He felt restless and hungry. The White House seemed suddenly bigger and more ridiculous than ever, and he couldn’t wait to get away from its stifling frills and history. He thought of all those miles of America opening out from his doorstep, a continent like a long empty beach.
William laughed a high child’s laugh and ran down the steps of the Main Portico.
The sky that day was heavy and fat with clouds.
* * *
By January, the albedo of the planet had risen considerably.
Traveller-engineered phytoplankton laced the surface waters of the tropics. Like crystals of fine glass, they bounced sunlight back into the sky.
Above these vast reflective ocean plains, domes of moisture-laden air punched into the troposphere. Convection clouds the shape of fists rose and flared into cirrostratus.
From orbit, the tropics resembled a fractal image, a fury of greater and lesser whorls. The air above the sea was knotted with hurricane crowns.
Individual pressure cells broke loose and travelled with the prevailing currents like tall ships of wind, wound tighter as they penetrated the cooler latitudes.
Some rode the monsoon drift into India and Asia. Some rode the equatorial currents to Australia or Africa. Some followed the Gulf Stream across the East Indies into the Gulf of Mexico.
A few rode the Kuroshio Current to Japan and then veered eastward, gaining new strength over the phytoplankton-heated North Pacific, and turned at last like lazy giants toward the coast of North America.
Chapter 24
Hard Rain
The storm, once a comfortably distant threat, seemed to hurry closer as the days passed.
Matt organized the men into a work crew, nailing plywood sheets over accessible windows on the first floor of the hospital and crossing the plate glass with duct tape. The hospital was a relatively new building, constructed under a strict State building code for regional emergency centers. Essentially, it was a three-story reinforced-concrete bunker. It stood on high ground in a neighborhood of middle-income residences and tall conifers. The basement contained a records room, generator room, laundry room, heating and plumbing, and a kitchen and staff cafeteria.
Matt chose the cafeteria to serve as shelter. It was a cheerless cinder-block box painted salmon pink, but it was spacious and well away from any exterior walls. Tables were shoved up against the service line to make room for mattresses and bedding. By the first Thursday in March the storm was still a day or two away, according to the Helper, but the shelter was as complete as Matt could make it, and people had already begun to truck in their valuables, protecting photographs, souvenirs, memories against the wind.
Abby Cushman served as coordinator, keeping in close touch with all nine members of the Emergency Planning Committee and relaying Helper updates. She conferred with Matt by telephone and they chose Friday at 6:00 p.m. as the hour when everyone should be in the hospital basement, doors closed, exits bolted.
“Incidentally,” Abby said, “I heard about Rachel. I’m terribly sorry, Matt.”
Matt accepted her condolences. Abby had recently lost her husband and two grandchildren to what Rachel had called the Greater World. For a moment, an unspoken understanding flowed between them. Then Matt was hailed by Bob Ganish, who had run out of duct tape; Abby said, “Tomorrow at six—and everybody better be there!”
* * *
The storm was preceded by strange gusts of warm air, flurries of rain, a racing overcast.
Matt had expected something sudden, a burst of weather as quick and violent as a spring thunderstorm. Tom Kindle, ferrying canned food down to the hospital kitchen, told him it wouldn’t be that way. A typhoon—which was what this was, if not something even more powerful, still nameless—wasn’t a localized event. It was a vortex of air, miles wide, slow at the edges, more intense as you moved toward the eye… or as the eye moved toward you. It would not come all at once; but it would come quickly, insidiously.
Friday afternoon, Matt packed up a few things at the house—the family album Rachel had cherished, Celeste’s letters, a change of clothes. It wasn’t much, but the act of selection was both agonizing and more difficult than he had anticipated. By the time he had the trunk full and his car on the road, his watch said 4:45.
The wind plucked at the car like a playful hand as he drove to the hospital. High clouds tumbled inland from the ocean, and the bay was so white with froth it seemed to be boiling. The roads were already littered with twigs and branches.
