Cra-a-a-k!
Frank disappeared from view. An instant later, the safety line went taut, yanking Jason off his feet. Then Jack felt himself sliding toward the hole as well. He put one hand on the safety line breakaway and tried to stop the slide with his snowshoes. No good. Jason was down and could not get any purchase with his own shoes. With his free hand, Jack drew his ice ax out of its holster. He prayed God the snow was packed hard enough not to crumble away. A mighty swing of the ax took it deep, and Jack felt snow building up against his arm as they were dragged closer and closer to whatever lay below.
Then they stopped.
He’d won—for the moment. Now came the hard part. Leaving the ax embedded, he began working his way back along the line.
And then he saw what had happened, and his stomach almost went out through his feet… to the floor of the shopping center fifty feet below. He could see a toy store and a central island planted with tropical flowers, bougainvillea, and what might even have been orchids. A RadioShack had been looted, and a drugstore, and the debris of the violence that had been done to them— radio boxes, pill bottles, and such lay scattered fity feet beneath Frank’s dangling boots.
With a sickening tinkle of shattering glass, Frank’s precarious hold gave way, and he plunged another twenty feet. Echoing up from below came the fainter sound of glass hitting the floor.
If Frank was injured, it was essential that they know that during the rescue. Jack called down to him. “Are you all right, Frank?”
“Fine. I just dropped in to do a little shopping.”
Beautiful, beautiful guy. “Hold on. We’ll pull you up. Jason, dig your heels in.”
This was going to be a piece of cake. They’d get Frank back up, then take off toward the edge of the damn mall and get the hell off this damn roof.
There was a sound above the wail of the wind, close to him. He looked over and saw that Jason was hyperventilating. Not needed, kid, not now. “Jason!”
Jason clutched the ice beneath him. He was too terrified to respond to commands, Jack could see that. He took a deep breath, fought to communicate as much calm as he could. “All right, Jason, take it easy. Take a breath and roll over onto your back.”
Jason looked at him out of the eyes of a hunted rabbit.
“Okay, easy now.”
Jason rolled.
“Good, that’s it. Now plant your feet.”
Jason worked the heels of his snowshoes into the icy snow. Now the shoes would operate as a brake if Frank’s weight began to pull him forward.
“Good work. I’m going to come to you. I’ll release the pressure very slowly.” Jack moved a little, allowing the safety line between the two of them to go slack. Then he drew his ice ax free.
Everything stayed as it was. Jason’s heels had effectively replaced the ice ax. Jack crawled methodically closer to the opening. He would try to stand up and overhand Frank back to the surface. It was going to be desperately dangerous, but it had to be done.
As he crawled, the wind seemed to come alive, grasping at his arms, whipping around his body, pushing snow in under the edges of his parka, sending freezing tendrils of water down his neck.
There was a shift, as if the weight distribution was changing. Jack thought, quite calmly, that he and Jason would go through in a moment and they would all die.
So be it…
He looked down into the opening. There was Frank, peering up at him. His expression was calm. A professional did not panic at a moment like this. A professional did the opposite, became calm and deliberate, followed the book.
With a heart-stopping tbwanggg, the safety line sliced into the glass, dropping Frank another five feet.
“Hang on!”
Now a terrible crackling sound radiated out from Jason, who began making little whimpering sounds. Jack ignored them. Let the man weep, he was probably about to die.
“It won’t hold all of us,” Frank yelled up from below.
Jack knew he was right. They had blundered onto a skylight that had never in a million years been designed to hold the weight of three men with two hundred pounds of arctic gear and a heavy sled, not to mention the couple of tons of snow that were already there.
Then he saw something in Frank’s hand. God, it was a knife!
“Frank, no!”
Frank looked straight at him. Their eyes met. The knife was poised beside the safety line.
“You’d do the same thing,” Frank said, and sliced through it with the expert stroke of a man who knew just how to cut one of the tough cords.
Frank’s face dropped away, the expression turning to one of horror—glaring eyes, mouth opening to scream.
From below there came a thud. Frank hit amid the blossoms and the toys and bounced into the landscaping. The sound swept up and down the mall’s interior, a fading echo.
The body did not move. The scream had never come.
Moving slowly, arms and legs spread to distribute his weight, Jack began edging back from the hole.
SIXTEEN
P
atrolman Campbell had gathered his brood of refugees into the third story of a ruined office building. He’d gone hunting then, not for food, which was unlikely to be found above the ice at this point. All the little cafes and restaurants that packed lower Manhattan were on the ground floors. Up here, if you were lucky, you might find an occasional lunch in a desk drawer, hard frozen.
He returned to the building after dark, guided by the flickering fire within, which they had made from furniture and paper.
“What’d you find out?” the library security guard asked.
