Day After Tomorrow

by Whitley Strieber

  In 2003, a devastating heat wave had caused temperatures as far north as Lapland to rise into the eighties. All through this time, there had been increasing signs of trouble, prompting the British government to deploy the research buoys that Gerald Rapson managed from his station at Hedland. Those buoys had been recording a steady weakening of the North Atlantic Current—data that this president, facing him now, had worked to keep out of the hands of NOAA experts here in the United States

  He was not a happy man, was President Blake. He was well aware that millions of his fellow citizens were going to die on his watch, and that history was going to lay the debacle at his doorstep, and for good reason.

  “When will it be over?” he asked in a hoarse voice. It was, Jack reflected, the voice of a man who had been crying.

  “The basic rule of storms is that they continue until they’re out of energy, which happens when the imbalance that created them is corrected.”

  Jack didn’t want to look these men in the eye, because he knew how painful that would be for them. But part of him was compelled to, to see the guilt. Between the left, which had always used environmental problems to push for more control of business, and the right, which had rejected environmental reality so that business as usual could continue, everybody had missed the point.

  This happened all the time on earth, just not frequently enough for it to be part of human experience. There were no factories spewing pollutants when it had happened ten thousand years ago, and a hundred and twenty thousand years ago when it had been so ferocious that it had led to a full-fledged ice age, the automobile had not exactly been invented.

  Jack’s message had always been the same: paleocli-matology is warning you. No matter what, this thing is coming again, not because of anything you do or don’t do, but because it is part of the nature of the earth. As long as there is no way for the oceans to circulate through the tropics and the sun remains a variable star, it is going to keep happening.

  Therefore, the smart leader plans for it, gets ready for it as the British had been trying to do, and the Italians with their efforts to protect Venice, and a few others. Human pollution had probably sped it up somewhat, maybe even intensified it. But Jack’s message, which these men had scoffed at, was “Get ready for it because it happens all the time.”

  Too bad that every hundred thousand years, which was the blink of an eye in earth time, made almost not one damn bit of sense to anybody except a scientist. Yeah, yeah, they all thought, but it ain’t gonna be while I’m around.

  He looked from face to face: sad, mad, too dumb, some of them, to understand even yet. Others understood all too well. They were the ones with clenched fists, the ones whose eyes never stopped.

  “We’re talking this time about a global climate realignment,” Jack continued. “These storms will end after they’ve covered most of the northern landmass in ice. That could take weeks.”

  Jack pulled up a graphic, created for him by Jason in about twenty minutes of the most frenetic keyboard activity that Jack had ever witnessed. It showed the ice spreading south. “The snow and ice will reflect the heat of the sun, and the earth’s atmosphere will restabi-lize, but with average temperatures closer to those of the last ice age.”

  General Arthur Watkins Jones Pierce, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was one of the ones with eyes that never stopped moving. He was one of the smart ones. “What can we do about this?”

  “Head as far south as possible.”

  Becker’s face darkened. Like most dumb men in high office, his main activity was ass-covering. Damned if this mistake was going to end up on his plate. “That’s not amusing, Dr. Hall.”

  “I’m not joking,” Jack snapped, then fought back the anger. He would not shout at this creep. That would only give him the upper hand. “People have to run while they still can. Those who aren’t already trapped.” An image of Sam appeared in his mind’s eye, and his heart filled with a number of things. He wished that he was the hell out of this jerk shop and on his way. But if he somehow prevailed among these men, he would be saving millions of Sams and Lauras and Brians, all those precious souls.

  Now the secretary of state, who had been sitting with her arms folded and her chin jutting, looking for some reason to scoff and leave, leaned forward. “Where do you suggest they go?” She was a lovely woman, was Angela Linn.

  And, possibly, given that question, a convert. One, at least. “The further south they can get, the safer they’ll be. Texas, parts of Florida. Mexico would be best.”

  “Mexico,” Becker yapped. “Maybe you should stick to science and leave policy to us.”

  At this moment Jack had a chance to do something that he was really going to enjoy. He fixed his eyes on the president and addressed him directly. He knew that Becker had stiffened, then turned red. Men like him were always sensitive to a slight.

  “Mr. President, if we’re going to survive—and I don’t mean survive personally, I mean survive as a species—we’re going to have to stop thinking nationally and start thinking globally. It’s not just America that’s in danger.”

  Becker scoffed, “It’s our responsibility to protect America first.”

  “Then protect the American people—not their national identity. Take a look at this thing from a long-term perspective. The prospects for agriculture in North America are slim to none. Now is a good time to start thinking ahead. Make alliances, ask for help. Before long, we may have to beg.”

  The silence was deafening. Becker broke it. “What exactly are you proposing?”

