The First Lady and everyone aboard had been killed.
“Do you understand, sir? Mr. President?” The aide who had called the President was crying.
“Yes,” the President said. “Yes, I heard you.”
Softly, he put the phone in its cradle. And sat behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk, hands on his knees, and listened to the slow, inexorable ticking of the casement clock on the wall. He waited in that posture for twenty minutes, until an aide appeared to remind him that the emergency working group was waiting in the Cabinet Room.
“I’ll be along in a minute,” the President said.
But he didn’t move. He sat there, behind the big desk, and listened to the clock as it ticked away the seconds of his life.
Larry’s helicopter circled around the brightly lit spectacle of Poinsett Island. That was good, he thought, at least they hadn’t lost power.
The earthquake had sent his bed careening into the bedroom wall shortly after one in the morning. He and Helen had clutched at each other while the earth thundered at them. At the penultimate jolt, the house had given a huge lurch as it fell off its foundation. Furniture and kitchenware crashed. None of the shelves fell over, even as their contents spilled to the floor. Helen’s anchor bolts held. As soon as the quake died, Larry groped for his clothes, his boots. He knew he had to head for Poinsett Landing.
Helen was going to be left with home cleanup again.
There weren’t many people who stayed at Poinsett Landing overnight. All of them, under the direction of Meg Tarlton, were safely on the Indian mound when Larry landed and staggered out of the aircraft into an aftershock that kept trying to buckle his knees. He pursued his path grimly until he saw Meg walking toward him beneath the light of the floods, swaying as the ground jounced beneath her with every step.
“What’s happening?” he demanded.
The two of them lurched like inexpert dancers to the rumbling music of the aftershock. “I can’t get near the plant, sir,” Meg said. “The piers and the barges are too dangerous. Some of the barges got loose, and a couple of the others were sunk.”
“Dang it,” Larry said.
“No radiation releases, though. First thing we checked.”
The aftershock faded. Larry stood on the edge of the mound and shaded his eyes from the nearby floodlights. He looked out over the water and could plainly see the damage to the little port that the Corps of Engineers built around the nuclear facility.
The portable harbor was lightly built, made of material that could be hauled or towed into place, and the morning’s earthquake had chewed it up considerably. Some of the barges had drifted off, still lashed to broken chunks of quay, then come aground on partly submerged ruins. Others had, seemingly, disappeared downriver. Bits of the quays were tilted up on edge. Others had disappeared. One towboat, ablaze with light, was heading away from the plant with deliberate speed, turbines whining loud in the still night. Larry wondered if it was going after lost barges or simply fleeing the scene.
“Lucky it happened at night,” Meg said. “Nobody’s out there now.” Larry said nothing, just turned and began to walk back to the helicopter.
He was going to have to radio Jessica and tell her that her little harbor, of which she had seemed so proud, had just been shattered.
It took Omar and Wilona over three hours to get from their home to Shelburne City, a journey far more difficult than it had been following the first big quake. Chasms or sudden upthrusts were scored across the highway, and the parish road crews had to attend to them before Omar could move onward. The traffic was another problem. The quake had struck with the evacuation in full swing, and the road was filled with cars from the southern part of the state. Hundreds of them, filled with families and possessions, pets and paintings and the family silver, all stuck on the road, unable to move on because the quake had gouged rents across their path. When one fissure was filled in, the cars would all surge along to the next chasm, then clump up in another disorderly mass. And when these people saw a police car moving along, they naturally tried to flag it down, or crowded around it, to ask Omar what to do, where they could stay, how far to the next town.
Nor were the refugees the only folk who needed help. This quake had caused significant damage to the area’s lightly built homes. Omar suspected that half the parish was homeless, at least for the present. It was fortunate that Omar had his radio, and he was able to deploy his department as well as conditions permitted, and also to contact other parish officials.
He also contacted his son David, who had come through the quake just fine, and was now involved in driving the injured to Dr. Patel’s clinic.
When Omar got to Shelburne City, he was shocked at the damage. Ozie Welk’s bar, south of town, was a pile of ruined lumber, with several pickup trucks parked out front, and Omar wondered if the roof had dropped on Ozie and his customers. Half the storefronts on Shelburne Street had collapsed. The Commissary’s roof had fallen in. All the black-jack oaks in front of the courthouse were down. The Mourning Confederate had pitched head-first off its broken plinth. The courthouse itself displayed some jagged cracks in its load-bearing walls.
“Do you think it’s safe?” Wilona asked as they entered.
Omar only shrugged. He had too much work to do to worry about whether the courthouse was going to fall on him.
Information came in. Electric power was restored, at least to the courthouse and a couple of blocks around. The injured were brought to Dr. Patel’s clinic, but because the building was unsafe, they were put on areas of lawn or side streets where nothing was likely to fall on them. No one quite trusted the churches or the schools not to fall down, and indeed some of them already had. It was toward dawn that the worst piece of news came in, passed on from the state police. “The staties say that the District Levee’s gone, right at the Parish Floodway.”
Omar reached for the radio that sat behind his desk. “This is Omar,” he said. “Says which?”
“District Levee’s gone. A two-hundred-foot crevasse, they said. The highway’s cut.” On the south end of the Parish Floodway, the highway ran for almost seven miles along the top of the District Levee. With the levee broken, the evacuation route to Arkansas had been cut off, and much of the land behind the levee would have been flooded. This also cut them off from the northern third of the parish, with about a third of the parish’s population of seven thousand. There was only one sheriff’s car out there to help police all those people. Omar guessed that meant they had become Arkansas’ problem. And with refugees continuing to pour up the highway from the south, that meant that Spottswood Parish had become a bottleneck on the evacuation route, a trap for everyone who entered. A random bunch of Louisianans, Omar thought. Mostly from the cities. And bringing city problems with them—crime, disorder, and negritude.
Jesus, he thought. Inner-city niggers. They’d probably start selling crack to the kids on the playground. Omar had to get those people turned around, get them out of his parish before they ate the place out like a swarm of locusts.
First he called the state police, told them of the situation, and asked them to get a roadblock put up south of the parish line, turn new refugees back before they entered the trap. Omar was told that the staties were fully occupied dealing with aftereffects of the quake, but would set up the road-block as soon as they had the personnel to do it.
As soon as they get their asses into their white Crown Victorias, Omar thought. He did not have a great deal of confidence in the staties. For one thing, they couldn’t even decide what they were called. They had State Police on the rear of their cars, State Troopers on the front fenders, and Louisiana State Police on the front doors.