“Come on, folks,” he said, clapping his glove-muffled hands, “you need to get up and get moving now.”
Ollie and Jimmy got to their feet. Other shapes began moving. One, though, did not. Tom thought her name was Noel. She’d come over here by herself instead of doing as ordered, and sharing body heat. He reached down and shook her. “Come on, ma’am, we need to push on.”
She rolled over, so slowly at first that he thought she was actually getting up. Then he saw her face, as slick as glass and ice blue. Like anybody who’s seen death, he knew instantly that she was gone. He didn’t need to feel for a pulse, but it was his duty, so he did it anyway. Nothing. He tried to raise an eyelid, but they were frozen shut. Deader. He pulled out his notebook and noted the date and time and wrote her name, Noel Parks. Then he added, in his careful, Catholic-school penmanship, 10-54, the code for a dead body.
He looked toward the others. Nobody was watching him. He reached down and pulled the coat back over her face, covered it with a little snow. No reason to let the others see. It would only demoralize them further.
He went back to his charges, put on a big smile, and led them off he knew not where.
FIFTEEN
J
D, watched Luther methodically tearing the pages • out of a book, page by careful page. He had found himself fascinated by this man who lived at the polar opposite of his own world. Before meeting Luther, he’d never given homeless people a second thought, except maybe to assume that they were probably either lazy or paranoid.
Luther was neither. He had, instead, made a complicated and difficult choice to opt out of the world that, as far as J.D. was concerned, was the only one worth living in. Even if you couldn’t have it all, then you could at least want it. Wasn’t that how things were supposed to work?
Not for this guy. Luther didn’t want anything except food for Buddha and to fulfill his own basic needs. J.D. had talked to him—not getting much out of him, because he was a solitary soul—but he’d discovered, among other things, that Luther hadn’t ridden in a car in twenty years. J.D. thought, but could not be sure, that Luther might once have been a journalist or a lawyer or something to do with the corporate world.
The amazing thing was that he had not ended up like this through tragedy. He had chosen this life.
And now he was doing something that was interestingly strange: he was tearing pages out of a book and crushing them into balls, then shoving them into his pants and sleeves. He was beginning to look more than a little like a Michelin tire person or the Sta-Puf marsh-mallow man.
“What are you doing?” J.D. finally asked, after spending some little time trying to figure it out.
“Insulating. Newspaper’s best, but this’ll do.”
J.D. found it difficult to believe.
“You spend some years on the street, you learn how to keep warm.”
Luther also found this kid interesting. He was so damned innocent, it was kind of wonderful. Luther had been through some dark years, and suddenly here was this handsome, strong, clean, and bright kid who had never had a lick of trouble in his life. And he was a nice boy. Just sort of… uninformed.
Luther watched J.D. petting Buddha, and that pleased him. Buddha was about as ugly as they came and a whole lot dirtier than Luther wished he was, and Luther was—well, they were both on the ripe side, that had to be faced. So most of the folks sort of kept their distance. Sort of? They ran like hell, actually. Luther had ended up staying on the far side of every room because he didn’t want folks to feel embarrassed by not being able to handle the odor.
J.D., though, he could handle it. Luther watched the young face as the boy and the dog enjoyed each other. A lot of sadness was in the boy, though. And why wouldn’t there be? He was alone here and his parents were nowhere around.
“You worried about your folks?”
“My brother.”
That was a rough one. Little brother, too, Luther didn’t even need to ask. Big brother protects little brother, and when he can’t, well, that is hard. “What’s his name?”
“Benjamin … but I call him Benny.”
J.D. gave Luther a long, appraising look. What was this old tramp up to, asking him all these personal questions? Luther looked right back, and J.D. saw something in his eyes that he knew about but had not often seen. Call it sympathy, call it compassion, it was the look people give you when they sincerely wish they could help, but they can’t. He’d seen it once in the face of Dr. Rettie, when J.D.‘d separated his shoulder and was writhing in agony on the rugby field. He had seen it in Benny’s face, when Dad had lit into him for no good reason.
J.D. let his guard down a little. “If I just knew he was okay…”
Luther nodded slowly. “That’s the hard part, the not knowing.”
J. D. heard a world of pain in those words. Luther had lost a hell of a lot in this world, that could not have been more plain. J.D. decided that they belonged together, the two of them, because they were both in the same situation: they were grieving for people they had lost. Whom Luther had lost, he’d probably never say. But he didn’t need to, did he?
Luther tore out a page and rolled it up into a ball. He held it out to J.D., who took it and stuffed it down his pants. “Thanks,” he said. Luther gave him a smile and rolled him another and was glad to see him put it to use.