He was sallow now, the color of parchment. His liver was failing, Tom Campbell thought, but he didn’t know why. God only knew what sort of diseases might emerge among these exhausted people. Poor nutrition, overexertion, and stress played hell with the immune system, allowing all sorts of things that had been dormant to become active.
“I talked to some guys who had a shortwave scanner. They’d heard that rescue crews were still picking people up further south on 1-95.”
The cabbie bestirred himself. Most folks were huddled close to the fire, their eyes closed, wrapped in their stinking clothes, showing as little of themselves to the cold as possible. Some of them had even taken Tom’s advice and were wrapped up in one another, seeking heat. The cabbie asked, “How much further south?”
It could have been Atlanta, for all Tom knew. But he didn’t say that. “They weren’t sure,” he said, and let it go at that.
The guard—was his name Hidalgo?—said, “It doesn’t matter. We’ve gotta get to them. It’s our only chance.”
Tom wondered if he would ever get these people moving again. If you don’t get decent food, you sleep longer and feel like doing less, until finally you die. It’s called starvation. “We need to rest, first,” he said. “Let’s stay here till morning.”
And maybe, he thought in the privacy of his secret despair, morning will become forever.
The snow was beyond belief, certainly beyond the capabilities of the equipment that General Pierce had organized to transport the presidential party southward. He found himself looking at what almost appeared to be new mountains. They were on 1-95 north of Richmond, but the snowdrifts were so huge that it seemed as if they must be out in the Shenandoahs, on their way down 1-81. They weren’t though. The superb navigational equipment on board was not confused by clouds. They had an exact fix, second to second.
Ahead of them, their snowplow spewed white fountains a hundred feet in the air. Beside it, a literal mountain of snow rose, it seemed, all the way to the sky. Behind the snowplow, General Pierce sat in a freezing-cold Hummer, in constant radio contact with the motorcade.
From moment to moment, gusts of wind made the snowplow disappear, but then its reassuring ungainly form would show up again and they would make another half mile or so.
The wind howled and the Hummer vibrated, and the whiteout became so intense that the driver called a halt.
/>
Then next thing the general knew, he was no longer looking at the back of a snowplow. Instead, a mountainside rose before him.
They did not move forward. There was no way to do so. The driver sat silently, obviously awaiting orders.
The general knew what had happened: a massive movement of snow—in effect, an avalanche—had just buried the plow.
Without a word, he stepped down into the roadway, such as it was. His boots sank almost to thigh depth in the softly packed new snow. For a moment, the cold stunned him. The Hummer’s heater had to be running full tilt, taking the interior temperature up to, what, maybe ten above? But out here, now this was what could be called cold.
General Pierce knew that the motorcade had come exactly 202 miles since it had left the White House nearly forty hours ago.
He watched the marines fighting to clear the snow from around the vehicles, saw their sweat turning to ice and falling off them in a fine powder even as they worked.
He also understood that this was not going to work. These vehicles were snowbound. There would be no further progress under present conditions, and present conditions showed no sign of letting up.
Wiping off his winter goggles, the general saw a familiar black vehicle ahead. The flags on its fenders were frozen solid. They looked a hell of a lot like ice-covered barber poles.
He pulled open the door of the modified Hummer and slid into the blessed warmth within. In his formal suit and red silk tie, the president seemed almost absurd. But it was quiet in here, preserving some of the elegance that was supposed to surround the highest office in the land. Despite everything, the men around the president were still efficiently insulating their charge from the freezing hell that screamed around them.
Well, that was about to change. “It’s no good, sir,” Pierce said as he settled in next to the president. “An avalanche buried our snowplow. The road’s completely blocked. We can’t stay here. The vehicles are gonna be buried soon.”
“We’ll have to try to make it on foot,” the president said.
He was right about that. There was absolutely no other choice whatsoever. The general experienced a rash of frustration. How could the most important man in the world have ended up in a fix like this? The president of the United States didn’t get stuck in a damn blizzard. Nature wasn’t powerful enough to stop the president!
He wanted to be sure the president knew the risks. “It’s miles to the nearest shelter, sir.”
The president remained silent for a moment. “Then we’d better get started,” he said grimly.
As a dark, frigid dawn rose over China, darkness swept westward across America. Europe was locked in the horrific cold of the deep night. Unimaginable temperatures were being reached, of 120 and 130 below in places like Russia and Sweden, and 100 below farther south.
In Paris, only Sacre-Coeur and the Eiffel Tower jutted above the snow. The temperature was ninety below, enough to shatter the iron of which the tower was made. The windows of the cathedral were dark, like put-out eyes, the glass made so brittle by the cold that the wind simply shattered it.
Across the Seine, Notre Dame looked like the keel of an overturned ship. Only one tower was visible, the other having already collapsed.
