The Reverend Noble Frankland rose from his knees. His clothes were soaked with rain, and his knees with mud, but he had not felt that this was any moment to cease raining prayers and praise back to heaven.
Despite the downpour, the air still smelled agreeably of brimstone.
He reentered the radio station, walked across the littered floor to the control room. Though power had been restored, the station was mostly dark. Very few lightbulbs had survived the quake. The dials on the control panel— the ones that hadn’t shattered, anyway— showed that he was still on the air. He fetched his old metal wheeled chair from across the room, dusted some broken glass off the green plastic seat, then sat before the microphone. His wet pants squished beneath him, and he gave a tug to one trouser leg. He put on his earphones, then spoke.
“Brothers and sisters,” he intoned, “the Last Days have begun. These are the days of lightning and brimstone and shakings of the earth, the prophecies of the Bible coming true. We praise you, Lord Jesus, for letting us see this day.” As he spoke his hands automatically worked the potentiometers. During the lengthy time he’d spent praying on his knees he’d had time enough to plan what he was going to say once he returned to the mike.
“If anyone in the Rails Bluff area can hear me, the first thing I want you to do is thank the Lord’s mercy for allowing you the opportunity to build His kingdom here on earth during the next seven years of Tribulation. And the second thing I want you to do is see to the safety of your family and your neighbors. And the third thing I want you to do, if your home is destroyed or damaged, or if you are afraid to be alone in this difficult time, or if you are in need of spiritual aid, I want you to come here— here, to the Rails Bluff Church of the End Times here on Highway 417. We will see that everyone is cared for and fed. We have enough supplies to support a large number of people, and we have the organization to make sure that everyone is cared for.
“If you don’t have transportation, or if you’re injured and can’t move, try to call emergency services. If you can’t get through, try to care for yourself as best as possible, and we will find you.
“If anyone from the Family Values campaign can hear me, I want you to look after those children and return them to their families if you can. If that’s impossible, I want you to bring them here, to the Church of the End Times, where we will care for them till their parents can come for them.
“To any Christians in the Rails Bluff area— if you have no other duties, come here now. We need you at the church! We know how to organize you for survival here in the End Times— we have studied this problem for years!”
Frankland took a breath. “And now, let us all give thanks ...”
He spoke a lengthy prayer, and then he broadcast his message again, recording it this time. Then he set the message to infinite repeat. He listened to it once to make sure that it sounded all right, and then he took his earphones from his head.
It was only then that he heard the noise in the outside office. Someone had come into the station. He could see a large, shadowy form moving in the outer office.
Frankland’s mouth went dry. In a movement that seemed to take forever, he reached into the drawer next to his chair and put his fingers securely around the custom grip of his P38 semiautomatic pistol. He eased the wheeled chair back from the control panel, but the wheels crunched over broken glass, and swift, angry reproach flashed through his mind at the sound.
The intruder halted at the sound, then moved down the corridor. Glass and wreckage crunched under his feet. Trying to breath in utter silence, Frankland thumbed back the hammer on the pistol and slowly raised the weapon. The intruder loomed closer. The pistol seemed heavy as sin.
“Reverend?” Hilkiah’s voice. “You in there?”
Frankland let his breath sigh from his throat. His head swam with relief.
“Yes, Hilkiah. I’m here.”
The big man groped uncertainly toward the doorway. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Frankland eased the hammer of the P38. “I’m just fine.”
“Praise the Lord you’re all right! I can’t see a damn— whups, sorry, Brother Frankland— a dang thing in here.”
Frankland put the pistol back in its drawer, rose from his chair, and shuffled through the rubble toward the door.
“Were you in town?” he asked. “What happened there?”
“Town’s wrecked,” he said. “The courthouse and the old Bijoux theater are the only buildings still standing, pretty much. A buncha houses caught on fire. Bet you we’ve got five, six hundred homeless people in this county, probably more.”
The Bijoux was an old opera house from the nineteenth century, later converted to cinema, but abandoned now for years. It had a strong iron frame, and Frankland had once considered buying it for the site of his church.
“God bless it!” Frankland said as he barked his shin on a fallen shelf. “How about my wife? Our kids?” meaning the Family Values picketers in front of Bear State Videoramics.
“A few cuts and bruises, but they’re okay. We were all knocked down when it started, but it was safer in the parking lot than inside the buildings, and we were away from the store fronts and the flying glass.” He gave a chuckle deep in his throat, hugh hugh. “You shoulda seen them cars jump! Like they was trying to fly to the moon!”
“And the Piggly Wiggly? The video store?”
