Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic
Nothing. No disaster. Larry’s breathing eased.
“Just take her forward and back,” he said.
Jameel approached the control panel, flicked switches, pressed a lever. With a hum of electric motors, the crane began smoothly moving forward along its tracks. He braked, then moved the crane back the way it had come.
“Nice,” Larry said. “Now traverse the turret.”
Larry leaned over the rail to peer at what he could see of the turret on the bottom of the crane, which was intended to traverse left and right so as to be able to drop the grab into any of the fuel storage racks in the storage pond. Another set of electric motors hummed. He saw the turret rotate, the grab on the end of its distended snout tracking past his field of view.
“Works fine,” he said. “Swing it t’other way.”
He waited for the snout to traverse into his field of vision, then called to Jameel to halt.
“Drop the grab,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to stop.”
The grab was like a metal claw on the end of the machine’s double chain. It was spring-activated so as to snatch a fuel assembly from its rack on contact, and would not disengage as long as the weight of a fuel assembly was detected at the end of the chain.
Jameel took hold of a lever screwed to the plywood control board and gave it a nudge. The bright stainless steel double chain clanked as it rolled out of the turret, the heavy grab swaying only slightly as it dropped to the water below. The Mississippi water in the holding pond lacked the brilliant clarity of the demineralized water that normally filled this space— the mud had mostly settled to the bottom, but its dark presence reflected little light and made it difficult to see into the water.
We’re going to have to put a lot of floodlights down there,
Larry thought.
Otherwise we won’t be able to see a dang thing.
The grab smoothly entered the water, the chain unrolling above it. “Stop!” Larry called.
He didn’t want to grab a fuel assembly by accident. He didn’t have anyplace to put it.
There was a tremor, a rattle of roof panels, and Larry realized an aftershock was hammering the building. Larry’s heart kicked into a higher rhythm as he felt the crane sway on its tall platform, and he backed hastily away from the rail he’d been hanging over.
The remaining roof beams and panels creaked. Fortunately, Larry noticed, he and the crane were under open sky.
The aftershock stopped. Meg gave a nervous laugh. Larry waited a few moments to see if it would begin again, then gingerly approached the end of the platform and looked down at the grab on the end of its chain.
“Bring ’er back up,” he said.
Jameel stopped the chain, then threw another lever. There was a brief electronic hum from the winch motors, and then a hiss and a pop as one of the control panel fuses blew. Jameel jumped back from the control panel as if stung, then gave a nervous chuckle at his overreaction.
“Cut power!” Larry bawled into his handset.
Lights on the control panel died. Meg was already down on one knee, reaching for her tool box. “Just a short, Mr. Hallock,” she said. “I’ll have that fixed in a jiff.”
While Meg and Jameel worked on the board, Larry took off his glasses and rubbed his aching eyes. There seemed no end to the problems. Solving one just meant another reared its ugly head.
The fuel handling machine was normally computer controlled, but the computer that did the job was now under the surface of the Mississippi. Control would have to be by hand and by eye, and that was going to result in awkwardness and lengthy delays in extracting over 1000 tons of nuclear waste from the pond.
Lost also were the records of exactly which fuel assemblies had been racked in which place, both those on computer file and the paper hardcopy, which had been stored in a destroyed building. Larry had no records that told him which of the rods in the pond below were the old safe ones, and which the new hot ones. He was going to have to drop radiation detectors into the pond on the end of a line to find out, and that was going to produce results that were messy and had a high degree of inaccuracy.
One problem after another,
he repeated to himself.
You’ve only got to solve one problem at a time.
At one time, he thought, that had seemed like a
good
thing.
*
TWENTY-THREE
There was one boat coming down on the same morning I landed; when they came in sight of the falls, the crew were so frightened at the prospect, that they abandoned their boat and made for the island in their canoe
—
two were left on the island, and two made for the west bank in the canoe
—
about the time of their landing, they saw that the island was violently convulsed
—
one of the men on the island threw himself into the river to save himself by swimming
—
one of the men from the shore met him with the canoe and saved him.
