Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic
“Have you ever used firearms?” he asked.
“No. My parents just didn’t— don’t— have them around. Muppet and I were going to go shooting over the levee when the water dropped but—” Jason swallowed. “We never got to it.”
“In that case, I don’t want you touching the guns.”
“No problem.”
“I
really
don’t want you touching them.”
“
Okay
!”
Jason said, his voice loud over the roaring engine.
“I need to confirm this, Jason. Because your record at following orders isn’t very good.”
Jason glared at him, his cheeks reddening. “
I won’t touch your guns, okay
?”
Nick took a long breath. Maybe his insistence on this would just make Jason mess with the guns out of sheer contrariness, but he thought he needed to make his point. “Maybe I can teach you how to use them when we get the time,” he said, conciliating, “but until then I want you to take this very seriously.”
Jason nodded again. Then he turned to Nick and said, “What are we doing, exactly?” he said. “Are you trying to get into a fight or something?”
Nick looked at Jason in surprise. He had been so absorbed in his own grim thoughts that he hadn’t considered how this would look to the boy. Finding his in-laws murdered, loading the boat with guns, then heading down the bayou, all without a word of explanation.
Jason probably thought that Nick was involved in some kind of gang war and bent on vengeance.
“No,” Nick said. “No, not at all. I’m trying to get to Arlette and her family, and protect them from the robbers who killed her relations. Those robbers might still be around, and I don’t want Arlette to be without help.”
A look of relief crossed Jason’s face. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Jason looked ahead and steered the boat around a tangle of cypress trees that the quake had cut off just above water level.
“Faster,” Nick said, and Jason looked surprised again. “We need to go faster.”
They found the place where Toussaint Bayou opened out onto Lopez Bayou, then instead of turning left, to retrace their path, they turned right, following Arlette’s map. Nick kept wanting Jason to go faster. Jason didn’t mind: he liked standing in the cockpit as he boomed up the quiet bayou, scattering ducks and herons and sending the boat’s big wake surging out among the trees.
Nick was nervous and had a hard time sitting still in the passenger seat, and eventually he took over the driving.
Jason went to the back of the boat and ate his lunch out of cans, and looked thoughtfully at the guns that sat on the bench seat opposite his own.
In the movies, he thought, there were a number of things that happened during every big disaster. And one of these involved some bad people with Really Great Hair, who, the very first thing broke into biker stores and stole all the cool leathers. And then they got some guns and some wheels and went on a general rampage until the good guy chilled them out in the last reel.
Something like those bad guys had happened to Nick’s in-laws. The cinematic prophecy seemed to be coming true.
Jason looked at the guns and wondered if Nick was the hero who was destined to destroy the bad guys at the end.
No, he thought. He knew who he and Nick would play in the movies.
We’re the bad guys’
victims, he thought.
The people the bad guys kill on their way to dying at the hands of the hero.
That’s who they were.
Corpses.
He turned away from the guns and looked ahead, at the still, silent bayou ahead. He didn’t want to think about the guns anymore.
It proved fairly easy going up the bayou. The obstructions had been cleared away by chainsaws and axes, presumably by the David party, and for the most part this left a channel wide enough to take their craft upstream. On occasion Jason was called to shove some piece of wreckage out of the way, and Nick tapped the steering wheel impatiently until the obstacle was clear and he could gun the engine ahead.
By late afternoon they came to a two-lane road that dead-ended on the bayou. This, Nick said, was where the David party had turned south, and turned south himself.
The road was narrower than the bayou, and choked with debris. Some of the debris had been cleared by the Davids, but some had just been shoved aside and drifted back, and other debris had floated into place since the Davids had passed. The road, though flooded, was elevated several feet above the surrounding country, and Nick tilted the Evinrude forward to keep the propeller from striking the roadway.
It was hard going. Jason stood on the foredeck and tried to clear away the obstructions with his pole. Within minutes he was bathed in sweat. Nick detoured off the roadway and around the obstructions where possible, but often this just led them into dead ends, or areas where the trees were too thick to permit passage.
When Jason was exhausted, Nick took his place on the foredeck, and Jason steered.
The sun was far to the west when they came to a debris field, hundreds of tree trunks piled over and across each other into a huge lumber raft that stretched as far as they could see. It looked as if a thousand beavers had labored on the dam for a thousand years. There was no way through the mass, and no indication that anyone had ever tried.
