Day After Tomorrow

by Whitley Strieber

  “You saw the model.”

  “Yeah, and I hope to God it’s wrong.”

  Jack wouldn’t have minded a disguise right now, because Becker was coming this way. Tom plastered a huge shit-eater across his face and said, “Mr. Vice President—”

  Becker didn’t even slow down. “Hey, Tom.”

  Tom dragged Jack along, keeping up with the striding Becker. “You know Dr. Hall?”

  What a moronic question. Had Tom forgotten what had happened just a week ago? Or had New Delhi been before that? It seemed as if the conference had happened in another lifetime, on another planet. Hopefully, also, to Becker.

  Becker glared at him. Jack gave a little smile. “We’ve met,” the vice president snapped.

  “Professor Hall has some new information I think you should look at.”

  Jack held the folder in front of Becker as the three of them shot down the long corridor. “We just got these results from our simulation. They explain what’s causing this severe weather.”

  “I’ll have to look at them later. The director of FEMA is waiting.”

  “This is urgent, sir,” Jack said. “Our climate is changing violently and it’s going to happen over the next six to eight weeks.”

  Becker gave him a look out of the side of his eye. Jack realized that the vice president wasn’t just vaguely aware of him. He was acutely aware. “I thought you said it would take hundreds of years.”

  “I was wrong.”

  Becker smiled slightly. “Maybe you still are.”

  “Look what’s happening around the world. Europe is already in serious trouble.”

  “We’re making all the necessary preparations. What more do you expect?”

  Jack actually entertained the idea of slapping some sense into this muttonhead. Probably 20 million lives were at stake in the United States alone, and half again as many in Canada. “You have to start thinking about large-scale evacuations.”

  That stopped Becker’s forward motion, at least. He turned on Jack. “Evacuations? You’re out of your mind, Hall.”

  Aides, who had been waiting for Becker at the end of the hall, began marching forward.

  “Excuse me, I have to go,” Becker said.

  Jack had to keep trying. He could not give up on those lives on a point of politeness or whatever it was. “Mr. Vice President, if we don’t act soon, it’s going to be too late.”

  Becker did not turn around. Jack and Tom found themselves staring at a closed office door.

  “Thing I like the most about you,” Tom said, “I think it’s your people-handling skills.”

  “Hey, I tried.”

  Gomez shook his head.

  “He’s an idiot, Tom.”

  “Rule number one: the boss is a genius.”

  “Oh, come on, Tom!”

  “The boss is a genius!”

  Yeah, okay, he could see that. He got it. “Brilliant, just awesome.”

  How long does it take 20 million Americans to freeze to death?

  J.D.‘s apartment made his school look like a real dump. Never mind what it did for Sam’s digs in Arlington. Even the halls had half-paneled walls. And was that actual silk on the walls or just wallpaper that looked like tan silk?

  He decided that the wallpaper in the foyer probably cost more than every stick of furniture in his mom’s house put together. Dad’s didn’t count. Neatness was his obsession, not decoration. His couch looked as if it had been won in a third-rate raffle circa 1990, sometime back in prehistory.

  Laura just gushed. Oh, she simply loved it. “You live here?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Only on the weekends. It’s my father’s place but he’s hardly ever around.”

  Laura shot Sam a look that almost melted his heart, it was so wanted and so very, very welcome. She had remembered one of their conversations, when he’d confided to her how much he missed his dad.

  “Is your dad here now?” Brian asked.

  “Skiing in Europe with Cindy.” He gestured toward a picture on the hall table, of a distinguished-looking older man and a girl of maybe twenty-eight. At most. “My stepmom,” J.D. said tonelessly.

  “Plenty of snow in Europe right now,” Sam said. They went into a sort of solarium that was full of plants, orchids and bromeliads in full bloom, and something that reminded him of what tropical nights ought to smell like. Frangipani?

  “Somebody knows how to take care of his plants,” Brian commented.

  “There’s a housekeeper,” J.D. said. “These things are my dad’s hobby.”

  “Where do we sleep?” Sam asked.

  “There are six bedrooms. Take your pick.”

  Six bedrooms overlooking Park Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street. What, Sam wondered, would be the tab on that? Ten mil, would be his rough guess. Could a nice smile and a lot of love compete with $10 million?

  J.D. smiled—nicely. He had noticed Laura pick up another of the photos.

  “That’s my little brother. I was teaching him to ride his bike.”

  Okay, so he was a nice guy, too. This was so not good.

  Brian had walked to the large window. The rain was so intense that you couldn’t see more than half a block. In fact, you could hardly see across Park. It had been raining like this now for twenty-four hours.

  “How long can this keep up?” Brian asked.

  Sam had been wondering that. His dad had wanted him home, and his dad knew an awful lot about weather. Sam sure wanted to be home right now, with his mom and his dad. He stood beside Brian staring out at the pounding, cold rain, and wondering.

