5 Days to Landfall

by Robert Roy Britt

  Couldn’t stand up without holding onto something. Another loud snap and he felt the stern drift away from the dock. Everything was coming apart. He made his way forward to the wheelhouse, deciding that if he were to be cast free he ought to start the engine. He turned the key, pushed the starter and the reliable diesel fired up.

  A wave lifted the boat up, pitching him to the hardwood floor. He scrambled to his feet and peered out the window toward the City for a reference point. He could make out the difference between the dark marina building and a lighter-colored area behind it. The two shapes moved in relation to each other. He glanced down at the dock. It was not moving. The whole dock had been lifted up off the pilings and was floating up the river with him.

  The stern drifted away from the dock. A bowline snapped, then another. Only the crisscrossing spring lines tethered the boat. Then they snapped, too, and the Slow Times floated free, upriver and toward the shore.

  Beasley was not an adept pilot even in the best conditions. The trawler had a top speed of eight knots. He watched the marina building slide in front of the bright spot and estimated that he was doing eight knots now.

  Backward.

  He put the gearshift into forward and applied full power, turned the wheel hard to starboard in an attempt to head out into the river. The bow rose as if on the high seas, plunged down the other side of a wave unlike anything ever seen on the Hudson. The dock, which had disappeared momentarily, reappeared and slammed into the fiberglass hull of the trawler. It was only a moment before the boat began to list.

  Beasley shoved down again on the throttle, but it had no travel left. He felt warm urine run down the inside of his left leg. A wave crashed into the cabin, starboard side, and blew the windows out. The engine died.

  He put his hands over his ears. The sounds, the sounds. A man who could not see was more in tune with the sounds of a storm, and Walter Beasley had never heard anything so evil. The rush of waves as though waist-deep in a crashing surf. The gurgle of remote space filling with water. Grind and tear of failing fiberglass. And the wind, the wind, the goddamn wind.

  The trawler lurched backward. There was a loud crash and a sudden jerk as the boat changed direction and seemed to twirl around a pivot point at the stern. Beasley clung to the wheel and squinted out the window. The blurry circle of darkness framed a brick wall, not six feet away.

  I’m on the goddamn streets of Manhattan.

  A huge wave washed over the Slow Times. The boat flipped. He saw the bright wallpapered ceiling come toward him. Water rushed in and his blurry circle of vision faded out.

  ***

  Amanda reached Rico’s apartment from the south, carrying Sarah. The water was above her ankles and rising faster than even she could believe. She wanted to round the corner and check on Henri Mouchet at the restaurant, make sure he’d evacuated. But there wasn’t time. She had saved as many people as she could today, and now it was time to worry only about Sarah. She had to get to a higher floor. Now.

  She pulled the outer door open and the water followed her into the entryway and was at her knees in a second. She left the door open and sprinted up the stairs. The water rose. This was where they would stay.

  She was close now. Rico would be here, at least. And maybe Jack. God, let Jack be here.

  The overwhelming cacophony outside was replaced by an echoing mix of shrill whistles in the stairwell. At the second-floor landing Amanda glanced at the window. Rainwater spat through its corners. They’re not designed for a wind like this. Got to get inside.

  By the time Amanda got to the sixteenth floor, she hadn’t an ounce of energy left.

  It was the end of a horrific journey. Rico’s apartment would be safely above the surge. It was time to rest. She tried the door and found it unlocked, pushed it open.

  She walked into Rico’s apartment, put Sarah down. Sarah instantly grabbed her mother’s soaked shirt and followed her into the living room. The orange juice stain was still on the wall, the broken phone still on the floor. The room was otherwise empty. Amanda’s heart sank. She closed the door behind her and headed for the hallway—the safest place—hanging on to one final shred of hope. She rounded the corner and saw three people. PJ was sitting against the wall. At the back of the hall she saw Jonathan and Sleepy. Tears welled up in Amanda’s eyes. Jack wasn’t there.