—
This man gave such an account of the convulsion of the island, that neither of the three dared to venture back for the remaining man. The three men reached New Madrid by land.
The man remained on the Island from Friday morning until Sunday evening, when he was taken off by a canoe sent from a boat coming down. I was several days in company with this man
—
he stated that during his stay in the island, there were frequent eruptions, in which sand and stone, coal and water were thrown up.
—
The violent agitation of the ground was such at one time as induced him to hold to a tree to support himself, the earth gave way at the place, and he with the tree sunk down, and he got wounded in the fall.
—
The fissure was so deep as to put it out of his power to get out at that place
—
he made his way along the fissure until a sloping slide offered him an opportunity of crawling out. He states that frequent lights appeared
—
that in one instance, after one of the explosions near where he stood, he approached the hole from which the coal and land had been thrown up, which was now filled with water, and on putting his hand into it he found it was warm.
Matthias M. Speed, March 2,1812
When the trees opened up again to show the big white frame house on its little green mound, Nick was taken completely by surprise. His heart turned cartwheels.
“We’re there,” he said, and his voice seemed unbelieving even to himself.
They had gone up the White River— flooded, filled with more debris even than the Mississippi— then spent a night on Lopez Bayou. He had tried to keep track, by dead reckoning, of how far they had come, but he knew that his estimates had to be wildly out of true. He was more surprised than anyone when a stretch of water opened up just where he expected Toussaint Bayou to be.
They hadn’t seen a soul the entire trip to Toussaint. Some flooded cotton fields, some abandoned farmhouses fallen into the flood, but no sign of a living human being.
Jason, in the other seat, turned to look at the big house with interest. Nick spun the wheel, aimed for the house.
One of the big oaks that shaded the house had fallen, he saw, but someone had turned the timber into a neatly piled stack of lumber. The windows had lost their glass, and the two brick chimneys had fallen. There had been some hasty repairs to the roof with plastic sheeting and mismatched shingles. Some of the outbuildings had collapsed into the flood. But the house itself was intact, and the sight of it made Nick want to laugh out loud.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jason said. “What’s a Gros-Papa? If I meet him, I should know what it means, right?”
“It’s French,” Nick said. “It means Big Daddy. It’s a name they have down here for grandfather.” And then he added, “Tennessee Williams had a Big Daddy in one of his plays. I don’t remember which one.”
Nick cut the motor and ran the boat up onto the green slope below the house, then ran forward, tossed the mushroom anchor onto the grass so the boat wouldn’t float away again, then jumped to solid ground. He held the prow steady while Jason jumped ashore, then realized he was staring at the boy with a silly smile, just a dumb happy guy standing on green grass in the sun, like any idiot about to see his daughter for the first time in months, and then he shook his head and started for the house at a brisk walk.
They approached the back of the house across a grassy plateau, walking toward the kitchen door. The town of Toussaint, such as it was, was on the other side of the house, and Toussaint Bayou curved around to meet it. The only sign of the town visible from where Nick walked was the water tower.
A rooster crowed from one of the outbuildings. Chickens scurried away from their approach.
“This is an old Indian mound,” Nick said. “They built this house up here over a hundred years ago to keep above the floods, but they didn’t know the mound was artificial until some archaeologists came up here in the fifties.”
“There was a mound where we lived in Missouri,” Jason said, and then an expression of loss crossed his face, and he fell silent.
Nick put his arm around the boy and walked with him through the grass, through the old shade oaks, to the kitchen door. The back windows had lost their glass, but screens were in place to keep out insects. The kitchen door, he saw, was open and the screen slightly ajar. Someone was home. He wanted to sing.
“Hello?” He opened the screen door and rapped on the frame. When no one answered, he stepped inside the big kitchen with its tall old wooden cabinets and its large modern range, and suddenly a graveyard chill ran up his spine, and he felt the winds of desolation blow in the hollow of his skull.
