The Rift (96 page)

Okay, Sun?
he thought.
Okay, Dad?

Nick gave his doomed soldiers the floppy-wristed home-boy handshake—
My God,
he thought at the touch of palm on palm,
we are surely going to die
— and then he hobbled to the cookhouse. Pain throbbed through his kidney at every step. Drank his glass of water, then poured another glass over his head in hopes it would cool him off.

He shook his head, and droplets of water showered the ground around him. The air hung torrid and oppressive, so sultry that Nick felt as if he were moving under water. One of the workers in the cookhouse gave him a cracker and a scoop of rice, leftovers from the noon meal that he’d missed, and he ate them.

“Excuse me?”

Nick turned to the speaker, a youngish white man with short-cropped hair bleached white by the sun. Nick blinked at the strange figure. One day in the camp, he thought, and now the very fact of a Caucasian seemed odd. The man held out his hand.

“Jack Taylor,” he said. Nick shook the hand.

“Nick Ruford.”

Taylor’s green eyes looked sidelong at the others in the camp. “Listen,” he said. “I know something’s up. And I want to be a part of it. You know what I’m saying?”

Nick looked at him warily. “Why ask me?”

“Because it’s centered around you.” Taylor licked his lips. “Look,” he said. “Nobody will talk to me. And I understand why, okay. Nobody trusts me. But listen—” A dogged look entered his eyes. “My
wife
is black. My step-kid is black. My children are half-black. They’re all in here with me. And you’d have to be crazy to think I wouldn’t fight for them. I
want
to fight for them. I want to be a part of what’s happening. Can you fix it?”

Nick thought for a moment. Taylor was sincere, he saw, and angry. But this fight, when it happened, was going to be a mob scene, a giant gang rumble. With the exception of a deputy or two, nobody was wearing uniforms on either side. In a mess like that, that blond head might be all anyone would see. Taylor could have both sides trying to kill him.

Nick looked for him. “How many kids do you have?”

“Two. And my step-daughter. They’re all here.”

Nick took a breath. “Jack,” he said, “the best thing you can do in this situation is stick with your family. Try and keep them safe.”
And let them keep you
safe,
he added mentally.

“Damn it!” Taylor said. “Why don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you fine,” Nick said. “But when these people get out past that fence they are going to turn into a mob, and it’s the mob I don’t trust.”

“I want to fight!”

Nick put a hand on Taylor’s shoulder. Taylor shrugged it off. Nick sighed.

“Look, I can’t give you orders. If you want to do something, listen for orders for the Home Guard. Somebody says Home Guard do this, you do it. But wait till the mob calms down first, or you’ll get lynched.”

Taylor turned and stalked away without a further word. Nick looked after him, sighed.

Lost one,
he thought,
and the fight hasn’t even started. What else haven’t I done right?

Nick found Manon sitting on the ground in the shade of one of the cotton wagons. He squatted by her and asked her how she was.

“All right. This is where the children and I agreed to meet when—” She hesitated. “When whatever is going to happen happens.”

“That’s good. Keep together.”

She looked at him. There was a distant, mournful look in her eyes, the eyes of a woman much older than her years. He realized with surprise that she resembled her aunt Penelope, her father’s half-sister, who had been twenty years older.

“I keep thinking about Frankland,” Manon said. “About Rails Bluff. It was crazy there, but—” She bit her lip. “Frankland was different from these people. He was kind of goofy. He meant well. He wanted to build Heaven there, in his camp.” She shook her head. “These people here, they set out to build Hell. And they built it. And nobody’s even
noticed
.”

Nick took her hand. “We’ll make people notice,” he said.

“I keep thinking about my family,” Manon said. “We left them in Rails Bluff. And we thought we were the lucky ones.”

“Baby,” Nick said, “one of those deputies— the little one who shot Miss Deena, the skinhead— he’s got your Gros-Papa’s watch.”

She looked at him in shock. “What?” she stammered. “What are you saying?”

“Some of these people, they must have been traveling around in all this chaos. Robbing people, and—” He shook his head. “They must have been in Toussaint before they came here.”

