The Rift (84 page)

“Satan never sleeps,” said Magnusson. “I should know. I let some people get away yesterday because I let them bluff me. It was the Devil who put that bluff in the boy’s mind, I know that for sure.”

Frankland glanced over the highway. “What I want to do is make this place defensible. Sandbagged emplacements on the corners of the camps. Slit trenches for the people to shelter in.” He pointed at the catfish farm. “And I want to emplace some of you
there.
I’m not going to let somebody with a gun catch us napping again.”

Most of the guides and guards nodded and looked severe. A few seemed hesitant. Frankland looked at one of them, turned on his silky, persuasive voice.

“Do I
want
a battle?” he said. “No. But we haven’t thought enough about our security, and yesterday we paid the penalty. I want everyone here
safe.
And they’ll only be safe if we
make
them safe. Then we can be like the angels around the Throne, spending our days chanting “Holy, holy, holy, Good God Almighty.’ We’ll be safe.”

“‘Lord
God Almighty,’” someone corrected.

“Sorry,” Frankland said, “I misspoke.”

He wasn’t sure whether he’d succeeded in motivating them or not. He made assignments, put people in charge of his new projects, then crossed the camp to his home.

Dr. Calhoun had been moved to the room where Father Robitaille had died. Calhoun was alive, his pulse strong, but he had been unconscious since morning and his abdomen was rigid and hard as iron around the bandaged entrance wound. He wouldn’t live more than a day or two, and would probably never wake.

Sheryl and Reverend Garb watched in silence over the dying man. Garb looked somber. He had been very quiet since the incident the previous morning and spent much of his time in prayer. Sheryl wore her reading glasses and had her art on her lap, working nimbly with tweezers and tiny bits of postage stamp confetti. She had started a new project to keep hand and mind occupied— the Book of Daniel this time, Frankland noticed, the beast with seven horns.

“No change,” Garb said in answer to Frankland’s query. He held Calhoun’s limp hand in his own.

“I’m trying to put the camp in a state of defense,” Frankland said. “The forces of the Enemy will be coming for us soon.”

Garb looked sadly down at the unconscious man. “I didn’t think it would come to this.”

Sheryl gave Garb a sharp glance over the rims of her spectacles. “You knew it was going to be bad,” she said. “You knew that most of these people would die during the next seven years of Tribulation, no matter what we did.”

“I suppose,” Garb said.

“It only matters
how
they die,” Frankland said. “If they have Jesus in their hearts, it doesn’t matter what happens to them.”

Sheryl dropped a yellow stamp-fleck onto one of the beast’s horns. “Once the people leave us, teddy bear,” she said, “they’ll be back in the secular world.” She shook her head. “Nothing there but temptation and sin, and most likely they’ll die no matter what happens. Better they die here, when they’re more likely to die in a state of grace.” Her eyes flickered to the wounded man. “Like Dr. Calhoun,” she said.

“Yes.” Garb nodded sadly. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m going to prepare the camp for the end,” Frankland said. “If we die, it’s best we all die together.”

“I’ll be along in a minute, sweetie,” Sheryl said. “I want to finish this horn first.”

Frankland rounded up some of the Christian Gun Club and put his block and tackle over the last, untouched concrete bunker. He lifted up the slab and looked at what lay there. The others stood in sober respect.

And when he had opened the seventh seal,
Frankland thought,
there was silence in heaven . . .

M26A1,
read the stencils on the box,
Fragmentation, 30.
Two cases at thirty per case. Hilkiah had acquired them two years ago, and Frankland had been careful not to ask how.

“Let’s take the grenades out,” Frankland said, “and then the .50 caliber Browning.”

*

Mid-morning, the bass boat drifted at last into the Mississippi. The great river was sluggish, but at least it moved faster than the Arkansas. The amount of debris had increased, if anything, but on the wider, larger river it was possible to steer around it. Nick started the outboard but kept speed and fuel consumption low.

He kept a wary eye on Jason, who shared with Arlette the duties of standing on the foredeck and fending off debris. Jason had turned cooperative— he was obedient, cheerful, helpful, and had kept to himself his endless supply of smart remarks.

