The Rift (91 page)

Jason clambered down with a show of reluctance. His face was swollen where the deputy had kicked him. Nick shepherded them toward the back of the camp. “Let’s get under one of the cotton wagons,” he said. He wished he could hide them all in a trench. Pain knifed his kidney as he crouched down, and he gasped in pain.

Crouching in cover, Nick didn’t see the deputies’ reaction to Miss Deena’s announcement. He didn’t see the argument, or the little red-haired runt of a man who led a group of deputies sprinting for the gate. But Nick saw and heard the crowd’s reaction, saw them fall back with a kind of collective cry, then saw them run as shots began to crack out.

Nick’s heart hammered. He clutched at Manon and Arlette, held them to his breast while Jason crawled restlessly left and right, trying to get a view of what was happening. “Get your head down!” Nick told him.

Then the crowd parted, and he saw deputies with shotguns at port arms running right for him. “This way!” he yelled. “Run!” He pulled Manon and Arlette away from the deputies, from beneath the far side of the cotton wagon, then urged them to run between a pair of tents. Shots cracked out. He heard a man scream. He remembered the flash as the shotgun went off in Viondi’s face, the way the warm, bloody body had fallen into his arms. He remembered fleeing into the night, running from the light, to wherever the light would not find him.

“This way!” he cried. His heart pounded in his throat. People screamed and ran in all directions. Shots began coming from the guards posted around the camp. There was nowhere to run, but Nick knew they had to run anyway. A man with a gun loomed up in his vision, fifteen yards away. “This way!” he shouted, and ran past the cookshed into a tangle of tents and awnings. A rope caught his ankle and he crashed down into the rainsoaked earth.

Hunted.
He was being hunted, and so was his family. He rose to his feet and began to run. Shots rang out behind him. People shrieked, and a whole mass of them surged across his path. He ran with them. He had lost Manon and Arlette. Desperately he called their names. He realized that the people were being driven, like cattle.

A fence loomed up in front of him, and Nick realized that he’d swung round in an arc and ended up at the front of the camp again, to the left of the gate. People flung themselves against the fence, then fell back at the sound of shots. Sobbing for breath, Nick looked for cover, found a fallen tent, and wormed his way into it.

Panic hammered in his throat. He had never felt so helpless in his life, not even when the first quake had torn the earth apart in front of the wheels of Viondi’s car.

He looked out at the world through a piece of mosquito netting that served the tent as a window. He saw the group of eighteen or twenty people, terrified and bruised and bleeding, that the deputies herded together and threw onto the five-ton truck. The deputies made no effort to search for the people they were actually after, just took whoever they could find. Nick saw Miss Deena still standing by the front gate, standing like a soldier with her back straight and her shoulders back, her gaze unflinching and defiant as the weeping people were herded past her. Too proud to run, too contemptuous of the enemy.

Nick saw the little redhaired runt, the leader, stop by the gate for a moment, saw strange green eyes turn to Miss Deena. Saw the thoughtful consideration in those eyes.

Saw him raise his pistol and shoot Miss Deena in the face.

A scream of horror and rage rose to Nick’s throat. It echoed the screams of dozens of others.

Then, as the gate swung shut behind him, the redhaired man took out a pocket watch and looked at it. “Six minutes!” he said. “Good work!”

Little chimes sounded through the air. Nick recognized the tune as “Claire de Lune” and felt his blood turn to ice, his thoughts to murder.

That little man, he saw, that baby-faced killer with the shotgun eyes, was carrying Gros-Papa’s watch.

Nick crawled out of his hiding-place. Frustration and baffled anger throbbed in his chest. He felt soiled, utterly disgusted with himself. He had allowed himself to be driven like an animal. Terror had ruled his mind. He hadn’t acted the part of a man. He hadn’t behaved like a father who cared for his child. He’d crawled into hiding like a worm into its hole.

Gunsmoke tainted the air. Nick wandered through the stunned, sobbing refugees till he found Manon bent under a tree and weeping. He knelt by her, put his arm around her.

“I’ve never,” Manon gasped through tears, “never imagined.”

