The Rift (54 page)

These people are not statistics,
the President thought in fury. But then the fury passed, and he sighed. He was slowly growing used to his own impotence. He looked up at Lipinsky.

“The— the nuclear plant in Mississippi? This situation is being dealt with?”

“I am informed that General Frazetta will implement a— rather novel— plan at Poinsett Landing. An artificial island will be built around the reactor to stabilize it.”

They can do that?
the President wondered. Well, he concluded, why not? “I want that problem neutralized,” he said. Meaning the political problem as much as any other. “The full resources of the government, you understand?”

“Indeed, sir.” Lipinsky, the President knew, understood the political dimensions of a nuclear catastrophe as well as anyone.

“And . ..” The President hesitated. “General Frazetta’s
other
problem? The water supply?”

Lipinsky paused, the moment of silence adding gravity to his words. “Our HAZMAT teams are still testing the water, Mr. President. Any information is exceedingly preliminary.”

“And the preliminary reports indicate what, exactly?”

Another pause. Then Lipinsky just shook his head. “Preliminary reports are not at all encouraging, sir.”

So,
the President thought,
it would get worse. Three million homeless, and it will get worse.

Worse.

*

Charlie woke with a start in the middle of the night to the sound of the telephone ringing in his ear. He clawed for the receiver on the passenger seat, clutched at it, raised it to his ear.

“Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

He heard nothing, not even a hiss. Charlie looked at the phone in growing surprise.

No one had called him. The cellphone had rung only in his dreams.

Charlie threw the receiver back on the seat. “Got to get a grip,” he advised himself, and opened the door to let some of the wine fumes out of the car.

He had been drinking the wine pretty steadily. It was the only food he had left. That and some hard liquor in a cabinet.

“Got to get a plan,” he muttered to himself.

He stepped from the car to let the cool evening clear his head. Pain stabbed at him from his injured leg. He wandered over to his oak tree, split right up the middle, and looked at the world from between its two halves.

He was a
trader,
damn it. He needed some way he could do his
job.

There had to be ways he could take advantage of this situation. He dealt in commodities all the time, and what everyone lacked at the moment was commodities. There had to be a way he could take advantage of that.

If only he had a place to start. A place where he could start trading. A
market.

When the idea came to him, it was so beautiful that he could only gaze in wonder at the picture that unfolded in his mind.

Charlie Johns,
he thought to himself,
you are a genius.

*

Birdsong floated on scented air from the Rose Garden. The President sat behind the desk that had been given from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes, the one made from the timbers of HMS
Resolute.

He wished he were on the
Resolute
right now, with eight inches of solid oak planking between him and the rest of the world.

“It’s your call, Mr. President,” said Boris Lipinsky.

Solemn faces, arrayed in a half-circle around the desk, gazed at the President. It was one of those moments where, whatever their ambitions, these people were clearly glad to be on their side of the desk, and not his.

Reports had come in, over two days, from the HAZMAT teams that had been sent to sample the water pollution levels of the Mississippi and other rivers in the disaster area. The reports had been terrifying.

General Frazetta had been right. The Mississippi, along with several of its major tributaries, had become an efficient pipeline for the delivery of every conceivable toxic substance to the water systems of every town and city along the river. There probably weren’t enough water filters in the world to clean the pollutants out of the drinking water.

“Mr. President?” the Minority Leader said. “May I say a word?”

The President fixed the man with a look. “
No
,” he said.

Another few moments ticked past on James Monroe’s bronze-doré clock. Then the President sighed and put his hands flat on Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk.

“It’s out of my hands,” he said. “I cannot permit millions of people to drink poisoned water. I realize that shifting our efforts from managing a disaster to managing an evacuation is going to strain our resources to the maximum, but I want the evacuation to commence.”

He looked at General Shortland. “You’ve got till tomorrow morning to get your plans finalized, General,” he said. “I’ll make the announcement at nine a.m.”

