Day After Tomorrow

by Whitley Strieber

  Gary didn’t dare say anything. He shot back a “Don’t ask” look and hoped the moron understood.

  What was jail actually like? Either he got through to Mr. Masako or he was going to need to find that out. Ironic, he was going to get rich even though he desperately did not want to, because a guy had been killed by a damn hailstone. He would have laughed. Not today.

  Pinehurst Academy had stood on bluffs overlooking the Hudson River for a hundred years. In contrast to the wild and crazy city on the other side of its high brick walls, red and aged, but topped by masses of cut glass embedded in concrete, the broad campus lawns were normally an oasis. But not today. As the storms rolled, one piling on another, crashing southward like an avalanche from the sky, the tossing trees and rainswept lawns, the sidewalks awash in runoff, were far from peaceful.

  In the gym, a lovely old structure with a barn roof held up by huge, dark beams, the rain roared so loudly that the nervous teams of academic competitors had trouble hearing their own answers, let alone the questions being asked. Behind the woodmont High School sign, Sam, Brian, and Laura sat with the others at the long competitors’ table.

  It faced a single podium, on which a referee neatly dressed in a dark suit with a maroon tie read a question. “In 1532, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro defeated this Inca emperor at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca. What was his name?”

  Sam thought disdainfully to himself that it was just glorified Trivial Pursuit. If it wasn’t for the lovely Laura, he would never in a million years be involved in this stupid kiddie contest.

  “Montezuma,” Brian whispered.

  “Montezuma was in Mexico, not Peru,” Laura shot back. “No, it’s Ana something. Ata?”

  Sam watched them struggle. He watched the other teams conferring, saw the looks of fear up and down the table. Actually, he was doodling. He was drawing a galleon sailing across the Spanish Main. Maybe it was Pizarro’s ship, on its way to Peru to exterminate one of the world’s great civilizations for what turned out to be about sixty thousand pounds of gold, all of which the Spanish kings spent within a single generation. By the time another five years had passed, half the Inca population would be dead, the other half enslaved. In ten years, Peru would be a ghost nation.

  Laura poked him in the ribs to stop the doodling.

  “Atahuallpa,” he said absently, returning immediately to his bowlines. Accurate or not, for a 1532 galleon? He wasn’t entirely sure. Laura scribbled on one of the Official Answer Sheets.

  “Time,” the referee said.

  She thrust their answer into the hands of the judge who stepped from behind the table. The referee asked, “Correct answers?”

  There were only two: Woodmont and the Pinehurst Academy itself. But, of course, Pinehurst was the host and founding school. In fact Pinehurst Academy was the New York Yankees of the Scholastic Decathlon. Their trophies lined the entrance hall. Then Sam noticed something he didn’t like too much. J. D. White, the captain of the Pinehurst team, made eye contact with Laura and gave her a little salute.

  He’d better start keeping those eyes of his to himself. He’d been devouring Laura with them ever since she’d walked into the damn room.

  FIVE

  A

  s Dr. Lucy Hall hurried into the Pediatric Intensive

  Care Ward, she thought for a fleeting moment about Sam. How was he doing up there? Were they ahead? She hoped so. Her son was a fierce competitor. He would not like to lose. He was also an almost infinite source of knowledge. It was not possible to play Trivial Pursuit with him. She’d wished that they would allow kids on some of those high-dollar quiz shows. Sam would start his adult life rich if they did.

  Her son left her mind as she approached the bed of one of her young patients. Silently, as she always did, she thanked God and her lucky stars that her own precious child was so healthy and so strong. People did not realize how hard things could get.

  She looked down at Peter. Brain tumor affecting his optic nerve. No surgery possible, chemotherapy ineffective. The weapon of choice was thus radiation. Peter looked real tired.

  “The treatments have shrunk the tumor twenty percent,” Maria said as she handed Lucy the clipboard.

  “How’s his eyesight today?” Lucy asked softly.

  “No change,” Maria said quickly.

  That was not good. Not good at all. Lucy moved closer to his bedside. “Hello, Peter. How’s it going?”

  “A little better, I guess.”

  Coming from a young patient, that meant its opposite. Peter felt a little worse. She wanted to just reach into his head and drag that dark offending mass out of there with her bare hands. How had it come to this beautiful little boy? Why? Was God asleep at the wheel, or what?

  When she saw he had a well-worn copy of Peter Pan opened, a wild sort of a hope leaped up, in her heart. Maybe, just maybe, the professional assessment of his vision was wrong. “Can you read that?”

  “Nah. But I know the story from the pictures. My mom used to read it to me.”

  Like most of the kids on this ward, Peter had a large support team of parents, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins who were there for him and for each other. Friendships blossomed in the family waiting room outside, hopes rose and fell, laughter broke out like sunshine, and tears flowed like a waterfall. As the storms of disease passed, Lucy thought of it as a sort of lifeboat. Strangers wept on each other’s shoulders and everybody bailed for everybody else.

