Walter Williams - The Rift

This last time, though, the meeting on Poinsett Island, the President’s affect had been different. It wasn’t so much as that the glow wasn’t there, but that it had gone somewhere that Jessica couldn’t reach. Though there was nothing Jessica could put her finger on, she had the sense that, at least part of the time, the commander-in-chief wasn’t home.

Hey, she told herself. Give the guy a break. He’s just lost his wife.

Flash. Flash flash.

She had lost another part of the vision in her left eye on the return helicopter trip to Vicksburg. The doctor, though, had been encouraging when he spoke to Pat on the telephone. Jessica had probably torn a retina. It sounded frightening- and Jessica was very frightened-but the doctor assured Pat that the retina could most likely be tacked back on with a laser.

To Jessica’s surprise, she didn’t have to check into a hospital. Unless there was some complication, the procedure could be done in the doctor’s office.

And that meant she wouldn’t have to be absent from her command for more than few hours. By the time the paperwork for the procedure caught up with the Army- and that would take a long while, given the current emergency- she would have been back at her work for weeks, if not months. Which meant that it would be far too late to question her presence at her job.

Flash flash flash. “The vitreal humor,” the doctor said conversationally, “that’s the jelly in the center of your eye. Well, it was probably pulling away from the retina- it happens to most of us as we get older. But in your case the vitreal humor pulled the retina away with it. Probably the earthquake tore everything loose.”

“Not the earthquake. It was a bumpy helicopter ride.”

The doctor was amused. “We don’t get many of those,” he said.

Flash flash flash.

“How’s that?”

Jessica blinked cautiously at the world. Reality seemed more or less intact.

“I can see,” she said in surprise.

“You may have lost some detail,” the doctor said. “Time will tell.”

“I- thank you, doctor. Thank you.”

“Lie back and let me take another tour of your eye,” the doctor said. “I want to check and make certain I haven’t missed something.”

“Certainly.” Jessica leaned back on the padded headrest.

“And another thing,” the doctor said. “No more helicopter rides.”

Jessica felt herself smile. She had got here on a helicopter, a smoother ride than driving the torn road between Vicksburg and Jackson.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

*

“Okay,” said Armando Gurulé, the electrician's apprentice. “I've made this double safe. To set off the claymores, you've got to throw both these switches, right?”

“Right,” Nick said. He bit his lip, looked at the wires. “What if they cut power to the camp?”

Armando gave a laugh. “They can't. Look at the power line. They run their own floodlights off the same power source.”

Nick nodded. “Good.”

“So you throw the switches. And then all the claymores go at once. Boom.”

“Boom,” Nick agreed.

Nick blinked gum from his eyes. The sun was just beginning to rise behind the trees east of the camp. In the last hour of darkness he had buried his mines- he'd ended up with eleven- leaving nothing but the detonator wires sticking out of the ground. Armando had crawled after Nick and connected the wires to his homemade control board, then covered the gear with grass or bits of matting or plastic sheeting.

“I hope this works,” Armando said. “I'm from the Dominican Republic, man. I don't understand this crazy scene at all. I keep thinking I'm here by accident.”

“We're all here by accident,” Nick said.

“I guess so.”

Weariness dragged at Nick's thoughts. He hadn't slept at all during the night, and only fitfully on the boat the night before. The thought that he might have forgotten something important beat at his brain like a weak, insistent pulse.

“I'm going to talk to the committee,” he said. “Then I'm going to try to get some rest. Make sure you wake me if the bad guys come.”

“You bet.”

Nick dragged himself to the pecan tree, told the combined Escape and Camp Committees that he'd finished his job. “I'm getting a little worried about security,” he said. “What I've been doing isn't exactly secret. Probably most of the camp knows about it by now.” He rubbed his weary eyes. “What if someone decides he can sell the information to the coneheads?”

“That doesn't make any sense,” someone on the Camp Committee said. “They aren't going to let anyone out of here.”

“People don't always think straight,” Nick said. “All you need is one parent panicked for the safety of a baby, or an alcoholic who will do anything for a drink …”

“Or a white man who got put in here by mistake,” said Tareek Hall. “Or who was planted in here as a spy by the conspiracy. Or some nigger traitor seduced by the conspiracy, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.”

The others were too tired to argue, but they took Nick's point. “The deputies already said nobody but the Camp Committee can come near the fence,” someone said. “All we have to do is enforce that from our side.”

Tareek began to say something about microphones planted by the conspiracy, and laser beams in orbital satellites that could make people behave crazy, but there didn't seem to be anything anyone could do about that. “You people have to organize the fighters,” Nick said. “I can't do that- I don't know the people. You have to find someone to enforce the rules. And you've got to do it yesterday.”

“We got motivation,” one man said. He pointed to the fence, where Nora's body still lay. “We know what happens if anything goes wrong.”

Nick could barely breathe in the hot and humid air. His mind swam. “I'm going to try to rest,” he said, and left them to their arguments.

He'd done what he could. Maybe later he'd think of something else to do, but right now he was too weary to think of anything but sleep.

He went into the storage shed where he'd found the fertilizer and motor oil and lay on the soft, oil-soaked planks. Sleep took him in an instant.

Nick was vaguely aware of Arlette waking him with some breakfast on a plastic plate, but he was less interested in food than in sleep. When he next woke the sun was high, and his body was soaked with sweat where it lay against the floorboards.

They didn't come, he thought vaguely. The deputies had not come. No one had discussed this possibility.

He sat up, and pain hammered through his stiffened body. He saw the plastic plate where Arlette had left it. It held two of the strange greasy crackers and a small mound of an opalescent gelatinous matter. He pushed the stuff around with one of the crackers and concluded that the mysterious substance was made from powdered eggs, but lacked the usual yellow food coloring that turned them into a reasonable facsimile of fresh, scrambled eggs.

Nick scooped some onto a cracker and took a bite. The taste wasn't bad, but wasn't good, either. He ate it all.

He wandered out of the cookhouse and saw people lining up for lunch. He blinked in the sun.

The deputies hadn't come. He had been so certain that the deputies would arrive that morning, would enter the camp and drive the refugees like cattle to the slaughterhouse.

It looked as if they would be given a breathing space. He should check all the work he'd done that night, make sure there wasn't something he'd overlooked in the darkness.

The plan could be refined. Everybody could be made to better understand their roles, to understand the necessity of what Nick needed them to do.