The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams Narrated by Kevin Kenerly

Overview

Fast-paced and terrifyingly real, The Rift is a blockbuster novel of destruction, heroism, and survival that is sure to grab fans of recent disaster movies.

It starts with the dogs. They won't stop barking. And then the earth shrugs-8.9 on the Richter scale. It's the world's biggest earthquake since Lisbon in 1755, and it doesn't hit California or Japan or Mexico, but New Madrid, Missouri, a sleepy town on the Mississippi River. Seismologists had predicted the scope of the disaster-but no one listened.

For hundreds of miles around, dams burst, engulfing entire counties in tidal waves of mud and debris. Cities collapse into piles of brick and shards of glass. Hospitals and schools crumble. Bridges twist and snap, spilling rush-hour traffic into rivers already swollen with bodies. Within minutes, there is nothing but chaos and ruin from St. Louis to Vicksburg, from Kansas City to Louisville. Every bridge down, every highway torn, every house gone.

America's heartland has fallen into the nightmare known as the Rift, a fault line in the earth that wrenchingly exposes the fractures in American society itself. As a strange white mist smelling of sulfur rises from the crevassed ground, the real terror begins for the survivors, who will soon envy the dead, including:

Jason Adams, a teenager separated from his mother; Nick Ruford, an African-American engineer searching for his estranged daughter; Noble Frankland, the television preacher whose visions of hell have become all too real; Larry Hallock, a technician working frantically to prevent a nuclear meltdown at his power station; And Omar Paxton, a sheriff and Ku Klux Klansman who seeks racial vengeance in the turmoil of disaster.

Walter J. Williams has created a modern American disaster saga, a story based on terrifying fact, filled with non-stop action, peopled with characters who are heartbreakingly real. Witnessing authentic heroes surfacing in the unlikeliest places, you will share their horror, feel their despair, and triumph with them in their struggle to survive. One thing you will know for sure: It can happen here. And sooner or later, it will.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
The rift is literal. The huge quake devastates the American Midwest, reduces much of the United States to a new stone age. Now another quake is coming that will kill tens of thousands, destroy major metropolitan areas and even change the course of the mighty Mississippi.
— Jim Killen

Pixel Planet

The Rift is an excellent modern-day adventure novel that fans of speculative fiction and action/adventure novels should seek out.

Gary K. Wolfe

It may be evidence of Williams's real ambition here that [disaster] passages, for all the roiling, bucking spectacle they provide, eventually take a back seat to what emerges as...a disturbingly incisive exploration of racial and religious intolerance in the American heartland....[I]ts antecedents include...Huckleberry Finn and Elmer Gantry.
— Locus

Kirkus Reviews

Contemporary disaster yarn from the accomplished science-fiction and fantasy author (City on Fire, 1997, etc.). Ever since the great earthquake of 1811•12, the fault beneath New Madrid, Missouri, has remained quiescent, and life proceeds as usual for the Mississippi Valley's modern-day inhabitants. Teenager Jason Adams lives in Cabells Mound with his batty New Age mother; Jason hates the Swampeast and wants to live in California with his father, who doesn't want him•though he does send a spiffy telescope for Jason's birthday. Black unemployed weapons- systems engineer Nick Ruford drives south to visit his estranged wife Manon and their daughter Arlette, for whom he's bought a beautiful birthday present. Omar Paxton, Spottswood Parish's new sheriff, has openly admitted his Klan affiliation, while the President keeps a wary eye on his further political ambitions. Nuclear engineer Larry Hallock supervises a routine refueling at his Mississippi Delta power plant. Options trader Charlie Johns makes millions gambling on a sudden economic downturn. Park Ranger Marcy Douglas conducts tourists to the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. General Jessica Frazetta of the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the entire Mississippi basin, worries more about actually rising floodwaters than hypothetical earthquakes, while Bible-thumping radio preacher Noble Frankland, convinced that the End Times are nigh, has stockpiled food•and guns. And then the earthquake hits. Measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale, it lasts ten minutes. Dams and levees break, fissures open to belch sulfur, water, and sand, the Mississippi changes course, and St. Louis and Memphis are flattened. As the true extent of thedisaster slowly emerges•there'll be international ramifications too•many of the characters will interact in surprising and intriguing situations. Rousing adventures involving an impressively vivid cast of characters: a plausible, sturdy, compelling doorstopper.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169580617
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	05/28/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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The horizon immediately after the undulation of the earthhad ceased, presented a most gloomy and dreadful appear-ance; the black clouds, which had settled around it, wereilluminated as if the whole country to the westward was inflames and for fifteen or twenty minutes, a continued roar ofdistant, but distinct thunder, added to the solemnity of thescene. A storm of wind and rain succeeded, which continueduntil about six o'clock, when a vividflash of lightning wasinstantaneously followed by a loud peal of thunder; severalgentlemen who were in the market at the time distinctly perceived a blaze of fire which fell between the centre and southrange of the market.

