Over the screaming of his engine, he thought he could hear the screaming of people. He tore out onto Sunset and he heard screaming all right.
It was excitement, delight even. A couple of kids, the youngest probably not yet twelve, were standing there laughing wildly and videotaping the storm, which was now so close the ground was shaking. He screamed at the innocent, crazy kids, “You can’t stay here! Run for cover! Go! Go!”
They looked at him as if he were insane, then went right on taping. A motorcycle hit the middle of the street with a tremendous crash and a small explosion. An office door followed, then a Coke machine, which exploded into a fizzing mess.
The kids looked at each other. They ran.
Jeff watched the funnel move toward the Capitol Records Building, famous for being round, shaped like a stack of records. He didn’t have all that good a view, so he raced the car a couple of blocks. He wanted to keep the monster in sight.
His cell phone rang. “Yeah?”
It was Bob, wanting to know where Jeff was.
The storm started ripping panels off the building. Jeff could see offices being exposed to the outside, papers fly off desks, chairs and equipment not far behind. The funnel seemed to be slowed by the building, like a lawn mower hitting high grass.
As it chewed the building to pieces, it made a continuous series of dull thuds, like some kind of automatic artillery piece pounding away in the distance. Then the building completely disappeared in a black mass punctuated by millions of white sheets of paper. The tornado briefly looked like a ticker-tape parade arranged by Satan himself. Then it passed, and the building reappeared. It was a skeleton, clean iron with a ragged bit of something dangling here and there. He could see through it, as if it were just a frame still, waiting for its walls, its windows, all the signs of life.
“Jeff, where are you?”
“Yucca and Vine. I’m on my way—”
Ahead of him, a taxi lifted off. It looked like a car from Back to the Future. It went up in the air, its brake lights flashing, its front tires whipping from side to side as the driver instinctively struggled for control he would never get.
Then it fell. Jeff saw it coming. He thought, Oh.
The cab smashed into the Porsche, which was also yellow. But not just yellow, not anymore. Both cars were also stained by red, running blood.
For Tommy Levinson, the catastrophe was also a dream come true. It was a TV reporter’s opportunity of a lifetime, and he knew it. He was off the 10 and speeding down a residential street near downtown. He wanted to get in front of the oncoming tornado, dangerous as this might be, to capture the human drama of people fleeing as the deadly storm rampaged toward their homes.
As he leaped out of the cab, he practically knocked down an old lady hobbling along carrying an equally old cat. The cat was vomiting.
“Hey,” his cameraman yelled, “the network’s gonna take your feed live!”
Wunderbar! Perfect news. Tommy Levinson was going national. “Are you serious?” he asked, trying to keep his voice from squeaking with excitement.
“You’re on in five!”
People were pouring out of houses now. Immediately north and west, the sky was a black wall raining roofs, bicycles, cars, and everything else from Chinese food to a damn horse, which was sailing slowly downward, its tail streaming.
“Do a three sixty around me and get them all in one shot!”
The wind was kicking up, it felt as if some kind of a muscle guy were shoving him, slamming into his back and shoulder. But who cared, this was national!
“Three … two … one!”
“This is Tommy Levinson reporting live from downtown Los Angeles. The devastation and destruction around me are incredible.”
A billboard ripped to pieces and came flying at him. A new movie, he couldn’t see which one. Around him, panicked residents ran frantically. The storm would be here in a matter of minutes.
“It looks like some sort of huge Hollywood special-effects movie here, only this is the real thing!”
Plywood from the billboard came angling in like a runaway wing. Tommy never felt it slice into him. But the camera caught the action as Tommy and the plywood went skittering off down the street, the blank wood square and the limp, lifeless body.
Inside the Fox news set, Lisa talked into her microphone. “Tommy? Tommy? Are you all right?”
From off camera, Kevin shot her a look that said, Drop it right now. She shut up. Their director saw he was ready to cue in and turned his camera on.
“I think we’ve lost that connection, Lisa. Let’s go to Bart.”
The chopper was standing off about two miles south of downtown. The air here was slightly less turbulent, so at least Bart wasn’t going to experience the embarrassment of spreading his breakfast all over the instrument panel. From his vantage point, he could see a number of tornadoes, most of them churning right toward downtown.
“I’ve heard of F-fours and F-fives. I have no idea how big this one is, Kevin. Is there such a thing as an F-ten?”
Kevin’s reply from the safety—maybe—of the studio, crackled in his ears: “I don’t know, Bart, but I’d keep your distance.”
For sure. The damn tornado chewed into a skyscraper, scraping off its glass wall like a kid tearing the icing off a cake. People came pouring out of this one, no doubt torn from their desks by the suction. Bart felt queasy, but not from turbulence. He hadn’t seen much death, and certainly not wholesale death like this, never.
