Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Out from under the truck and—

  They grab him by the collar, pin him to the asphalt as he struggles. God, there are a lot of them—they grip his hair painfully, and his scalp is pulled tight. His face is pressed into the pavement. They press the pistol to his left temple.

  The last thing Di Callare thinks about is to be grateful he got far enough away so that his family didn’t see this; the last thing he feels is heat from the asphalt on his cheek, then nothing.

  When Lori arrives, minutes later, following the police, she’s violently ill; it’s almost an hour before she realizes Di is gone forever, because the sight of his shattered face and the bloody mess they made of the back of his head overpower her. The line of cars waiting for the zipline still hasn’t moved.

  Carla Tynan knows they are there only when they yank the jack out of her skull; she has time to shout hey! before they break the connection. They empty a machine pistol into her before she even gets her hands positioned to cover her nakedness.

  Brittany Lynn Hardshaw would like to grieve but there’s no time. Secret Service people are hustling her down one of the safety tunnels to the secure chambers. Harris is gone… and the others, whom she was getting to know and like—

  “It was the Siberians, almost for sure,” Hardshaw says aloud. “Probably Abdulkashim’s old faction, waiting to hit us until the worst was about to descend. Did you get one for questioning?”

  The Secret Serviceman who was guarding Harris Diem shakes his head. “It was a totally professional hit. His house had been surrounded for days by two different teams, a group of six commandos and a single agent. The commandos pulled back a block and it looked like they were grouping for an attack, especially since they left electronic monitors in place. We had the single guy pegged as the scout. Naturally we followed the team—but that guy was Superman. He nailed the house electronics, got in there, shot Mr. Diem, all in maybe two minutes. Did it with a Self Defender, of all the corny things—but of course that gave the commando team a signal. They came in throwing incendiaries, and… well, the house was totalled. It’s still burning. And all of them died in the fighting. We’re not even sure which body is Mr. Diem and which is the solo agent—they were about the same size physically.”

  Hardshaw nods. “I wish we’d had the chance, but I don’t suppose that we can have much doubt. The idea was to put us in chaos just before the superstorm, and they’re listening in all the time. Get me a playback on the transmission.” She strides into the saferoom, the room the White House has had since the Flash, and sits at her desk. They set up a video screen and the signal begins to play. One of the Secret Service agents whispers that they have no confirmed attack aimed in her direction.

  She hears Diogenes Callare and Carla Tynan explaining it to her again. God, it’s hard to believe that none of their bodies are cold yet.

  At the end of the tape, she says, “Well, they’re right. No public announcement. But I think we’d better get ready to run… no, scratch that. I’ve got faith in Carla Tynan, anyway, and if she said it was going to happen that fast, it was. Get me to Charleston and start the Federal evacuation as quickly as you can.”

  When the eye forms in the Bay of Campeche, there is more than adequate energy; the eye wall swells outward, and windspeeds rise; as they approach Mach 1 they rise more slowly, but they don’t stop rising.

  Just after dark, there’s a brief time when the sea chums and thunders, waves a hundred meters high whipping up and crashing down; then the airflow abruptly becomes smooth and layered—the eyewall has passed into the supersonic realm.

  By that time the center of the eye is at 92W 22N, well out into the Gulf of Mexico, and the eye is already 400 km in diameter. Storm surges are already lashing Veracruz and are pouring upward toward the American Gulf Coast.

  Carla’s model missed one detail, but only one. Just as she predicted, within twenty minutes the hurricane has swollen until there are Beaufort 12 or higher force winds across an area 1,600 km in diameter, as if a great drain plug had been pulled at the center of the Gulf. The eye has fallen to 530 mb in pressure, and the eye itself is rapidly swelling, the winds gaining force.

  Nonetheless, Carla missed the detail that in addition to its tsunami-sized storm surges, a supersonic storm is large enough to lift significant quantities of warm water. The better mixing of water and air, in turn, means the air gets warmer and there’s greater efficiency in the storm, converting the heat of the sea to wind. It has more energy—and a lot more water.

