The Rift (103 page)

THIRTY-SIX

Previous to my leaving the country I heard that many parts of the Mississippi river had caved in; in some places several acres at the same instant. But the most extraordinary effect that I saw was a small lake below the river St. Francis. The bottom of which is blown up higher than any of the adjoining country, and instead of water it is filled with a beautiful white sand. The same effect is produced in many other lakes, or I am informed by those who saw them; and it is supposed they are generally filled up. A little river called Pemisece, that empties into the St. Francis, and runs parallel with the Mississippi, at the distance of about twelve miles from it, is filled also with sand. I only saw it near its bend, and found it to be so, and was informed by respectable gentlemen who had seen it lower down, that it was positively filled with sand. On the sand that was thrown out of the lakes and river lie numerous quantities of fish of all kinds common to the country.

Narrative of James Fletcher

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.

The grownups had put the boat in the water. Manon was piloting, and Arlette was aboard, and a man named Bubba who said he’d worked on towboats as a bowman and knew the Mississippi.

They were going to Vicksburg. They were going to Vicksburg to put Jason into a hospital and get help for the refugees in Spottswood Parish.

Moss-shrouded cypress floated past, tall in the water. Stars glittered at their feet.

Jason leaned on the side of the cockpit and tried to breathe.

*

The library smelled of dust and decaying book paper. It was a better fortress than Nick had expected— there were iron grills over the windows, which would certainly keep out unwanted visitors as well as the larger munitions, like tear gas grenades. The front door was solid cypress wood and so invulnerable that the Warriors had been unable to break it down: they’d had to pry off one of the iron grills, go in through a window, and open the door from the inside. The walls were thick concrete, covered with plaster that had partially peeled away in the quakes.

“Keep a lookout,” Nick said. “Two to each window. Nobody show a light.”

He took his own station behind the reassuring oaken solidity of the reference librarian’s desk. In front of him, on the desk, he propped the radio handset he’d taken from the deputy Jedthus. Carefully, wary of the pains in his stiffening body, he lowered himself into the librarian’s padded swivel chair.

He picked up the phone. Nothing. Just as Cudjo had said, the phones were out.

He sat in the chair and glanced around. There had been surprisingly little quake damage to the building. The shelves were metal and bolted to the floor and still standing. A great many books had spilled to the floor, and papers from the librarians’ desks. All the windows were shattered— probably in earlier quakes— but the iron grills would work better than glass to keep out whatever needed keeping out.

There were three different channels on the police radio, which Nick could reach with pushbuttons. He shifted from one to the other, but the sheriff’s deputies kept all their calls on Channel One. There were calls about earthquake damage and injuries, all of which the sheriff relayed to other emergency services, most of which seemed amateurish and improvised. There was chatter about putting up roadblocks around the library, about evacuating people who lived in the neighboring buildings. Nothing whatsoever about sending deputies after the refugees that had fled from the camp.

Nick heard nothing about sending in a negotiator, nothing about trying to find out what Nick and the Warriors actually wanted. Nick wasn’t particularly surprised.

Darkness slowly fell. The library grew full of shadows. Flickering on the wall behind Nick was firelight reflected from the burning police vehicle that Nick had driven onto the front lawn of the library, then set on fire.

Nick didn’t know whether it was a signal, or bravado, or something else. It had just seemed the thing to do.

The other cars were parked closer, nestled right against the library, in case the Warriors decided they needed a fast exit.

“Anyone have a watch?” Nick asked. “What time is it?”

It was after ten thirty. Cudjo, he hoped, had got the refugees well into cover by now. Nick rose from his chair and winced at the pain that shot through his kidney. He hobbled to the front window, but stayed well under cover as he shouted, “We’ll talk! Send somebody to talk to us!”

“What you doing?” said Tareek Hall from somewhere from the depths of the library. “We want to kill those crackers, not talk.”

“Send someone to talk!” Nick shouted out the window. “We want to talk!”

“The fuck we do,” said Tareek.

At least he wasn’t shouting out the window.

Nick turned to Tareek and limped toward him. “I’m going to try to get other people here,” he said. “Someone from the Army, the Justice Department. Major network media.”

“Shit, they’re all part of the conspiracy anyway,” Tareek said.

“If the Army’s part of the conspiracy,” Nick said, “we’ll be dead in an hour or two no matter what we do. We can’t match their firepower for a second. But you don’t know the Army, and I do. I grew up in the Army. And I do not believe they are a part of this.”

“Shit,” said Tareek in disgust. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

Jedthus’s radio began to chatter. Nick limped back to the librarian’s desk to listen. Nick’s offer to talk had been heard and was being reported to Omar, the sheriff. Omar just acknowledged with a “ten-four” and otherwise made no comment.

That was all right, Nick figured. He could wait.

*

Omar looked across the lawn at the Carnegie library from the relative safety of Georgie Larousse’s living room. The smell of the lasagne that the Larousse family had eaten for dinner made his stomach turn over. His head throbbed. He had no idea what to do.