“Roof came down. We had to pull people out. Some busted legs and heads— I didn’t stay to take count, I just helped round up the kids and then Sister Sheryl sent me here to make sure you were okay.”
They emerged from darkness into the gloom of the outer office. “Where are the kids now?” Frankland asked. “Did you hear my message?”
“I don’t got no working radio in the pickup, pastor. But Sister Sheryl was going to try to get them back to their families, then come here. And Dr. Calhoun had his bus there, and he was going to take care of the kids that live out of town.”
If the bus doesn’t break down somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Frankland thought. He sighed.
“We’ve got to get ready,” he said. “I’ve told people to come here if they’re in need. We’d better be set for them when they come.”
He opened the metal door, let murky sunlight flood the room. “We need to clean the glass out of the church, so people can sleep there. Hang some plastic sheets on lines inside so the women can have privacy.”
He looked across the road and saw Joe Johnson with a blade on his tractor, trying to shore up his leaking catfish ponds. Those catfish, he thought, they could feed a lot of people.
“Is it time to open the vault?” Hilkiah asked.
Frankland stepped into the parking lot and savored the sulfur in the air. Even though there were a number of vaults, all containing supplies laid under concrete until the End Times, Frankland knew which one Hilkiah was thinking of. “Not yet,” he said. “We don’t want to scare people with all those guns before we have to.”
*
Jessica rolled up to the headquarters of the Mississippi Valley Division in Pat’s red civilian Jeep Cherokee, with her husband behind the wheel, half her senior military staff either in the back or hanging off the vehicle’s sides, and Sergeant Zook, her driver, sitting on the vehicle’s hood brandishing a Homelite chainsaw.
No one could say she didn’t know how to make an entrance.
It had taken Jessica almost half an hour to get to her headquarters, normally a three-minute drive. The roads were badly torn, blocked with fallen trees, power poles, and landslides. The aftershocks that came every few minutes threatened them with further slides and falling trees. Only the Cherokee’s four-wheel-drive made the journey at all possible. Along the way she’d picked up most of her staff, who lived on the same road above the WES, and found Zook, who after the quake had tried to fetch her in her car, but had got bogged down trying to negotiate a landslide.
The headquarters building was still standing, but Jessica suspected that this was going to be about the only good news. She bounded out of the Jeep before it quite pulled to a stop on Arkansas Road, and she headed for the group of soldiers she saw on the grass inside Brazos Circle. She was followed by a wedge of senior officers.
To the poor junior MP lieutenant on duty, it must have looked as if the whole Pentagon was descending on him. All the soldiers were in battle dress, BDUs, and most were wearing helmets, a sensible precaution in an environment where things might fall on their heads at any second.
The lieutenant had no good news. “We evacuated the building, General, because it’s damaged and we figured it was dangerous to stay inside,” he said. “Ground lines are down. Power’s out. Most of our communications gear is wrecked, inaccessible, or without power. We got a multiband Satcom radio out of a wrecked vehicle, but the batteries were dead, so we’re recharging ...”
Jessica looked at the radio. It had a segmented antenna with a metal flower at the end, meant to communicate via satellite. Now useless, until they could recharge the batteries that were sitting in the solar array next to the radio on the lawn.
“How long is that going to take?”
“Quite a while, General.”
Jessica looked at the red Cherokee. “Recharge it with the vehicle engine.”
“Ma’am!” The lieutenant looked happy for an excuse to leave the cluster of senior officers.
“Just a minute, soldier,” Jessica said. “How many personnel do we have on station?”
“You’re looking at most of us, General. Most of our people went home at five o’clock, just before the quake.”
They should know to report back, Jessica hoped.
No communication, no information. No information, no decisions. No decisions, no orders.
No orders meant waiting. Jessica was not very good at waiting.
“Have you tried cellphones?” she asked.
“Negative result. Towers must be down.”
“Satphones?”
“Haven’t found any, ma’am.”
“Right. Get that battery recharged.” Jessica’s satphone was clipped to her belt. It was connected to the Iridium network: 66 satellites sent into canted polar orbits in the late nineties by a consortium headed by Motorola. The satellites were supposed to cover every inch of the globe, capable of patching into every active phone network in existence.
The disadvantage was that, if the local cells were down, the phones had to be used out of doors, because buildings would impede the signal to and from the satellite. Jessica considered that the advantage of instant communication with Moscow, say, or Antarctica, outweighed the disadvantage of having a conversation during the occasional rainstorm.
She unclipped the phone and turned to Sergeant Zook.
“Report to the motor pool,” she said, “and sign me out a Humvee.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And I want a report on what you find there, particularly the earth-moving machines. I want to get the roads open around here so that our own personnel can report for duty.”