“Where is Arlette?” Nick asked. “Where is Jason?”

“I am somebody,” Manon said. “I am a
person.”

Nick stood, bit his lip as he looked for Arlette. He hadn’t seen anyone familiar among those being herded onto the truck, but anxiety sang through him until he saw Arlette and Jason emerging from behind an awning. He called out to them, hugged them both against him.

He wouldn’t run again, he thought. Next time, he swore, it would be the guards who felt fear.

*

Crystals of salt were forming in the simmering water that Nick had drained from the night soil. Nick set Jason to scooping them out with a coffee filter. Nick began assembling material for his next bit of chemistry.

Miss Deena didn’t die, not right away. She was laid under an awning near the cookhouse, along with an unconscious wounded man who had been shot in the stomach. There were some other wounds, all minor, and a few dead. Miss Deena’s moans and incoherent cries floated through the door and she tossed restlessly on a bloody mattress. The woman who had walked with such pride, spoken with such forth-rightness, would not be allowed to die with the dignity she carried in life. Instead she would die slowly, half-conscious and moaning in pain.

Nick could see a little shudder run up Jason’s spine at every moan.

“I can do that job, Jase,” he said. “Why don’t you go find Arlette?”

Jason gave him grateful look and made himself scarce. Nick tied a towel around his head so he wouldn’t drip sweat into his chemicals. He continued to pick out crystals of salt until he’d boiled most of the liquid away. Then he added methanol to the solution and filtered it through a paper coffee filter. The white crystals of pure saltpeter, collected on the towel, he laid out to dry.

While the saltpeter was drying, Nick got out the bottle of aspirin that Miss Deena had given him. He ground a fistful of aspirin tablets into a cup and mixed them with water to make a paste, then added methanol and filtered the mixture through a paper towel. He evaporated the remaining liquid out of the mixture, then added the white powder to the sulfuric acid he’d made earlier, then added saltpeter till the mixture turned red.

He refined the mixture further, cooling and straining and reheating, until he had picric acid.

While the refining process was underway, he began to make lead monoxide from saltpeter and the chips of lead pipe that Joseph of the Escape Committee had sawn for him. This required more methanol, more distilling and filtering operations. By this point his operations monopolized the burners in the cookhouse.

When he had picric acid, he used part of it to mix with the lead monoxide to form lead picrate.

“Boom,”
he said softly to himself.

There it was. The lead picrate formed the primary explosive, the picric acid the booster explosive. Pack them together and they made a detonator. And that would set off the fertilizer explosive he would make next.

He had his weapons. What he needed now was a plan for using them that would leave his family alive.

He stepped out of the cookhouse to take a breath of air, and he saw a woman drawing a blanket over the terrible gunshot face of Miss Deena. Her agonies were finally over. The wounded man, the one shot in the belly, had died also, apparently without ever regaining consciousness.

Nick stared at the two bodies while pain throbbed through his skull. He had the sensation that he lived now in death’s realm, that his father’s passing had somehow opened a door into the world of night. The bodies were piling up. And the only escape, perhaps, was for Nick to start piling up bodies himself.

He turned his eyes from Miss Deena and walked away, out of sight of the corpses, and simply stood for a while, looking at nothing, taking deep breaths of the sultry air. He’d been looking at Manon for a while before his mind really registered her presence— when it did, he felt it as a small shock. There she was, her unforgettable profile, the proud Nefertiti arch of the neck. She was facing away from him, gazing at the hardwood forest behind the camp.

Nick approached her. She turned as he neared her, looked at him with an expressionless face.

“You okay?” he asked.

“What a question,” she said. “No, I am not okay.”

Nick felt sweat trickling down the back of his neck. “I’m not okay, either,” he said.

She hesitated, then touched his arm. “What’s going to happen?” he asked. “Are we going to be all right?”

“Some of us will get away,” Nick said. “How many, I can’t say. But some will. That’s the best we can hope for.”

Nick saw that Manon’s eyes were shiny, that tears were rolling down her face. She looked away from him suddenly. He stepped closer and touched her face, wiped a tear away with the back of his fingers. “I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s all right,” Manon said with a kind of sigh. “That was the General talking.”