Manon’s chin began to tremble. She clutched at his hand. “Oh, Nick,” she said. “Oh, Nick, you’ve got to stop them.”

“Yes,” he patted her hand. “Yes, I’ll stop them. I’ll stop them for you.”

*

“We got this by express,” said Nelda. She had a strange, expectant smile on her face. “I think you’ll like it,” she said. Jessica put her cup of coffee on its desk, took the air envelope from her secretary, hefted the envelope. It was surprisingly heavy and obviously had a lot of paper in it. Jessica sighed— she’d just had her eye repaired that morning and wanted to avoid too much reading— and then she slid out the contents.

A magazine slipped through her fingers and dropped into her lap. Her own face scowled back at her from under the brim of her helmet. “Oh, my God,” Jessica said.

It was a special edition of
Newsweek
dealing with the quakes and their aftermath. A particularly determined-looking photo of Jessica was on the cover, glaring at the camera through her black eye. The photo seemed to have been taken at the ceremony and press conference at Poinsett Island.

general j.c. frazetta, it said on the magazine cover, america’s river warrior.

“Oh, my God,” Jessica repeated.

“That nice Mr. Sutter wrote it.” Nelda beamed.

Jessica stared at the picture of herself in shock.
I need to lose ten pounds fast
, she thought.

“Which one was Sutter?” she asked.

“He was here for several days, remember? He talked to all of us about you.”

“Was he the one with the hair?”

“The hair. The face. The body. You know.”

Apparently Jessica
didn’t
know. She was surprised at herself. She’d been so busy she hadn’t even had the chance to ogle a good-looking guy.

She’d probably seen only the press pass, and then did her best to politely ignore him.

She opened the magazine and scanned at random. “Frazetta’s lucid briefings,” it said, “did much to clarify the situation in the Delta during the days following the first May quake.”

So
that’s
what they did, Jessica thought in surprise. She’d had the impression she’d been talking to a roomful of deranged, bloodthirsty, invincibly ignorant maniacs who insisted on interpreting her every word in the most sensational, dangerous, provocative way possible. An opinion that seemed borne out by the next part of the article that fell beneath Jessica’s eye.

“Sources report that Frazetta, inspired by her vision of turning Poinsett Landing into an island, ran over all opposition at one of her daily council briefings and successfully commandeered the resources to carry out her project.”
Untrue
! she thought. No one had objected to the project at all, at least not to her. And the project had been Larry Hallock’s idea, not hers.

She briefly meditated a letter to
Newsweek
on this matter.

While gratified by your otherwise flattering portrait, I beg to state…

“Such steamroller tactics,” the article continued, “were unlikely to work with the President, whose defenses were put to the test when Frazetta personally phoned him to insist on the controversial evacuation of the Lower Mississippi...”

“Hey, babe,” said Pat as he came into Jessica’s tent. “I heard you got a present.”

“It has a nice picture of you,” Jessica said, presenting her husband his picture, which showed him with the banjo he’d brought to the camp.

His eyes narrowed critically. “Do I really look that old? I look like a
geezer
.”

“In my eyes you’re forever young,” Jessica said, and glanced down again at the article to read the summary of her “most controversial” decision: the intervention at Rails Bluff. There was a sidebar concerning the reactions of unnamed but highly miffed Justice Department officials, who claimed that the situation in Rails Bluff clearly called for Justice Department expertise, that the use of the military in a situation of this sort was a dangerous precedent.

Oh yeah, Jessica thought. Like the Justice Department could even
get
their people to Rails Bluff.
We’d have to carry them in our helicopters,
she thought,
and hold their hands all the way to the camp. And even then they’d bungle it.

Still, she would have to bear the Justice Department in mind. Her superiors had warned her that the Civil Rights division was looking into her handling of the matter, in case she’d violated peoples’ rights while in the process of freeing them from gun-toting lunatics, but she’d been too busy to worry much about it. Maybe she should talk to someone high up in the Judge-Advocate General’s office and make sure her ass was sufficiently covered.

“Hey,”
Pat said, “no fair skipping around. Let’s start at the beginning.”