*

Charlie was back at the little grocery store. In the twenty-four hours since he’d left with laughter ringing in his ears, the pile of canned goods had been reduced by about two-thirds. The cans remaining weren’t the most desirable: they were things like cranberries and pickle relish.

The young man was behind the counter this time, his gun still at his waist. Behind the counter Charlie saw television sets, stereo systems, boom boxes, a few home computers. “You found some cash?” the young man said. “Or you got a TV set or something, we’ll take that, too.”

“What I’ve got, friend,” Charlie said, “is a way to get rich. What we need to do is establish a market.”

The young man looked at him. “This
is
a market. Don’t you
comprendo
no English where you come from?”

“This is
one
kind of market,” Charlie said. “But what’s going to happen, mate, is that you’re going to run out of food soon. And then how are you going to make money?”

The young man shrugged. “We’ll get a delivery sooner or later.”

“But when?” Charlie said. “And how much is it going to cost you? See, the weakness is that you don’t know the answers to those questions, so your market isn’t stable.”

“Junior? What’s going on here?” The older man emerged from the back room, buttoning his jeans. He looked at Charlie, then scowled. “Oh,” he said. “The Limey.”

Charlie turned to him. “I was explaining to your partner here—” he began.

“My son.”

“Your son,” Charlie said, “that the market for your goods is unstable, because you don’t know when you’re going to get a delivery, or how much it will cost.”

The older man reached into a back pocket, took out a round tin of Red Man, and put snuff in one cheek. “Yeah?” he said.

“So what you do in order to regain stability,” Charlie said, “is establish a market in contracts to purchase goods when they’re delivered. Or contracts to
deliver
goods, if people have goods that they can sell to you.”

The two men squinted at him. “And how do I do that exactly?”

Charlie wiped sweat from his forehead. Hunger growled in his belly. “See, mate, what happens is that somebody comes in and wants to buy some bread. But you don’t
have
any bread, and you won’t until you get a delivery, so what you sell the man instead is a
contract
to sell him bread on a certain date, at a certain price. And then—”

“Wait a minute,” the old man said, “they give me
money
for this contract?”

“Right, mate. Yeah. The man gives you money, or—” glancing at the electronics behind the counter “— something else of value. And then, once he has the contract, he can keep it or sell it. And if the price of bread goes
down
by the time you’re supposed to deliver, you’d lose money on the physical transaction, but you could
make
money by buying an obligation at the lower price to deliver the same goods ...”

“This ol’ drunk’s crazy,” the young man said.

“No!” Charlie said. “This really works! See, if the price of bread goes up ...”

A young, very pregnant woman came into the store. She was badly sunburned on her forehead and shoulders. She pushed a shopping cart that held a portable television set. “How many cans can you give me for this?” she said.

“Just let me set up this market for you,” Charlie said. “I know how to do it. We can all make money.”

“We got a customer here,” the older man said. He walked to the pregnant woman, picked up the television set, looked at it. “Five cans,” he said.

Charlie looked at them in annoyance. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry to interrupt the workings of this primitive system of finance you’ve developed here, but I’m talking
big money here.
This is the
futures market
I’m talking about.”

The older man looked at Charlie from under the rim of his baseball cap and put the TV set on the counter. “Pay me cash money for something,” he said, “or get out of here. I got business to transact.”

Charlie couldn’t believe this stupidity. “Just listen to me!” he said. “Millions of dollars are made every day in just this way!
I’ve
made millions of dollars just like this! It’s
easy
!
All you have to do is listen!”

The older man slapped Charlie across the face, hard. His hand was large and rough. Charlie stared in shock at the man, at the incredible red violence in his glare. The man grabbed Charlie’s collar and rushed him through the door, shouting
get out get out get out.
Charlie caught a heel on the threshold and went over backward. Asphalt bit his hands, and his teeth rattled. The older man stood over him, red-faced and shouting.

“You’re right out of your mind! Get out of here before I blow your brains out!”