Across Europe, the snow continued to fall. By immense effort and with superb coordination, roads in southern France and the west of England were still relatively passable. Elsewhere, though, the situation was impossible. Whole towns were buried in the snow. Trafalgar Square consisted of a white drift of snow punctuated by Nelson’s Column. Only the deep tube was running, and officials were stopping trains before they went aboveground and sending them back along their shortened routes. Aside from those few tube trains, London’s traffic had stopped. Throughout the city, as across the whole northern hemisphere, there were collapsed roofs and people atop others frantically shoveling to keep them from going, too. In London alone, one person was having a heart attack every fourteen seconds, and the telephone lines were jammed with emergency calls to which there could be no response.
At Hedland, the wind howled with a banshee’s supernatural fervor, stripping parts of the facility entirely of snow while burying others under fifty feet of the stuff. Inside, practically everything was shut down to conserve power. The project’s purpose had been made moot by events. Obviously, the current it had been set up to monitor had done what it had been feared that it would do. It was gone south, thank you, and all the buoys would be flashing alarms if the monitors had been turned on.
The distant sound of the generator changed, going high, then sputtering. As it sputtered, the lights flickered. Also, no doubt, the heat. They had closed off most of the facility, leaving heat registers open only here in the monitoring room. When the generator failed, the boiler’s electric pumps would stop, and it would automatically shut down. The outcome would be simple: death.
“We must almost be out of diesel fuel,” Dennis said.
Simon opened a drawer and pulled out a bottle. “Any chance it’ll run on this?” It was a fine single malt.
“Are you mad? That’s superb twelve-year-old Scotch.” Dennis took the bottle from Simon and produced some glasses from another drawer. It wouldn’t run the generator, but it had a very definite use, most assuredly. Dennis opened the bottle and poured three drinks, generous ones. Then he poured some more. Why not be very damn generous?
Simon raised his glass. “To England.”
Privately, Gerald Rapson thought that was a hollow toast. England had ceased to exist, was his thought. He raised his own glass. “To mankind.” His thinking was that surely somebody was left somewhere.
Dennis laughed a little. “To Manchester United!”
They all laughed, then, and drank. At that moment, the generator whined again, sputtered… and stopped. The lights flickered out and did not come back on. From the heat register across the room, there came
a long, declining sigh, followed by a series of bangs.
It was probably under a hundred below outside, maybe even colder than that. Gerald thought that they would lose consciousness from the cold in about an hour. And how strange that seemed, to be in the last hour of life.
Dennis lit some emergency candles. Gerald looked at his two assistants in their glow. They seemed to him to be two brave men, sitting about with their glasses of Scotch, in the jaws of death.
“I just wish I could’ve seen him grow up,” Simon said.
“The important thing is, Simon, he will grow up,” Gerald said. Deep in the secrecy of his own mind, he wondered if it was even true. It might be that nobody in the British Isles was going to survive … not one.
“Amen,” Dennis said, and Gerald thought that the word meant more than amen to the idea that Simon’s son would grow up. It was a final word, a good-bye to life.
‘Goodbye,’ Gerald said in his heart, ‘good-bye.’
It was a damned nice Scotch, smoky, smooth, just enough bite to remind you that it was not some sort of exotic wine.
Goodbye…
The Trustee’s Room of the New York Public Library had been transformed from a large and elegant chamber to something very different. The wooden furnishings that could be broken up had been piled beside the fireplace. There were chair legs and arms, stuffing, cloth upholstery, wooden backs and frames. Drawers from a side table had been made into kindling, as had three display cases that had contained a collection of bookplates, some two hundred years old. The plates themselves had been carefully saved by Judith, stacked in the middle of the huge old conference table along with the Gutenberg Bible and a number of other fine editions that had come in with the more humble books.
Sitting together in the circle that the stacks of books made around the fireplace were the members of the group, the ones who had taken a boy’s word over a man’s and stayed put when escape seemed the only logical alternative.
Sam and Laura were speaking so softly together that it might have been thought that they were praying.
“Best meal ever?” Sam asked.
“First time I had lobster. My uncle stuffed them with shrimp and baked them in butter. Unbelievable.”
She closed her eyes, remembering. He closed his… imagining.
She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Most physical pain you’ve ever experienced?”
That took him back to the beach, and, oh, it was one beautiful memory now, despite what had happened. “The time,” he said, his eyes closed, “that I stepped on a jellyfish.” By the beautiful sea, under the sweet blue sky, with a little yellow plane chugging past trailing a suntan-lotion sign. And the smell of suntan lotion, and of the sea, the rich, mysterious, devastatingly alive tang of the ocean.
“Ouch. How old were you?”
“Eleven.” He remembered the astonishing shock of pain that had raced up his leg, causing him to fall forward screaming. “It hurt so bad I threw up.” Mom had carried him over to the cabana, and a lifeguard had put alcohol on it, which had helped.
“My wisdom teeth,” she said. “After the drugs wore off.”
He noticed her rub the cut on her leg. It looked kind of swollen and red, not like a normal infection. He thought maybe it wasn’t too bad—hoped, rather, that it wasn’t.
“I got another one,” she said. “Favorite vacation?”
