She sort of sighed, and Sam went over to her again. He laid a hand on her forehead, and a thrill of fear raced through him, causing him to draw it back as if her skin had burned him … which it almost had. She was hot, and she should not be. She was also awake. He could see an eye looking at him.
“Are you all right?” he whispered. “You feel like you’ve got a fever.”
“I’m fine. I just can’t sleep. My mind keeps going over all those worthless Decathlon facts.” She snorted out a soft laugh. “Pretty stupid, I know.”
“It’s not stupid. It’s just that you need time to adjust. That’s all.”
“How am I supposed to adjust, Sam? Everything I‘ve ever worked for—it’s all been preparation for some future that doesn’t exist.” She sat up and wrapped her hands around her knees and stared into the fire. “You always said I took the competition too seriously. You were right.” Again, there came that little laugh, which Sam sensed contained a world of disappointment and hurt, just as he was feeling. “It was a waste of time.”
If the adults loved us, then why did they do this to us? Laura’s dad used to scoff about global warming, Sam had heard him do it. Shouldn’t he have at least looked at the facts before condemning his own daughter to this hell?
“It wasn’t a waste of time,” Sam said. “I just said that to avoid admitting the truth.” His mouth went dry because of what he had suddenly decided to do.
She looked at him. Her face was really sweaty, gleaming in the firelight. “The truth about what?”
He parted dry lips. “The truth about why I joined the team.”
She frowned. How totally clueless could a person look? He realized that she had no idea at all. He drew closer to her. The others couldn’t hear this. This was private stuff. “Because you were on the team.”
Her eyes widened. Something came into them—he thought it might be laughter.
“It was an excuse to—” The eyes twinkled. It was laughter. She was going to laugh at him. “Uh, just forget it…”
He turned away, but then he felt a hand on his arm. “Hey, come here.”
He turned back. She reached up and took his chin and guided his face toward hers.
A second passed as he gazed into her big blue eyes, the most beautiful eyes on earth. Then her lips brushed his and a shiver went down all the way to the hollow of his gut. He reached up, laid a hand on the back of her head, and pressed his lips against hers.
Deep in her throat, she made a little sound and he knew it for what it was: a sound of relief, of joy.
She had been hoping for this, waiting for it.
He moved against her, took her in his arms, and opened his mouth to her mouth. He felt himself becoming excited, and he knew that the pressure of it would be against her free arm, and it happened, and she did not move.
They kissed deeper, tasting of each other body and soul, and where their lips met, the storm and death stopped. The little couple, entwined in each others arms, were like a blazing comet that would push back the north wind and sweep the snows aside … at least, here in this room beside this one flickering fire, for the moment.
SEVENTEEN
H
ideki Kawahara gazed down at the earth’s surface.
As he watched, the station orbited up from the South Atlantic, angling over America. Westward, he could see South America, the center of which was relatively untouched. Along the distant line of the eastern horizon, though, over central Africa, the flicker of lightning was continuous. There, a storm front had almost reached the equator, penetrating the tropical air mass with temperatures not seen in East Africa in living memory. In Djibouti, it was fifty-seven; farther north and inland, it was snowing lightly in Timbuktu.
As the International Space Station moved toward North America, what began to slide past below looked more like the surface of the moon than anything one would associate with the earth. The immense cloud cover stretched from horizon to horizon like a huge white plate. Here and there, the vortices of megacells might have been mistaken for craters. But they were not craters, and he hardly dared think what was happening down at the base of those dark glaring eyes.
“There’s no point of reference,” he said as he drifted away to let the others look. “All I can see is cloud cover.”
NASA Houston was still online, but they were being evasive about when the shuttle might return. The Baykonur Cosmodrome was not responsive, nor was JAXA communications. NASA kept promising to send word of families, but that word never came, except for Bob Parker, whose wife was safe in their home in Sarasota, Florida.
Nothing had been said, but the three men all knew that their supplies up here were limited. They knew that the shuttle was on indefinite weather delay, and that there would be no supplies forthcoming from Baykonur. They were already rationing food, which would be their main problem. The station’s recycling system would keep them in water for another three months, in oxygen for much longer. No, the issue was going to be food. They had about six weeks of it left. Emergency ration protocols would stretch that to three and a half months, maybe four.
So far, NASA had not actually declared an emergency, but they’d heard radio broadcasts suggesting that there had been sustained 130 mile an hour winds at Cape Kennedy. Could the shuttle hangar survive that much stress? For all they knew, somewhere under that cloud cover was wreckage that would mean their lives.
Yuri Andropov began throwing switches. Bob Parker asked him what he was doing.