He parked close to the Emergency entrance but was drenched before he could dash inside with his two cartons of worldly goods. The rain was cold and the wind so intense he had to put his shoulder against the door to close it again.
The basement cafeteria, by contrast, was warm and noisy. He felt unreasonably cheered by the sight of other people, by the babble of their voices. Abby’s deadline was only a quarter of an hour away. If we’re all here, Matt thought, we can nail plywood over the last door and hunker down for the night. He looked for Abby Cushman, meaning to propose a final head count and a battening of the hatches—but Abby was on the phone.
It took him a second to work out the implication.
She waved him over. “It’s Miriam Flett. Miriam won’t leave her house—it’s too stormy to drive, she says. She thinks she’ll be safe where she is.”
Matt checked his watch again. “How about if we send someone to pick her up? Would she be willing to go with an escort?”
“Matt, do we have time? It’s getting bad awfully fast.”
“Ask her if she’s willing.”
Abby took her hand away from the receiver. “Miriam? Miriam, how about if we send somebody? Somebody to drive? Because we’re not sure your house is safe enough. No. But it’s not just the wind, Miriam. There’s the storm surge to worry about. Flooding, yes. You might be too close to the water. I know, but… yes, dear, but… but if we send someone, how would that be?”
Five-fifty, according to his Timex.
Abby covered the receiver again. “She’s willing to go, but she wants to know who to expect.”
“Tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Matthew? Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “I’m already wet.”
“Well—you be careful. We can’t afford to lose the town doctor.”
“Tell Miriam to make sure she’s packed.”
“All right. We won’t barricade the door until you’re back.”
“No. But do it if you have to.”
* * *
Ordinarily it would have been a five-minute drive from the hospital to Miriam’s bungalow on Bellfountain Avenue. Allowing for the weather, Matt had estimated twice that. Outside, he wondered whether he should have doubled it again.
Coming around Commercial, he managed to stop just short of a toppled Douglas fir. The tree was a giant, old growth left to mature next to a grocery store parking lot; its trunk obstructed the road as neatly as a fence. It would mean a detour, but not a long one: another block south and left to the highway. He backed up, sweating despite the cold.
The fallen tree made the storm seem suddenly real, an immediate danger. For Matt, a kind of emotional electricity always accompanied even a modest summer cloudburst. He used to love the sight of a storm coming in around the crest of Mt. Buchanan, the thunder rolling up the slopes. Grotesque as it seemed, maybe he had been getting the same kind of pleasure from this storm.
But the fallen tree had cut his euphoria as neatly as it divided the road. This wasn’t a cloudburst or an out-of-season thunderstorm. This was something immensely more powerful, an engine wound on a column of air as tall as a mountain. It had the power to lift, to compel, to move, slash, shatter; to destroy. It could pick up his car and spin it like a top—probably would, if not now, then in an hour or two hours. It had already toppled this ancient fir, and the storm had not even begun. This was only its curtain-opener, its prelude.
He circled down to Marina with his high beams on. The storm h
ad blotted up all but the last trickle of daylight; streetlights cast a feeble iridescence into the gloom. Every house he passed was dark. The Contactees had turned out the lights before they left, a universal primness as alien as their means of departure.
Coming toward the highway along a familiar residential road, he was startled to see a house with windows blazing yellow light… even more startled when he recognized it as the house where Jim and Lillian Bix had lived for the last ten years.
He looked at his watch, fretted a moment, then pulled over to the curb.
The house wasn’t fortified against the storm. The windows weren’t taped or shuttered. Matt hoped the building was simply unoccupied, the lights left burning for no good reason—but then he saw a shadow against the downstairs curtains, a motion there and gone again.
He sighed and climbed out of the car. He was instantly wet, wetter than before, the rain drilling through his topcoat. He ran to the shelter of the porch, knocked once, waited, and knocked again.