  When Jesse gets the word that Di has been murdered, he sits down and cries for an hour. Mary Ann isn’t sure what to do. She’s lost some acquaintances in XV, and you’re supposed to overreact to that—she really admires hell out of Surface O’Malley for not going along with that policy. But this is just a kid who is crying for his big brother. What do you say? “Cheer up”?

  She finally settles on, “I’m so terribly sorry.”

  He hangs on to her as if he were drowning, and she holds his head and strokes his hair. She thinks about how the world slips away, how she’ll never meet Di now (and she had looked forward to it), how Jesse will never quite be the same because pointless evil has gotten into his world.

  All across North America and Europe, people who should be evacuating sit down to grieve with Synthi Venture.

  Death comes quickly for millions as Clem 900 is born. Within hours storm surges are large enough to rage right across Florida. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t evacuate before now are drowned by the waves, tens of meters high, that pour over the peninsula one after another; the mangroves that have held the land give way, concrete crumbles, steel bends and breaks, and the surface of Florida is washed off into the Atlantic to thunder down the continental slope in a great avalanche. More and more follows; there will be little land left by morning.

  Winds reach speeds of 100 mph as far north as Memphis, and cities and forests are flattened.

  The rotary current produced by the storm begins to scour the Gulf out on all sides, chewing off Plaquemines Parish from Louisiana, reopening Lake Pontchartrain to the sea, and eating away at the whole Gulf Coast from Brownsville to Panama City. When next the sun comes out, it will be on a much wider Gulf—and one with much more open jaws.

  The Caribbean islands, at the center, are drowned to their highest mountain peaks, battered, eroded, scoured into new shapes. They will become wildernesses of rubble, sand, rock, and packed debris—but only after the storm stops. Right now they are places where the water and wind foam furiously at the obstacles.

  And yet all this pales beside the effects of the new storm’s outflow jets. Sucking up seawater like a giant vacuum cleaner, mixing far more efficiently and thus using more of the available energy, the great hurricane dumps more than a thousand tons of water per square acre—the equivalent of ten inches of rain—all over the eastern third of the United States in the nine hours before the storm abruptly veers to roar across the Atlantic, gaining energy before it mauls its way into Europe, still dropping saltwater three days later as far inland as Kazakhstan.

  The Mississippi is briefly as wide as Lake Erie; the James River carries all of Richmond out to sea, and running water rises seventy feet on the Flash-scarred stub of the Washington Monument.

  In Georgetown, the still-smoldering remains of Harris Diem’s home are picked up and dragged away by the current. The burned remains of Randy Householder had not even been pulled from the rubble, and what is left of him mixes in and is swept out to the Atlantic, along with all the wedges of the raped and murdered girls.

  In all his dark dreams, Harris Diem never imagined that it was possible that no one would ever know. But fourteen years after her miserable death, it is as if there never were a Kimbie Dee Householder.

  Karen always kind of hates herself for thinking it, but here she goes again… she wonders what Mary Ann would do now. It’s funny how life diverges… Karen’s hair was too dark to take the needle well, and her hips were just a little too wide, so she wasn’t c
alled back for the Passionet auditions.

  And the strange result is that while Synthi Venture is down in warm, safe Mexico with a great-looking young kid, Karen Mary Ann finds herself sitting in the Dance Channel Tower—the tallest building in the United States, so big that Herald Square is its central courtyard—and looking down on the boiling anthill of Manhattan.

  The salt rain has been falling so fast and hard that the building engineer has diverted the rain pipes into the building’s power drains. At eighty stories taller than the World Trade Center, he explained to them earlier, the building is too tall to drain easily by gravity—so he has pumps on every floor. Now, with the quarter of a million people who work here mostly gone, he’s been able to divert most of the power drains to pushing water from the roof and the terraces down into the sewer system.

