Walter Williams - The Rift

His mind whirled. It had only been a few brief minutes since he had been standing atop the mound, watching his mother in the kitchen through the telescope. Now the kitchen was gone, and the house, even the field in which the house had stood.

There was a weird singing in his heart, a wail of loss and grief and shock. He couldn’t think what to do. He didn’t know whether to allow himself the hope that his mother might be alive. Alive and where? In the burning ruins?

The elm tree below his feet shifted in the current. Jason looked at the breaches in the levee, saw them wider than ever before. The Mississippi didn’t seem to be an inch lower than it had been: there were six-foot waves in both the breaches, and flying white scud. Eubanks’s cop car was perched on an island that was getting smaller by the second.

Jason needed to move to higher ground. Wearily he turned and began to climb.

A shadow fell on him and he looked up. Though only moments ago the day had been perfectly sunny, now a low dark cloud nearly covered the sky.

Jason viewed this phenomenon with the same dull acceptance with which he accepted the need to climb. He was beyond thinking about things. He could only react.

He began to claw his way up the mound, bracing his feet against trees or broken stumps, digging in the turf for handholds or pulling himself up with branches. Twice, powerful aftershocks knocked him flat, belly to the damp earth, sent him clutching for anchors to keep from falling off the mound’s steep flank. Finally he dragged himself to the topmost level, the little clear area from which, a few moments ago, he’d viewed his world. The telescope sat there waiting for him, unbroken. Apparently its hard red plastic case was adequate for an earthquake. The lens cap lay where he left it.

Without thought he put the cap on the objective lens, then turned and gazed at the scene below him.

The burning wreckage that once was his home had dispersed a bit, though it was still heading west with the flood. To the north, a dark, lowering cloud of smoke, its bottom marked by scarlet flame, hung above Cabells Mound. It seemed as if the whole town was burning. He could not see the water tower and assumed it had fallen. With no water pressure, he knew there was no way that Cabells Mound could fight the fires.

Not until the river water smothered them, anyway.

To the east, the two gaps in the levee were growing toward each other. As chunks of the levee tore away, Eubanks kept shuttling his police car back and forth, trying to remain in the exact center of his diminishing island. His car’s rack lights continued their mute flashing: Emergency! Emergency!

Within a few minutes, however, the island was not much bigger than the car, and Eubanks had nowhere to go.

Jason could see his dark silhouette moving inside the car. At first he wondered what Eubanks was trying to do, and then he realized that he was closing all the car’s windows, making it as watertight as possible.

He was planning on floating away, then, as far as he could. Jason supposed it was as sensible a plan as any.

But Eubanks’s plan never had a chance. The levee did not tear away beneath his car, it was torn - a mass of laden metal rammed through the breach, trailing a nest of cables, a barge that had broken free from its tow. Perhaps it was one of the barges that Jason had just watched the Ruth Caldwell push upstream. It smashed the levee beneath the front half of Eubanks’s car, and as the barge swept past, the car pitched down nose-first into the gap, then toppled over onto its roof. Jason could hear the thud from where he sat, along with the sound of shattering glass. The car spun madly in the current for a few seconds, water pouring into the broken windows, and then the river swallowed it with the same fantastic speed with which it had swallowed everything else.

Jason watched with the same dull, mute acceptance with which he had viewed the rising waters, the burning of Cabells Mound. It was as if he’d already used up all his stock of emotion and there was nothing left.

A gust of cool wind blew across the mound, and Jason shivered in his wet clothes. He looked up into the dark, threatening sky.

And then, out of nowhere, the first lightning bolt rained down.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Had such a succession of Earthquakes as have happened within a few weeks been experienced in this country five years ago, they would have excited universal terror. The extent of territory which has been shaken, nearly at the same time, is astonishing - reaching on the Atlantic coast from Connecticut to Georgia and from the shores of the ocean inland to the State of Ohio. What power short of Omnipotence, could raise and shake such a vast portion of this globe? The period is portentous and alarming. We have within a few years seen the most wonderful eclipses, the year past has produced a magnificent comet, the earthquakes within the past two months have been almost without number - and in addition to the whole, we constantly ‘hear of wars and summons of wars.’ May not the same enquiry be made of us that was made by the hypocrites of old - "Can ye not discern the signs of the times."

Connecticut Mirror

“ Is this the day?” Frankland demanded. “ Is this the day? Is this the Day of the Lord?” The station was vibrating to pieces around him as he shouted into the microphone. Things tumbled off shelves: a stack of tapes slid off their metal trolley and spilled on the floor with a clang. Frankland’s chair was moving in wild circles across the tile floor, anchored only by his hand on the mike. He ducked into his collar as a fluorescent light exploded overhead.

“And I looked when He broke the sixth seal,” Frankland shouted, “and there was a great earthquake- are you ready for judgment? — and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair- are you ready for Jesus? — and the whole moon became like blood- are you ready for God’s Tribulation?”

Frankland, trying to hold on, was wringing the microphone as though it were the neck of the Devil himself. “Are you ready?” he howled as something in the outer office crashed to the floor.

And then the lights went out. Frankland waited, in the rumbling darkness, for the emergency generator to kick on, but nothing happened.

Darn that diesel anyway. Frankland tried to stand, but he put a foot on something that had tumbled from a shelf and fell clumsily to his knees. Crawling, he made his way to the door, tugged it open, and then crawled through the office- all the shelves had fallen, all the furniture had shifted- to the exterior door.

Suddenly the shaking ceased, and the rumbling receded, like a train passing on to somewhere else. Frankland hauled himself upright by the doorknob. Vertigo swam through him. He needed to use his shoulder to drive the metal door from its bent frame.

As he burst open the door, sunlight and the smell of sulfur hit him in the face. Brimstone! he thought in sudden delight. The dirt parking space in front of the studio was torn clean across by a rent four feet across. He made his way around the building, one hand on the wall to keep him steady. The church, he saw, was still standing, though its windows were gone. He felt a grim satisfaction: he had built his station, and his church, to survive this and more.

His hands were trembling, and it took him a while to get the padlock on the generator room open. Once there, it only took a moment to start the piggyback electric motor on the diesel.

The diesel coughed into life. The light in the shed winked on. Frankland staggered out of the shed and waved his arms at the heavens. “The voice of the Lord is back on the air!” he shouted.