Earthquake account, Feb 12, 1812

The sound of drumming and chanting rolled down from the old Indian mound as the school bus came to a halt. Jason Adams wanted to sink into his seat and die, but instead he stood, put his book bag on one shoulder, his skates on the other, and began his walk down the aisle. He could see the smirks on the faces of the other students as he headed for the door.

He swung out of the bus onto the dirt road. Heat blazed in his cheeks.

"Wooh!" one of the kids called out the window as the bus pulled away. "I can feel my chakras being actualized!"

"Your mama's going to Hell," another boy remarked with satisfaction.

Jason looked after the bus as it lurched down the dirt road, thick tires splashing in puddles left by last night's rain. Another few weeks, he thought, and he wouldn't have to put up with them anymore.

Not for the length of the summer, anyway.

The drumming thudded down from the old overgrown mound.Jason winced. Aunt Lucy must have let his mother off work early. There wasn't going to be a lot of business at the greenhouse till Memorial Day.

It was bad enough that his mom was a loon. She had to drum and chant and advertise she was a loon.

Jason hitched the book bag to a more comfortable position on his shoulder and began the short walk home.

Green shoots poked from the cotton field to the north of the road. The furrows between the green rows were glassy with standing water. Swampeast, they called this part of Missouri, and the name was accurate.

The inline skates dangled uselessly off Jason's shoulder. Gravel crunched under his shoes. He could put up with the drumming, he thought, if only he were back in L.A. Drumming was even sort of normal there-well, not normal exactly, but there were other people who did it, and most other people didn't make a point of telling you that it quahfied you for eternal damnation.

Jason passed by the Regan house, a new brick place on the lot next to where Jason lived with his mom. Mr. Regan was as usual puttering around Retired and Gone Fishin', his bass boat parked inside his carport. So far as Jason could tell, Mr. Regan spent more time polishing and tinkering with his bass boat than he did actually fishing. The old man straightened and waved at Jason.

"Hi." Jason waved back.

"Found a place to skate yet?" Mr. Regan asked.

"No." Other than the outdoor basketball court at the high school, which was usually full of kids playing basketball.

Mr. Regan tilted his baseball cap back on his bald head. "Maybe you should take up fishin'," he said.

Jason could think of many things he'd rather do with his life than sit in a boat and wait for hours in hopes of hauling a wet, scaly, smelly, thrashing animal into the boat with him.

He really didn't even care for fish when they were cooked and on a plate.

"Maybe," he said.

"I could give you some lessons," Regan said, a bit hopefully.

Regan had made this offer before. Jason supposed that he sympathized with his neighbor's being retired and maybe a bit lonely, but that didn't mean he had to assist him in his rustic amusements.

"Maybe after school's out," Jason said.

After he finally went crazy from living in the Swampeast, he thought, sitting in a boat next to a stack of dead fish might not seem so bad.

The drum boomed down from the mound behind the houses. Jason waved to Mr. Regan again and cut across the soggy lawn to the old house where he and his mother lived. Batman, the dog that belonged to the Huntleys on the other side of his house, ran barking toward Jason in order to warn him off. Jason, as usual, ignored the dog as he walked toward his front porch.

Jason's house was very different from the four modem brick homes that shared its short dirt road. A dozen or so years ago, when the farmer who owned this area decided to retire, he sold the cotton fields to the north of the dirt road and created a small development south of it-two new brick homes built on either side of his own house, four altogether. When his widow died, Jason's mother had bought the old farmhouse, and when Jason first saw it, four months ago, he thought it looked like the house that Dorothy lived in before she went to Oz. It was a turn-of-the-century frame farmhouse, large and spacious, painted white. There were a lot of things that Jason liked about the house: the funky old light switches, which had pushbuttons instead of toggles. The crystal doorknobs and the old locks on all the bedroom doors, some of which still had their skeleton keys. He liked the sashes that made a rustling sound inside the windowframes when he lifted the windows, and he liked the screened-in front porch with its creaking floorboards. He...

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