The Rift (66 page)

What went wrong? he wondered. What had gone wrong with Charlie Johns? He was too smart to die like this.

Bill started pushing the barrow again. He’d deliver the food, then he’d walk back to the park to inform the authorities about the dead trader lying in the BMW.

*

By late afternoon Omar had a head count. Two hundred thirty refugees, mostly black, on the A.M.E. campsite. Four hundred and forty-three, mostly white, crammed into Clarendon’s parklands, a stench unto the nostrils of Mrs. Ashenden. Thirty-one badly injured people had been moved into the house itself, where they could fulfill her Civil War fantasies— maybe, Omar thought, she’d feed them off the Wedgwood.

And then of course there was the dead man occupying a body bag at the coroner’s office.

Omar didn’t know how many natives of the parish were without homes, but it was well into the hundreds. Many had taken refuge with friends; others were camping or living in their cars.

Omar couldn’t just round them up. After all, they were voters.

The strangers were all hungry. The parish had done what was possible to get food to them, but there wasn’t that much food in the parish to begin with, less than a week’s supply.

Fortunately Judge Moseley had been on the phone to the Emergency Management people, and they had promised for the next day a helicopter supply mission, food, tents, and medical equipment.

Omar had just been to the A.M.E. camp to tell them that help was coming tomorrow. His reception hadn’t been very cordial. “There are some damned angry niggers here,” Merle grinned as Omar got out of his car. The camp inmates, Merle implied, wanted assistance
now,
and they weren’t taking any shit from Klan Kops.

Omar went into the camp and tried to talk to Reverend Dr. Morris, tell him that the government was shipping in stuff tomorrow, but that everyone would have to sleep in their cars tonight— but there wasn’t just Morris, there was a whole
wall
of black folks, all of them talking. All the white people in the camp— and there were a few— were probably in hiding. Some of the blacks looked like
aliens,
with dreadlocks or strange headgear or crazy, incomprehensible speech. All of them seemed to know who he was. “You can’t scare
us,
cone-head motherfucker,” one big man chanted, the deep voice repeating the words over and over, sometimes varying his rhythm, mother
fucker
alternating with
mother
fucker
.
There were at least two people with video cameras, hoping to catch Omar in some brutality.

Anger flared in Omar’s veins as he tried to shout his message over the sound of the crowd. He felt his fingers tingle as he thought about his pistol, thought about the flap holding the pistol in the holster. He thought about firing the pistol into the air just to get everyone to shut up. He repressed the thought. These people could be armed, he thought. They could shoot back.

He delivered his message and left. Taunts rang in his ears as he stalked away. Merle stood by his car at the gate, his easy grin turned taut on his face. “Figured I might have to pull you out of there, boss,” he said, and showed Omar the Ingram Mac-11 he was holding concealed behind his car door. The thing fired eighty zillion rounds per second, Omar knew, and not a one of them accurate.

“Jesus,” Omar said. “You would have shot me along with all the others.”

“The first burst would have gone over their heads,” Merle said.

Omar was not comforted. He looked over his shoulder at the angry crowd, the video cameras that were still trained on him. “Put that gun back in the car.” he said, “if you don’t want it on the evening news.”

“I’m gonna need more boys here for crowd control,” Merle said.

Omar pushed his sunglasses back up his nose. Anger snarled through his nerves. “You’ll get them,” he said.

“Make sure they’ve got shotguns at least,” Merle said. “These aren’t
our
niggers we’re dealing with.”

*

Omar rolled his cruiser carefully over a barely-filled-in crevasse as he drove down Main, then turned onto Courthouse Road. Anger still shimmered in his nerves, though weariness was beginning to beat it down. The courthouse lawn, with its stubs and torn stumps of blackjack oak, looked strangely bare in the slanting western rays of the sun. A wrecker, with a crane on the back, had been backed onto the courthouse lawn. Probably yanking stumps or hauling wood away, he thought.

He would sleep in his office tonight. After sixteen hours of coping with one emergency after another, he didn’t think he could face the wreckage that was his home.

