Still, though, the city kept on, cars everywhere, traffic jammed tight in all directions. Sam feared that this was because millions of people were trying to cross through two tunnels and one bridge to New Jersey, and it was just not going to happen. Plus, what if the tunnels were flooded? They could be. All of this traffic might be headed in just one direction: the George Washington Bridge.
J.D. tried to lead them. “This way,” he said, taking Laura’s hand. J.D. liked her because she was so damn wonderful, and Sam couldn’t blame him for that. He was seeing a different side of the guy now. J.D. was working hard to care for these strangers. Sam had to give him credit. But he did not think that J.D.‘s limo was going to get them anywhere any more than the train would, and he was real scared.
Downtown, Gary and Tony and Paul were still not fully aware of the scope of what was unfolding around them. There was a lot of traffic and a lot of confusion, and one hell of a lot of rain, but they still felt basically in control of their lives. If you’d asked them, they would have offered a dozen reasons for the market collapse, none of them correct.
The general public, watching the drama unfold in Europe and now in the United States, had not liked what it had seen. Investor after investor had realized that, whatever it was, this disaster was going to cost a hell of a lot. People who had gone through the crash of 2000-2002 had decided to throw in the towel at last. The big boys can rock the market like a mother rocks a baby, but when the little guy speaks with one voice and says, “Sell,” a broker’s hell has no bottom.
Tony was getting soaked as they struggled along the sidewalk trying to hail a cab. “Look at this, goddamn fifteen-hundred-dollar suit!”
Gary saw a city bus standing at the curb and hurried over to it, his soaked feet splashing in the ice-cold puddles. He knocked on the doors.
“Outta service.”
But the guy opened the doors. So what he said and what he meant had to be two different things. Gary stepped into the bus, smiling hard. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks to put it in service.”
The driver took the bills, looked at them. He seemed amazed even to see that much money.
“Look, I—”
“Two hundred! Not another word, my friend.”
Tony followed Gary onto the bus. The driver closed the doors.
Now what?
Every time she noticed a weather report or looked outside, Lucy was more concerned about Sam. Other staff were gathered around a TV at a nurses’ station, and she went over.
“… severe thunderstorms have caused a major power outage involving all of Manhattan. Efforts to restore power are being hampered by heavy rains and flooding.”
She didn’t like that one bit. She wanted her boy back, and she wanted him now. She watched as they went live to a New York street. “The situation here in Manhattan is very dangerous. There have already been over two hundred reported accidents….”
Oh, God, help my Sammy.
This rain was getting to be a serious problem for Buddha, who was soaked and shivering, his tail tucked between his legs. It was colder now than it had been, and it was just totally soaking both of them.
Ahead, Luther could see the big lions of the main branch of the library, and he piloted his shopping cart in that direction. A fair number of people were going up the steps, obviously ducking in to get out of the rain.
He parked his wagon at the base of the steps. There was a lifetime in here, his memories of better days that, when he touched them, brought back his years as a trombone player and a drummer, and even, from long, long ago, the bright days of youth, when he could hit a softball home run right out of a hardball park.
“That dog can’t come in here.”
Another security guard. Sometimes he thought they grew them in some cellar somewhere, like mushrooms. Normally, he would have let the harsh words blow him away like the dried-up old leaf that he was, but not now, not today, because they were down to the skinny, and the skinny was that Buddha was gonna die out here, and maybe Luther was, too.
“C’mon, man, it’s pouring and it’s gettin’ cold!”
“Read the sign.”
Yeah, there it was, a sign like a wall: no food, no drinks, no pets. So he couldn’t bring in his turkey dinner or his pitcher of cosmopolitans or his damn weasel, either. And if Buddha was going to die, he was just going to damn well do that. “It’s supposed to be a public library,” Luther muttered as he struggled back out into the downpour.
At the Central Park Zoo, there was further evidence of just how wrong things were going. Human beings, long accustomed to living behind walls, to taking shelter from sun and storm alike, had lost the sensitive nerve endings that connect most living things with nature. Animals had not lost them, and for this reason the zoo was a wailing, whooping, flapping, pacing riot of frantic creatures.
But not entirely. One of the keepers, frightened himself and ready to bolt for home, shone a flashlight into the wolf enclosure, which was surprisingly quiet, and discovered that they were not huddled back in the hutches. He’d heard a noise earlier, and he knew now what it was: a tree had come down on this cage and split the back of it.
The wolves were gone, the whole damn pack. If he reported this, a huge operation was going to be mounted to find them. He would end up stuck on duty for the next two or three days, out there in that mess helping the cops track them.
The hell with that. He cut off his flashlight and hurried back to the office.
J.D. was leading Sam and Laura and Brian through long lines of cars that were submerged up to their headlights. Some engines were running, some were not. J.D. was on his cell phone, which, amazingly, was still working.
