It hadn’t taken Sam long to realize that Laura was gone. In fact, he’d realized it halfway up the steps. But the rain was so dense that he couldn’t see her. He stopped, turned around, then took the steps two at a time so he could stand in the portico and look for her without water pouring in his eyes.
He was shocked so badly he almost froze. A forty-foot wall of water was coming up Fifth, marching along like a monster truck, and he knew that it was death, and she was in its path. Then he saw her, crouching on the trunk of a cab, rummaging in its broken rear window. She had no idea that only seconds of life were left to her.
Many people, perhaps most people, would have stood rooted to safety, and watched the water take her. In fact, it seemed as if there were nothing else you could do. The water was coming too fast, surely.
He did not waste a second with ordinary reactions, not even to yell. He took off, leaving Brian behind him calling, “Where are you going?” He was still oblivious to the danger.
Then J.D. turned, and he saw it, and Brian saw it, and their reactions were the normal human ones: they stood rooted, staring, jaws agape.
Sam passed an old bum who was just scooping up an old dog and loping up the stairs. He reached Laura and hauled her out of the cab.
“Run!”
Confusion flickered in her face. Seconds to go. “What’s wrong?”
He grabbed her and hauled her off the cab. “Go! Go! Go!”
Then she saw it, climbing up Fifth, swooping into Lord & Taylor’s, building again, lapping, sweeping ahead. She ran and Sam ran behind her. As they reached the top of the steps, the water did, too, and they pressed their way into the foyer amid a mass of screaming, terrified people.
Outside, a city bus sloshed against the front of the building, followed by a taxi that came crashing through the doors, sliding on its roof in a surge of filthy water and screaming people. The kids scrambled toward the grand staircase across the wide space, the taxi bearing down on them, propelled by a flood of murky death.
TEN
G
erald Rapson gazed at the picture. In it, the sun
shone down on a cottage, beside which a mother, all red and with red eyes, stood beside a father of brown. Their dog, green with green fangs and a curling green tail, sat beside them in the wavy green grass. A little yellow boy stood between his red and brown parents, and Gerald though he would probably never see again the child who had drawn this portrait of himself and his family. His grandson. His daughter. His son-in-law.
Simon offered him a cup of tea. “Is that Neville’s work?”
“Neville’s far beyond stick figures now. He’s six. This masterpiece belongs to my other grandson. David.”
There was a gentleness between the men in this room, almost a reverence. They knew where they were. They knew what was happening. “Neville’s six already?”
“It goes so fast.“Gerald said. When he was a boy, his father had said to him, “When you hold your bairns, never forget it.” So true. The way a baby feels in your arms is one of the best things in the world.
Dennis’s voice called from the communications room. “Doctor! I’ve got Jack Hall on the phone!”
Gerald leaped up. His heart began pounding, he couldn’t help it. What he wanted to hear was that he’d been dead wrong, that his data were flawed, that the sun was going to come out anytime now.
Jack’s voice came crackling through on the speakerphone. “Did you pull up the file?”
“I’ve had some problems with the connection, but I’m opening it now.” Gerald looked at the blue 3-D graphic that shimmered on the monitor. “Were you able to match the thermal cycles?”
At NOAA, Jack heard the question and answered immediately, “Yes. The storm’s rotation is drawing supercooled air all the way down from the mesosphere. That’s what’s causing those killer cold pockets you’re getting.”
Rapson’s voice came back. “Shouldn’t the air warm up before it reaches ground level?” He sounded sad, even angry. He was still up there at Hedland. Jack thought that the guy was lucky to be alive.
“It should but it doesn’t. It’s descending too rapidly.”
“Is this an isolated incident?”
Gerald knew the answer, and Jack knew why he’d asked the question. He wanted another answer. Any other answer. “I’m afraid not,” Jack said. “We’ve located two more of these megacells in addition to the one in Scotland.” Jack pulled up a satellite image that showed three of the nasty circular storms moving south across the arctic circle. They looked like tight little hurricanes. At night, a natural-light video image would have revealed them to be fantastic engines of lightning. “One’s in northern Canada and the other’s in Siberia.”
“Do we know their projected paths and evolution?”
Jack did some keyboard work. Normally, thunderstorms are short-lived phenomena, rarely lasting more than twenty-four hours. But these beasts were feeding on a powerful air flow from the south, actually drawing the energy into themselves. “This is twenty-four hours out,” he said.
According to their model, the storms would have grown by about 20 percent.
“Forty-eight hours.”
They now covered large regions of Canada and Siberia. Underneath these storms, there would be brutal winds, sleet and hail, with lethal cold pockets forming without warning, freezing everything they touched solid, including living human beings.
“Five to seven days.”
There came a shout over the phone line. Rapson was seeing the same thing that Jack had just modeled. The vortex of the Canadian storm was fifty miles across. It looked like a thunderstorm that had turned into a hurricane.
