Walter Williams - The Rift

“At least there aren’t any operations going on right now,” Pat commented. His voice was as conversational as the circumstances permitted, shouting over the banging furniture and moaning earth.

“I hope I don’t lose an eye,” Jessica said. Rayleigh waves rattled her teeth as she spoke.

“I was hoping to keep your mind off that.”

“That was good of you.”

A wineglass walked off the edge of the table. Jessica snatched for it in midair, but the earth took a lurch at that instant and robust red wine splattered over the dining room floor. The solid Baccarat crystal, the sort of glassware out of which a major general was expected to serve her guests, didn’t so much as chip.

She closed her right eye and peered out with her damaged left, tried to determine if she was losing any vision. But the earth was heaving and leaping too much for her to keep her eye focused on anything long enough.

The earth thrashed a few last times and then the vibrations died down. In the precarious silence, Jessica took a defiant bite of her dinner, handed the plate to Pat, and cautiously ventured into the front room to find her cellphone in the corner, having leaped from where she’d placed it on the coffee table.

It was already ringing.

She was in communication with her headquarters immediately, and with Washington in a few minutes. Her staff were well practiced by now; they smoothly gathered information and fed it to her as it arrived. Jessica had time to scarf her dinner before Sergeant Zook arrived with her car. Pat stayed behind to get the house in order. On her way to headquarters in the Humvee, she hit the speed dialer number for Larry Hallock, but didn’t get an answer.

She tried three more times over the next hour, then tried some other numbers. She was unable to raise anyone at Poinsett Island. Then she got absorbed in her work, in the information flooding in and the deployments that needed to be made, and didn’t try calling again.

It was while looking at a hastily made printout of Prime Power deployments that she absently raised her hand to her right eye and looked at the list with her left.

A chill whispered up her spine as she realized that her left eye had gone blurry. She looked at the list for the length of three long, slow heartbeats, then reached for her cellphone and hit Pat’s speed dial number.

“Do you know the gentleman I saw this morning?” she said. “The gentleman in Jackson?”

“Yes.”

“I need to see him again,” Jessica said. “I need you to make the appointment.”

“Are you-”

“It’s not like it was last time,” Jessica said. “The situation has improved, but I still need to see the gentleman.”

“Jessica,” Pat said, “you are not keeping this job at the expense of your sight.”

“I hear you,” said Jessica, and rang off.

Her phone chirped again the instant she returned it to her pocket. Her caller was Helen Hallock, Larry’s wife, wondering if her husband had checked in. “When I last talked to him, he was about to call for his helicopter.”

Jessica checked and discovered that the helicopter hadn’t been called. She called her own chopper and took off into the waning light.

It was after the sun had already set that Jessica landed on Poinsett Island and made contact with the handful of people waiting there. They’d been cut off because their radio antenna had pitched into the river. It was then that Jessica discovered that part of Poinsett Island had slid into the river, that Larry Hallock was missing, and that a barge filled with murderously hot nuclear waste was drifting, untended, down the Mississippi.

*

The Mississippi Delta is filled with magnetic anomalies. Known as “plutons,” these objects are believed to be extrusions of magnetic ore created by volcanic activity during the distant geological past. These structures are enormously dense, and they straggle along the middle Mississippi like pebbles being washed along a ditch. Their immense weight creates stress on the surrounding subsoil- and since the Delta’s geology consists of little more than layers of muck, there is very little save inertia to prevent a pluton from doing exactly what it wants to do.

Plutons have been associated with earthquake activity, particularly in places where no fault lines have ever been detected. A large pluton discovered off Cape Ann, Massachusetts, has been blamed for the earthquakes that struck Boston in 1727 and 1755, quakes that inspired a famous sermon by the revivalist Reverend Thomas Prince, “The Works of God and Tokens of His Just Displeasure,” in which Prince demonstrated that the quakes were caused by the Lord’s opposition to the sinful behavior of Boston’s backsliding Puritans. Another pluton beneath Charleston, South Carolina, has been held responsible for the giant earthquake that shook the southeastern United States in 1886.

The first June earthquake, Jl, began at 5:54 p.m., Central Daylight Time, when a pluton, sitting atop gooey Delta subsoil beneath Jonesboro, Arkansas- subsoil destabilized by the series of quakes- dropped six meters through slumping ground. The shocks caused by the passage of the pluton set off a familiar chain reaction as stored tectonic force was discharged throughout the various New Madrid fault structures.

Jl registered at 8.3 on the Richter scale, one-sixth the strength of Ml and a third the power of M6, but still equivalent to the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Its destruction was mitigated only by the fact that so much of the affected area had already been destroyed. Anything that was likely to fall down had already fallen down, and much of the population had been evacuated. Those remaining in the area were wise to the ways of earthquakes. Deaths were later reckoned to be in the 100-plus range.

Jonesboro, already hard hit by Ml and M6, was shattered. Memphis- by this point a near-desert of broken stone, torn roadways, refugee camps, and collapsed homes- received another pounding. More land slid, more fountains geysered skyward, more damaged buildings collapsed. Precarious infrastructure repairs, to power and sewer lines, to bridges and railroad tracks, were wiped out. Efforts by the Coast Guard and the Corps of Engineers to mark a safe navigation channel in the Mississippi and other major rivers were brought to nothing as the topography of the river changed once again.

But relief workers were already in place. Supplies and funds had already been allocated. In spite of the quake’s great size, remarkably little disruption took place, if only because everything had been disrupted long since.

Most of the survivors considered themselves lucky.

*

One Mississippi, two Mississippi. . Nick, without a watch, counted the seconds slowly to himself.

This was bound to disrupt the whole parish, Nick thought. Which would make things easier for him. The more emergencies the sheriff had to deal with at once, the better.

The world ceased its moaning after three minutes. Nick could hear the S-waves receding toward the south, the freight train moving away. Nick looked up, saw others cautiously lifting their heads. Children screamed as their parents tried to comfort them. Nick carefully raised himself to his feet.

“Everyone into a car!” he said. “Let’s get ready to move out!”

He made sure that Cudjo was in the lead car. He kissed Arlette and Manon. He hugged Jason and rubbed the red casing of the telescope for luck, then made sure they were all three on a truck rolling south.

When the last of the Home Guard, the women, and the children were gone into the growing darkness, Nick waved the shotgun over his head and shouted for the Warriors to get on the road.

Bringing the war to the sheriff, Nick thought. To the capital of the enemy’s kingdom.