Walter Williams - The Rift

Concussions slapped at Jason’s ears. He felt himself wince with each shot, felt tears squeezed from his eyes. He couldn’t seem to breathe. Couldn’t breathe at all.

Jason blinked tears away. To his surprise he was looking at the deputy again.

The deputy was lying on the ground. And he was dead, small blank irises staring at the sky from his white, startled eyes.

*

“Well, excuse me, then, General,” the towboat captain barked. “I was told to pick up a barge filled with nuclear waste that had got loose during the quake. Well that’s what I come for, so when I was directed to a barge filled with nuclear waste I picked it up. And now this guy says it was the wrong barge of nuclear waste, and acts like it’s my fault.”

The towboat captain was a red-faced man in a baseball cap. His chin bristled with gray unshaven whiskers. He glared at Emil Braun, the power company executive. Braun glared back through his thick spectacles.

“This is the empty barge,” Braun said. “Those containers haven’t been filled with waste yet.”

“Why is that my fault?” the captain demanded.

“Wait a minute,” Jessica said. “The radwaste is still missing?”

Emil Braun had been sent by the company to take charge at Poinsett Island in the absence of Larry Hallock. The tow-boat and its captain had been near Poinsett Island before the quake, on their way to retrieve the barge of nuclear waste that had just been unloaded from the Auxiliary Building. On the night of the quake, when the few people remaining on the island had finally realized that the barge was missing, Jessica responded by sending out helicopter patrols to scour the river downstream from the power station. A drifting barge had been located toward morning, and remained in the choppers’ spotlights until the towboat could take it in charge.

Now Emil Braun, having checked the numbers, was assuring everyone that the wrong barge had been rescued.

“The captain picked up the wrong barge,” he told Jessica.

“I picked up the barge y’all told me to,” the captain said.

Jessica reached for her cellphone. “Can you give me the numbers of the barge we’re looking for?”

Braun looked at a clipboard filled with computer printout. “You bet,” he said.

Jessica gave the orders for a complete helicopter sweep of the river between Poinsett Island and Baton Rouge. Then she told the towboat captain to get his boat on the river and be prepared to undertake another rescue.

“I picked up the boat y’all told me to,” the captain said. “I don’t got to pick up another till my company gets another contract.”

“You picked up the wrong barge!” Braun insisted. “The contract wasn’t filled!”

“Enough!” Jessica said in her major general voice.

There was silence. Jessica looked at Braun. “Okay,” she said. “What happens if this radwaste gets into the river?”

Braun licked his lips. “Well, that depends on whether the fuel assemblies get broken or not. The rods are full of little uranium pellets, and those could spill out. And if the pellets were from the really hot fuel assemblies that just got removed from the reactor, then there would be a steady source of contamination in the river until the pellets eroded completely. But,” he added judiciously, “that’s not likely. I don’t think. Quite frankly, I do not believe any studies have been done in regard to this eventuality.”

Jessica nodded. “So what could happen is somewhere on a scale between nothing at all to radioactive contamination of the lower Mississippi that could go on for years.”

Braun nodded. “Um. I guess.”

Jessica turned to the towboat captain. “This river is under martial law,” she said. “You can contact your company and tell them to generate a new contract if you have to, but contract or not, you’re going after that barge.”

The captain began to speak.

“Don’t make me put a guard on your boat!” Jessica snapped. “And don’t think you can just sail away, because I’m going to be flying right above you, in my own helicopter, until that barge is found and brought under control.”

The captain hesitated, then spoke. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Jason sat in the cockpit of the bass boat. Midnight-black water hissed along the boat’s chine. Jason had turned his body to port because he’d been wounded in the back and he couldn’t sit properly in the seat, not without agonizing pain. He rested his chin on his left shoulder and upper arm. He tried to breathe, but it wasn’t easy- he had to take shallow, rapid breaths, because deep breathing had become impossible. He just couldn’t seem to expand his diaphragm far enough to take a full breath.

Cypress floated across his line of vision, alien shadows reaching for the sky with moss-wreathed fingers. Stars floated overhead, shone in the still waters of the bayou.

He had been shot, it seems, when he’d jumped onto the deputy. The bullet had gone into his lower back on the right side and come out near the top of his right shoulder. The entrance wound was smallish and the exit wound not much bigger. From the murmured, half-overheard conversations of the grownups, the chief question concerned what the bullet had hit on the way. Probably it had struck a few ribs. The chief question was whether or not it had punctured a lung. Jason’s inability to breathe properly seemed an ominous symptom, though the fact he wasn’t spitting blood seemed cause for optimism.

He could feel Arlette’s hand stroking his head. She was kneeling behind him on the afterdeck. Barring a few cuts and bruises she was all right, had come through it all unharmed.

Her voice came into his ear. “Ça va?”

“Ça va,” he said. “Okay.”

The deputy was dead. Still lying on the grass, probably, starlight reflecting in his startled eyes. Samuel had shot him. Samuel hadn’t been killed when the car hit him, he hadn’t even been badly hurt. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, that was all. The chain link had absorbed the force of the hurtling car.

When Samuel had got his wits and breath back, he’d seen Jason fighting with the deputy on the ground. He’d reached for the pistol he wore and got it free of the holster and taken aim and shot the deputy as soon as the little man had wrestled his own gun away from Jason and stood. It gave Samuel a clear shot.

Samuel had got his breath back, but Jason hadn’t. He was in pain and the muscles of his back had swollen hard as iron and he could barely breathe.

And maybe he’d been shot in the lung. Was Jason dying? It was a question that seemed of great interest to the grownups. Jason himself was past thinking about it, though.