betrayal!
—
verse ten!”
Frankland’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers.

Betrayal. St. Matthew had it right. Frankland was betrayed, and so was God.

“I’ll be staying, Brother Frankland,” Sheriff Gorton assured him. “They’re not evacuating law enforcement, that’s for sure.”

Frankland readied himself for a last appeal, and he raised his arms in exhortation, but the words didn’t come. The Spirit went right out of him, something that had never happened before. The promise that God had made him, made him amid the fury of the rain and the lightning and the shaking of the earth, had come to naught.

He slumped and turned away. And then, out of the shuffling crowd, someone took him by the arm.

“Brother Frankland.”

Frankland looked up, saw the pornographer Magnusson gazing at him with a peculiar expression in his face. The man had probably come to gloat over Frankland’s defeat. “Yes?” Frankland said.

Tears glimmered in Magnusson’s eyes. “I’m staying, Brother Frankland!” he said. “I’m staying with you! I owe you my salvation.”

To Frankland’s utter surprise, Magnusson threw his arms around Frankland and began sobbing on his shoulder. Slowly, Frankland put his arms around Magnusson and began patting him on the back.

“Praise God, Brother Magnusson,” he said. “Praise God.”

Ten minutes later, the National Guard officers blew their whistles, and the convoy began to move off, the inhabitants of Rails Bluff staring out the back of the trucks from under the olive-green canvas.

When Frankland called for a head count, there were eighty-seven people left in the camp, including the three pastors and their families. There were probably less than a hundred others this side of the piney woods, mostly farmers who refused to leave their land, along with a few people in the Bijoux Theater too sick to be moved and under the care of a National Guard medic.

The awnings of the empty camp flapped disconsolately in the morning breeze. Frankland walked along the lines of tents, gazing in disgust at the garbage left behind by the six hundred people who had left earlier that morning, the plastic Star Wars cups and plastic sheeting and stained foam bedding.

Day 8
—
the people confirmed and strengthened in their faith.

He had planned for
years
for this. For the moment when the world began to come apart, when the people would be lost and need his guidance. He had
given
that guidance. He had shared his own food with refugees who had nothing to call their own. He had preached to them from the depths of his heart.

And now
this.
They had abandoned him, all but eighty-seven loyalists. Abandoned him for
Hot Springs National Park
!
What a humiliation.

No more betrayals
, he thought. He had been naive. He hadn’t foreseen the seductions that the liberal humanist/satanist government would offer to his people. Now he knew.

No more government
! That was the answer. You could not serve God and Caesar. There would be no room in the camp for anything but the Lord and praising the Lord and preparing the people for the end of the world.

No more desertions. No one would leave again. The soul was what mattered, and Frankland was going to save the souls of everyone here. That was his charge.

And anyone else— any more
government
— who tried to interfere, Frankland would deal with it.

Personally.

*

Charlie Johns looked into the one container remaining in his refrigerator, the week-old pieces of duck, and wondered if it was all right to eat. It
looked
all right. It smelled like it had been in the refrigerator a while, but didn’t smell
bad.

Maybe if he drank some brandy with it. Brandy was a disinfectant, wasn’t it?

The house was full of flies, and Charlie didn’t want to think about the reason for that, so he took the food into the shady backyard along with a bottle of Martell. He sat in the shade under his Russian olive tree and ate the duck along with swallows of brandy. He dug bits of rice off the ribs, sucked all the remaining meat off the bones, gnawed at the cartilage. Then he sucked the bones for a long while.

He stared at the pool while he ate. The neighbor kids had been coming over to take drinking water from it, and they’d kept it clean of leaves and sticks and windblown junk. He’d thrown chlorine into it every day and figured it was still safe to drink.

The cramps started an hour later. He barely made it to the toilet in time. He shuddered and sweated on the toilet for hours as he emptied everything that remained in his bowels.

When the spasms finally ended, he barely had the strength to crawl to the car and drape himself across the front seats.

*

Jessica gazed from the old Indian mound at the transformation of Poinsett Landing nuclear station. From the wreckage and desolation of just days ago, Poinsett Landing was on its way to becoming the busiest port on the Mississippi.

Operation Island was proceeding at a truly astounding rate. While power company and Energy Department teams concentrated on the problems presented by the leaking storage pond, the Army under the direction of Jessica’s engineers had been engaged in the work of turning Poinsett Landing into a river port. Portable quays had been moved into place, cabled to building ruins, to the auxiliary building or the control facility, or when necessary to the river bottom. Barges filled with supplies and necessary equipment had been warped alongside.