“He’s stuck a few blocks further up,” he called back to them.
Stuck, indeed, Sam thought. Nobody, but nobody, was going to drive a car out of this mess. In fact, the only way off this island right now was to walk to the shore and take a boat.
Laura said, “This is ridiculous. We’re not going to be able to drive anywhere in this. We should go back to the apartment.”
“I vote for that,” Brian added.
They didn’t get it, even yet. Sam doubted that Manhattan was actually sinking, but this water was getting high. They had come all the way down past Forty-second Street and cut over to Fifth, following J.D.‘s quest to reach his driver. Sam very much doubted that they could backtrack. He thought that the lower parts of Forty-second were probably impassable.
He peered ahead and saw the library looming like a great island. “Up there,” he yelled. Now he was in the lead, the other kids behind him.
Laura cried out when her leg hit the submerged fender of a car, but Sam didn’t hear it, not in the roar of the rain. He pressed on, passing a yellow cab that was actually going to be submerged in a few minutes.
But they didn’t know that or they would have stopped. Cars don’t get submerged in Manhattan. That wasn’t the way the world worked—or not the way it used to.
Officer Thomas Campbell was not as unconcerned. In fact, he was afraid that the woman and the little girl who were trapped in this taxi were going to drown. The cab was so wedged into the mass of cars just south of Forty-second that the doors couldn’t be opened. The driver was nowhere to be found.
“Calm down, ma’am,” Tom yelled, “I’ll get you out of there.”
But first she had to get the hell away from that window. He needed to break it out, and he couldn’t do that if she stayed where she was, pressing her daughter against the glass like that.
“Au secours! Ma fille a peur de I’eau! Sortez-nous!”
Oh, boy, what was that? Some African language? Italian? French? It sounded like French, but that didn’t make any difference, did it? “Ma’am, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Get away from the window!” He brandished his nightstick, which made her eyes go wide. She pressed the baby forward even more, as if hoping that the sight of the child would gain her some sympathy. Where she came from, a man with a gun was probably not to be
trusted in any way whatsoever.
All of a sudden, a remarkable thing happened. A young woman, very wet but even so looking like an angel, with her wide blue eyes and sweet lips, came up out of the storm. She yelled into to cab, “Allez plus loin de la fenetre!”
Tom was as astonished by her radiant beauty as he was by her perfect French. If there was such a thing as a guardian angel, he was looking at one.
“Le monsieur va vous sortir,” she continued.
Like magic, the woman pulled her daughter away from the window.
“Thanks,” Tom said as he hauled out his nightstick and went to work.
On Liberty Island in New York Harbor, visibility was so low that only the base of the statue could be seen, and then perhaps just the lower twenty feet of it. The harbor itself was completely invisible, except for the small boat bobbing at the Parks Service pier, the boat that carried the staff back and forth each day.
Jimmy Swinton’s walkie-talkie crackled. “What’s taking you so long?” his supervisor demanded.
“Just another minute.” Jimmy was having trouble with the security system. No matter how hard he slammed the damn door, it wouldn’t arm. It had to arm, though. They couldn’t leave the island if it wasn’t armed. That was procedure.
He heaved again, pushing the old bronze door as hard as he could. And finally, the green light came on and the siren bleated once. The statue was now sealed against all intruders, and all the emergency evacuation procedures had been completed.
He turned and began trotting through the park. He was as eager to get to Jersey as any of the others. He wanted coffee, a good meal, and above all, a nice, dry living room where he could put up his feet, suck a beer, and watch whatever the hell was happening on TV.
As he hurried along, he felt something—or, no, heard it. Above the sound of the rain, there was a distinct rumble. It was rising. He stopped. What the hell was that? It got louder still. Christ, look there, a shadow. He saw that it was a ship black and huge, coming straight at the island.
There was going to be a collision. Except, Jesus, that damn ship was rising, it was bobbing like a cork.
Then he saw. He saw what was under the black shadow of the ship, and was making it bob and turn and rock as it came toward him. The ship was riding on a frothing wall of water.
He turned and ran, thinking only that he needed to get the hell back in the statue and get upstairs, or he was going to be swept right off this island.
The ship veered away but the water came dead on, a forty-foot wall frothing, twisting, raising breakers and dropping them with sounds like many small explosions—boom, boom, boom—as the water came on.
He saw it roil up past the dock, knew that it had swamped the tender, saw fingers of it quest up the island and come racing across the grass sand the sidewalks. By then he had his keys out and was getting them into the lock.
The water reached his feet just as he turned the key. Then he felt the cold and found himself looking out into a strange, gray silence and knew that he’d been overtaken by the wave. He swam, but the surface did not appear. He struggled, kicking wildly now, but it got darker and quieter, and he realized that he was being dragged down, not swimming upward.