“I’d advise anybody on the ground to stay as far from this area as possible,” he shouted into his mike, hoping that he was still on the feed.
In the L.A. Weather Center, Bob was wishing to God his boss would hurry up and get here. Jeff was never late, but he hadn’t answered his cell for a long time. Could he not get through because of traffic? Surely he would call in, given the emergency. Of course, there was another possibility, but Bob did not want to think about that one.
He listened to the whine of the floor waxer outside. What, exactly, was he supposed to be doing here? He’d sent the warning. All that involved was activating the emergency warning system with a key. Piece of cake. But now what? The storm was bizarre. It was killing lots and lots of people, for sure. So what did he do?
Jeff, get your ass in here! He called the cell phone again, listened until the message came up—and then listened more as the line went dead.
He looked down at his feet. The building was vibrating. And now there was a new sound, a big mother of a sound, like some hell demon pounding on an organ the size of Mt. Rushmore, drowning out the floor waxer and everything else in the world.
Tina crouched behind a chair. Bob ran to the conference room window and threw open the curtains. Before his eyes was a black wall. Nothing else. Just pure black. Then something came out of it, tumbling end over end. It was yellow. It was somehow … familiar. Dimly, he was aware that Tina was beside him, that she was clutching his shoulder.
A yellow traffic light weighs over a hundred pounds, so when it came crashing through the plate-glass window, it did so with the force of about four sticks of dynamite, given that it was moving at over a hundred miles an hour.
The janitor turned off his floor waxer. He looked along the hallway to the closed doors that led into the conference room and control center. Things had been really noisy a moment ago, but now they’d gone quiet. Awful damn quiet, as a matter of fact.
He headed quickly toward the doors. He had to get in there, anyway. He needed to clean up before the day crew came on duty. These night folks took a fair amount of looking after, the way they spread the pizza boxes around, and never mind what those two kids tended to do to the couch in the conference room.
He opened the door and almost fell out of the building. He stood there, his mouth wide, his eyes almost pleading that this not be true. Where the rest of the building had been, he was seeing outside. He was looking at buildings, not a room. He realized that he was looking at downtown, but it didn’t ma
ke sense because—oh, jeez, where were those two kids?
On the East Coast it was already ten in the morning, Inn the Olympic Decathlon at the Pinehurst Academy was not in session, not right now. Sam was, frankly, scared. Something was very wrong here. Laura knew it, too. She sat close to him, close to her friend. J.D., not so conscious of the strangeness of what they were watching on TV, hovered nearby, looking for an opening.
The TV showed a helicopter image of the most terrible thing that Sam had ever witnessed, the destruction of Los Angeles by some kind of weird tornado swarm. They just kept materializing out of the sky and swooping down, sending the black clouds and glittering debris that meant more death and destruction.
Brian came in. “I was just on the phone with my mom,” he announced. He grabbed the remote and changed the channel.
“—a second aircraft has apparently crashed, also as a result of extreme turbulence …”
The image cut to a long shot of the L.A. airport. Smoke was rising from many fires, most particularly on the runways. When Sam thought of the turbulence they’d gone through, he almost threw up. Laura squeezed his hand. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She squeezed harder.
SEVEN
C
amp David was founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Catoctin Mountains near the District of Columbia. It was re-created by Dwight Eisenhower as a much needed place to escape to from the rigors of Washington, D.C. It was a quick trip by marine helicopter, and not a president since hadn’t been grateful to FDR for his foresight and to Ike for his old-fashioned good sense.
Over the years, though, one president and then another had taken his work with him to Camp David. Some, like Johnson, Reagan, and Clinton, had used it more as a conference center than a retreat. Richard Blake had tried to emphasize its retreat aspects, but not very successfully. The presidency tended to follow you like the most loyal pooch you could possibly imagine. Sometimes. Other times, it was more of a tiger hunting you down—like now.
He was still dressed for golf as he entered the conference room with its pine paneling and its bank of TVs. It looked a little bit like a rustic living room on steroids, but make no mistake, it was all steroids. The Camp David communications system duplicated that of the White House.
Vice President Becker hung up a phone. “The FAA wants your approval to suspend all air traffic.”
Becker was the authority on things like the weather and the environment, things that should not be of any concern to a president and had been too much of concern to too many of them for too long. Becker’s brief was to assist in whatever way he could to disentangle industry from the morass of environmental regulations that were socking too many of Blake’s supporters in the pocketbook.
And do the country a favor in the process. This was a damned economy, this United States, not a nature preserve. Blake sought eye contact with his veep, but said only, “What do you think we should do, Raymond?” There were a lot of things he didn’t care to say aloud, not even among trusted aides. Another thing about presidencies—they leaked. If the two of them had been alone, he might have added, “About an asshole demand like that?”
Becker got the meaning of that look. He shook his head tightly and said, “Until we can figure out what’s going on, I don’t think we have a choice, sir.”