  If you wanted to know something about the nobility of the human species—if you believed for a second that the greed and the cruelty and the violence were all she wrote-—then you needed to spend a shift here where children lay dying and getting well, and you would find out two things: saints are a lot more common in this old world than sinners, and the eyes of a sick child shine with higher love. Few people could leave a place like this still believing that the universe was void of spirit, and when you died, that was that.

  “I know your mom’s been very proud of you,” she told Peter. “You’ve been very brave.”

  As if reacting to her words in some obscure way of its own, the building shook. Then came a sound she’d never heard before at the hospital, a long wail of wind speeding, perhaps, around a corner or whipping past an eave, a banshee wail on a stormy, unsettled day.

  Los Angeles in the evening was bizarrely silent. It was quiet in the way that London used to be quiet, when all sound was absorbed by fog. It was beautiful, though, the fog rolling in from the Pacific, blanketing the Santa Monica beaches, turning Venice into a ghost city, then sweeping up Sunset and Wilshire and across the 10, slowing traffic on the 405 from the usual evening crawl to a creep.

  It came like a living creature made of damp and shadow, slipping and sliding along, bringing with it magic and danger in a place where the traffic boomed and rush hour was all hours.

  Inside the Fox news chopper, Bart Tonnies worried that L.A. was about to get a dose of weird weather like New York and Tokyo were seeing. He thought maybe this had something to do with Typhoon Noelani, which had dissipated north of Hawaii a few days ago. He began to make his report.

  In the studio, Tommy Levinson stood in front of his blue screen, listening as Bart reported. He was damn glad he wasn’t up there in that chopper. A helicopter was not a nice place to be in fog, for sure.

  “This layer of fog is very unusual for Los Angeles,”

  Bart said. “It occurs when warm, moist air collides with cold ocean water. Surface temperatures in the Pacific must be abnormally low right now to create these conditions.”

  Tommy’s camera came on and he said, “Thanks, Bart, that’s really something.” But it wasn’t the number one story. No, the story of the day was connected to Noelani. They had gotten a heavy surf warning from NOAA a couple of hours ago. Even the email was strange. You didn’t get emails from NOAA marked EMERGENCY too damned often. He continued smoothly on. “And later today, the experts are telling us that we’re going to be seeing some
record-breaking surf along the southland’s beaches, from Santa Barbara all the way down to San Diego.”

  His pause cued the coanchor, Lisa Richards. As always, Lisa was ready. “Just how big is this surf going to be, Tommy?”

  “Lisa, we don’t know for sure, but it’s coming off Hurricane Noelani, which hit Hawaii last week. My guess is that it should be massive.”

  “Thanks, Tommy. I hope nobody gets hurt.” She turned to Kevin Garner, her coanchor.

  “That’s it from us,” he said. “On behalf of all of us here at Fox Eleven news, good night and we’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Fat chance nobody was going to get hurt, Tommy thought. There’d be half a dozen surfers swept away was his guess. His camera went off. He was done. He hurried out of the set. He had a mission to accomplish, and there was no time to lose.

  Bernie’s office was empty. Tommy moved fast and caught up with him in the parking lot. “Hey, Bern, you said you’d wait.” He needed something from this man, something it looked as if Bernie was not ready to give him.

  “You’re a weatherman, Tommy.”

  Was he ever sick of those words. A producer says “weather,” he means “trap.” It was a job with no steps—except down. If his ratings should ever slip, a thousand smaller markets beckoned. He’d clawed his way this far up the greased pole of television. He needed just this one little push.

  He forced himself to smile at Bernie, made himself radiate the cheerful good humor that kept his audience coming back. “It’s a weather story. My guy in the forecasting center tells me this is gonna be the biggest surf ever.”

  “Surfing is not a weather story.”

  Tommy kept smiling. Inside, he thought moron, he thought jerk. “I can do more than weather, Bernie. Just give me a chance. You know I want to get on the network someday.”

  “Sorry, I already promised it to Jaeger.” Bernie started to get in his car.

  Jaeger? What was wrong with this picture? Jaeger got funerals and cats in trees, for chrissakes. Then he knew. Oh, Bernie, you are bad. You are so bad. “All right, I’ll give you my Lakers tickets.”

  Bernie stopped getting in his car.

  “Courtside, two rows back. You take a shower.”

  Bernie frowned.

  “From the sweat, Bernie. The players are that close.”

  Bernie smiled.

  The Pinehurst Jazz Quartet played what Sam thought was probably supposed to be music as waiters in white jackets moved around the room with trays of canapes. Outside, the rain rained, as it had, it seemed, for at least forty days. Sam was feeling highly vulnerable, to say the least. How were you supposed to act at an adult party for kids? Pretend to be an adult? He couldn’t even button his ancient sports jacket. He saw Brian and sidled up. Please, engage me in conversation. Save me from this rabble. “This is so retro,” he said into Brian’s ear, “it might actually be cool if it was on purpose.”

  Brian’s top shirt button was so tight ,his neck was folded. His face was red. At least one person in the room looked stupider than Sam Hall. “Yeah,” Brian said, his voice a nasal whine, “look at all these nerds.”