Nick found this ominous. That and the way Jason was relating to Arlette— the shared glances, the giggles, the way their arms or legs brushed together, as if by accident, as they worked on the foredeck.

Nick knew damn well what was going on. It was right there in front of him. But there was nothing he could object to, no inappropriate behavior, not so much as a kiss.

Just two young people falling in love. It made Nick grind his teeth. He ground his teeth so much that it made his neck ache.

There was no traffic on the river. None at all. The huge cypress and cottonwood trees coming down with the flood apparently provided too great a hazard to navigation.

At De Soto Landing, they gave a wide berth to a docking platform that thrust a hundred yards or so into the river. The facilities were big enough for tankers. Some of the big oil tanks on shore had burned. There was no sign of a living human being.

The boat floated downriver alongside the shimmering ribbon of oil that stretched out from the landing. The stench of the oil sank into the back of Nick’s throat, a foul rasp he couldn’t cough out even though he tried.

The river slowed to a crawl. The boat drifted, bumped aimlessly against debris, because Nick wanted to conserve fuel.

Hunger settled into Nick’s stomach, became a part of him, a steady ache he carried always with him like a woman carries a child. He found himself thinking nostalgically of Brother Frankland’s greasy fish and mixed vegetables. Food occupied his thoughts almost every minute. Not just for himself, but for his family. Rescue needed to come very soon.

A cooling breeze fluttered the surface of the water, brought light dancing on the river’s skin of oil. The breeze was refreshing at first, the first real weather change in two weeks and a relief in the sweat-drenched, smothering tropical heat. But as the sky darkened and the breeze strengthened, flying into their faces from the south, Nick began to look for a way to shelter from the storm that was obviously building. Lightning flashed in the oncoming clouds, suggesting it would be unwise to remain in the main channel as the tallest electric conductor for half a mile in any direction. A gray chop rose on the river, tossing debris against the boat’s chine.

It was clearly time to take a chance on the falling timber in the flood plain. The treeline on the east bank looked far too dense to safely enter, so when Nick started the Johnson, he maneuvered toward the western bank, crossing the track of the oil that had been draining from the broken tanks upstream. Oil-flavored spray spattered Nick’s face as the bass boat shouldered into the chop. Thunder boomed from the sky like the bootsteps of God.

The bass boat reached the trees just as the rain cut loose, a drenching rainstorm that came down in floods all at once, without preamble. Within seconds it was too dark and wet to see more than a few feet. Wind howled through the broken tops of the trees, bringing a gentle drizzle of small branches and willow leaves. Nick and the others huddled in the little cockpit, stretching over themselves the orange plastic sun shade that they’d taken from Frankland’s guards. Rain rattled on the plastic, little bright concussions like gunshots next to Nick’s ears. Thoughts of cold drove thoughts of food from his mind. He was cold and hungry and wet, and as he shivered he could feel the others shivering, too.

The rain ceased around midnight, and with stiff limbs Nick and the others bailed out the boat. No stars were visible overhead. The downpour started again an hour later, as fierce as before, and continued intermittently past the gray, uncertain dawn.

When they finally shook the last drops off the orange plastic and looked around them, they found themselves in a flooded stand of cypress. The sun was invisible behind dark cloud, and they had no way of telling direction. Soon little wisps of mist began to rise from the water. The wisps thickened, then closed overhead like interlaced fingers.

The boat bobbed silently in the fog, lost and alone in the forest of silence.

*

The rain hammered down. Omar had set out pails and crockery for the leaks— his roof had not done well in the quakes.

Wilona was standing a night shift at Clarendon— probably sitting down to a session of tea and heartfelt gossip with Mrs. Ashenden as the rain drummed on the rooftop— so Omar was home alone, lying on the sofa with his shoes off and listening to Johnny Paycheck on the radio.

It was the endgame that he worried about. He’d isolated the A.M.E. camp. He’d made certain that no one but certain of his own people had access. Jedthus and Knox both told him that things were going well there, though they volunteered no details, and Omar asked for none.

But at the end, when the camp was empty, what then? He couldn’t tell everyone that two hundred refugees had just flown away.

Timing, he thought. If the Bayou Bridge could be repaired soon, and he could know the date in advance, he could just claim that everyone had left of their own accord as soon as they could.