  In her grief, she stared at the boy and his father, and the vague recognition she’d felt the first time she saw Sleepy crawled back into her consciousness. Then she understood: He looked like a normal-sized version of the wide Leonard Lassitor.

  She wanted to make some sense of that. It meant something, her frazzled brain told her. She went to the end of the hall and shouted into his ear. “You’re Leonard Lassitor’s brother?”

  Sleepy hesitated, then nodded. Amanda remembered Lassitor’s bruises. “What did you do this morning?”

  He stared at her, didn’t answer.

  “It’s important,” she shouted.

  “I let him go.”

  As Amanda toyed with this new information, she saw from the corner of her eye a fourth figure emerging from Juan Rico’s study and into the hallway. It was Jack.

  She rushed to him and Jack dropped the portable radio in his hand and absorbed her wordlessly, with Sarah sandwiched between. Amanda closed her eyes, pushed Leonard Lassitor, Maximo Perez and the storm out of her mind and let herself feel Jack’s body press against her own. It felt good to be the comforted one for a change.

  Then Juan Rico popped into her mind. “Jeez! Where’s Juan?”

  “Don’t know,” Jack shouted over the whistling wind, holding Amanda’s shoulders. “Any ideas?”

  “He’s shooting,” Amanda said. “Only question is where.”

  “Who knows?” Jack shrugged. “Hope he gets the shot.”

  “Oh, shit,” Amanda said. “That’s it!”

  “What?”

  “The shot. The tunnel. I told him earlier in the week how the Holland would flood. He said that would be the shot.”

  Fear crossed Jack’s face. He pushed Amanda aside and headed for the door. Amanda grabbed him by the forearm. “No!”

  “But he’s probably at the goddamn restaurant.”

  “It’s no use.” She firmed her grip and shook her head. “It’s flooded. You can’t even get out of this building.”

  Jack’s eyes watered, then he seemed to deflate. He looked at the floor, leaned against the wall, slid down into a squatting position and grabbed his knees. Amanda sat next to him and put her arm around his shoulder.

  Then she heard something bang against the side of the building. The storm was still growing. Amanda picked the portable radio up from the floor and tuned it to WCBS.

  “…report that the World Trade Center building is flooding. On the scene is reporter Mary Simms. Mary?”

  Mary Simms sounded less like a professional reporter and more like a scared victim.

  “I’m standing near the large bank of revolving doors that separate the World Trade Center Tower 1 from the large concourse that leads to the subway entrance.” She spoke hurriedly, her voice cracking. “To my right is Tower 1 and the Marriott Hotel. Just moments ago water began flowing into the hotel and the tower lobby from West Street, then through the revolving doors here. I’m already in about six inches of water right now, and it seems to be rising still. The water then flows to my left, down the concourse, through a set of double-doors and down into the subway. I was just at the top of those stairs, and it’s like a waterfall already. Now, hundreds of the roughly 20,000 people who work in the 110 stories of this building had earlier taken refuge in this main-floor lobby to escape the hurricane’s fierce winds. There is considerable panic right now as people scramble for the stairs to escape this flooding. Also, an unknown number of people had been lingering down in the subway platform, even though the trains have not been running for hours. We’re still seeing people scramble out of the subway entrance, but it looks like they’re having difficulty making it up the stai
rs against the increasing flow of water…”

  The radio cut out. Amanda turned the volume up, and there was only static. She tried other stations, but found nothing.

  She listened to the wind. The combination of screaming and moaning was frighteningly similar to a noise she had heard before—at Bill Leaderman’s house. There was something about hurricane winds that sounded the same in a city or on a beach, in a wood-frame home or a solid brick structure. Maybe it was the way the wind seeped into every crack, whistled and pulled and pushed and tore.

  From the sound and direction of the wind Amanda guessed the worst of the storm was upon them. Hurricane Harvey was racing with incredible speed, and as soon as it was no longer moving toward them the winds would diminish rapidly.

  The wind barreled in from the south now, blowing in the same direction as the storm’s movement. The right-side eyewall was upon them. The building had survived the surge. Now it had only to survive the wind, for a few moments, and the worst would be over.