Jim Bix opened the door.
Matt recognized him immediately, although his friend had changed.
The last time he had seen Jim Bix was when they argued over Lillian’s pregnancy, Jim insisting she didn’t need prenatal medical care: the Travellers would protect her. And Jim had cut his hand, and the blood had been viscous and very dark.
Now Jim stood in the doorway, haphazardly dressed, as tall and ugly as he had ever been… but thinner and inhumanly pale. His skin, Matt thought, didn’t look like skin at all; it looked like some much finer membrane, a transparent sheath drawn over bones as delicate as seashells. His eyes, in their china hollows, were like dusty blue marbles, as if the color of the irises had bled into the whites. The pupils, fixed and small, were the bottomless black of night shadows.
Matt thought of the empty skin he had inspected at Tom Kindle’s house. It looked like his old friend wasn’t far from that condition.
“Thank you for stopping,” Jim said. His voice was a husky whisper. “But it’s not necessary, Matt. We’re fine. You should get under shelter.”
He said, somewhat breathlessly, “So should you.”
“Really—we’re fine.”
“Is Lillian here?”
Jim hesitated, still blocking the doorway. Matt called out, “Lillian? Are you all right?”
No answer—or if there was, it was masked by the roar of the wind along the overflowing eaves.
Lillian would have been three months from her due date by now. “The baby,” Matt said. “Is that why you’re still here when everyone else is gone? Jim, for Christ’s sake, is it the baby?”
The thing that had been Jim Bix peered frowning at him but failed to answer. Frustrated, frightened, Matt pushed past him into the house.
Jim fell away instantly from the pressure, and Matt sensed his lightness, the terrible lack of solid weight behind his ribs.
“Lillian?”
“Matt,” Jim said. “It would be better if you left. Will you leave?”
“I want to see her.”
“She doesn’t need medical care.”
“So you say. I haven’t examined her since Contact.”
“Matt—” His friend looked at him mournfully. “You’re right. It was the baby that kept us here. Lillian wanted to finish the pregnancy. But the storm—it would be awkward to linger past tonight. This is a private moment, Matt. Please leave.”
“What do you mean, finish the pregnancy? You mean she’s having the baby?”
“Not exactly. We—”
“Where is she?”
“Matt, don’t force this on yourself.”
The front door was still open. Distantly, from somewhere down the street, came the sharp sound of a window shattered by the wind.
He felt driven by the need to see Lillian and speak to her; or, if not, to know what had overtaken her, know precisely what maze of transformation she had stumbled into. Maybe he wasn’t being reasonable. He didn’t care. She was his patient.
“Lillian?” He stepped into the kitchen; it was empty. “Lillian!” Shouting up the stairs.
Jim, too fragile to stop this, stood aside and gazed at him with a vast sadness in his cavernous eyes. “Matt,” he said finally. “Matt, please stop. She’s in the bedroom off the hallway.”
He hurried there and threw open the door.
Lillian was naked on the bed.
Her ribs were stark against her papery flesh, and her eyes were as strange as her husband’s, though browner. She raised her head to look at him and seemed unsurprised by his entrance.
Her legs were spread. There was no blood, but Matt recognized with horror that she had delivered… something.
It resembled a shriveled homunculus—a monkey fetus, perhaps, as preserved on the shelf of some medieval apothecary. It was quite dry, quite motionless.
His horror was overtaken by an immense, weary sorrow. He looked at Lillian. Her face was bland. She had wanted a baby very badly. “Lillian,” he whispered. “Dear God.”
“Matt,” she said calmly. “You don’t understand. This is not the baby. You must understand that. This is only an end product. The baby is with us! He’s been with us for some months now. A boy. He’s alive, Matt, do you understand me?” She tapped her head. “Alive here.” And spread her arms. “Here.” The Greater World.
She smiled a bloodless, paper-thin smile. “We named him Matthew.”