There was silence on the line. Then: “My God.”
“It’s time for you to get out of there.”
The line crackled again. Jack knew that contact could be lost at any moment. “I’m afraid that time has come and gone,” he heard Rapson reply. And he also heard the deep sadness in the man’s voice.
Static swept the line. “What can we do, Professor?”
From inside that static, there came back the voice of a ghost: “Save as many as you can.”
Then there was static. As Jack was hanging up, Jason rushed in. “What is it?”
“Jack, New York. It’s New York!”
A wave of cold, sick fear passed through Dr. Jack Hall.
The Reading Room of the New York Public Library is one of the great public spaces of the world. In it, thousands of writers have found inspiration and information. On any given day, at least three novels are being written there, and many more works of nonfiction, articles, papers, and essays. Then there are the readers, poring over some of the world’s hardest-to-find books, or just enjoying the latest mystery or the newspaper.
A hundred cold, shivering, wet people huddled there now, in the dark and bellowing of the storm, listening to water surge and lap outside, as hungry waves tested the building that had saved their lives … for the while.
J.D. slammed his cell phone closed in rage and frustration. Nobody minded that his filthy face was tear-streaked. They were all crying. Everybody in this room was lost, it was a chamber of the lost.
“I can’t reach my brother’s school.”
“The circuits are probably overloaded,” Brian said with what Sam thought was amazing confidence. “Everybody’s trying to call at once.”
It was true enough. At least half the people in the room were trying to use cell phones. Sam suspected that the towers were down, that they had no power, that they had been torn from their moorings and swept away by the surge. He didn’t say that, though. He wished he could call his folks. He wanted to know that they were alive, and he knew that they would be tormented with worry about him.
It was funny, though, the way you changed. Coming down here, he’d been a frightened kid wanting only to he in the arms of his mom and dad. But now, here, in ihis situation, he had found a calm place inside, a place to go that could be counted on. He probably wouldn’t have put i
t this way, but the fact was, under the pounding pressure of this unprecedented situation, a good kid was becoming a good man.
He saw Laura rubbing her shin. “What’s the matter?” he asked, going over to her.
“I cut my leg. It’s not that bad.”
He looked at it. At least she was right about the seriousness of the injury. It was cut but not bleeding anymore. Sam guessed that it was going to be okay— unless it got infected, of course.
“Listen,” Laura said, “I wanted to say thanks for coming back to get me. It was really brave.”
“I didn’t really think about it.” No, they never do, men of action like Jack Hall and his son.
Laura looked down at the sodden purse in her hands. It was made of some sort of cheap wicker material, painted black. It was torn and probably thoroughly soaked inside. “I’d better give this back.”
Sam watched her go to Jama and present her with the purse that had nearly taken Laura’s life. Jama gave her a big smile. Sam could not hear their conversation in French, but he could see the gratitude in the Senegalese woman’s eyes. No doubt she was poor. No doubt everything she possessed of importance was in that purse.
J.D. came up to him. “You should just tell her, Sam.”
Tell her what? Could J.D. mean that he should declare his love? He didn’t see J.D. as being that kind of a gentleman. So, maybe he saw him wrong.
Laura was taking a flashlight from Patrolman Campbell, who had known where to go in the building to obtain emergency supplies. “Conserve the batteries,” Campbell said as flashlight beams began to dart around the increasing gloom.
Oddly, the librarian, or the one who hadn’t abandoned her post long ago, was still at her desk, presiding over an order and a meaning that had slipped, Sam thought maybe forever, into the past. He had an idea that just might work. “Excuse me,” he said, “are there any pay phones on the upper floors?”
Judith answered, “On the mezzanine.”
“Where are you going?” Laura asked him. “The power’s out.”
“Older pay phones draw their power directly from the telephone line. Come on, it’s worth a try.”
Lucy had made her way across D.C. from the hospital to Jack’s office and now paced the lobby waiting for him. It used to be that you’d be waved through by the guards. It wasn’t that way anymore, and her fear was that Jack would forget all about her the second he put the phone down, but he came hurrying out. She almost hugged him, just by instinct, just because it was so good to see him. But that was all over between them. It was.
“I’ve been trying to reach Sam.”
“So have I.”
“I tried to call you but I couldn’t get through.”
Jack saw that she was trembling and put an arm around her. She leaned against him. He was warm and strong, Jack was. She just wished to God she could find her boy.
In the murky dark of the mezzanine, Laura’s flashlight was essential. “Are you sure about this?” she asked Sam.
The water was up to their knees and still rising. It must have taken tremendous energy to push this much water this far inland. Sam could hardly imagine what must be going on out in the Atlantic to cause this. He hoped to God that he was right to come down here. The floor was slick. If the water suddenly started rising fast, they might not get out.