Charlie wiped tobacco juice off his face. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“I know a drunken derelict when I see one! Now clear out!”

Charlie got cautiously to his feet, keeping his distance from the man. “I’m not a derelict!” he said. “I’m a millionaire!”

“You’re a derelict
now,
rich man! You’re a bobtail flush that ain’t got nothing to sell but bullshit!”

Charlie backed away. His cheek stung. Bewilderment whirled through his mind. What was
wrong
with the man, he wondered.

He had to stop three times on the way home and sit on the curb to rest. He was
rich,
he protested to himself. He had guessed
right
about the market. So why couldn’t he buy anything?

*

Cable snaked through the block hung below the triangle. The electric winch whined, and the great concrete lid rose from the bunker.

Below Frankland saw packaged food. Flour, beans, rice, condensed milk, baby formula, canned fruit and vegetables, vitamins. Two years’ supply for two people. Plus seed corn and fertilizer so that crops could be raised after the food ran out.

The Rails Bluff area had finally run out of food. What had been plundered from the Piggly Wiggly, the Wal-Mart, and the cupboards of the residents would be gone within a day or so.

Frankland decided to open the bunkers of the Apocalypse Club. These were supplies laid aside for the End Times by his followers, people who had answered his radio appeals and who had intended to join him here in Rails Bluff when the end of the world was clearly nigh.

But they hadn’t arrived, not one of them, and hundreds of refugees had come instead. He had to feed the people who were
here,
no matter who the food actually belonged to.

The Apocalypse Club had thirty sealed caches behind Frankland’s home. Some belonged to the Elders, who had three months’ supplies in their bunkers, and others to the Lions of Judah, with six months’ supplies. Some belonged to the Roots of David, who had a year’s supplies, and others belonged to the Seventh Seals, who had purchased supplies for two years or more.

Actually there were only three Seventh Seals: Frankland, Sheryl, and Hilkiah. Response to Frankland’s radio appeals had not been as great as Frankland had hoped. Hilkiah had bought his supplies on credit from Frankland and was slowly paying off the debt a few dollars at a time.

If necessary Frankland would open them all. But he would set a personal example and start with the Seventh Seals, with his and Sheryl’s own personal supplies, and work from there down the list.

Things were moving along too well for material considerations to impede progress now. It was just as he had written it down in his Plan, years ago.
Day
7—
all unite in love and praise of Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
Everyone was pulling together. Everyone was praising God. Sin had been vanquished, in the persons of people like Magnusson and Hanson and MacGregor, and everyone had rejoiced in their repentance.

The only thing that Frankland regretted was the death of Robitaille. If he’d had a chance to work with the priest a little more, he’d probably have been able to bring him around.

Frankland bent and helped Hilkiah move the heavy concrete lid to the side. “There,” he said. “Let’s get it moved to the kitchens.”

“Brother Frankland?”

Frankland turned to find Sheriff Gorton approaching, along with a well-dressed, white-haired man in a coat and tie. Other than for Frankland and the other pastors, who wore ties for services, ties had been pretty rare since the End Times had begun.

The stranger looked somewhat familiar, though Frankland couldn’t place him.

“Brother Frankland,” the Sheriff said, “this is Gus Gustafson, from the County Council.”

Frankland wiped the soil from his hands and shook Gustafson’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Brother Gustafson,” he said.

Gustafson glanced around the camp with ice-blue eyes. “It’s quite a place you have here, sir,” he said. “Quite an accomplishment.”

“Thank you. But all glory goes to Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit.”

“Ye-es.” Gustafson’s blue eyes darted from one place to the other. “When I tell the rest of the council members what you’ve done here, I’m sure they’ll be impressed. I think the county owes a vote of thanks to you for helping so many of our people.” He cleared his throat, and his voice turned brisk. “But what I’ve come to tell you, sir,” he said, “is that the state is now able to take some of this burden off your shoulders. We’ve managed to open a road through the piney woods east from the county seat, and from there to Pine Bluff and points south.”