  Jack was standing around a speakerphone with his team. Dr. Rapson’s voice crackled from the far north of Scotland. “About two hours ago, three helicopters went down on their way to relieve Balmoral. They crashed because the fuel in their lines froze.”

  Jack felt sick. Was he talking about the kind of temperature that might be recorded during a supercold downburst? “At what temperature does—”

  “Negative one hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit,” Rapson said. “We had to look it up. The drop was phenomenally fast, also. People froze solid.”

  Jack thought. There had to be imagery that would flesh this thing out, prove that it wasn’t just a once-in- a-millennium freak.

  “Can we get a satellite image of Scotland?” Jack asked. “Two hours ago?” He asked Rapson, “How do you know all this, Gerald?”

  “Our monitoring stations captured everything. We’ve got mountains of data, but nowhere near enough computing power to analyze it, and every supercomputer in the UK that’s not doing something urgent seems to be down.”

  “That’s gotta be a lot of data,” Jason said.

  “Drop it on our FTP site,” Jack told Rapson. Assuming that the Internet was still working, that is. Things were getting dicey. All sorts of Web-based communications systems were having trouble.

  Janet had imagery up of Scotland from the DSRS geosatellite. “This is what was over Scotland when they experienced that temperature drop,” she said.

  “It looks like a hurricane,” Frank said.

  Jack stared at the white cloud, giving special attention to the eye, which was not a distinct feature. Still, there was rotation, no doubt of that. He had never seen a megacell before. Such thunderstorms only existed in theory.

  He stared at it, thinking that this was the most menacing object he’d ever seen, right up there at the top of the list of nature’s most dangerous hazards. He wondered, if he could pull together satellite imagery of the whole northern hemisphere, how many other of these demons he would see? Not over New York, he thought, please, not over my boy.

  NINE

  I

  t was still pouring in New York, and Luther was confused. Yes, that was it, he was confused. He and Buddha were dry, though—at least, a little dry. They were under the awning of a fancy building, and the doorman was not there.

  Then he was. “Hey, you, you can’t stay here. Get a move on.”

  Get a move on. How man
y times had he and Buddha heard that? Well, they knew from long experience that a guy didn’t raise a stink and a dog didn’t bark, not if somebody didn’t want to get kissed with a billy. And all doormen had them, concealed under those fancy coats of theirs.

  They got a move on, back out into the rain, but they took their sweet damn time.

  Maybe the schlubway. They couldn’t stop you from being in there, not as long as you kept moving. The transit cops weren’t too bad, most of ‘em. They’d give a guy a little break in the rain. Most of ‘em.

  But when he tried to go down, he couldn’t, because so many folks were coming up. Now, this was the damnedest thing, here. Who would be trying to get out of a place of shelter? It was raining at least an inch an hour, and it was cold and getting colder. In fact, the rain had a kind of a freezy feel to it, and Buddha was starting to shiver.

  They were down about ten steps when Luther saw that the damn subway was filling up with water! It wasn’t just a little, like, ankle-deep water. This was serious, and it was happening fast. It hit him that people could be dying down there, it was flooding that fast.

  Buddha gave Luther a fantastically pitiful look. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. fl can’t swim, either.”

  Buddha was a sinker. He’d jumped into the reservoir in Central Park a couple of times going after ducks, and Luther had needed to go down and get him off the bottom. Damnedest thing. Some dogs were sinkers, though, like some people—weird dogs like Buddha, anyway.

  A couple of hundred feet up and in very different circumstances, four brilliant young people, the kinds of kids who filled the human future with promise, watched television. The family room was the size of a small movie theater, with a huge TV, and on that TV was a reporter who did not look happy. In fact, he looked scared, his face pale, his eyes flicking back and forth as if he were waiting for all hell to break loose.

  “It’s a mob scene here at Grand Central,” he shouted above the roar of a large crowd. “Over half of the platforms are flooded and service has been suspended….”

  Sam was just as scared as that reporter. He felt far from home, and he knew Laura did, too, because her hand was holding his tightly. Brian sat with his arms folded—or rather, clutching his shoulders. J.D. was on the phone. “Don’t worry, Benny, I’ll be down there in a few hours. I’ll see you soon.”

  “My dad’s driver is coming to pick me up. Do you guys want a lift to the station?”

  “Not anymore,” Brian said.

  J.D. watched the TV for a moment. “I’m going to pick up my little brother. I can give you a ride.”

  “Where is he?” Laura asked.

  “At boarding school just outside of Philly. I’m sure you guys could get a train or a bus from there.”

  “The Dow tumbled a catastrophic sixty-one percent this morning before trading was halted moments ago… .”

  About four miles away, on Wall Street, Gary was feeling as if an angel of mercy had come down and lifted him out of SEC hell. Yesterday, the market had been strong. Top of the world.