“You have some quarters?”
They pooled their change, and Sam went for the pay phone. As he moved along, he realized that the water was now up to his hips. He picked up the receiver.
Jack had taken Lucy to his office. They needed privacy to share the amazing suffering of parents who have lost their child. He brought them coffee. He’d wanted the few moments of being involved with his hands; now he wanted the comfort, and so did she.
“Thanks,” she said. She took the cup. Then she picked up the familiar photo of Sam on the beach, from one of their early trips, taken now, it seemed, back during life in another world. “I love this picture of Sam.”
“Yeah. I can’t remember where it was taken.”
“Florida.”
“I don’t remember that trip.”
“Sam and I went with my sister. You were in Alaska doing your doctoral research.”
Jack saw a lot of things in that moment, an entire lifetime of missed opportunities. Work was important, but now, facing what they were all facing, he saw that a lot of other things mattered, too, and maybe he had made some mistakes.
Lucy gazed at the picture. “You do remember what he was like at that age?”
“Oh, yeah. He always wanted to hear one more bedtime story.” Jack smiled at the memory, and then his heart filled with pain.
“Jack, how bad is it going to get?”
The pain increased; in fact, the pain seemed to flood out of his heart and into every pore of his body. He laid his hand on hers. He decided that he had no choice here: the truth and nothing but. “It’s going to get worse than you can possibly imagine.”
At that moment the door flew open and Frank burst in. “Jack! It’s Sam! Sam is on the phone!”
The world swayed, came back, and then Jack was running, Lucy behind him. He wheeled into the conference room and grabbed the phone that Sam had come in on.
The water was up to Sam’s chest and it was cold and dirty, and he was scared that they might have trouble wading back to the stairs. “Sam, it’s Dad,” the voice in the phone said, and Sam’s heart almost broke into pieces, and tears stung his eyes. “Are you all right? Where are you?”
He had to be strong. He could not tell his dad just how terrible his situation was. His dad would do anything to get here if he knew. His dad would die, if necessary, in the effort. “I’m okay,” Sam said, and Laura’s eyes widened. “We’re at the Public Library.”
Jack and Lucy huddled around the speakerphone. “Your mother is here,” Jack said. He knew well that Sam was far from okay. He knew well that Sam was in mortal danger. But he admired his son’s courage, to try to keep his situation from his parents, to keep from worrying them.
“Thank God you’re safe,” Lucy said, and hearing those words, Jack had a realization. Divorce and separation do not end the marriages of people like this man and this woman. Nothing ends them, not really. They were married forever, the two of them, in the blood of their beloved son.
“We’re all right, Mom,” Sam said carefully. That’s right, boy, never lie. Tell what part of the truth you must. All right made his dad’s heart thunder with relief. Whatever was really happening to Sam and around him, Sam did not feel in enormous and immediate danger. “Can you call Laura’s and Brian’s parents,” he continued, “and tell them?”
Sam was now up to his armpits. The water was coming up fast, and he knew that he had to put an end to this little miracle, a phone call that had gone through despite impossible odds. “The water is rising,” he said—and immediately wished he hadn’t.
Lucy stifled a scream, and Jack grabbed her hand, held it tight. He had to do his best to instruct his son. Just maybe, the knowledge he was about to impart would save Sam’s life. “Listen carefully, Sam. Forget what I told you about heading south. It’s too late now. This storm is going to get worse. It’s not like anything anybody’s ever seen.” Jack paused to let that sink in, but only for a second. Given what was happening in New York, Sam probably already knew that, in spades. “It’s going to turn into a massive blizzard with an eye in the center like a hurricane. Except the air will get so cold, people will be freezing to death in seconds.”
Laura was motioning to Sam. The water was getting too high, they were beginning to need to swim. But Sam had to hear this incredible thing his dad was saying, he had to hear every word. He knew well that their lives depended on it.
“Don’t go outside. Burn whatever you can find to stay warm. Wait it out. I’ll come for you. I promise. Do you understand?”
Sam did not fear that his dad would risk his life, not after hearing those calm, authoritative tones. His dad had the measure of this thing. “Yeah, Dad
, I understand.” Laura was treading water. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” his mom yelled. “I love you! Oh, Sam, we both do!”
His dad added, “We love you—”
Just as Sam went under, the line went dead. When he emerged, Laura was frantically shining her light around, the beam darting across the mean little waves that filled the hallway. “I was afraid you’d drowned,” she screamed, her voice producing a dull echo in the confined space.
Sam understood how close she was to panic, to absolute, mind-twisting, insane panic, the kind that led to shock, to helplessness, down the path to death.
He waded to her. “Come on, lady,” he said, mustering every scrap of courage he had left and putting it into the calm voice with which he spoke to her. “We’ve got to find some dry clothes for you.” And he led her toward the staircase.
Day After Tomorrow Page 11