They read the article from beginning to end. Jessica decided she was pleased with it on the whole.

“Though it makes me seem like such a pushy broad,” she said.

“You
are
a pushy broad,” Pat said chivalrously.

“Yeah, thanks.” Jessica reached for her cup of coffee.

“You’d better call your mom,” Pat said, “and tell her to go to the news dealer and reserve her twenty copies.”

“Twenty?” Jessica mused. “No— for Ma, more like fifty.”

It was then that Nelda came through the tent flap again. Once again she had a pleased,
I’ve-got-a-secret
look. “General?” she said. “There’s a call for you on the radio. Secured line. From the President.”

As she rushed to the communications tent, Jessica found herself brushing at her clothes as if for an inspection. She picked up the handset, said, “Sir? Mr. President?”

There was a moment of silence as words passed back and forth between satellite relays. “Jessica?” he said. “How do you do?”

“I’m fine, sir. And you?”

“I am fit as a fiddle and strong as a bull. I dominate the world as a colossus. I rival the sun as a source of radiance, and I am a nexus of power acknowledged by all the world.”

Jessica blinked, uncertain quite how to respond. “I’m pleased to hear it, sir,” she said finally.

“The only cloud on the horizon, Jessica,” the President said. “The only fly in the ointment, the only blot on my escutcheon, in fact the only taint on my total omnipotence, is the fact that someone has usurped my rightful place on the cover of
Newsweek
.”

Jessica’s heart gave a lurch. “In
fact
—” The President’s voice rose in volume, “In fact, I shall have to devote much of my attention to
making that person’s life a complete and utter hell on earth.”

“Um,” said Jessica, paralyzed. “Well.”

The President barked a laugh. “Congratulations, Jessica. Well done. I really had you going there for a moment, didn’t I?”

Jessica felt sweat trickle down her nose. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you did.”

“My staff insisted that I take a few days off and relax at Camp David. That’s where I’m calling from. It’s so dull here that I have no choice but to amuse myself by making prank phone calls to my subordinates.”

“I hope it’s not
that
dull, sir.”

“Well, no, not entirely, not with Chinese missile tests and the menace of the Gamsakhurdians. I just wanted to congratulate you on your celebrity. And besides, I got the cover of
US
News and World Report.
Unfortunately those swine at
Time
decided to devote their cover to some little pasty-faced urchin being rescued from the roof of his momma’s car by one of your helicopters.”

“Better luck next time, sir,” Jessica said.

The President laughed. “Yes!” he said. His voice was manic. “Better luck next time! Exactly!”

Jessica’s head swam. This was decidedly strange. The President seemed to be calling her from well beyond the ozone layer.

“I wanted to give you a little friendly advice in view of your current celebrity,” the President said. “You’re going to start hearing from people now— people in
my
line of work, you understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re going to want to talk to you about running for office. Maybe even for
my
job.”

Jessica answered quickly. “Mr. President, I have never even for a moment considered—”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Jessica,” the President said. “I don’t give a hang if you run or don’t. What I wanted to say is this— they won’t be approaching you because they admire your brilliant political thinking. They’ll be approaching you not because you’re the best candidate, but because you’re a
viable
candidate. Because of that
Newsweek
cover and because you’ve got a very prominent job where you can score a lot of points with the public. And it won’t be about
you
— it will be about
them,
you understand? It’s their job to find people like you and groom them for office. It’s their job to approach people and awaken ambitions that people never knew they had, and the more ambition they can find in you, the more they can generate business for themselves. That’s how these people work.”

Jessica’s head swam. “I understand, Mr. President.”

“Now if you’ve always wanted to run for office, that’s fine. I can even introduce you to some people— people who work for
my
party, you understand. But if you have never thought of a career in public service, then I urge you to think long and hard before you give any kind of answer at all to these people.”

“The only career in public service I’ve ever wanted,” Jessica said, in all truth, “was in the military.”

The President cackled. “That’s a good one, Jessica!” he said. “That’s exactly what you tell those bastards! That’s my little politician!”