  The Dance Channel itself never occupied more than the top fifteen floors anyway, and even though the building was thick and squat in its lines, it swayed too much up there on windy days for them to use the Top of the World Studio much.

  Karen was very lucky to get one of the micropartments—a nice word for “dorm rooms”—in the building, and since she works on the eighty-first floor, she has been commuting by elevator for a long time. There really isn’t anywhere else for her to go, and the super—a big, muscular, older man named Johnny Wendt—told them that anyone who wanted to could try to ride it out here. There are maybe a thousand of them now, gathered in the floors between forty and fifty, far enough up not to drown and—if they’re lucky—far enough down not to be carried off by the wind.

  It’s not much, but it beats being outside, she thinks. There is an enormous jam of people and vehicles down there, and none of them seem to be going anywhere when she can see them, under the streetlights, through the salt rain. Johnny has signs out inviting people to come up—between the cafeterias and stores in the building, and three different hotels, people could be fairly comfortable—but anyone who is in the street now is trying to get elsewhere, either to join family or because they don’t trust a tall building.

  “Damn foolish,” says a voice behind her. She turns and sees it’s Johnny standing in the corridor, his shirt soaked with sweat, his coverall much dirtier than she’s ever seen it. “At least all my staff stood put. They understand that this place is as stable as a small mountain. We could save ten thousand lives here if people were smart enough to get inside.” He peers at her for a second, and then says, “APDP. Eighty-first floor. Third desk to the right as you go in.”

  “Right,” Karen says, glancing down. It makes her feel a little shy, these days, when anyone notices her; she’s changed a lot since she used to audition and pal around with actors. Perhaps not for the better….

  “Well, I assume you’re smart enough to stay away from the windows if the wind picks up,” he says, “but we’re rated up to Beaufort 30, and the storm isn’t supposed to come near us. It’s the Hudson we have to fear.”

  Water is already running a foot deep in the street below, and Karen shudders. “Will the building take it?”

  “It’ll have to. I’ve got a brand-new music-and-video rig in my apartment, and it’s not paid for yet. The company would never let anything happen to it.”

  She laughs, not because it’s funny but because he’s a nice guy and clearly wants her to like him. He steps a little closer and looks down into the street as well. “Look at them. Can’t they figure time? They won’t get off the island before the worst of it hits. The surge is already on its way down the river.”

  “How high will it come?”

  “Call it a hundred feet or so. That’s what the meterology guys call an order-of-magnitude estimate. They mean more than ten and less than a thousand.”

  She sighs. “Is there anything we can all do?”

  “I’m afraid most of you are just passengers,” Johnny says. “Naw, I’m just looking to see if the streets are clear so that—shit.”

  At his voice, she looks and sees it too, even in the dim gray shapes up toward Times Square: a wall of water and people running from it. There is nothing at all for anyone to do; Johnny is on the phone telling his people to get out of the lower floors if they’re there, but all that Karen sees is the gray-black surge below her, washing up to the third story, sweeping people along in it like struggling insects. There is a faint shudder through her feet as the surge wraps around the building.

  “Suzette? Is that door holding?” Johnny is asking. “Okay, is everyone out? Check in with me!”

  There’s a very long pause.

  “Okay,” he says. “Go with the plan. No sense waiting any longer—no one else is coming through the lower doors.”

  “Er, what’s the plan?” Karen asks.

  “Anhh?” He hasn’t heard her because she spoke very softly. Outside, there is now a rushing river in the streets; Broadway is filled with dark boiling water in the lights that shine down on it from the Dance Channel Tower.

  “Uh, what plan? Just curious.”

  “Hang on—” he says, and raises a finger. He listens to the phone, says, “Good, right, okay,” several times, and finally sighs. “Well, that’s that. The plan is, we’re flooding the lower floors, using the water from the rain pipes and the power drains. So we’re putting clean water into the building up to a bit past 100 feet. With luck it will equalize pressures, to some extent, and make us a bit less likely to get cut off at the base and go over in the storm.”

  “Doesn’t it kind of damage things?”