  Speaking of which, Paul said, “It’s like the end of the world.”

  “Billions of dollars gone,” Tony whispered, “billions …”

  Gary smiled. He wanted champagne. “So much for the Voridium merger.”

  Paul looked at him as if he were insane. “Voridium. Yeah, that was something that was gonna make this firm a little dough.” He stared at the TV as if it were trying to bite him. “What’re we gonna do?”

  Gary couldn’t stand it. He had to just damn well raise a glass to a life that had been saved. “I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna go out and damn well celebrate.”

  Up on Park, J. D. was still pretty calm, as far as Sam could tell. Pretty calm, still in control. Sam clung to that. He wanted somebody to be in control. He wanted not to panic, and he was about to do just that, no question.

  “Victor is stuck in traffic over on Fifth,” J.D. said. “It’ll be easier to head straight out of town if we meet him there.”

  Brian’s mouth dropped. “You mean walk? In this?”

  “It’s only a few blocks.”

  Just then the lights flickered. Sam thought, Oh, God, electricity, don’t go out, not that, too, because I don’t want to cry in front of these kids, and I am about to. Laura seemed to know, or maybe to be falling apart herself. Her hand became like steel. Warm steel, comforting. Sort of.

  Morton’s Bar was open and jammed, mostly with a double dip of brokers at the bar knocking back shots. Tony wanted to join them, but there was no way he was going to make it far enough forward to get to the oblivion section, which was the front, where every time you dropped a five on the bar, another dram of bourbon or vodka or whatever hit your glass.

  Back here, it was a matter of handing money forward, waiting, waiting some more, and hoping that some asshole didn’t just down your shot for you. “I just took out a second mortgage,” Tony said miserably.

  Gary felt oddly superior. It wasn’t his doing that his ass had been saved. But still, miracles on this scale didn’t happen every day, did they, now? So he must have some kind of preferred stock with somebody upstairs. Had to.

  “You know what your problem is?” he told Tony.

  “Yeah, everything’s gone to shit.”

  “Your problem is, you worry too much about money.”

  Paul actually put a hand on Gary’s forehead. “You feeling all right?”

  Gary had bought some Camels on the way in. He unwrapped them, took one out, and then rummaged in his pocket for the lighter he’d also bought.

  “I thought you quit,” Paul said.

  “From here on in, I’m living every day like it was my last, brother. You never know what’s in store for you. One minute, you’re lookin’ at ten million dollars, the next you’re lookin’ at ten years in prison. Whatever.” Gary knew he was getting louder. He knew that. He knew, indeed, that he was getting so loud that people were noticing, even over the din of weeping that filled the place. “I pay five grand a month for an apartment my maid spends more time in than I do. What is that about? I’m telling you, Paulie, it’s about time to make some changes. Say good-bye to the old selfish, materialistic, greedy Gary. I am no longer gonna be a slave to the almighty dollar!”

  “Maybe you should sit down, Gary.”

  “From now on, it’s all about the moment. Money means jack shit to me! From now on!”

  “Gary, sit down!”

  Gary picked up a bill, rolled it like a coke stick, and lit it with the lighter. “This, is worthless.”

  “Jesus,” Paul said, “that’s a damn C-note, man!”

  “It’s a piece of paper.”

  The lights went out. There was silence. Shock. The darkness was broken by only one small light, the hundred-dollar bill burning between Gary’s fingers. It went out.

  Pandemonium.

  J.D. had just hit the button to call the elevator when the power failure hit his building. “Maybe we should take the stairs,” Sam said.

  “We’re on the top floor,” J.D. replied.

  They waited. This time, the power did not return.

  “Guess it’s the stairs,” Brian said.

  They made their way down the stairwell, which was illuminated by harsh emergency lighting from the battery-powered floods that hung at each landing.

  It wasn’t a tall building, so being on the top floor turned out to be not that big a deal. It took only about ten minutes to reach the lobby.

  Outside the front door, Park Avenue had become a river. Normally, Manhattan is well drained, even superbly drained, but you drop an inch of rain an hour on it, and you keep doing that and doing that for hours and hours, and you are going to get flooding where you have never seen it before or believed it possible.

  Laura suggested that they just stay there. Sam thought she was probably right, but he could not quell his urge to return home. This was all very, very wrong. It was worse than the other kids knew. Something was going real wrong,
something that his dad would understand and protect the family from. But you had to be together for that to happen, and he secretly thought that, if they did not all get back with their families right now, they might never see them again.

  “We need to get home,” he said, striding out into the storm. The water was at hubcap level in the street, deep enough on the sidewalk to get in your shoes if you weren’t careful. And the rain, it was a pounding, roaring Niagara of water, coming down so steadily that the idea that it might ever end seemed inconceivable.