There was horror here. Somehow he knew it— there was a smell in the house, or a peculiar, ominous brand of silence, or some kind of spectral, psychic echo of terror ...
Whatever it was, he’d felt it once before. In Helena.
He put a hand on Jason’s chest as the boy was about to step into the kitchen, and held him back. “Stay here,” he said. The boy’s eyes widened in sudden comprehension and alarm, and he stepped backward, out of the doorway. Silently, carefully, Nick closed the screen door.
He could hear the buzzing of flies in the next room. If anything had happened to Arlette, he felt, his heart would tear open like the ground had torn in the quake, and he would die on the spot.
His nerves tingled as he walked past the big butcher-block kitchen table to the arched doorway that led to the dining room. There, by the dining table, he found Penelope, Gros-Papa’s younger half-sister, who had moved into the house to look after him after his wife died. She had been shot several times in the back. She had her apron on when she died.
Gros-Papa lay in the front parlor, all three hundred pounds of him, in the jacket and tie he wore even on informal occasions. His silver-rimmed glasses were perched firmly on his stern nose. Shot in the chest. The watch chain he wore across his big stomach was gone and, Nick presumed, the watch with it, the watch that played “Claire de Lune” when you opened it.
Nick went to the gun cabinet in Gros-Papa’s study, but the guns had all been taken. The drawers of the desk and file cabinets had been opened, and their contents strewn on the floor.
Gros-Papa’s second son Gilly— short for Guillaume— was on the stair, as if he’d tried to run upstairs and been shot as he fled. Near misses had punched holes in the wall above the stair and knocked down a small watercolor that someone had made of the house a hundred years ago.
Nick’s head swam. He hadn’t really dared to breathe since he’d entered the house. He forced himself to take in a breath, and then he searched the house for Arlette and her mother. He went to Arlette’s room first, found the closets ransacked, the drawers emptied. The scent of his daughter still hung in the room. His own image, a photo of Nick, gazed up at him from its frame.
The other rooms had been looted as well. Jewelry was gone, and probably money. Nick found no living persons, no additional bodies. Arlette and Manon and the others of the household were gone.
They’d evacuated, then. Got away before this had happened. Relief sang through Nick’s blood. But the relief died as a horrifying thought rose in his mind.
Where had the killers come from? Arlette and her family were moving down the bayou by boat, toward the White River and the Arkansas. They had probably left sometime yesterday. If the killers had been coming up the White, they would have encountered the David family, and the encounter might well have been violent. But Nick and Jason had seen no sign of any violent encounter, or any encounter at all.
Which meant that the killers were coming
down
the bayou, traveling on Arlette’s heels, possibly only a few hours behind. They hadn’t turned down the White, because otherwise they would have met Jason and Nick. So that meant they had gone upriver, right on Arlette’s trail...
He felt his lips peeling back from his teeth in a snarl. No. He would find the killers before they could find Arlette, and do what was necessary.
Nick went down the stair, avoiding Gilly’s body, and then crouched for a moment next to Gros-Papa. He steeled himself, then reached out and touched the old man’s large dead hand. Cool to the touch. He took the hand in his fingers and tried to raise it, but there was still a faint stiffness in the corpse: the rigor not yet passed. The death had been fairly recent, maybe last night.
Nick straightened, felt his head swim, then walked carefully back to the kitchen. Light glared in from the screen door. He paused by the butcher-block table for a moment, tried to clear his head and decide what he needed to do, and then he looked down and saw the envelope that rested on the table. The word
Daddy
was written on the back in Arlette’s hand.
Much of his burden of dread fell instantly away. He felt physically lighter, as if someone had removed a burden from his shoulders.
Arlette had left him a message, and if she’d done that she wouldn’t have been herded away at gunpoint. He picked up the envelope and headed out the screen door.
Jason stood in the shade of one of the oaks, pale and nervous. His lips were blue as if he’d been standing up to his neck in cold water. “What happened?”