She looked at the faces around her. “I hope some of you have experience in operating bulldozers and graders, gentlemen.”
The colonels and majors looked at each other uneasily.
Zook trotted off, then stumbled as the sudden shearing force of an aftershock almost took him off his feet. As the earth began to growl, Jessica stood in place, feet braced apart, knees bent slightly. The ground felt liquid below her feet, like Jell-O. Vertigo shimmered in her inner ear.
There was a crash in the headquarters building as something very large fell. The aftershock faded, though the uneasy sensation in Jessica’s inner ear continued.
“Come with me, gentlemen,” Jessica said, and began walking for the headquarters building.
Jessica opened her cellphone, punched in her parents’ number in New York, and was delighted to hear a ringing signal. Her mother answered: Jessica told her that there had been a severe earthquake, that she and Pat were fine, but that she was very busy and couldn’t talk.
“I know,“ her mother said. “It’s been on TV.”
“What do they say, Ma?”
“They don’t seem to know much of anything.”
“Do they know what cities have been hit?”
“We felt it here.”
Jessica was horrified. “You felt it in Queens?”
“Your grandfather’s Toby jug— the one he got in England— it fell off the shelf and broke.”
“In Queens ...” Jessica’s mind whirled as she tried to understand the scope of it all.
“The TV says they can’t raise anyone in St. Louis or Memphis. None of their, what d’you call ’em, affiliates. Chicago got shook up, and Kansas City. And this place that’s named after the syrup, you know ...”
Jessica looked at the phone in disbelief. “Syrup, Ma?”
“Kayro! That’s it.”
“Cairo.”
“They said they got a radio message from someone in Kayro, wherever that is, and the town got knocked down and flooded.”
Well, it would be. Cairo was at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio and practically surrounded by water. Protected by flood walls, but an earthquake would breach those easily enough.
Jessica paused in front of the headquarters’ glassed-in front. Most of the glass was broken or shattered. Jessica’s mother began complaining about the incompetence of the Korean family that had just bought the grocery on the corner.
“I gotta go, Ma,” she said. “I got work to do.”
“Call when you can.” Jessica’s mother sounded resigned. “You know how we worry.”
“Love you. Bye.”
She closed the cellphone, clipped it again to her belt. Her staff were looking at her.
“The earthquake was big enough to break crockery in New York City,” she said. “St. Louis and Memphis are out of communication, and that leads me to suspect that it was the New Madrid fault that slipped.” Jessica looked up into their eyes, and wondered why every person she’d ever served with was so much taller than she. “This means, gentlemen,” she said, “we’re going to be coping with a three-hundred-year event. Maybe even a thousand-year event. Which means that we are involved in a calamity akin to that of a major war, with bloodshed, property destruction, and damage to communications all on a similar scale.”
Colonel Davidovich, her second-in-command, blew out his cheeks in surprise at this notion. Jessica spoke on.
“We’re going to have to assume significant damage to Corps installations throughout the MVD. As soon as we get into communication with the outside, I want to check the dams first— I want a complete list, however many hundred there are.” Walls of water pouring down river valleys from broken dams was the vision that frightened Jessica most.
“We’re in Vicksburg,” she went on, “which is built on a bluff— reasonably solid ground, even if there’s no bedrock. But most of the Mississippi Valley is built on goo. We’re going to have to assume that the damage we’ve seen here is probably on a lesser scale than has been inflicted elsewhere.”
Her staff looked at the building behind them, with its shattered windows and ominous-looking cracks, and for the first time looked intimidated.
“What I need now is an evaluation of the buildings here— HQ in particular. I want to know if it’s safe to reoccupy the building. And even if the building is safe, we’re still going to have to break some tents out of stores. So who’s qualified to do an assessment?”
Davidovich and a couple others raised hands. She looked at Davidovich, said, “Right, you take charge of the survey party. Report to me when you’ve reached a conclusion about HQ.”
Davidovich drew the others off for a quick briefing. Jessica looked at the wreckage of the porch.
“I’m going to go to my office,” she said, “and get some maps and phone numbers.”
She felt a presence hovering behind her and turned to see her husband. Pat wore an expectant look.
“Once the battery’s charged,” she said, “I guess you can head on home.”
He looked dubious. “Not much for me there,” he said. “And I’d as soon not have to make that drive alone.” He rubbed his face. “Maybe I can make myself useful.”
Jessica thought about it. “Right,” she said. “In the absence of proper communications protocols, I hereby appoint you my message-runner.”
“Jeb Stuart,” Pat reminded, “had a banjo player on staff.”
“He was in a different army,” Jessica said, “but I’ll take that suggestion under advisement.”