  The light went out in the hallway. Then there was a large crash, metal against brick.

  Sixteenth floor. What the hell?

  ***

  Rico was shivering and exhausted, bleeding from the shoulder and the fingers of his good hand when he got to the stairs. He thought of continuing around the corner to his apartment, but knew he didn’t have the strength to fight the surging river much more. Not with one arm. So he crawled into the doorway of Chez Henri, turned and took one last look at the Hudson River two steps below. He closed the door solidly behind him. In the entryway, he lay prone and rested until his thoughts, which were telling him the worst was not over, forced him to stand up. The power was out, the sky ominously dark, the restaurant dim. He grabbed a small card from a table in the entryway. On the card was printed the restaurant’s address and a small map showing directions.

  Henri Mouchet seemed glad to see him and made a nervous joke. “How many in your party, Juan?”

  “Gimme a pen.”

  “Here. What?”

  Rico glanced around the room. The old drunk with the white hair and the purple nose sat at the bar. Six other heavy drinkers sat at various tables. Rico sat down at an empty table in the middle of the restaurant and oriented himself to the map. Watts ran east-west. The restaurant was on the south side of the street. Blocked the wind. He drew an arrow running north. Wind’s blowing north. Rotates counter-clockwise. He made a dot on the left side of the card, west of the restaurant. Eye has to be here.

  “We’re in the right-side eyewall,” he told Henri Mouchet.

  “What does that mean?”

  Means I owe Jack Corbin a hundred bucks. Rico turned over in his mind conversations with Jack and Amanda. To his chagrin, nothing they had said told him what would happen to this restaurant.

  Whether it was fear, intuition or an educated guess didn’t matter: It dawned on Juan Rico that he’d made a mistake. And it was too late to change his mind, with the street now a river.

  “Don’t know for sure,” Rico finally said to Henri. “Jack and Amanda always talkin’ about it. It’s the worst part, right around the eye. And right now it means the worst is yet to come. Jesus fuck, Henri, we shouldn’t be here.”

  Rico was overcome by a sense of dread. The warm and high-ceilinged restaurant seemed suddenly oppressive. The life had gone out of it. It felt like Bill Leaderman’s house.

  “Fucking fish in the window.” It was the old drunk at the bar.

  Rico ignored the man for a moment, as usual. Then his blood went cold. He looked over at the windows along Watts Street. The water was a foot above the bottom sill. He looked toward the door. Water was streaming in underneath. The same was happening under the door on Washington Street.

  “Jesus fuck, Henri.”

  “What do we do?”

  “No fuckin’ clue.” The water rose as they talked. Can’t open the door. Windows don’t open. A tomb. A fuckin’ tomb. “There another way out?”

  “Just the doors.”

  A window on Watts Street gave way to the weight of the water. A wave washed tables and chairs across the room, knocked Rico off his feet. Another window gave way, then another. He got up and found himself in waist-deep water that was rising quickly.

  “Tables! Get on the tables,” he shouted.

  The water continued to rise, floating the tables. Rico clamored atop one and laid flat to keep it from tipping over. The inflow of water pushed everything that floated, including Rico and Henri and the six other men, to the back of the room.

  Where’s the drunk old man? Shit.

  The water was above the windows now, gushing in from underneath. Only one window remained visible, a high one over the door along Washington Street. With his bleeding but usable arm, Rico paddled toward it, instructed the others to do the same. He saw the pool of blood, trailing behind him like chum. He thought briefly of the snakes Jack had told him about that hung in the trees of the Carolinas after Hugo.

  When he got to the six-foot tall window, the water was halfway up. Rico found a chair, pounded at the window, but lost his balance and fell into the water. The weight of his camera equipment and computer pulled him down. He struggled to remove it all, swam one-armed back to the surface. Henri Mouchet was near the window. “Henri! Break it! Break the fuckin’ window.”