“Not counting this?”
She rolled her eyes. God, but she was beautiful. How could somebody rolling her eyes be lovely to see? Everything she did seemed to make her prettier. And when she smiled—that was amazing, that was almost, like, supernatural beauty.
“My best vacation ever,” he said, looking back. And then he knew. Exactly. “A few years ago my dad took me on one of his research trips to Greenland. The ship broke down and we got stuck. The sun was only out like four hours a day and it rained constantly.”
“Sounds kind of boring.”
“My dad and I hung out together for ten days. Doing nothing.” He remembered back to the endless talks, Dad explaining about the way the Greenland ice sheet worked, and how they could drill down the same way they were doing in Antarctica and find out what the world temperature was year by year, and even the composition of the air, by reading the ice cores. And there had been more, much more. Dad had even quoted poetry from memory—“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink … “It was great,” he said fervently.
She stared off into space a moment, then nodded slowly. She had understood how much he missed his dad, how much he wanted to be part of his life.
“My father and I were supposed to go look at colleges next month,” she said. “He wants me to go to Harvard.” She laughed ruefully. “I guess I don’t have to worry about getting in anymore.”
Suddenly, her laughter turned to tears. She wept bitterly, and he thought to himself that the magnitude of all this had just smashed into her mind. Her Harvard application didn’t matter because there was no Harvard.
What did matter? Well, he knew one thing that did. He put an arm around her shoulder and said, “Hey, guess what? Everything’s gonna be all right.”
She reared back, turned on him. Her eyes were running with tears. “No, it’s not.”
Across the vast American plain, the snow fell. It fell on great cities and small towns, whipped by winds that came straight down from the north, that came even faster because the plain’s smooth surface offered no resistance. The highways were studded with necklaces of humps, each one a vehicle that had once been full of life and hope. The snow ran in the streets of the cities, the wind screamed around the eaves of houses and the walls of buildings.
In the fields, cattle stood frozen solid where they had been grazing, most with grass still in their mouths. The snow covered them just as it covered the cars and trucks, the barns and the houses, and the long lines of suburbs that had once defined the American dream.
Some of the largest cities remained defiantly alive, their lights gleaming in the maelstrom, snowplows roaring in their streets, people hurrying from place to place on foot. Mostly, though, the snow had enclosed a whole world in a frigid, pitiless cloak of freezing death. Not three days ago that world had seemed to its inhabitants to be eternal. From Paris, the City of Light, to Chicago, the Windy City, and on across to Beijing and Novosibirsk, death danced on winds gossamer with snow.
In his proud and defiant heart, Jack Hall felt that he and Frank and young Jason were just about done. Devoutly, he wished that the two of them had not insisted on making this journey. They were here, though, and his obligation was to do everything he could to both save their lives and reach his objective.
Up to a point. The father was going to save his son if he could. If he had to die in this freezing hell to do it, that was an acceptable sacrifice. It is deep in the nature of the species, no doubt running in the fragments of DNA remaining from the first living things, that the parent will die for the child.
He pushed forward, Jason beside him. Frank was behind the sled, shoving it and guiding them as best he could. The GPS was only occasionally working now. New York was a big place, and Jack’s hope was that if they just kept moving east, they were bound to come across it. So he mainly used his compass, correcting When Jason got a fix.
Ahead, there was nothing but a featureless plain of snow, broken only by whiteouts. Snow was still pouring out of the sky. He knew that they were south of Philly, crossing one of the suburbs. His concern was air pockets that had undoubtedly formed under the covering of snow. From his antarctic experience, he knew how dangerous it was to try to cross a glacier on fresh snow. Covered fissures were often impossible to detect, no matter how good an eye you had.
He glanced back at Frank. He was hunkered down, pushing hard. Jack did the same. The snow felt fairly stable. So maybe they were crossing a field twenty or so feet down. They were over Chester Heights, he thought, moving toward Chester. He was hoping that they would be able to see well enough
to cross the
Delaware on a bridge. It was a big river and would probably still have flow in it, meaning that getting across on the ice would take every ounce of skill that they possessed, seasoned with a large dollop of luck.
Was that a shudder coming up from below? He glanced over at jason. He didn’t appear to have noticed. They went on. Now jack heard a long sound rising over the howl of the wind, a cr-a-a-ak. Again he looked at jason, then back at Frank, All seemed well. Of course, he knew differently. The sound had come from somewhere.
Long experience told him that they were in trouble, also that the smartest thing to do was to press ahead and try to outrun whatever was giving way beneath them.
Craek!
A huge jerk on the safety line that connected the three of them, jack turned around. For a moment, he saw only the sled, then made out Frank’s dark form behind it. He was in a hole, supporting himself on his outstretched arms, his head and shoulders bent forward to maximize the amount of snow carrying his weight. Even in what had to be a terrifying situation, Frank was the consummate pro.
Day After Tomorrow Page 17