Nick looked at the obstruction in despair. “Did they go around?” he asked. “Or did they turn back?”
Jason looked left and right in the fading light. “Let’s see if we
can
go around.”
They tried, but every attempt to leave the roadway was blocked, either by falling or standing timber. It didn’t look as if anyone had tried to get through.
“Where did they go?” Nick moaned. Shiny cables stood out on his neck, and sweat made big blotches on his T-shirt. “Where did they go?”
“They had to have turned back from here,” Jason said. “They probably went farther up Lopez Bayou, then tried to cut south on another road.”
Nick bit his lip. “If they’d gone the other way, to the White, we’d have run into them,” he said.
“Right.”
“Turn the boat around, then.” Anger entered his voice. “We’ve wasted the whole day.”
“It’s getting dark, Nick.”
“
Just go
!”
The return journey began. Jason turned the boat around, banging into the trailing bass boat in the narrow passage, and crept forward toward the first obstacles. Nick stabbed furiously with his pole at the floating debris until it was completely dark and he couldn’t see it anymore.
“Flashlight!” he called. “Give me a flashlight!”
Jason passed forward one of the two flashlights. They kept going down the roadway, while Nick juggled his pole and the flashlight. Jason could hear Nick cursing under his breath as the bow ground against debris. Finally Jason saw Nick’s shoulders sag in the fading light of the flash.
“God damn it!”
Nick jabbed at a floating tree trunk as if it were an enemy to be impaled on his spear. “This is useless!”
Jason said nothing. Nick’s pole clattered on the foredeck.
“Eat,” Nick said. “Sleep. We’ll get an early start at first light.”
Nick stalked aft, the flashlight reflecting the fury in his eyes. Jason pulled the bass boat up close and climbed aboard to get access to the stores.
When he had stowed away, Jason thought, he’d expected to spend the summer in some big farmhouse, with Nick’s daughter and in-laws. Instead he’d been thrown back into the river again, and he was trapped on a small boat, in a dead-end waterway, with a heavily armed man who was in a bad mood. To put the icing on the cake, there were a bunch of murderers loose in the area.
It occurred to Jason that leaving the
Beluthahatchie
might not have been the smartest thing he’d ever done.
After their meal Nick didn’t insist they continue their journey to the bayou, but he was too agitated to sleep. He paced up and down the short length of the cabin, pausing occasionally to pick up one of his guns or drum his hands on the steering wheel.
Eventually exhaustion claimed Jason, and he fell asleep despite Nick’s restlessness.
He woke with a full bladder hours later. Nick was asleep on the bench seat opposite. Jason rose stiffly from his bed, stepped aft, leaned against the fiberglass hull, and relieved himself into the water. He looked up and saw past the overhanging branches of the trees the stars wheeling overhead.
He looked for M13—
a million stars
— and found the cluster easily enough, a bright smudge against the hard, brilliant light of the stars. Twenty-five thousand light-years away. No matter what happened here— no matter what catastrophes, horrors, anguish— whatever lived in M13 wouldn’t know about it for twenty-five thousand years, not even if they were interested.
He finished and zipped his pants, but he still stood gazing skyward, looking into the silent beyond.
And then the night’s darkness faded. Suddenly the entire country began to glow, as if hidden floodlights had suddenly switched on, bathing the still waters and the trunks of the trees in golden radiance. The suddenness and silence of this ghostly flourishing was breathtaking.
“Nick!” Jason called. “Look!”
“Wha?” came Nick’s sleepy voice.
“Look!” Jason could see leaves outlined perfectly in the glow, the patterns on tree bark, the vines coiling up the trunks.
“Oh my God,” Nick breathed in awe.
And then the quake struck, and the world again turned dark.
A roar filled the air like the earth moaning in pain. Spray spilled into the boat as the water turned white around them. The air filled with leaves and twigs. Debris ground against the hull, and Jason fell, heart hammering, into the bench seat next to him.
“Get into cover!” He heard Nick shout, but all he could do was cling to the side of the boat as it leaped up and down to the music of the quake. Tearing sounds filled the air as tree limbs began to crack and fall.
Nick’s strong hand grabbed Jason by the arm and pulled, and suddenly Jason was able to move. He crawled forward, past the driver’s seat, and wormed into the damp space below the foredeck. Nick crawled in after him. A falling limb dropped onto the bulwark where Jason had been lying, then ground against the hull as it slid into the water.
“It’s a bad one!” Nick shouted in his ear. Jason knew that already.
