Day After Tomorrow

by Whitley Strieber

  Again there came the magic silence down the line, the words that could not be spoken flowing into her heart like the sweet breath of angels. Slowly, blinking away the tears she didn’t have time to cry, she hung up the phone. Out the broad glass front of the building, she could see young patients being loaded into waiting vehicles, attended by hospital personnel and parents.

  Dusk came early, and with it worrying flurries of snow. The trees were already bare, and their limbs rattled softly in the uneasy air. Overhead, low, ragged clouds raced south, reflecting the lights of the city in hues of gray and rose. Once, it would have been beautiful, a moment like this, with all the lights along Connecticut Avenue flickering behind the dancing tree limbs, and the snow making a curiously lonely place for itself in the heart.

  But not now, on this night, when the souls of the dead were already thick in the storm wind.

  Jack fought the sled into the back of a white Chevy Blazer with NOAA’s blue seal on the doors.

  When another pair of hands grasped the other side, he almost jumped out of his skin. “You’re supposed to be on a bus heading south, Frank,” he told his longtime partner.

  “I’ve watched your back for twenty years, Jack. You think I’d let you tackle this alone?”

  Jack laughed. “And all the time I thought I was watching your back.”

  And then another surprise, scuffling at the steel door that led to the parking area, and Jason came trundling out, burdened by a case of equipment, which he tossed into the back of the truck as well. Then he headed around to the cab.

  “Where do think you’re going?”

  “Neither one of you can navigate your way out of a shower stall. Without me, you’ll end up in Cleveland.”

  Janet Tokada came hurrying out. Wrapped in her overcoat, with her dark hair flying in the freshening wind and her cheeks flushed by the cold, Jack thought she was incredibly attractive. And then he wondered, Is this battlefield effect? To men on their way into battle, women were supposed to be overwhelmingly beautiful. “I’ll try to give you updates on the storm as it heads your way,” she said.

  Jason, ever the optimist, responded, “Maybe with a little warning we can get our butts inside before they’re frozen off.”

  Janet took Jack’s hand. “Good luck, Jack. It’s been a privilege working with you.” Translation: since I’m never going to see you alive again, this is good-bye to whatever probably wouldn’t have happened between us anyway.

  Jack took her hand. “The privilege was all mine.” He meant it, too. She was one of that rare band of people whom Jack Hall truly admired: those who were totally committed to excellence in all they set out to do.

  By dawn of the next day, it had been snowing for eighteen hours, and it was still getting harder. In front of the library, the cargo ship sat jammed in ice, its superstructure a fairyland of gleaming, icy wires and frost-crazed portholes.

  Inside, Brian was working on the radio. He had the back open and was tracing the circuitry. He didn’t know how well he could repair it, but he thought he could at least get something out of the thing.

  “Maybe you should let somebody help you with that, son.”

  Brian raised his eyes, looked at Campbell’s broad, red Irish face, his twinkling green eyes. “I’m in the

  chess club, the electronics club, and the Scholastic

  . *

  Decathlon team. If there’s a nerdier nerd here, please point him out. Or her.”

  The cop smiled slightly. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “Thank you.”

  The idea the Buddha might make a mess inside the library was horrifying to Luther. His sense of order would not allow it. So as soon as first light began sifting in from outside, he was headed out with the dog.

  It was a strange experience, crossing slippery ice instead of the floor that lay twenty feet below, but they made it out onto the rough white plain that stretched to the fourth-story windows across the street. It was as cold as a Riverside Drive sidewalk in January, and them was the worst nut freezers in Manhattan, when the north wind came cutting down the Hudson, sweeping them with snow.

  “Come on, Buddha,” he said, “nobody’s damn well looking, buddy.”

  But that wasn’t quite true. Buddha was distracted because he was seeing and smelling people. He let out a bark, a loud, curious wowf, but not nearly what he could generate when he got going. A protecting-our- grocery-basket bark this was not.

  A crowd went past using a car hood as a freight sled. On it were the contents of an apartment: chairs, a table, an elderly TV. They were working damn hard to save their stuff, for sure. Luther could understand that. His own treasures were under about ten feet of ice, which he suspected was not doing his collection of John Coltrane LPs a whole lot of good. Or was that a collection of Duke Ellington LPs?

  But, hell, a lot of people were out here, and the folks inside needed to know this. Risking the worst from Buddha, he headed straight back into the library.

  “There are people out there!” he yelled as he slid across the ice and up the six stairs that were all that remained between its surface and the third floor. “People all over the place!”

  Everybody went running to see. The library security guard who had appeared during the night said, “They’re getting out of the city before it’s too late.”

  Folks started crowding around, trying to get a look. “All right, everybody,” Patrolman Campbell shouted, “quiet down!”