“I’m sorry,” Nick said again.

She turned to him. “You don’t think it’s my fault, do you?” she said. “Because I wanted to go the wrong way up the floodway?”

Nick looked at her in surprise. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s
their
fault.”

“Those bastards,” Manon said. Her lip trembled. “Those clay-eaters. They don’t know us. How dare they judge us on one thing? I am a
person
.”

Nick remembered her repeating that sentence,
I am a person,
after the deputies chased them through the camp. Clinging to her selfhood in the face of those who would deny it.

Manon’s family had worked for generations to build their pride, to educate themselves, to maintain their high standards of achievement, to lead their community. And that didn’t matter to the people on the other side of the fence, because they saw color only.

“I know,” Nick said. Because color wasn’t all Nick was, either. He was a father, an engineer, a man who loved. He was a father, at least, before he was a black man. He didn’t have any issues with people who reversed the order of those values— that’s who
they
were, and that was all right— but he always resented those who insisted that there existed values that were solely black, that black people who didn’t adopt these values, and no other, somehow weren’t black enough; that by choosing one life over another they were somehow betraying their ancestors; that he, by his choice of school, his choice of friends, his choice of a job, was betraying the brothers he’d left behind.

His mind spun. He wondered if the deputies— those people out there he was going to do his best to kill— ever accused each other of not being white enough. Probably they did.

“How
dare
they?” Manon said. “I have never felt so degraded.”

“Because somebody overlooked this damn place,” Nick said. Overlooked it for a century, probably. All it took for death to take a grip on a community was a handful of crazy people and a lot of other people who
weren’t paying attention.

Both in Rwanda and in Bosnia, the radio had told people to pick up weapons and kill their neighbors. And they
did.
All that was needed to unleash the savagery was for someone to tell people it was okay.

Wars were all ethnic now. That had been a problem at McDonnell, maybe even the reason Nick had been laid off. You don’t need a jet airplane to kill your neighbor; all you need is a shotgun and a machete and a voice on the radio to tell you what to do.

Whatever chaotic combination of circumstances had led to this situation in Spottswood Parish, it hadn’t been planned this way from the beginning. Never mind what Tareek Hall might claim about a nationwide conspiracy, this camp and this situation had the feel of improvisation. This simply wasn’t organized well enough to be a deeply held conspiracy. The coneheads and crackers that had gained control of this area were making it up as they went along, and that gave Nick a kind of hope. They might not have any kind of backup plan. If Nick could throw a monkey wrench into their scheme, their whole operation might fly to pieces. The Escape Committee had said there were a couple dozen guards at most, and some of them, like the Klan sheriff, hadn’t been seen since before the troubles really began. The ones who were present were standing double shifts, and were probably weary by now. The total wasn’t very many, not to keep a place like this going.

“The rest of the country has forgotten this place exists,” Nick said. “We need to remind them somehow. There’s got to be
some
way of getting news to the rest of the country. Radios, satellite phones, something.”

Manon shivered and turned away, hugging herself with her arms. “There’s nothing I can
do.”
She said. “I went to college. I’m not a fool. But I’m useless. I don’t have any skills that apply in this situation. All I can do is
watch.”

Nick came up behind Manon and put his hands on her shoulder, began to work the iron-taut muscles. “Look after yourself, that’s your job,” he said. “Look after the children.”

“I can’t even do that!” Manon said. “Not in a war! I don’t know how!”

Nick felt her muscles leap under his hands. “Then save yourself for after the war,” he said. “Save yourself for me.”

Her muscles leaped again, and she cast him a glance over her shoulder. “Oh, Nick,” she said. “Let’s not.”

Nick sighed. “Okay, baby.”

“There are reasons we’re divorced.”

He let his hands fall from her shoulders. “You know,” he said, “I’m not too clear on what those reasons were. Other than the legal ones, ‘irreconcilable differences’ or whatever.”

She sighed. “We discussed it at the time.”

“You
discussed it. I don’t think
I
discussed it much.”