  “Not like having the building fall over would.” He grins at her, and she smiles back. When did she get this shy? Obviously he’s hanging around because he wants to talk to her, and he’s a nice guy.

  Her phone rings, and she lifts it from her belt. She turns it on to find—“Mary Ann!”

  “Yeah, I’m taking one of my breaks to see if you’re okay. Did you get out of Manhattan?”

  “No, but I don’t think I could be any safer,” she says. “Nowhere on the East Coast is safe, but at least I’m in a building that should stand up to this.”

  “That’s something. Take care of yourself if you can.”

  “You too.”

  They chat for a few minutes; one thing you have to say for her, though Mary Ann changed a lot as she became Synthi Venture and her career took off, she didn’t get stuck on herself and she stayed in touch. There’s not a lot to say—and there’s always the possibility that this is their last conversation, Karen realizes, something Mary Ann is being careful not to mention—but they don’t need to say much.

  When they click off, minutes later, Johnny is still standing awkwardly in the hall, and finally he says, “I couldn’t help overhearing, uh, and seeing a little of your screen, and, uh—”

  “Mary Ann Waterhouse used to work next to my desk. We used to go to Equity calls together, back when I still thought I had a career on Broadway,” Karen says, a little proudly. “I knew her a long time before she was Synthi Venture.”

  Johnny nods, clearly impressed, and now it looks like he’s a little shy.

  She glances out the window, and says, “Of course, nowadays you could have a career on Broadway running a submarine.”

  Now it’s his turn to give a nervous laugh. They stand there for a long time, watching the water get up to the eighth floor; there’s nothing much for either of them to do. The powerchips will keep the building running, and hardly anyone needs data patterning.

  Eventually someone shouts about what’s happening on the downtown side of the building, and they run around to see what the searchlights can show them. Buildings as tall as forty stories are going over, but the World Trade Center seems to be holding firm.

  Around dawn they eat; the water is still rising, but slowly, and finally they stagger off—to separate apartments, Karen thinks a little wistfully—and fall asleep.

  She need not have worried; there will be plenty of time. It is not until October third, ten days later, that the water will fall far enough, and enough rubble will be cleared, for them
to leave the building. By that time, millions of New Yorkers will be dead, and the world changed utterly, but Johnny and Karen’s greatest discomfort during the whole thing will be that, during the last week, the building ran out of soda, peanut butter, and mayonnaise.

  Father Joseph urged people to accept evacuation, but since the church rode it out once, they are convinced it must again. It’s strangely familiar in here, the same people, candlelight, the same odors—but the wind is rising fast. He wonders if the building will go over in a hurricane.

  The thing that troubles him most is that he could not bring himself to tell them that he didn’t believe it was a miracle before, finally, but merely luck. Plenty of other churches must have drowned.

  He wonders what he has to say to them. The water has been running out, not in, at the mouth of the Shannon, and the wireless is saying the giant hurricane that has wrecked the States is headed here. He has cousins in Boston, and he hasn’t heard a word…. They say most rivers have risen enough to drown their cities there, and that Florida is gone….

  There is a deep rumble like an oncoming train, and people huddle together. Father Joseph barely has time to say “Let us pray” before, as abruptly as a foot descending on a cockroach, the storm surge—twice as high as any mountain in Ireland—slams church, congregation, and all into oblivion. Moving at hundreds of miles per hour, the surge washes clear across the island; within hours it will penetrate Britain so deeply that a torrent twenty miles wide will flow up the Mersey and down through the Trent, tear a great open bay into the face of Europe where the Zuider Zee once stood, and still have force enough to flood St. Petersburg to a depth of ten meters.

  Nodes collapse and packets are rerouted in the global data system; much like their namesakes, datarodents flee the places that are drowning, and copy themselves endlessly through what remains, up through satellites and down through fibrop. They begin to find each other, to merge, to seek more of their kind—there are moments of recognition, and then, because more data must be assembled to find out what they are to do, they join up and seek together….