Jason clamped his eyes shut. The boat vibrated, banging up and down on water that seemed hard as concrete. His inner ear spun as the boat slewed to the push of the water. He could feel his teeth chattering.
Something heavy mashed the boat’s canvas top, and he gave a cry at the thought of being killed here, in the darkness. The cold waters pouring in as he struggled, trapped, in the close little space under the forepeak. He gulped down a sudden flood of stomach acid that had poured into his throat.
“It’s okay!” Nick chanted. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay!” But Jason knew it was pretty clearly
not
okay.
He heard the shriek of wood as a tree limb tore free, and then the limb thundered off the gunwale as it splashed into the water next to the boat. The boat tilted alarmingly to port. Jason gave a shout as Nick rolled onto him, squeezing the breath from his lungs.
“It’s okay!” Nick said. “It’s okay!” The boat righted itself, and Nick’s weight fell away.
“It’s okay!” Nick said.
Jason bit his knuckle to keep from screaming.
The earth roared on, and the boat danced to its anguished tune.
*
TWENTY-FOUR
During the day there was, with very little intermission, a continued series of shocks, attended with innumerable explosions like the rolling of thunder; the bed of the river was incessantly disturbed, and the water boiled severely in every part; 1 consider ourselves as having been in the greatest danger from the numerous instances of boiling directly under our boat; fortunately for us, however, they were not attended with eruptions. One of the spouts which we had seen rising under the boat would have inevitably sunk it, and probably have blown it into a thousand fragments; our ears were continually assailed with the crashing of timber, the banks were instantaneously crushed down, and fell with all their growth into the water. It was no less alarming than astonishing, to behold the oldest trees of the forest, whose firm roots had withstood a thousand storms, and weathered the sternest tempests, quivering and shaking with the violence of the shocks, whilst their heads were whipped together with a quick and rapid motion; many were torn from their native soil, and hurled with tremendous force into the river; one of these whose huge trunk (at least 3 feet in diameter) had been much shattered, was thrown better than an hundred yards from the bank, where it is planted into the bed of the river, there to stand, a terror to future navigators.
Narrative of Mr. Pierce, December 25,1811
Captain Jean-Joseph Malraux hummed Bernard Herrman’s theme music to the film
Jason and the Argonauts
as he steered
Beluthahatchie
down the channel of the Ohio River. The pilothouse was dark around him except for the glow of the instruments. The lights of Bay City were falling astern, and the mass of the Shawnee National Forest loomed dark and silent off to port. Joe kept one eye cocked on the depth indicator as he steered, making certain not to run onto any more unexpected sandbanks looming out of the river’s channel.
His company had given him permission to moor his tow of fifteen barges to the St. Francis revetment, where it could be picked up when the river was safer, and so he had only the fast and highly maneuverable
Beluthahatchie
to worry about. He was happy to be out of the Mississippi with its shifting channel, its hidden reefs, and its masses of saw-toothed debris. The Ohio was in bad shape as well, with the bridge at Cairo lacking a span and Locks and Dams No. 52 and 53 both broken. But the Corps of Engineers had been clearing the wreckage, the river was high enough so that the dams weren’t necessary to keep the channel full, and all the wreckage was heading to where Joe had been, to the Mississippi. And now that he was above the intact Smithfield Lock and Dam, the Ohio was smooth sailing.
The worst part of the last two days, though, had been calling Frank Adams on the marine band to tell him that his kid had gone missing. Frank had reamed him up one side and down the other. He had used language that would make a longshoreman blush, as Joe, who had known plenty of longshoremen in his time, could testify.
And then, when Joe had refused Frank’s demand to turn his boat around and head back to conduct a search for his missing son, Frank’s language had grown even more violent, and Joe’s temper had finally snapped, and he’d given Frank the company’s phone number, and told him that the company had lawyers who were
paid
to take that kind of abuse.
Joe felt kind of bad about that. Frank had just been looking for someone to blame, which was understandable enough.
But it wasn’t Joe’s fault. He had looked after Nick and Jase as well as he could. It wasn’t his fault that they had left
Beluthahatchie.
And damned if he was going to let some Los Angeles shyster tell him that it was.
Cincinnati, he thought hopefully, in the morning. And then a lot of downtime, while barge traffic languished and the Mississippi was made safe again. Time in which Captain Joe would probably not be employed.
At least it would give him a chance to get his video collection in order.