The parking place that had been reserved for the sheriff and other parish employees had been filled by a truck full of building scrap from the collapsed Robbie’s Barber Shop across Courthouse, so Omar turned the car around and parked next to the courthouse lawn. He got out of the car, crossed the broken concrete sidewalk, then stopped in surprise as he saw who was standing by the wrecker under the cracked plinth of the Mourning Confederate.

Micah Knox. The biggety bantam Crusader stood among a knot of strangers, a camouflage baseball cap cocked back on his burrcut head, the long sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled down to his wrists. And standing next to Knox, looming over him almost, was the tall figure of Omar’s son, David.

David looked up and grinned as Omar approached. “Hey, Dad,” he said.

“Hey,” Omar said.

The wrecker had been backed up to the Mourning Confederate, Omar saw. The bronze statue had pitched headfirst off its plinth during the morning’s earthquake and stuck in the soft ground like a spear. A cable had been wrapped around the statue, and the crane on the wrecker was about to lift the Confederate and set it upright.

“Micah said it wasn’t right that the statue should just be left there,” David said.

“Not in Liberated America,” Knox said.

“I agreed with him,” David said, “so I got ahold of Judd Criswell and got him to bring his wrecker.”

“Micah?” Omar said. He looked from David to Knox and back. “You know each other?”

“Since this afternoon,” David said. “Micah and his buddies came in on a boat this afternoon, down by the Bayou Bridge.”

And David and his partner patrolled down there, Omar knew, looking out in case refugees managed to get across the bayou.

“We were pretty grungy,” Knox said. “We’d been on the river almost a week.” He grinned at David, fiddled with a gold watch chain looped between a front and back trouser pocket. “Dave here took us to your house so that we could get a shower.”

“And they cleaned the place!” David said. “Set the furniture up, tidied up the broken glass. Nailed the ceiling panels and the box siding that come loose.”

Knox grinned, bounced up on the tips of his toes. “Five people,” he said. “Working for an hour, while Dave was off on his patrol. It’s not as nice as Wilona would make it, but it’s a lot neater than it was.”

Omar looked at the strangers. “Who are your friends, Micah?” he said.

“Crusaders brave and true,” Knox said. “We keep in touch through the Internet and arranged a rendezvous. They’re all happy to be here in Liberated America.”

He introduced them. They were all bigger than Knox. Some looked like serious streetfighters that Omar would hate to encounter in a barfight situation. They were all young and wore combat boots and bits of military uniform. Their ears stuck out from short-cropped heads. Two had bad acne, and all displayed lots of insect bites. None of them seemed particularly happy to be in Shelburne City, liberated zone or not.

“Where’ve you been?” Omar asked.

“Arkansas, mostly. We met up there, before everyone started evacuating. We just wandered around, then got a boat when we got caught by flood—” His restless hands touched his cap brim, his belt, his shoes. His voice turned louder. “Hey, you know Omar, this quake knocked ZOG for shit. No Feds anywhere. No FBI, no DEA, no judges, no marshals, no military. No Equal Opportunity Commission. Just the
people,
for a change. It’s like the frontier all over again.”

“Hey, Omar,” Judd Criswell said from the cab of his wrecker. “Can we get moving, here? I got plenty work for this truck.”

“You bet,” David said.

The winch whined, and the bronze man slowly rose from the soil. The others pitched it over so it would land right-side up, and Criswell carefully lowered it again to the ground.

“There we go,” David said admiringly. “Straight up-and-dicular.”

The figure had survived remarkably well. The muzzle of the statue’s rifle had broken off, but the bowed head, with its somber expression, and the body in its caped overcoat had come through unscathed. David stepped forward and wiped dark soil from the mustached face.

“Can’t get it back on the pillar, I guess,” he said. “But the least we could do was set the ol’ boy on his feet again.”

After Judd Criswell disconnected his cable and drove off in his truck, Knox drew himself to attention and gave the statue an elaborate salute. “Comrade, we salute you!” he said. “We have kept the faith! The struggle goes on!” The Confederate gazed at him with glacial sorrow.

