Walter Williams - The Rift

“Soft,” she remarked. “You don’t really have to shave yet, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“That’s cute, that hair you got there.”

“Thanks, I guess.” His mind whirled at her touch. He kissed her cheek. She turned and her moist lips touched his. He kissed her avidly, dreadfully aware that they might have no time at all, that this could end any second. He wanted to melt into her, bury himself in her muscle and nerve. He yearned to obliterate himself in her.

He touched her hair through the kerchief, began to pull it down her hair in back so that he could caress her. Gently her fingers carried his hand away, rearranged the kerchief on her head. Jason felt a baffled amusement at this strange modesty. “I want to touch your hair,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “I haven’t looked after my hair in over a week.”

“That’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a mess. Every day’s a bad hair day for me.”

He let his hand fall from her hair, clasped it around her waist instead. “Okay,” he said. “But I can still kiss you, right?”

“Sure.”

“Could you lean on my other shoulder? My throat hurts if I turn that direction.”

Arlette shifted her position. “It’s okay if I kiss you from here?”

“Yes. And you can touch my cute little sideburns all you like.”

Arlette giggled. “Okay.”

She touched his cheek, then brought her lips to his. They kissed again in the clinging darkness. Then Arlette gave a cry of alarm and Jason’s heart leaped; he turned to see a strange figure silhouetted against the stars, standing above them.

The man was burly, dressed in a long coat and a broad-brimmed hat. Jason saw a long beard silvered by starlight, hair tumbled over the shoulders, strange yellow eyes that gleamed in his black face. The man brought with him an earthy smell that Jason tasted on the night air.

“I come from outside, me,” he said, in an accent so thick that Jason could barely make out the words. “I need talk the man in charge, eh?”

*

Nick sat in the cookhouse, making bombs. He had the overhead light on, but he kept the doors shut so he wouldn’t attract attention. It was hot and stifling in the cookhouse, and his head swam with the scent of fuel. He worked slowly and deliberately, not daring to make a mistake.

Nick took one-pound coffee cans from the camp’s meager stores, then packed them two-thirds full with an explosive made from fertilizer and motor oil. He put all his weight into compressing the explosive, because he wasn’t sure if the picric acid he was using as a booster explosive would be “fast” enough, when exploded, to detonate the fertilizer, and the more fertilizer hit by the shock wave of the detonator, the better. He pushed his finger into the compressed explosive, and then in the hole he made he placed a homemade blasting cap. Each cap was made from one of the spent pistol cartridges that the deputies had scattered in the camp on their raid that afternoon, a fact that Nick considered poetic justice. Nick had punched the used primer out of the bottom of each cartridge with a nail and inserted an electric fuse put together by Armando Gurulé, the electrician’s apprentice who had been stranded in Shelburne City on his way to look for a job in California. Once the fuse was in place, Nick then packed in charges of lead picrate and picric acid, the primary and booster explosive.

Nick put in some scrap paper to hold the explosive in place, then began packing in pieces of metal. Nuts, screws, bolts, nails, bits of pipe, old hacksaw blades, coins, more of the spent cartridges- everything the Escape Committee could scrounge, including their own wrist watches. Anything that might make a hole in a deputy if it was shot at him with sufficient force.

When he was done, he’d created homemade claymore mines, a more primitive version of the notoriously effective antipersonnel weapon that U.S. forces had used in Vietnam. Each mine, when planted in the ground with its open mouth pointed toward an enemy, would spray out its scrap metal in the direction of the foe like a huge shotgun, shredding flesh with hundreds of small projectiles.

Nick had no certainty that any one mine would work- there were too many variables in these homebuilds, too much improvisation in the formulae, too many things that could have gone wrong in the assembly- but Nick hoped that enough mines would actually work to blanket the area occupied by the deputies when they next came into the camp.

There was a soft knock on one of the cookhouse doors. “Nick?” Manon’s voice. “You in there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come in?”

“I’ll come out. Just a minute.”

He finished packing explosive into a coffee can, then rose and switched off the light. Blinking dazzled eyes, he groped for the door knob. He opened it carefully, then slid out of the cookhouse and closed the door behind him.

Fresh air. He took in a few deep, grateful breaths. He couldn’t see Manon in the starlight, but he felt his flesh prickle as he sensed her nearness.

“Nick, I’m worried about the children,” Manon said. “I haven’t seen Arlette since nightfall.”

“Where can she go?” Nick said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she whispered. “What if that boy’s talked her into going over the fence?”

Nick breathed in the fresh air and considered this. “We haven’t heard shots, right?” he said. “So if they’ve gone, they’ve got clean away. We should be grateful they won’t be here for what will happen tomorrow.”

“Damn it, Nick!” Manon flared. “I want you to help me look! This is your family - this isn’t an army, this isn’t some soldier you’ve sent away on a mission; this is our baby we’re talking about.”

Nick looked at her. “If they’ve escaped, it’s a good thing. Jason knows enough about survival and the river to get away if he can find a boat. If he can get to the authorities, he may be able to save our lives.”

Nick’s eyes were adjusting slowly to the darkness. He saw Manon outlined before him, her tall, proud figure standing by the corner of the cookhouse. “And what if they haven’t tried their escape yet? What if they didn’t try to escape?” Manon demanded. “What if they’re together somewhere? Off in the night doing what they shouldn’t?”

Nick took in a breath of night air. “Good,” he decided.

Manon’s outrage was palpable. “Good? Good? Is that what I heard you say?”

Nick licked his lips. “I wouldn’t want either of them to die without knowing love.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Manon moaned. “Oh, my God.” He could hear the keen-edged grief suddenly enter her voice. “Oh, my God, that you would say they will die.”

Nick’s head swam. “I’ll do my best to see that they don’t,” he said. He was tired, far too tired, to offer any degree of false reassurance.

“You’re blaming me. I know you are.”

Nick looked at Manon in surprise. “Why would I do that?” he asked.

“I know it’s true.”

“Daddy! Daddy!” Arlette’s urgent whisper cut through the night. “We found someone! Someone from the outside!”

Nick looked up in surprise as Arlette and Jason came out of the darkness followed by a strange figure, a bizarre bearded apparition, as if a scarecrow dressed in second-hand clothes had come suddenly to life. To his astonishment, Nick saw that the scarecrow was carrying a gun over one shoulder.

“Bonsoir,” the man said. “I am Cudgel, me. I come see how you get along.”

Nick took Cudgel to the Escape Committee, and they set out to round up as many of the absent members as possible, along with any from the Camp Committee who could be found. Rumor spread swiftly, and a small crowd gathered, murmuring in the darkness as speculation spread among them. Cudgel seemed taken aback by all the sensation. Nick urgently whispered for everyone who didn’t have business here to get away, that such a crowd would only attract attention and, maybe, bullets. Reluctantly, the crowd melted into the darkness. Jason and Arlette remained, and Nick saw a defiant look in Jason’s eye. Nick decided he might as well let them stay. They’d found the man, after all, or he’d found them.