  Jack was quietly amazed. That was the kind of question somebody who was buying your story asked. But Becker? Stranger things had happened. Maybe.

  Jack walked over to the map wall. He raised the map of Southeast Asia that had been used earlier in God knew what capacity and pulled down the map of North America. He took a black grease pencil from the trough below the maps and drew a line that roughly paralleled the old Mason-Dixon Line.

  “Evacuate everybody south of this line.”

  Now the president spoke. He raised his eyebrows first, as if asking Jack for the floor. Jack nodded at him. “What about the people north of the line?” His voice was heavy.

  The president knew. The president understood.

  In the privacy of his heart, Jack thanked God. This meeting should have been held three days ago, and it should have been a matter of activating a whole elaborate predesigned plan. But at least it was happening now, instead of not at all.

  But because this meeting was so late and there had been no planning, Jack had to say one of the hardest things he’d ever said in his life. “I’m afraid it’s too late for many of the people to the north. If they go outside or try to travel, the storm’s going to kill them.” And maybe my own boy, maybe my Sam.

  Jack could not resist giving Becker a hard look. The man turned away as if Jack’s gaze had acid in it.

  Jack continued, “At this point their only chance is to stay inside, try to ride it out, and to pray.”

  The president thought for a moment. Jack could see the names going through his mind, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, Gary and Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Omaha, names from the deep song of America. The numbers, too, no doubt. President Blake was famous as a numbers man.

  The president stood up then and thanked Tom Gomez. This meant that Jack’s presentation was finished, and it was time for him to leave. Jack tried to conceal his eagerness. All he could think about now was Sam. He’d done his duty for his country, now it was his right to do the same for his loved ones.

  Gomez came out with him. He put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. Job well done. Too bad it was such a sad job, in such a tragic situation. “What will he do?” Jack asked. He hoped that he’d been reading the president right.

  “I don’t know,” Tom answered.

  That was honest, anyway. They could still do nothing, of course, still pretend to themselves that their ideology—that man’s pollution couldn’t affect the environment—me
ant that nothing they didn’t like would ever happen. Too bad nature doesn’t have ideology, just numbers. And two and two are always going to equal four, no matter how hard you try to believe the truth away.

  As Jack went off toward the security station, the meeting continued behind closed doors.

  “We can’t evacuate half the country because one scientist thinks the climate is shifting,” Vice President Becker burst out. He’d felt the contempt radiating from Jack Hall, and he hated him now. He wanted him to be wrong, he wanted him the hell out of NOAA and off teaching grade school or something somewhere far, far from Washington, D.C.

  Secretary of State Linn said, with that mildness of manner that had so often deceived her enemies, “Every minute we delay is costing lives.”

  “So what about the other half of the country?”

  Becker persisted. “When all these people come down on them, what do they do? Where’s the infrastructure to handle that, Angie?”

  “If Dr. Hall is right, sending troops north is only going to create more victims. We should save the people we can, right now.”

  General Pierce spoke up next. Like the secretary of state, he was moving toward the edge of shock. “We, uh, use triage. Same approach a medic takes on the battlefield. Sometimes it’s necessary to make hard choices.” He cleared his throat.

  “I don’t accept that abandoning half the country is necessary,” Becker almost shouted. Or rather, screamed.

  This gigantic, almost unimaginable catastrophe had come out of nowhere. Just thinking on the scale that it demanded would not have been easy for a skilled professional planner, let alone a small group of desperate men with no plan at all.

  Tom Gomez watched them squirming, as well they should. “Maybe if you’d listened to Jack Hall sooner, it wouldn’t be—”

  Now Becker did scream. “Bullshit! Hall’s a loose cannon. It’s easy for him to suggest this so-called plan. He’s safely here in Washington.”

  Tom looked at Becker. He’d always been told that choosing a weak vice president was a sign of a weak president. “Jack’s son is in Manhattan,” he said. His voice was quiet, but they all heard, Becker included.

  Becker turned back to him. “What?”

  “Dr. Hall’s son—he’s in Manhattan. I thought you ought to know that before you start questioning his motives.”

  The faces changed, grew more grave as each man realized the significance of what was being said. Jack Hall, in stating that it was too late to evacuate the northern part of the country, was including his own child among those left behind. And they all knew, then, just how completely convinced he was of his data.

  The president also realized it, and as he did, he slowly came to his feet. Normally content to watch and listen and allow his aides to come to consensus, he had finally seen that debate was over. It had been over, probably for months, maybe for years, but nobody had been willing to face that.