“Taking infrared image of thermal layers. We send to Houston, to our weather service.” He nodded toward Hideki. “To yours.”
“I’ll help you,” Bob said.
As the images became more complex, they started to take on the shape of a computer model that Bob had seen once or twice before. In fact, it had been in a magazine called Weather, a hobbyist’s journal. This was the spitting image of the model storm that Jack Hall had postulated would appear if the North Atlantic Oscillation ever moved south due to excessive warming of the northern North Atlantic.
He looked out the window. Back toward Africa, he could see a definite line swooping across the mid-Atlantic, perhaps five hundred miles north of the equator. North of that line, the weather was cloudy, indicating the presence of the same extensive storm activity that was directly below them, covering North America. South of it, there were long necklaces of fair-weather cumulus, typical of the place and time of year.
So that was what had happened: that line must be the new route of the North Atlantic Oscillation. Without the current to warm the northern half of North America and Europe, it was going to get very, very cold up there. Much of it was going to be unlivable.
It was selfish of him, he knew, but he was damn glad that Gerry was in Sarasota. It was cloudy and cold there, but he very much doubted that the weather would become life threatening.
Yuri and Hideki, on the other hand, had probably already lost their loved ones. He wondered when NASA would give them a new resupply timetable, or an exit date. Then he thought, Not when. It’s if. If we will get a resupply date. He gazed long out the window. If.
In normal times, the Texas-Mexico border, from El Paso-Juarez to Matamoros-Brownsville, has a total population of 4 million, half of them packed into the slums of Juarez.
Not now. Texas’s Rio Grande Valley had tripled its population from 1 million to 3 million in a matter of days. And the lucky ones—another 2 million—were across the border in Mexico. In all, the United States now had a population of around 100 million living souls, 5 million of whom were even yet in jeopardy. A 150 million brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers were entombed, not to be seen again for vast cycles of years; indeed, not until the equinox had marched its stately way backward around the pole four more times, taking twenty-two thousand years to make each journey.
Scientists, politicians, the media—they had all scoffed that nature could do something as radical as this. “Where’s the energy for a storm like that?” scientists had sneered when Jack Hall
had published his papers.
The energy was there. What was not there was the will to see the truth. And so nature had done her worst. Ironically, proper planning and greenhouse-gas management could have staved off the disaster for years, possibly until ways were found to interrupt the ice cycle that had the planet in its grip once and for all. Alone among world leaders, the Canadian prime minister had pointed out that simple voluntary measures that could be done in the home at virtually no cost could have so reduced human greenhouse-gas emissions that the catastrophe would have been averted.
At no cost. Maybe for years, maybe forever.
Now, instead of these millions of people living out their precious lives, there was vast death across the northern half of the planet, a civilization thousands of years old had fallen, and along this border, in wretched camps, huddled the pitiful remnant of its greatness.
Still, though, the Americans were organized. Thousands of tents had been found and stood in long sentinel rows, their flaps shuddering in the blustery north wind, light snow flurries hissing against their peaked roofs.
There were people everywhere, listening to radios, watching what little television they could pick up, but mostly watching the sky. The National Guard distributed food from large centers that would spring up as soon as another truckload of supplies arrived from the north.
The United States was vastly harmed, but it was not killed. The West Coast was functioning as far north as San Francisco—wet and storm-battered, but not killed. Much of the Southwest was intact, also, as was southern Texas. San Antonio and Houston were hubs of organization and the source of food supplies for the millions.
Ominously, though, those supplies were dwindling fast, and neither Fourth Army planners nor local grocery chains were able to obtain anything like what would soon be needed.
In Mexico, the price of masa, the tortilla flour essential to life, had risen a thousand percent overnight. The result was that the poor were gathering along the borders of the American camps, and it must not be long before there would be friction.
The world was like a great ocean liner that had taken a torpedo and was filling fast, but there were still people aboard with hopes, with dreams, gazing out across the empty ocean for rescuers who were, themselves, already dead.
The emergency White House consisted of an elaborate series of tents. Inside, staffers moved about in every direction, as this flimsy, inadequate nerve center struggled to make some sense out of chaos, to get itself going, to offer meaning and support to the American people.
Secretary of State Linn was pressing through the crowd. “Where’s the vice president?”
Then she saw him. Sitting over there in that corner, he looked, well, small. Very small. Shrunken. It was as if the suffering of the nation had literally diminished the man. Well, he needed to find his strength and his courage fast. She went over to him. “Raymond?”
At first, he didn’t react. Then he raised his eyes … slowly. “What?”
“The president’s motorcade got caught in the storm.”
His eyebrows raised. She saw fear flicker in his eyes. One of the most ambitious and outspoken vice-presidents in American history was obviously terrified at what he thought he was about to hear.