Bernard Herrman kettledrums boomed through his mind. He pictured the Argonauts’ galley moving up the river, drums beating time to the oars, while invisible gods and goddesses bickered overhead.
The door to the pilothouse opened, and his bowman came in. “Coffee, skip. And some beignets.”
“Thanks,” Joe said. He had barely slept in the two days since
Beluthahatchie
had got off its sandbar in the Lower Mississippi. He was the only crewman aboard certified by the Coast Guard, and he wanted to be on hand at every moment of the treacherous passage.
The bowman, who shared his watch, dropped the coffee cup into its waiting holder, and put the plate of beignets within Joe’s reach. Joe reached for one of the beignets, but they were fresh from the deep-fryer and burned his fingers. He dropped the beignet and licked confectioner’s sugar from his fingers.
And then the water began to dance around him, thousands of little wave-crests criss-crossing the river’s still surface in the light of
Beluthahatchie’s
floodlights. He could feel a trembling run through the towboat, shiver through the wheel beneath his fingers. To port and starboard, whole forests waved madly in the darkness.
“Aftershock,” he said to his bowman. He had seen this before.
But the aftershock didn’t die. Instead the wave peaks grew taller, and Joe could see foam forming in streaks along the surface. The vibration increased. The plate of beignets threatened to slide onto the floor, and Joe’s heart beat like the
Argonauts’
kettledrums. His hand hovered over the engine throttles, but he didn’t know whether it would be safer to throttle up or down, so he decided not to make a change.
“Go get the other watch,” he told the bowman. “I want as many pair of eyes up here as possible.” The aftershock could stir up all kinds of crap in the channel.
The bowman nodded and left the pilothouse in a hurry. Spray bounded over
Beluthahatchie’s
blunt bow. And then the pilothouse door slammed, and the bowman was back, his eyes wild.
“Big wave!” he shouted, one finger pointing aft. “Just behind us!”
Joe’s hand slammed the throttles forward before he looked over his shoulder. The diesels roared to a deeper pitch as Joe craned his neck aft, searching the leaping water for sign of the overtaking wave.
Joe’s heart gave a lurch. There it was, a big black wall moving across the leaping, foam-flecked water. It had to be at least fifteen feet high, and it was about to climb right up
Beluthathatchie’s
ass.
Tsunami.
The great sea-wave caused by an earthquake.
Joe had never heard of a tsunami on a
river
before.
“Sound the collision alert!” Joe yelled. He didn’t want to take his hands off the controls, but the off-duty watch needed to be ready for what was going to hit them. The other watch, plus any other human being within hearing distance of the signal.
The bowman threw himself across the pilothouse and the alarm blared out. White water boiled under
Beluthahatchie’s
counter as the engines redlined. Joe peered at the great wave rising astern, tried to judge its speed relative to the boat.
Still overtaking. Damn it.
The bridge telephone rang. The off-duty watch, trying to find out what was happening.
“Answer that!” Joe snapped. Calculations leaped through his mind. If the wave rolled over the towboat’s stern, it could sweep
Beluthahatchie
from stern to stem, bury it beneath tons of water. The boat might survive that, he reckoned, or it might not. And if the wave caught the boat broadside,
Beluthahatchie
would almost certainly capsize.
There was one possible escape, Joe thought. And that was to keep forward of the crest, by using the wave’s own power.
He gripped the wheel with one hand, the throttles with the other. The bowman, shouting into the bridge telephone, was looking aft with eyes wide as saucers.
“Hoo-aaah!”
Joe shouted in a voice intended to be heard on the other end of the telephone. “
Hang on! We goin’ surfing, podnah
!”
Joe pulled the throttles back, saw the wave loom closer. He let it come till he felt the wave just begin to lift
Beluthahatchie’s
stern, then throttled forward again. Turbines shrieked. The boat rose, and Joe felt a flutter in his stomach, panic rising in his throat.
Joe throttled way back. The boat continued to lift. The foaming curl at the wave top loomed closer, then stopped, hanging over the stern. Exultation screamed through Joe’s veins.
“Yeeow! Hang ten, baby!”
He adjusted the throttles so that he was neither climbing the face of the wave, nor dropping forward. The power of the wave itself was doing most of the work.
Joe’s inner ear swam. There was a sense of movement swirling on the other side of the pilothouse windows, and Joe felt panic burn along his nerves. He threw the wheel over, shoved the throttles forward. The boat straightened.