  The president of the United States faced it now. He took a deep breath, sighed a long sigh. And in the crossing of that breath, gave nearly 100 million of his fellow citizens into the jaws of the storm and the hands of God. “General,” he said, “give the order for the National Guard to evacuate the southern states.” Now his eyes rested on his vice president, as if daring him to utter one single word of protest. “We’re going to follow Dr. Hall’s plan.”

  Tom Gomez hurried out, his heart thundering. He had an enormous amount of work to do. NOAA had to be informed, all the field offices prepared, the National Weather Service alerted. Plus, he had to get his headquarters staff to safety with whatever essential equipment could be salvaged. He recognized that his agency’s services and skills were going to be essential to the survival of the nation, not only now but in years to come, more essential than ever.

  If this thing left a sheet of ice too large to melt over next summer, a new ice age was going to begin. Human life was going to be different, very different. The northern hemisphere, where the strongest countries and the best-educated people were concentrated, was going to disappear under the weight of trillions of tons of ice and stay that way for the next hundred thousand years.

  General Pierce picked up a telephone. “Get Case Unicorn up,” he said quietly.

  TWELVE

  C

  ase Unicorn was the closest of the Pentagon’s thousands of case scenarios to an evacuation of the people of the United States. It would not be perfect, not nearly, but it would be a beginning. He paused. “Restrict case activation to First Army and Fifth Army.” First Army was commanded out of Georgia, Fifth Army out of Texas. According to the president’s order, there was no point in activating the case in the other continental army commands.

  Before he had even hung up the phone, the command structure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was going into operation. The “case” the general had referred to covered only the evacuation of populations from major cities into surrounding countrysides, not a wholesale movement south of millions.

  But it didn’t take an announcement from the government to get most people moving. They saw the clouds coming, and they saw on Fox news and CNN what the storm was doing farther north. Toronto ceased to report, then Montreal, Bangor, and Minneapolis, and the silence from Europe was frightening.

  In Houston and Atlanta, Europe-bound flights began to be held at their gates. Farther north than Atlanta, nothing was flying anyway, so the matter was moot. The president had already grounded domestic flights, as if anybody would dare to take a plane aloft as a sheer wall of clouds fifty thousand feet high and five thousand miles long came slipping and sliding across the continent.

  It darkened the fields of Minnesota and the ranges of Montana, the rolling lands of Iowa and the sweet Ohio flats that, until just a few weeks ago, were the breadbasket of the world. Running before it like leaves before an autumn wind, the quick and the smart were getting out. Even some from as far north as Chicago and Gary made it, by jumping in their cars and racing southward the instant that they heard that a strangely powerful blizzard was on the way.

  But most people followed their instincts, and when danger threatens our instincts tell us to go to the back of the cave. So storm windows went up and grocery stores were stripped and kids brought home from school. The TV was turned on, and then they waited.

  When people in the northern half of the country realized that their more southerly neighbors were being evacuated and they weren’t, many more of them hit the roads, and the snow-choked interstates began to fill up with long strings of cars, creeping south with pitiful slowness—pitiful and fatal. Not one human being from one car was destined to survive. In fact, as the snow closed over them, most of them would not be seen again for stretching cycles of years, when the ice would once again fall back, leaving their rusting, twisted remains on a scraped plain that nobody in those days would ever imagine had once been fragrant with cornflowers in the moonlight, in the long ago.

  Farther south, some had recourse to their Fourth Amendment rights to resist the soldiers’ attempts to force them to leave. Their names and addresses were noted, and they were left behind. They died with their rights intact, at least.

  Evacuation was proceeding efficiently at Lucy’s hospital, so when Jack’s call came in, she took it without delay. He explained more to her about what was happening than they’d so far been told. She thought that the government should have said how incredibly cold it was going to get, but she understood that this would have spread unimaginable terror among those millions already trapped, who did not yet understand that their lives were over.

  “It’ll be impossible to reach each other,” Jack said. Her heart almost broke to hear that. She had faced the fact, in recent hours, that she’d loved this man too much not to divorce him. What she had been unable to bear had been the endless waiting and the struggle of his prophet’s life, preaching to the hostile and the indifferent his unwanted message of doom. He added, “Leave a message for me at the American embassy in Mexico City.”

  She wondered if she woul
d get that far south in a caravan of ambulances full of sick kids. She said, “All right.”

  The silence that came between them wasn’t really silence at all, but rather another part of the mysterious life of couples.

  Jack answered it in just the way she’d hoped he would: “I love you.”

  Now it was her turn. “I love you,” she replied, and it felt better, she thought, than anything she had ever said before in her whole life, except for one thing: the moment that they had laid her purple, wrinkled baby boy on her belly, still damp from her own waters, and she had said, “Hi.” “Tell Sam that I love him so much. And, Jack, God be with you.”