Well, that was his problem. “They didn’t make it,” she said. No point in mincing words. What was, was.
If Becker leaned away from her any farther, he was going to fall out of the tent. “How … how could this happen?”
How, she wondered, could you have been such a dumb jerk for your whole damn worthless life, or how could the president of the United States have gotten himself frozen to death in a snowbank in Virginia, for the love of Mike?
“He wanted to be the last one out the door,” she said. Blake had realized the incredible scope of his mistake, the tremendous, historical immensity of it. No doubt of that, he had known that his name would be cursed for millennia, as the names of the demons were cursed.
He hadn’t wanted to live.
She patted the veep’s perfectly manicured hand. If ever a man had a chance to grow into an office, it was this man, and this office. “Good luck,” she said, “and God be with you, Mr. President.”
It was the beginning of the third day in the Trustee’s Room, and Jeremy had lost his energy to a rattling cough. Elsa, as well, huddled close to the fire, coughing and staring at the flickering flames.
Not nearly as many books were in the room as there had been at first. Not nearly as many.
Laura was shivering in Sam’s arms. Earlier, she’d been talking, laughing to herself. Beads of sweat were on her forehead, and sweat was running in rivulets down her cheeks. Sam was so scared he could hardly think straight, his mind just kept turning over and over. He was trying to remember what you did—was it starve a fever, feed a cold? What did you do for somebody who was real sick, and Laura, he knew, was real sick.
“Maybe she has the flu,” Brian said. He and J.D. were sticking close.
“It’s not the flu.”
Then Judith came over. She tossed a dictionary into the fire, made sure it was open so all the pages would burn, then turned to them. “Okay, let’s go over the symptoms.”
She’d tossed away the dictionary, but she had in her hands a thick blue book called The Merck Manual. It was a couple of thousand pages of fine print, all the diagnostic knowledge of mankind, gathered between two covers.
“She’s got a fever and her skin is cold and clammy.”
Judith flipped pages. “Books can be good for something other than burning,” she muttered.
Some books, Sam thought, now, just some books. He tossed a James Hilton novel on the fire, watched it burn. Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
“How’s her pulse?” Judith asked.
Sam lifted her wrist, looked down at her soft hand, lying limp and hot in his. He closed his eyes, found the pulse. Wumpwumpwumpwump. “Beating really fast.”
Judith turned more pages. “Does she have any injuries? A cut or something that could’ve gotten infected?”
Sam remembered the flood, the car bumper down there under all that dirty water, Laura’s blood flowing. “She scraped her leg in the flood. I noticed she kept rubbing it.”
He pulled up her pant leg, and what he saw caused him to gasp, caused them all to gasp. Angry red lines marched up her leg under the skin, which was so swollen that it looked as if it’d pop if you pricked it. The wound itself was an angry, puckered mass of swollen skin and pus.
“That’s septicemia,” Judith said, “blood poisoning. She’s at risk of septic shock.”
Sam felt as if he were going to throw up. “What can we do?” he asked, frightened that the book was giving Judith an answer he did not want to hear.
“She needs a massive dose of penicillin or a broad-spectrum antibiotic immediately.”
Judith stopped. Sam saw her jaw working, saw the wet that had appeared at the corners of her eyes.
“Or what?”
There was a silence. Judith looked at him with hollow eyes. He took the book from her, read it himself. “In untreated cases, death would follow within hours, or at most days, but modern treatment protocols make this an extremely unlikely outcome.”
Death? But she was just a kid! He threw his arms around her.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had assumed an enormously important role in the life of the country and the world, with control over most environmental satellites, the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, the Severe Storms Laboratory, and almost all of the reporting and analysis facilities possessed by the United States.
The problem was, although that Tom Gomez and his staff had actually moved the headquarters facilities to the government compound on the Mexican border, the vast majority of their data collection facilities were not reporting. The National Weather Service was intact in only the southern tier of states, and it was presumed that the stations not reporting had been destroyed.
Still, the NOAA tent presented an appea
rance of lots of activity. One of the main tasks was making use of all the personnel who’d found their way here after being displaced from their stations. Many meteorologists had realized early on that something was very wrong and had moved south with their families in the first wave of migration.
Janet Tokada moved quickly through the milling groups of scientists, some of them standing around jerry-built terminal stations, all, inevitably, trying to make sense of the spotty data they were receiving, and having trouble doing so.
The greatest loss was probably in the satellite department. The storm hadn’t reached the satellites, of course, but cloud cover was causing signals acquisition problems, and many ground stations were no longer reporting.
Day After Tomorrow Page 19