The clutter of plant workers’ vehicles that stood atop the Indian mound blocked any serious and sustained use of the mound by Jessica’s engineers. The world would have forgiven her if she’d pushed these vehicles into the drink in order to turn the mound into a giant helipad, but Jessica realized she was going to depend on these plant workers, and didn’t want to commence their working relationship by shoving valuable workers’ property into the Mississippi. Instead the vehicles were airlifted to Vicksburg by huge Super Stallion helicopters. On return flights, the big copters— which had been developed to carry the heavy equipment for entire Marine divisions— had carried enough supplies for a small camp atop the mound, and material to start building jetties and anchorages for the barges and boats that would bring emergency material to the landing.

For the moment, everyone in the area had been evacuated to the top of the Indian mound. Operation Island was about to enter a new phase.

“Good news, General,” said Larry Hallock, who had just returned from the auxiliary building in a boat. “And bad news.”

And how many times had she heard
that
in the last few days, Jessica wondered.

Well. By now, she figured, she was equal to just about anything. World ends the day after tomorrow? Fine, we’ll come up with a plan for disassembling the planet and recycling the materials in order to create the galaxy’s largest shopping mall. Just give us a few minutes.

“Good news and bad news, Mr. Hallock?” Jessica said.

She
liked
Larry Hallock. He was proving indefatigable at a time when indefatigability was at a premium. Within twenty-four hours of the big quake, he had put together the plan to entomb his reactor and salvage the spent fuel, a plan so solid in its fundamentals that no one had been able to improve on it in the time since. Larry worked twenty-hour days supervising the work at the plant, his detailed knowledge of the plant site was unsurpassed, and he was always able to modify his plans to account for the limited materials available. After a day or so on the job, he’d thrown away the sling that had supported his broken collarbone and spent his days scrambling over scaffolding, jumping between barges, and climbing ladders.

Larry was the kind of soldier that Jessica always wanted in her outfit.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Good news first, if you please.”

Larry nodded. “We’ve cleared away most of the wreckage in the auxiliary building,” he said. “We’ve cut away the roof that was damaged, and reinforced the parts of the roof that are still standing. We’ve rebuilt the catwalks, and repaired the two leaks we know about. There’s probably at least one more leak that we
don’t
know about, because water levels are still declining, but I expect we’ll find it before long.”

“Very good, Mr. Hallock. And the bad news?”

Larry hesitated. “The crane that we hope to use to extract the spent fuel suffered some serious damage. So the repairs will delay things. We’re probably going to have to cannibalize parts from other plants and fly them out here.”

Jessica nodded. “I understand.”

“And the reactor complex has increased its list. By another half a degree.”

Jessica bit her lip. The endless series of aftershocks continued to shake the soupy ground beneath the reactor’s massive concrete-and-steel foundation, eroding its support. While its current angle of list placed it in no danger of toppling, Jessica was still uneasy. What if another major earthquake occurred? The danger was by no means remote— in 1811-12, there had been no less than
three
major earthquakes on the New Madrid fault system, all Richter 8.0 or greater. If another big quake hit, Jessica worried that the foundation pad beneath the reactor might begin to break up. If it shattered, the Poinsett Landing reactor might well decide to start rolling down the Mississippi.

The best way to guard against this danger was to get on with Larry’s plan to turn Poinsett Landing into an island. But Operation Island, despite the name, had run into a critical shortage.

In the normal course of events, when something on this scale was to be created, enormous works of engineering would be constructed to shift the river into another channel. While Poinsett Landing was dry, solid objects— such as quarried stone— would be moved from a nearby source of supply to the construction site and laid in place to form the island.

This was purely impossible. Even when the nation’s infrastructure
hadn’t
been shattered by an earthquake, the technology to shift a river as mighty as the Mississippi from its mucky bed would have taken years to get into place. Whatever work was to be done would have to be done with the river right where it was.

Not only that, but there was little to build an island
with.
There was no solid ground in the Mississippi Delta, and no source of solid material needed to implement the “island” part of Operation Island. No quarries, no hills to dismantle, no sources of stone at all. When the Corps of Engineers constructed its dikes and levees on the lower Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s, the stone used had been imported by rail all the way from Tennessee.