He heard booted feet stomping on the porch, kicking off the raindrops, and then David came in, banging the screen door and moving with the slow, over-elaborate deliberation that gave Omar to understand that he was drunk.

David wore a plastic rain slicker over his deputy’s star and one of Omar’s spare uniforms. That morning, Tree Simpson had ruled that his shooting of the refugee was justified, and David had returned to duty as a special deputy.

Omar had made a point of assigning David to patrolling the highway between Shelburne City and the fallen Bayou Bridge, on the other end of the parish from the A.M.E. camp. He didn’t want David near the place. When David asked him why, Omar said, “because if you turn up at the camp, we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

Which was not the real reason, but it was a reason that would have to serve for David.

“Hi, Dad,” David said. He hung up the rain slicker and his baseball cap on the pegs by the front door.

“How was your evening?” Omar asked.

“Went out with the boys.”

“Which boys?”

David went into the refrigerator without answering, got a beer, returned to the front room to sit in Omar’s easy chair. Omar looked at him from his reclining position on the sofa. “Which boys?” Omar repeated.

“Knox and them.”

“I thought—” Omar was about to repeat his instructions to stay away from Knox, but then he saw David’s knuckles bruised and swollen, and he sat up.

“You been in a fight, son?” he asked.

David looked at his battered fists, then shrugged. “A little ramshagging, that’s all.”

Anger snarled in Omar’s veins. “You just survived an
inquest,
sonny boy!” he barked. “Now you want to start getting into fistfights and maybe having people start thinking second thoughts about that killing you did? Who were you fighting
with,
anyhow?”

David gave a slow, drunken grin. “Nobody that’ll complain. We was down to Woodbine Corners.”

Omar stared at him in shock. David took a swig of his beer.

“We decided, hell, we’ll save some bullets,” he said. “We’ll kill this batch with our bare hands. So we had a few drinks and got to business.” He looked at his free hand, flexed the fingers meditatively. “It was a lot more work than we thought. It takes a long time, you know, to kill someone like that.”

Omar’s head swam. Revulsion squeezed his stomach, brought the tang of vomit to his tongue. He bit it down.

Then the anger hit, and he stood over David and slapped the beer from his hand.
“What are you doing?”
he demanded.
“Just what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

David stared up in amazement. Omar slapped him across the face. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from Knox?” he demanded. “Didn’t I?”

The beer bottle gurgled as it emptied itself onto the floor. “What’s the problem?” David demanded. “What’s wrong?”

“Knox is
crazy,”
Omar shouted. “Isn’t that enough?” He clenched his fists and marched an angry circle around the room. Spilled beer soaked his socks.

“But Daddy,” David said, “Knox believes the same as you. He believes the same as what you’ve always taught me.”

Omar lunged across the room to stand over his son again, hand raised to strike. David flinched but didn’t raise a hand to defend himself. Omar didn’t bring the hand down; he left it in the air, in case he changed his mind.

“Knox is out of his head!” Omar shouted. “He’s been wandering around the country stealing and killing! If you hang around him, you’ll get killed or spend the rest of your life in jail! Did I raise you for that?” Omar demanded. “Did I, Davy?”

“He’s a soldier!” David said. “He’s fighting a war against ZOG. Just like you!”

“ZOG, shit! Ain’t no ZOG and never was!”

Bewilderment shone on David’s face. “I don’t get it. If you ain’t fighting for the white, why are you doing what you’re doing?”

Blood flamed in Omar’s heart. He panted for breath. He looked at the hand he’d raised, and let it fall.

“It’s for you, son,” he said. “You did a killing. Can’t let no witnesses testify or they’ll hang us both.” He took a breath. “I’m not doing this so you can get drunk and beat niggers to death! I’m doing it so you’ll stay out of prison!”

David licked his lips as he tried to comprehend this. “Knox says we’re going to be famous. Knox says we’re going to liberate all America starting with Spottswood Parish.”

Omar straightened wearily from his crouch over David’s chair, turned, slopped through the spilled beer back to the couch. He sat down heavily, staring at the wall opposite with the blue flowered wallpaper that he and Wilona had put up when David was still in grade school.