  He looked over the crowd of about sixty people he had been wondering what the hell to do with. What were they going to eat in here, shoe leather and hair? Books sure as hell wouldn’t do it, and the water fountains were history. Even the toilets were dry. Not frozen, damn well dry. But maybe this meant the end of the food and water issues that had been worrying him. “All right,” he said, “it seems pretty clear that we can get moving, too. The water’s frozen enough that we can walk. So we need to do this before the snow gets too deep.”

  “So let’s do it,” Jama’s cabbie said. He started bustling out.

  “Hold it! Slow down. We’re gonna help each other, it’s the only way. Let’s get ready as best we can and make sure nobody gets left behind. So if you need help, sing out!” A few people raised their hands, an older guy with a limp, a young woman who’d sprained her ankle yesterday.

  Sam watched this carefully, saying nothing. The cop was a natural leader, but Sam was just going to let this one play out a little longer.

  “When’s the last time anybody got a signal on their cellphone?” Campbell asked.

  “I got through to my cousin in Memphis a few hours ago. They’re being evacuated,” a young woman said.

  Another, older lady added, “I talked to somebody about the same time who said the same thing. The whole country’s headed south.”

  Dad. Doing his work. How many lives had he saved? Twenty million? Fifty? What he was hearing told Sam exactly what he had to do. Also, that his dad was out there somewhere for sure, and he was not heading south.

  Sam turned to his friends and said softly, “We shouldn’t go.”

  “Everybody else is,” J.D. pointed out.

  Sam stopped Laura, who was trying to explain what was happening to Jama in French.

  “Hold off,” he said. “When I talked to my dad, he told me we have to stay inside. This storm is gonna kill anybody who gets caught in it.”

  Laura looked around her. People were loading coats from the lost and found on their shoulders, layering as best they could, “Sam,” she said, “you have to say something.”

  Sam did not relish going up to the huge, authoritative cop and telling him he was totally wrong. But he knew she was right. He had to do it. He went over to where Campbell was helping the girl with the bad ankle improvise a walking splint.

  “Uh, sir?”

  “Yes, Sam?”

  “This is actually, uh, it’s a mistake.”

  Campbell looked at him, his broad face full of surprise. “What?”

 
“We—it’s a mistake.”

  “Listen, Sam, we’re all scared but we’ve got no choice.”

  “No, sir, that’s not it.”

  “C’mon, son, get ready to go.”

  Campbell patted the splint and bustled away. Sam did not like to be cold-shouldered like that. Shades of second grade, when his smarts had intimidated his teacher so much she wouldn’t allow him to ask questions. “If you go outside now,” he blurted, “you’ll freeze to death!”

  Speaking of freezing, that froze the entire crowd. Faces turned toward him. He found himself looking into a whole lot of eyes, all of them scared, some of them flashing with anger at his challenge to the accepted wisdom.

  “What is this nonsense?” Campbell said.

  “It’s not nonsense! This storm is going to get even worse. It’s going to get too cold to survive.”

  One of the crowd, a guy with round glasses and fuzzy hair, gave Sam a long, thoughtful look. “Where are you getting this information?”

  “From my dad. He’s a climatologist. He says that this storm is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

  Sam had the attention of a few more of them now. A couple more, anyway. “What are you suggesting we do?” the guy asked. Jeremy, Sam remembered. He was a computer technician and his name was Jeremy.

  “Stay inside,” Sam replied. “Try to keep warm until the storm passes.”

  “Look, the snow’s getting deeper by the minute. We’ll be trapped in here without food or supplies. If we want water, we’re gonna have to eat snow.”

  “It’s a risk,” Sam admitted.

  Campbell shook his head. This kid was an idiot. “Better to take our chances leaving with the others. And it’s time to do that.” He raised an arm. “Come on, everybody.”

  “Don’t go out there!” Sam was surprised at his own intensity. But lives were at stake here. “It’s too dangerous. You gotta believe me!”

  But their shuffling exit had begun and it was obvious that they were going to follow the police officer and the word that the rest of the country was evacuating, not listen to some kid who said the opposite.

  “Ou va tout le monde?”

  Sam knew enough French to understand that Jama had innocently asked where everybody was going.

  Laura replied, explaining that they were going south, but she and her friends were staying here. She said that Sam’s father was a scientist, and he’d said that it was dangerous to go out.

  Elsa, who’d gotten through to Memphis on her cell phone, was also hanging back. Sam heard her say to Jeremy, “I’ve got a bad feeling about leaving. What are you gonna do?”

  “Well, with all due respect for New York’s finest, I’m going to put my trust in the climatologist.”

  Eisa turned to the librarian, who had reoccupied the space behind her desk as soon as she’d woken up. “How about you, Judith?”

  “I’m not leaving the library.”

  Some people are funny about libraries, Sam thought. He hoped that would stay true in the future. The Internet was going to be down for a long, long time, but a book was still a book.