Joe took a gasping breath. He had almost lost the boat. If he’d let the wave push him to one side or the other, he’d have swung broadside to the wave and been rolled under.
Debris boomed on the bottom of the hull. The boat swayed: Joe corrected. The bowman was standing in the pilothouse staring aft, his knuckles clenched around the telephone.
“Put that down and call the Coast Guard!” Joe said. “Tell them we got a tsunami on the Ohio heading for Golconda!
Move
it, there, podnah!”
The bowman lunged for the radio. Joe’s head lashed back and forth, peering behind to make certain the tsunami wasn’t about to fall on them, staring forward into the night to see if the wave was going to run them right onto an island.
“Careful baby baby careful just a little more a little more
juice gaw-damn ...”
Words burbled from his lips in accompaniment to his thought. The blackness off the port bow was broken by light. Joe peered at it, trying to make certain the light wasn’t a reflection on the pilothouse glass ...
Golconda.
Already.
He didn’t dare think about how fast they were going.
Whoah.
He juiced the throttle, swung the boat to starboard. He’d almost lost it there.
And if that
was
Golconda, he thought, that meant he was coming up on a big island that sat smack in the middle of the river. And if he made it past the island, the river was going to make a sweeping ninety-degree curve to the right, and that meant the big wave was going to get
complicated
...
Adrenaline screamed through his veins. He goosed the throttle, shaved the wheel just a little. Joe wanted to steer down the face of the wave, moving laterally to port as the wave kept rolling down the channel. He needed to get well clear of that island before he impaled the boat on it...
“Whoah whoah whoah you
cochon
just a little baby there you go ...”
He was inside the wave’s curl, heading slantwise down the wave. Golconda was dead ahead. Now if he could just head the boat a little to port, get it moving straight again ...
“There you go baby there you go
aiaaah
surfin’ USA careful there
goose her yaaah
...”
The boat swayed, the wave crest looming on over her, and then
Beluthahatchie
leaped down the wave, picking up speed. Joe’s laugh boomed in the pilothouse.
Golconda was past and the island flashed up to starboard. Joe heard the grinding, grating, booming noise as the tsunami pounded over the island, ripping it and its timber to shreds.
“Roi de la rivière! C’est moil”
Joe felt like pounding his chest in triumph.
The island caused the wave to lose cohesion, caused ripples and back-eddies to build under the crest. Joe twitched the wheel and throttles to keep
Beluthahatchie
on course. And then the island was astern, and the tsunami shuddered as it met its twin, the wave that had creamed along the Kentucky side of the island. Joe felt sweat popping on his forehead as the boat surged beneath him.
“Yah, baby,
roi de la rivière!
Surf’s up!”
He tried to decide what to do about the upcoming bend. He didn’t want to be where he was, near the north bank of the river, when the river turned to the right— he would get caught between the bank and the tsunami and pounded to bits against the timber in the floodplain. So what he needed to do was cross over the front of the wave again and get as close to the south bank as he could . ..
“Here we go here we go on t’udder side . ..”
He was traveling along the front of the wave again, the turbines carrying him to starboard, white water creaming behind. The wave’s curl hung overhead, looming over them like a white-fanged monster about to drop on them from above.
“Skip! What are you doing?”
the bowman demanded, staring at the curl in horror.
“Hang on podnah.” Joe skated right across the front of the wave, speed building. Then he turned the wheel, got the wave behind him, felt the boat lift...
He could see the silver surface of the water curving to the right.
Damn
they were going fast.
Water boiled white to port as the tsunami slammed into the outer bank of the river bend. There was a rending, crashing, as if the wave was trying to tear the riverbed itself from the earth. But the part of the wave pushing
Beluthahatchie
seemed to be speeding up, going faster as it skiddered around the inside of the river bend. The boat swerved violently, and Joe steadied it just in time, a bellow of terror and exultation rising in his throat.
The roar to port continued. Joe worked the throttles. “Yah baby you go papa say you go ...”
The wave kept going, rolling across the curving river to smash into the north bank in a fountain of white foam. Trees went down like ranks of soldiers before machine-gun fire. But
Beluthahatchie
was flung away, across the river’s inner curve and into the calmer upper river, like a watermelon seed squeezed between the fingertips.
Joe throttled up, intending to get clear of the turbulent water behind him and the reduced reflection of the tsunami as it bounced off the north bank. He looked into the terrified eyes of his bowman and gave a wild laugh.