“Three people killed,” Nick said. And then, in answer to the question he saw in the boy’s horrified eyes, he added, “Not Arlette. Not Manon. They must have left before it happened.”
“Is it gas again?” Jason asked. “Poison or something?”
Nick’s fingers trembled as he opened the unsealed envelope. He shook his head. “They were shot. Robbers.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Jason said. “Jesus, Nick, I’m sorry.”
Nick’s fingers were trembling so hard he couldn’t manage to get the paper out of the envelope. He paused, took a breath, pressed his hands together with the envelope between them. Then tried again, and succeeded. His daughter’s round, exuberant script opened before him like a flower.
Daddy,
I am sorry but we have to leave. The phone exchange was flooded and I couldn’t call you to let you know, and the water plant is flooded too and the water is not safe to drink. We are going in boats to Pine Bluff and I am drawing you a map.
I love you and I hope to see you soon. Don’t worry about me, I will be safe.
Love, your daughter.
Below the words were a row of hearts and then the map, which looked as if it had been traced off a highway map. Nick crushed the paper to his face, inhaled the scent of paper and ink and, maybe, Arlette.
Don’t worry about me, I will be safe.
It was up to Nick to make certain that remained true.
“Come on,” he told Jason, “we have to hurry.” And he began walking off before Jason began asking questions.
Nick didn’t want to leave the bodies unburied, to leave the house open. But his duty was to the living, and every moment might count.
*
There was decay in Toussaint’s general store, and for a moment Nick felt faint, expecting more bodies. But then he realized that the smell was coming from dead minnows in the galvanized bait tanks that lined one side of the store. The bayou hadn’t reached high enough to wash the minnows out.
Toussaint consisted of about a dozen buildings grouped around a crossroads, most of them owned by the David family. People’s farms and private residences spread for miles up and down the roads, and they all gave ”Toussaint” as their address, but what passed for the village itself was tiny.
It was tinier now than it had been. The brick office building had been wrecked, along with its post office, and so had the brick filling station. The David family, who between them owned all these properties, had taken a couple big hits.
The general store had come off its foundations in the quake and had collapsed to one side. The roof sagged. Clapboards and shingles were missing. The flood had risen to the middle of the doorframe. Nick tied the boat to one of the supports of the sagging porch, then dropped into the cool water. He felt ahead with his feet as he carefully made his way into the store’s interior.
When he returned he was armed with weapons that had been stored high above the flood. He had a Winchester Model 94 lever-action 30-30, a pump shotgun, and a couple of revolvers, a pair of .38s, one large and one small. He hadn’t handled firearms since he’d left high school, and they felt heavier than he’d remembered, solid and purposeful. The weight of them in his hands didn’t make him nervous, but he found they didn’t give him an increased sense of security, either.
In a rucksack he carried boxes of ammunition, holsters for the pistols, a cleaning kit, and a sling for the rifle. Holding all this over his head, he waded back to the front porch and put it all on the speedboat’s foredeck. .
Jason looked down at the pile of weaponry with a stunned expression, as if he was trying to work out what horrible, apocalyptic movie scenario he’d just wandered into. “Jeez,” he said.
Nick hoisted himself onto the boat. Water sluiced from his soaked clothing. “Can you take the boat down the bayou?” he asked. “Back the way we came? I’ve got to sort out these guns.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
Nick untied the boat and then carried his gear into the cockpit. He loaded the larger of the two pistols, put it in the holster, and clipped the holster to his belt in the back. He practiced drawing it a few times, but he saw Jason looking at him, and he quit. It’s not like he was going to turn himself into a gunfighter overnight.
He worked the action of the rifle, dry-fired it a few times, then loaded it and the shotgun, leaving the chamber empty in each instance so that the gun couldn’t fire accidentally. He left the long guns on one of the bench seats that ran the length of the cockpit, then moved forward to sit in the bucket seat next to Jason.