* * *
He arrived at Miriam Flett’s small house grateful for the anesthetizing noise of the storm. The roar of the wind had become so intense it was hard to think. Which was good. He didn’t want to think.
Miriam met him at the door, a small woman, her spine curved with what Matt diagnosed as a mild osteoporosis. Her expression was grim. “You’re late.”
“I had some trouble on the way over.”
“You look sick, Dr. Wheeler. Are you sick?”
“Miriam, I may very well be, but we don’t have time to worry about it. We have to get you to shelter.”
“I told Abby on the phone—I have shelter.”
It was an invitation to argue that Matt did not accept. “Are these your bags?” Two pale gray Tourister cases.
“Yes,” she admitted. He picked them up. “Well,” she said. “All right. But they’re heavy. Be careful.”
He carried them to the trunk of the car, came back to help her into a bright yellow raincoat. He took her arm, but she resisted. “My journals!”
“What?” The door was open and the wind was shrieking.
“My journals.”
“Miriam, we don’t have time!”
“We would have had time if you hadn’t been late.” She stamped her foot. “I won’t leave without my journals!”
Have mercy, Matt thought. How many minutes back to the hospital? And what were his chances, in that time, of staying on the road? “Damn it, we simply can’t—”
“There’s no call for profanity!” Shouting to make herself heard.
He closed his eyes. “Where are they?”
“What?”
“The journals! Where are they?”
She took him to the kitchen, where it was marginally quieter, and pointed to three shelves of bound notebooks so full of newspaper clippings they were bent as round as bread loaves.
Matt gathered up an armful.
“No!” Miriam shrieked. “They’ll get wet!”
“I can carry them to the car. I can’t make it stop raining.”
“Don’t be testy! Here.” She shrugged out of her raincoat and draped it over the journals.
“Miriam—you’ll be soaked to the bone.”
“I’ll dry out,” she said.
He took her to the car, helped her inside, and piled the journals at her feet. She slammed the door to keep the rain away from the books, narrowly missing the fingers of Mart’s left hand.
He climbed in behind the wheel and advised her to fasten her seat belt. The engine stuttered a little when he cranked it, as if some moisture had crept in w
here it didn’t belong.
He said as they pulled away from the curb, “Have you talked to Abby? She must be worried.”
The wipers, on double-speed, did very little to improve visibility. The road in front of him was a liquid blur.
“I would have liked to talk to Abby,” Miriam said, “but the phone stopped working twenty minutes ago. Dr. Wheeler, may I ask why you were so late?”
“Believe me, Miriam, it isn’t something you want to know.” She examined him over the rims of her eyeglasses and rendered a judgment: “Maybe you’re right.”
* * *
He took a different route back to the hospital, longer but higher; he was afraid of flooding down by the marina. The road rose along the foothills of Mt. Buchanan and Matt was forced to crawl along in the breakdown lane, away from the winds that had begun to sweep up the hillside with devastating force. Many of the houses he passed were already windowless and the road surface was littered with broken glass. Debris rolled past the car at a constant rate—loose garbage bins, cardboard boxes, green matter.
At the apex of the drive, where the road began a descent into the hospital district, the battering rain suddenly eased. Matt spared a glance to the west. The clouds, skimming overhead at a dizzying speed, had briefly lifted. He could see the water of the bay driven up beyond the marina and nearly to Commercial Street, the hulls of overturned pleasure boats bobbing level with the roofs of warehouses and restaurants. The bay itself was a furious caldron, though calmer than the sea beyond, where waves the size of houses battered the stony southern tip of Crab Pot Island. The last daylight came from the west—seemed to come from the storm itself, a strange, weak radiance.
He turned his attention back to the road and swerved to avoid a cartwheeling tree limb. The wind made his steering awkward; it was like driving into a tide of molasses.
“Dear God,” Miriam said suddenly. “Look at that.”
The Harvest Page 30