  On the second swing, the chair went through the window. Water and wind came through the other way and broke glass out in panes, which sank like guillotines.

  “Go,” shouted Rico.

  “You too,” said Henri Mouchet.

  “The old man,” said Rico. “Go!”

  He dove and tried to see under the water but there was nothing but murk. The fuckin sea again. He felt a beer tap at the bar, dove deeper. Nothing.

  Juan Rico was out of air. He struggled to the surface. Up, up, up. He hit his head on something. Frantically, he reached up with his good arm and felt around. It was solid. He moved to one side. Still solid. In the darkness, he heard Bill Leaderman’s chimes, saw Amanda pulling him up onto a scrap of tattered floor on a piling. His mind filled with a vision of Terese. She was moving toward him, her arms open. Then the darkness turned inward. At least I got the fuckin’ shot.

  ~ ~ ~

  EXCERPTED FROM HURRICANE HARVEY: CHRONICLE OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, BY NICHOLAS K. GRAY (2000)

  Hurricane Harvey couldn’t reach all of Manhattan with its storm surge, but no spot was safe from its vicious winds, which by late evening were peaking at 185 miles an hour with stronger gusts. Elements of the city’s infrastructure that nobody had considered began to fail.

  A wooden water tower in Chelsea pulled at the bolts that held it to a steel frame over a twelve-story apartment building. A gust that may have exceeded 200 miles an hour provided the final push and the tower toppled, crashed through the roof and through another floor. The roof began tearing away section by section until seven apartment dwellers were sucked up into the storm and tossed through the streets like rag dolls. Construction sites throughout the region proved menacing. Supplies and tools flew from open floors. Hardly a scaffolding remained intact.

  Times Square was almost completely stripped of its famous billboards. Large images of men and women in stylish underwear flew through the square, knocked out windows and rendered the headline-scrolling Zipper useless.

  CHAPTER 56

  Manhattan

  6:52 p.m.

  There was another crash. Amanda’s mind raced. What could be hitting the sixteenth floor of a building?

  Something from a higher building.

  The only higher building nearby was the construction site to the south, directly across the street. Amanda pushed herself up and ran out of the hallway to the southfacing window. It was streaked with rain, giving a blurry, surreal view of the naked building in progress across the street. Concrete floors and steel pillars. No exterior walls yet. The orange nylon netting, which had encircled each floor, had all been ripped away. She could see straight through the sixteenth floor into the skysc
rapers of the financial district to the south.

  On each floor were partially erected inner studs. And toolboxes, wheelbarrows, aluminum framing studs, plywood and other supplies. It was all lifting up, skidding across the floors, destroying the inner walls. And heading toward them.

  The construction crane, a temporary tower of crisscrossed steel attached to the north wall of the naked building, was vibrating. Amanda craned her neck to look up. Lumber rained down. The top of the crane swayed. Teetered.

  Coming down.

  She bolted from the window, scurried into the hallway. It was a straight shot from the south-facing living room window. Sleepy was against the back wall of the hall.

  Jonathan closer, just past the door to Rico’s study. PJ, Jack and Sarah were on this side of the door.

  Creak. Groan. Snap.

  Amanda hollered, but nobody could hear her. She grabbed Sarah with one hand, then ran past Jack and grabbed Jonathan with the other. The others saw what she was doing and got up. Jack opened the door to Rico’s study. He and PJ went in. Amanda shoved Sarah in and followed her with Jonathan in tow.

  There was a horrendous crash, a whoosh of dust and glass.

  The crane was inside the building and had destroyed much of the roof of Juan Rico’s apartment. The back wall of the hall blew out. Jonathan was in Amanda’s grip, but still in the hall.

  Sleepy was sucked out, tangled momentarily in the crossbars of the temporary elevator still attached to the north side of Rico’s building. Then Hurricane Harvey picked him up and tossed him beyond the roof of Chez Henri below and into the river that used to be Watts Street.

  Amanda lost her grip. Jack lunged for Jonathan, landing face down in the hallway, but missed.