Well, hell. There were some big-mama storms brewing this morning, to be sure. And there had been crashes, maybe because of the weather. Maybe.
He sighed. If Raymond thought they should go for it, they should go for it. “All right. What’s the National Weather Service say?” He could predict that: Maybe hot, maybe cold, could rain, maybe not. Global warming, natural causes. Or not.
The vice president looked grim. Real grim. The president knew, then, that he didn’t yet have the whole story, and it was not going to be a good story. Becker was about to “suggest” a briefing.
“I’ve already asked Tom Gomez to meet us at the White House. He’ll give us a full briefing when we get there.”
Tom Gomez, the head of NOAA, was a professional scientist, not an administration appointee. He would normally brief his bosses at Commerce, not the president. “What about the secretary of commerce?”
“He’ll be there, too, sir.”
Something was up. Sure as hell. And bad. That, too, for sure. The president understood that there would be no back nine, not on this day.
Jack Hall was thinking about an apple tree. It had stood in what was now tundra in northern Alaska around ten thousand years ago. On the fine June day that world had ended, it had been in bloom. It had died in bloom, quick-frozen by a storm so intense that it had pulled supercold air from fifty thousand feet to the ground in a matter of minutes. Temperatures had probably dropped from around 75 above to 150 below in seconds. Thus, mammoths froze solid with delicate plants in their mouths and stomachs, and the apple tree.
His mind snapped back to the present moment, the conference that was going to be about not quite what was happening and was going to drive him nuts.
Tom Gomez got up on the podium. “Listen up, everybody. We don’t have much time, so let’s get started. Dr. Vorsteen?”
The director of the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center jumped to his feet like a soldier coming to attention. “All our grid models are worthless,” he all but screamed. “We’re baffled.”
Okay, that was a step in the right direction.
Now Walter Booker with his wild hair and his Einstein glasses popped to his feet. “I don’t think grid models are going to be a lot of help here. We’ve got serious circulation moving down from the Arctic, two storm cells in the Pacific, and one developing in the Caribbean.”
Tim Lanson, the sharp young hotshot from the Severe Storms Lab, interrupted, “Are you suggesting that the arctic events are somehow connected to what we’re seeing on the West Coast?”
It was an excellent question which, Jack knew, nobody in the room could answer, except him. And he didn’t have his data yet.
Booker said bravely, “We have to consider the possibility.”
Now Vorsteen chimed in with some gimcrackery: “The only force strong enough to affect global weather is the sun.” Oh, yeah, buddy, that and your big, beautiful SUV and a few billion other smoking machines… .
“What’s NASA say?” Gomez asked.
The ridiculously beautiful Janet Tokada said, “We’ve already checked. Solar output is normal.”
Jack tried one. Not that it would help. “What about the North Atlantic Current?”
Eyes turned his way. He leaned up against the back wall, arms folded. He wished that he had his Indiana Jones fedora. Too bad.
“What about it?” Vorsteen asked.
“Well, I got a call from Professor Rapson at the Hedland Center at about five this morning. He believes that the current’s chasing south like a scared puppy.”
Booker shook his head. “Come on, Jack, how could that be?”
Might as well float a little idea. “Weil, the current depends on a delicate balance of salt and freshwater.”
“Okay,” Vorsteen said. He was on the record that the current wasn’t anywhere near doing anything unusual.
Jack continued, “Nobody’s taken into account how much freshwater has been dumped into the ocean by melting polar ice. I think we’ve hit a critical desaliniza-tion point.”
He could taste the skepticism. His theory, unfortunately, had captured the imagination of popular authors and filmmakers. Right or wrong, that was a major strike against it in the scientific community.
“I don’t buy it,” Vorsteen snapped, correctly reading the silence as doubt.
A surprising ally appeared. Janet Tokada said, “It would explain what’s driving this extreme weather.”
He heard Lanson warn Booker, “If he’s right, all our forecasting models are useless.”
Jack decided to try a frontal assault. Old debate technique, not a good one. But what the hell, the weather he’d been predicting was sure as hell out there. “Hedland h
as some pretty convincing data. They’ve asked me to feed it into my paleoclimate model to track upcoming events.”
That got Gomez rolling. “Hold on, jack, are you suggesting that these weather anomalies will continue?”
Time for a little reality check, folks. “Not just continue, get worse.”
“Worse?
“I think we’re undergoing a major climate shift.”
There was a moment of total silence. Jack watched various pairs of eyes widen. He saw a smile cross Vorsteen’s thick face. Then the place erupted into debate. Gomez saw that it was over and left the podium.
Jack made his move, the one he’d been planning since he’d planted himself near the door. He followed his quarry into the hallway. “Tom! Hi. What are you going to tell the White House?”
Day After Tomorrow Page 7