He couldn’t seem to
think.
That was the trouble. All the careful fences he’d built were breaking down, and he didn’t know how to rebuild them.

All Omar had managed to do so far was choke off any attempt to talk to the people inside. But he didn’t know how much longer he could do that. The parish council could decide to overrule him at any time, and he suspected that the only reason they hadn’t was that they were distracted by earthquake repair work.

And he had called in as many local Klansmen that he could get ahold of, people like Ozie Welks, who hadn’t been directly involved with the business at the A.M.E. camp because they’d been looking after their businesses and families in the wake of the disaster. They were armed, reasonably committed, and dangerous so long as they stayed sober, but Omar knew perfectly well that he couldn’t launch them at the library without getting them all massacred.

I had no idea about the deaths at the A.M.E. camp,
he said to himself. Rehearsing his defense.
That must have been Jedthus Carter and those skinhead friends of his. I had no idea who those people were, but Jedthus said they were private security guards and I was so short-handed that I had to employ them.

“How about we gas ’em?” Merle suggested. “Shoot some tear gas in there, then gun ’em when they come out?”

“Grills on the windows,” Omar said.

“Oh.”

Merle seemed surprised. Probably he hadn’t been inside the library since he was in grade school.

An aftershock rattled the shelves in the Larousse kitchen.

Did anyone see me at the A.M.E. camp after the second day following the quake?
Omar thought to himself.
None of your witnesses can put me there. I was dealing with the epidemic at Clarendon that whole time and didn’t have any time to spare to deal with the situation anywhere else.

He considered this defense to himself. It was possible he could get away with it, he thought, if he had the right jury.

Maybe, he thought, maybe it was just time to run for it. Keep things going here as long as he could to guarantee David time to escape, and then follow him over the bayou and away.

“Is there a back door or something?” Merle said. “Is there a basement and a way into it? If we could get someone in there, he could gas the place out before they knew anything about it.”

Omar thought about that one. “Let’s see if we can get the keys from the librarian,” he said.

*

Nick listened to the plot developing over the police radio. He didn’t know whether the sheriff had completely forgotten that his radio security was compromised, or just figured that the car radio Nick used had burned up with Jedthus’s car. In any case it seemed not to have occurred to him that Nick might have taken Jedthus’s handset.

A party was going to creep up to the rear of the building, let themselves into the back door, and start flinging tear gas grenades up the back stair into the library. Then another group would charge the building and shoot down the Warriors as they came staggering out.

It was easy enough to counter the scheme. But as Nick placed his soldiers in the windows and told them to keep alert, he felt sadness drift across for the poor fools who were going to try to storm his stronghold.

They’d even waited for moonrise, so that they could be spotted all that much more easily.

His people saw three figures slipping across the back lawn, aiming at the rear door, and held their fire until they couldn’t miss. A volley of shots boomed out, echoing in the wide space of the library. Nick felt his ears ring. One of the party fled, and the other two lay stretched out on the lawn.

The larger storming party never left their assembly area behind one of the residential homes across from the front of the library. Instead they swarmed into whatever cover they could find and started shooting, a truly impressive amount of fire that crackled through the night, but all completely useless, most of it going into the air or thwacking solidly into the library’s concrete walls.
Poor fire control,
Nick thought. The Warriors fired back, increasing the racket. It required some effort for Nick to get his own people to stop shooting. Eventually the deputies’ fire dwindled away.

No one inside the library had been hurt. The sharp smell of gunpowder stung the air.

Nick asked someone for the time. It was a little after two in the morning.

“We want to talk!” he shouted out a window. “Send someone to talk to us!”

*

Warm night air drifted through the Larousse house. Return fire from the library had knocked out most of the front windows, letting out the air-conditioning. Omar’s headache beat at his temples.

Merle had been killed trying to sneak into the library. Omar felt as if he’d just had his right leg shot out from under him. He didn’t know what to do. Those people in the library, under their ... their general ... were just too heavily armed.

“What I want to do, Omar,” said Sorrel Ellen of the
Spottswood Chronicle,
“is volunteer to talk to those people.”

“No, Sorrel,” said Omar. “No way.”

Sorrel gave his high-pitched laugh. The grating sound sank into Omar’s head like a sharp knife.

“I’m a trained interviewer,” Sorrel insisted. “I can find out what they’re up to.”

“I know what they’re up to,” Omar said. “They’re a bunch of killers. They killed my deputies, and if—” He gave up. “Sorrel, I’m too busy to talk to the press right now,” he said. “I need you to leave the building.”

“But this is your headquarters! Your nerve center! I want to be present at your decisions!”

Omar firmly took Sorrel’s arm and led him to Georgie Larousse’s kitchen door. “Keep your head down as you go,” he said. “Those people are killers.”

And there, as he saw to his deep surprise, he saw Miz LaGrande crossing the lawn and heading in his direction.

“Mrs. Ashenden!” he said.