Then Knox turned to Omar and gave another salute. “Micah Knox and detachment reporting for duty, Sheriff Paxton,” he said. “Tell us what you want us to do.”

“I mentioned you could make ’em special deputies.” David said.

Omar hesitated. “I don’t know rightly,” he said. “You’re not from around here.”

“Neither are the Klan boys you brought in,” David said. “I heard the radio calls from that African Methodist camp— sounds like you need more people.”

Omar paused for a brief moment to admire the thought of Knox and his Crusaders National race warriors guarding the nigger camp— now
that
would be fun to watch— but he remembered the video cameras and reluctantly dismissed the idea.

“Okay,” he said. “You boys can relieve some of my trained men, and they can look after the camp.”

Knox’s strange emerald pupils blazed from within their rim of white. “We
are
trained, sir,” he said.

“Not for police work, son.”

Knox accepted this judgment with reluctance. Omar took them into the courthouse, swore them in, and assigned them as partners to other deputies, then sent the deputies’ former partners either to bed or the A.M.E. camp.

He was going to have to do something about that camp, he thought as he sat in his office and listened to radio calls crackling out. Too many guns out there. Too many strangers. Too much unruliness.

He thought about it, and an idea came to him. He smiled.

Knox and his Crusaders might be useful after all.

*

The morning after the quake, Nick and Jason continued their water journey. But the waterscape had changed completely: they floated through a forest of broken trees, stumps, and raw wood spears jabbing from the flood. The water was choked with wreckage, and it was very easy to wander from the roadway they had been following. After losing it and finding it several times, they lost it for good, and after that they tried to navigate by the position of the sun.

Eventually they stopped using the speedboat’s engine, because it spent so much time idling that they reckoned they were wasting fuel. Because the speedboat was too wide to row, they moved to
Retired and Gone Fishin’,
which they could row with the oars that Captain Joe had provided them. They towed the speedboat behind on a line. They traded rowing with fending off wreckage and trying to clear a path for the boat.

It was hot, backbreaking work. Insects buzzed round them in swarms. They had no idea whether they were moving in a straight line or in circles.

The next morning was no better, but by noon they found themselves rowing through water that was perceptibly moving, trickling past the stumps and standing trees. They decided to follow the direction the water seemed to be flowing, even though it was in a different direction than the one in which they’d been going. The trees seemed to open up gradually, and they found themselves in what might have been a river, or a flooded road, or possibly even a section line cleared of trees, but at any rate seemed to be a straight path that was taking them somewhere. The sun seemed right overhead, and they couldn’t tell whether they were moving east, west, or south.

They moved from the bass boat to the speedboat, though they didn’t start the engine, just drifted with the current. They stretched their kinked and sore muscles, and shared a can of tuna, some pickles, and an orange.

Then the trees opened up to the right, and drifting into sight came an open field with an old Allis-Chalmers tractor standing in it, the water up to its motor. Visible in the near distance were the collapsed remnants of a farm and its outbuildings. And between the farm and their boat was another boat, a fifteen-foot open flat-bottomed aluminum fishing boat with three people in it.

Jason’s heart leaped. “Look!” he said. Nick jumped up with a shout poised on his lips, and then he hesitated. A darker look came into his eyes.

“Get into the driver’s seat,” he said. “Take us close to them. But not
too
close.”

Jason’s mouth went dry as Nick reached for his rifle and crouched down in the cockpit. Nick looked over his shoulder, saw Jason’s expression. “I’m just being careful,” he said.

Jason’s heart hammered in his chest. He got into the driver’s seat, pulled the choke, pressed the starter. The Evinrude started up with a roar.

The people in the other boat heard the engine start up, and they jumped upright and started waving. Jason coasted closer to them. All three were black, he saw, one older man and a pair of boys about Jason’s age.

“That’s close enough,” Nick said.

Jason cut the engine and drifted. Jason watched Nick’s hand clench and unclench on the barrel of his rifle. The three in the other boat waved their arms and shouted.

“Heaven-o!” they cried. “Heaven-o!”