His lungs began to hurt, his every instinct demanded more air. He felt his heart becoming a rebel in his chest, then he was seized by a convulsion of air hunger.
He began to take a breath, he could not stop it any more than you can stop a runaway freight train by standing in front of it. Still, he forced himself not to, he even clapped his hands over his mouth and nose.
A flash, another. And then he was breathing, and it was water, and he was coughing but there was nothing but more water. His mother said to him, “I’ve ironed those jeans, Son.”
It was such a pretty day.
But that was then, this was now: the water sped on, the worst storm surge ever seen on the East Coast questing toward the unsuspecting city, dark Manhattan in the rain laid out before it like a virgin before the ministry of a ravening wolf.
The surge sent long fingers questing against the Battery that shot straight up in the air like geysers. More and more faces appeared at the windows of downtown skyscrapers as the juggernaut, a black, roiling mass choked with the hulls and superstructures of ships, came rumbling now, blasting up the island.
All along the subway system, a breeze from downtown began to worry the water that stood along abandoned platforms, followed by the booming as if of a rhythm band from hell, as the water exploded down from above into the tunnels.
On the streets above, cars and crowds disappeared, horns honking, sirens screaming, feet sloshing in the little streams and puddles that had been there before the surge arrived.
And then surge covered all, breaking down the windows of shops and restaurants, blasting into the faces of surprised customers, killing grills in a puff of steam and short-order cooks with hardly even a scream. The water came calling at Trinity Church, speeding up the aisles with a robber’s frantic urgency, sweeping across the ancient graveyard and digging up the ancient graves, and now coffins bobbed along the wild way of desk chairs and awnings and jackets and all manner of improbable flotsam. And in the spinning dark below, voices gargled their last and bodies twitched their last, and still the surge raced on.
At the library, all was as it had been before. Or no— unnoticed in the rain, there was a bit of darkness, like some sort of odd blot, appearing twenty or thirty blocks downtown
Officer Campbell got the little girl through the rear window he had taken out with his club. The angel of mercy helped the mother, Jama. They crossed the mostly abandoned cars around them. In one, a massive Expedition, a tiny, infuriated woman honked and honked her horn. Her eyes were like the bulged eyes of a rat, her windshield was spattered with blood from the insane screaming that she could not stop.
And the water came on, slowed for a moment by a building, or the need to go down and fill another tunnel complex, then sped by the long sweep of the avenues.
Laura and Tom and Jama and her daughter heard the rumbling now, but they did not heed it. Nothing made sense to them except the rain, endlessly falling, and that one last horn endlessly honking.
“Mon sac! Nos passeports sont la-dedans!”
She’d stopped in her tracks. Tom asked, “What’s the problem?”
Laura said, “She left her purse in the cab. Their passports are inside.”
“Tell her to forget it.”
Death by water was now less than a mile away.
“I’ll go get it,” Laura said. Tom thought she shouldn’t, but the cab was just a few feet away, so he didn’t stop her. He ushered Jama and the little one up the steps, many and high.
Gary’s bus had reached Eighteenth Street, largely because the driver was willing to do just about anything as long as you kept feeding him C-notes. He was actually a pretty good guy, come down to it. There was a time when Gary would have been really, really pissed about all that money, but, truth be told, it was a whole lot easier not to care.
“When was the last time you were on a bus?” Paul asked.
“Dunno. Sixth grade?” Gary remembered that bus, remembered bouncing on the seats. And, say hey, he did it again. He started bouncing. Tony glared at him. Screw Tony. “This is great, isn’t it?” Gary said.
Paul cracked up and started bouncing. Finally, Tony joined in. Here they were, dead broke and without futures, bouncing their way up Sixth Avenue on a bus that, by all rights, was stolen. Only in New York.
They didn’t notice how the driver was acting. He was sure as hell not bouncing. In fact, he was noticing that people were starting to run like hell up the sidewalks, jumping out of cars, speeding out of low buildings, running into high ones. His eyes, in his rearview mirror, were terrible to see, so terrible that they stopped Gary’s bouncing.
Then the bus stopped, half up on the sidewalk it had been negotiating. There was a rush of air as the doors came open. Then the driver got up and got the hell out of there.
The roar got even louder. Through the rear window of the bus, had any of them turned around, they would have seen a black wall. Inside it, there were what at first looked like the ghosts of whales. But they were not whales swimming in that water. It was full of buses, cars, trucks, and bodies.
It slammed into Gary’s bus so hard that all three passengers were knocked senseless before they even saw the windows implode and the cataract surge in around them and over them.
When Gary found himself on another, very different bus, he hardly missed a beat. He kept bouncing on the bus to hell, bouncing and laughing amid the huddled, despairing shades of the evil dead.
Day After Tomorrow Page 10