  Luther’s dog was whining nervously. “Don’t worry, Buddha, we ain’t goin’ back outside.”

  Sam and the others followed the people, if only to watch them go. When he reached the street, Sam saw that literally hundreds of people were on their way south. Was the Hudson also frozen? Could be. Probably was. You could probably walk all the way home from here, without ever getting your feet wet.

  He thought of their places in Arlington, of his room with its model of the Constitution left over from childhood, and his various scientific collections, his trilo-bites and his 150-million-year-old ferns, all correctly preserved under nonacidic coatings.

  They watched a crowd of at least eighty people file past them … and past a cab frozen in the ice, with frozen people inside, their blue faces peering out of the windows. Sam thought, If it hadn’t been for Laura, that Jama and her little girl would be in one of those cabs.

  Death has a surprising tendency to blindside you. Who would ever have thought, yesterday morning, that

  Manhattan in twenty-four hours was going to be a frozen wasteland?

  After the crowd had gone, nine people were left— nine people and a dog.

  Luther turned to J.D., who still looked kind of resplendent in his fur-lined coat, despite the growth of beard, despite the hairstyle from hell. “Name’s Luther. And this here’s Buddha.”

  J.D. looked down at the extended hand. Sam thought, It has a crust. J. D. looked sick, but he grasped it firmly and shook it, and for doing that Sam was proud of him.

  THIRTEEN

  Interstate 95 runs between Washington and Boston via I New York and can be one of the windiest roads in the United States. More than one eighteen-wheeler has been caught by a gust during a nor’easter and sent hydroplaning to truck heaven, its driver frantically working his air brakes and cursing the air blue.

  Gusts of upward of forty miles an hour blew snow to whiteout and made life hell for the National Guardsmen directing traffic southward on all lanes but one. The ribbon of cars stretched from horizon to horizon, and Jack knew that it was unlikely, at the rate they were moving, that a single occupant would be alive by this time tomorrow. And those poor National Guard kids—they were standing in their own graves and they didn’t know it.

  Inside the Blazer, the air was warm and would remain so unless the temperature dropped low enough to freeze the fuel in the gas line. Jack knew that temperature—150 below. He also knew that fifty to seventy thousand feet overhead it was even colder than that… and that the air rushing upward, cold as it was, was warm by comparison and was thus getting sucked into those hostile realms as the storm continued to boil ever upward.

  At some point, it would begin snatching at that supercold air, dragging it from its accustomed place above the stratosphere—whereupon it would communicate its coldness to the denser air below, and the whole mass would plummet downward, smashing into the ground and killing all that it touched.

  He knew that, but he kept his show on the road because Sam was at the end of that road, and he’d promised his boy that Dad was on his way.

  Jason was consulting a map and his GPS at the same time. The GPS frequently lost itself, because of the thick clouds, but he was managing to get a sufficient number of readings to maintain their course.

  With the snow as deep as it was, signs were few and far between, and those that were visible were so ice-choked they couldn’t be read. So Jason had been needed, for sure. A navigator was as essential as he would have been on the Sahara.

  Jack inched through a line of cars waiting to get onto the interstate, being led by a snowplow. Then the road was more or less clear. It had been plowed in the past few hours, too, so it was passable. “At least we won’t have to deal with traffic going in this direction,” he said.

  They had the radio on, but station after station had left the air. Now there was only one still alive, a Spanish-language AM station out of D.C.

  At the International Bridge in Laredo, Texas, one of the most bizarre spectacles ever seen there was occurring: people were fighting to get into Mexico. It was snowing hard as far south as Dallas, just four hundred miles to the north, and from the banks of the Rio Grande the most incredible cloud line ever observed by the eye of man could be seen rolling slowly out of the north, rolling closer and closer.

  This far south, it consisted of a fifty-mile-deep band of absolutely fearsome thunderstorms, spawning tornadoes, which appeared as long, gray worms swinging out in front of it. The lightning and the thunder and the deathly cold wind blowing out of the monster drove people to a frenzy.

  Lines and lines of cars were backed up at the bridge. Mexico demands elaborate permits for automobile entry, and the border police were not about to change the regulations just because the gringos were being inconvenienced. Mexicans were inconvenienced every day, trying to go the other way.

  Car radios were playing, and folks were
getting out, standing beside their vehicles, their belongings piled on top and in trunks, their kids jamming the backseats. Many of them had cats and dogs, birds, every kind of pet as well. These were Americans in this evacuation, people with no experience of being refugees. Some cars had barstools and remote-controlled model airplanes in them, not to mention televisions, video game consoles, computers, and all manner of other things that would be profoundly useless to a refugee. Pound for pound, probably as much sports gear as food was in those cars.

  “Half an hour ago,” the radios were saying, “Mexican officials closed the border in response to the overwhelming number of American refugees heading south.”