Far to the north of Scotland, three brittle bodies sat motionless in the pitch-dark Hedland facility. No light flickered on the control panel. The tea still in Dennis’s cup was harder than granite. Every so often the building emitted a sharp bang, as frozen girders and rivets burst. Soon, the snow that buried it would also collapse it.
Across the tossing Atlantic waters, the Queen Mary drifted helplessly. Frozen hydraulic fluid had rendered rudder control impossible. Still, it was ablaze with light… the only electric light for thousands of miles in any direction.
For over the Western world, a great darkness had fallen. In fact, it had not been this dark since before the native Americans had colonized the continent, and Rome had risen in Italy. Here and there, fires flickered, some of them large enough to be visible for miles, but most pitiful affairs, made from what little fuel could be gathered by people who were fast freezing to death.
The triangle of flickering light that glowed across thirty or so feet of snow was not one of the larger fires. In fact, it was coming from a tent, and not from a fire but from a gasoline lantern. Inside the tent, Jack and Jason huddled close to a camp stove.
Thirty feet below them, in a Lincoln Navigator with a crushed roof, lay the bodies of two adults, two children, a dog, a cat, and in a cracked bowl, two frozen-solid goldfish. But they knew nothing of this. All they were aware of was the small heat from the camp stove on which they were boiling water, and that they both felt as if temperatures were dropping below the minimum rating of their clothing.
Jason got their mugs from their mess kit, and for a moment both of them stared in silence at Frank’s. It had been with him for a lot of years and had the dents to prove it. Like much of the equipment of old hands, it was a treasured keepsake.
Silently, Jack poured split-pea soup for himself and Jason. The kid was a problem for Jack. He could not ask him to continue on, because that was virtually certain death. But he couldn’t go back alone, either. That was certain death, too.
Jack knew that he should turn around right now and attempt to save their lives. But then he thought of his last words to Sam, “I promise.”
Jason had known that the promise had been made, and he’d come anyway. To his death, though? If he’d fully understood the danger, would he be here right now?
Part of Jack’s conscience said to him, “turn back, save this kid if you can.” The other part said in reply, “You promised. You promised Sam.”
Jack sipped his soup. Even Jack Hall, with all of his experience of the effects of extreme polar weather, was stunned to discover that the mug was already cold.
Sam alone was awake. He was tired just like the rest of them, but if they were going to live, the fire required constant attendance. He watched Laura. She was sleeping fitfully. Her face seemed sweaty even though it was hardly even livable in here, let alone warm, let alone hot enough to make somebody sweat.
He went to her, started to wake her up, then stopped himself. Even here, with her face all dirty and her makeup not even a memory, she was almost heart-breakingly beautiful. His best guess was that she was real pretty, but not the goddess that he saw. No, he saw his love for her, the towering passion in his heart.
They were young, true, but he’d decided that they ought to get married. What was happening had changed everything. Last week, marriage among seventeen-year-olds would have sounded really stupid. Now, what he wanted most in the world was to get south, find some way to feed some mouths, and start a family. He didn’t know where this ambition was coming from. He just knew that it was there, and it was powerful.
He went back and tossed some Thorstin Veblen and a couple of pounds of IRS rule books into the fire. Sparks flew up the chimney. Outside, the wind still howled. This storm was still going full blast.
He wondered why nobody had listened to Dad. If the president was dead, he’d be just as glad. He knew it was wrong to feel that way, but what about his generation, what about him and Laura and J.D. and Brian and all the kids of the world, what was left for them now?
Thinking back, he could not remember anything from any president or any other world leader about planning for the possibility of sudden climate change. What he remembered was a debate about whether global warming was real. Of course it was real. It was part of nature.
Why hadn’t they listened to Dad?
He gazed across the room toward the big doors that led out into the hallway. Would Dad ever come through those doors? He did not want to face that Dad might not—actually, probably wouldn’t—so Sam imagined him as he might look: tall, wearing a filthy parka with the hood framing his bearded face.
Dad. His deepest heart whispered, “I belong to you, Dad, I’m your son, remember me?” The fire guttered as a frosty gust came down the chim
ney and spread out into the room. Dad. “You belong to me, Dad, I’m your son, you took responsibility for me.”
He thought of Brian and his family, where were they? Brian never said anything about it, but Sam had gone over to him a few hours ago, and he’d been quietly crying. Judith, too, and her tears had continued long after Brian’s had changed to the sweet breath of sleep. And Benny, was he lying beneath a snowdrift somewhere? Would J.D. ever gain closure? Probably not. Probably, he’d live the rest of his life, however long that might be, wondering about his little brother.
Sam had hated J.D. at first. But it was only his male nature that made him want to be with Laura. J.D. was also a loving brother, and in Sam’s eyes, that made him a good guy. He deserved all the help and comfort he could get, J.D. did. But not, oh, please, the hand of the woman I love.
Day After Tomorrow Page 18