  Then something so fantastic happened that Sam could not believe it. Brian actually started bobbing his head to the music.

  No, it was impossible. Nobody could flame out this badly. Dorktown. Unbelievable. He looked like a drunk turkey. Sam slid off, wishing that some god of teenage embarrassment would have mercy on him and drag him right up through the ceiling and the rainstorm and the stratosphere into space. Far into space.

  And then a vision appeared. It’s name, officially, was Laura Bowden, but it was not an ordinary, earthbound girl. In that amazing antique dress, she looked as if she’d just been painted by Renoir or somebody. He knew that his jaw had dropped because he had to snap his mouth closed. How could anybody look that hip and that just achingly beautiful at the same time? “This place is incredible,” she gushed. “Can you believe this is their cafeteria?”

  Oh, my beloved, please don’t be impressed with this incredibly impressive place and these incredibly cool kids, not when I can’t even button my jacket! He said, “I suppose it’s all right for nineteenth-century robber-baron decor.”

  Her eyes flashed. “Don’t be so caustic.”

  He had to be. It was his only defense. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, trying desperately to maintain a cool he did not feel at all.

  Brian, sensing his weakness, stopped doing the turkey trot and chimed in, “Caustic. It means capable of destroying or eating away by chemical action. Corrosive. Marked by sarcasm.”

  “I know what caustic is,” Sam snapped. He turned to Laura. “You think I’m all those things?”

  She started to answer, would have answered, but now the unthinkably awful happened. J. D., resplendent in his perfectly tailored school blazer moved on her. “You played a great first round,” he said. To her. Not to the team. Absolutely not. He offered Laura his hand. Sam could smell the manicure from here.

  “Thanks,” Laura said from behind the stars that were suddenly swarming in her eyes, “so did you.” Then she said, to Sam’s total amazement, “These are my teammates, Sam and Brian.”

  Class. She also had class. Sam decided that he was enough in love to actually go crazy.

  “Welcome to New York, boys. I’m J.D.,” he added pointlessly. Who did they think he was? Sir Paul McCartney? The pope?

  Sam found himself examining J.D.‘s name tag. He sensed that this was not going anywhere good, but his fingers were already on the thing. “That’s it,” he heard himself say … caustically. His brain screamed Shut up, but out of his mouth came “No name, just initials?”

  It was so not funny, so utterly lame. And it made him realize that his own amazing, childish stupidity in filling in his own tag as “Yoda” was going to haunt him for the rest of his life. Sam, his brain screamed at him, the name is Sam!

  “Nice name tag,” J.D. deadpanned. “You should meet my little brother.” He smiled so smoothly that it might have been done by a movie actor. “You guys could swap booger jokes.”

  Laura laughed. Brian laughed, too, but who cared? She laughed. Then Sam was looking at her back—and at J.D. on the far side of it. J.D. gave him the slightest of winks.

  “Your school is amazing,” Laura said with a little tremble in her voice. J. D. was so supercool, so far up there, that she was nervous.

  J. D. was as smooth as a destroyer on a glassy, moonlit sea … and as lethal. “You should see the library,” he crooned. “Would you like me to give you a tour?”

  “That would be great!”

  Great. We’ll all go. Then she’d shoved her punch into Sam’s hand and sailed away on the arm of Apollo, the Sun God … in the damn rain.

  “Man,” Brian said, “you’ve got some serious competition.”

  Oh, yes, he did. Yes, he surely and disastrously and miserably did. “Please”

  Brian knew when to lay on the coal. “Bet he’s rich, too.”

  That was enough. “Shut up.”

  Brian started to ignore him. Then he saw Sam’s face. He shut up.

  Thunder boomed and lighting stalked Washington’s monuments, striking the capital, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial. It didn’t matter. A little lightning wasn’t even enough to make those stout buildings vibrate. But the wind that swept through the streets and shook Jack Hall’s town-house windows gave more than a few people pause. At Reagan, the National Weather Service was recording eighty-mile- an-hour gusts. The cherry trees around the Jefferson Memorial were taking a beating, and some of the old oaks in Rock Creek Park were shaking like saplings.

  Jack was asleep, something he’d been wanting to be for about forty-eight hours. So, when the phone started ringing, he started by integrating it into the sound of the thunderstorm he was dreaming about.

  The thunderstorm was on an island somewhere just this side of heaven. There were big tropical flowers, the rain was warm, the wind was sighing gently through the coconut
trees.

  And the phone was ringing? In the coconut trees? No, in the bar. Yes—but that was another dream. No bar here.

  Then his hand was moving, grasping something, bringing it to his ear.

  The multicolored tropical flower became a very black telephone receiver. He started his throat, tried to make it work. Nope. He started it again. Careful, though. Mustn’t flood the engine. “Who is this?” he heard some kind of hoarse, old gorilla rumble.

  “It’s Gerald here. Rapson.”

  “Whoson?”

  “Gerald Rapson. I’m sorry to call so early.”

  Calling from England. Jack’s eyes opened. All traces of sleep evaporated. He sat up. “No problem, Professor, it’s all right.”