Over the next few minutes, the sounds at the door increased: growling, frantic digging and whining, horrible barking and howling.
A whole damn wolf pack was out there. And that appeared to be the only door.
Judith sat with Laura’s head in her lap, gazing down at her sweet, sweating face, listening to her rattling breath. Judith thought this might be the storied “death rattle.” She thought this lovely girl was going to die any minute, right here in her arms.
“How’s she doin’?” Luther asked.
“Not so good.”
Judith wiped Laura’s brow. Where were those boys? Had they gotten lost out there, or frozen to death? If they didn’t get back here very soon, their effort wouldn’t make one bit of difference.
Laura coughed again, the long, rattling sound echoing in the room. Luther threw some more books on the fire. Judith found herself praying. This was a child, a wonderful girl child just starting out in life. She’d seen her kissing that sweet beau of hers, Sam Hall.
She found herself praying damn hard.
Janet and Tom were watching the monitor as a new set of images appeared, relayed from the orbiting Space Station to NASA’s still intact communications center in Houston. “It should be over New York by now,” Janet said softly.
They were both thinking of Jack Hall. He’d be right under it, assuming he’d got to New York. But also, the city probably had lots of survivors in it, folks clinging to life in whatever shelter they could devise. They’d be out there, under bridges, huddling in buildings around makeshift fires, you name it. People were amazingly resourceful.
But nothing could prepare them for what was about to strike them now. Tom gazed at the bizarre tower of clouds that swept up out of the broader cloud cover. How could anything be like that? What unknown mechanism of nature was driving that air upward like that? Somewhere, the storm was drawing warm air into its belly from the tropics, carrying it toward its eye until, at some point, it let go of it and the air shot upward at inconceivable speed, driving right through the stratosphere, up past thirty then forty thousand feet, up to fifty thousand feet, where it froze and fell, speeding downward like a stone toward the earth.
Temperatures on the surface were going to drop a hundred degrees in a second or two. He watched the killer moving slowly south, imagined the desperate, clinging lives that were being snuffed out beneath its awful mechanism.
Sam listened at the door. Nothing. He motioned to Brian to listen, too.
“Maybe they’ve left,” Brian said.
Sam went to the door and pounded on it with his closed glove, the thuds echoing back flatly from the pantry beyond.
Snarling and growling erupted, scratching at the door, frustrated whining.
“Where the hell did they come from?” j.D. moaned.
When Sam looked back at J.D., who was lying against a counter trying to prop himself up, Sam noticed that the room was distinctly lighter. He thought to himself that the lessening of the storm that he’d noticed earlier was developing nicely. Too bad it was an illusion.
Brian noticed it, too. “Looks like the blizzard’s finally letting up,” Brian said happily. “That’s one bit of good news.”
“No, it’s not.” Sam knew what this meant. If it had tapered off, the wind dropping, the snow would have stopped falling and the sun would have begun to appear through thinning clouds.
Instead, there was this strange translucence, as if the nature of the clouds themselves had somehow changed. “We’ve got to get back right away,” Sam said.
He took J.D.‘s penicillin from him, gave one vial to Brian and took the other one himself. The odds were against J.D. That had to be faced. J.D. did not protest. They all understood that death was just an inch away. In this case, less than an inch. The door into the pantry and the dining room beyond was made of tin, that was all.
Sam went to a window and smashed it open. The air outside was weird, as if the sun were shining through a window covering made of pearl. He’d never seen anything like it. The wind wasn’t blowing anymore, either.
That was death out there, he knew it, the very storm that had killed the mammoths and the rhinos across Alaska and down into the Midwest all those thousands of years ago. Science had come up with every kind of nonsense explanation that could be conceived of to explain away what had happened to those animals. They’d dropped through permafrost into subsurface bogs and drowned. They’d gotten stuck in crevasses and frozen to death.
The one thing that must not have happened was the only thing that really could have: they’d been quick-frozen by a rare and extremely powerful atmospheric phenomenon.
Sam peered out along the catwalk. “I’ll lure the wolves away from the door. When they leave the mess hall, lock them out.” He started out the window. “If I’m not back in five minutes, get the penicillin to Laura.”
He moved out along the catwalk. The light was now eerily pale, with an odd yellow tinge. The air had become still, and a profound silence had fallen over everything. To the north, the sky was a clotted black mass. Immediately overhead, clouds bulged down toward the land, so low that they scraped the top of the Empire State Building to the south, and the Chrysler Building immediately to the east.
It was like a sky that belonged to another planet. Sam scuttled along the catwalk, hating the poor damn wolves, his skin clammy with fear.
The air now became filled with electricity, and distant rumbles began echoing off Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Sam reached the medical station window and crawled in. As he did, some glass fell to the floor.
He reached the interior of the room and froze. Had the wolves heard? Of course they had. Their hearing was naturally superb. And they’d probably smelled him by now, too. A moment ago, he had been afraid. Now it was worse. A hand that was shaking so badly he almost couldn’t control it went to the doorknob. Outside was a terrible death—to be eaten by wild animals. A week ago, he thought, if you had asked me how I thought I would die …
What a world. You just never know.
He turned the knob and stepped out into the hall. The wolves were still milling around in the pantry, but they heard him and came yapping their horrible eagerness, their claws scrabbling on the metal deck.
Sam leaped down the stairs into the bowels of the ship. He turned and saw the eyes of the lead wolf, saw in their gray, glaring fury a truth that we have almost forgotten: nature is savage, relentless, and far more powerful than we like to believe.
He ran, not knowing where he was going exactly, just hoping, somehow, that his death would not be the agony of being eaten alive by wolves.
On the deck above, Brian opened the door from the galley to the ship’s larder. He opened it just a crack.
No wolves. He hurried across the mess hall to latch the swinging doors—and couldn’t find any way to latch them.
As Sam ran, he pulled out his knife. The wolves were fast, they moved with the eerie grace of ghosts, their dewlaps flying, their tails circling. They yapped with excitement. And why shouldn’t they be excited? Dinner was on the table.
The knife was small and not real sharp. The wolves were on him now, he could feel their muzzles brushing his legs, his thighs, hear the snapping jaws as they strove to grasp an edge of his clothing and bring him down. This was how they did it with moose, he remembered—their method was to grasp the loose skin of the belly between their teeth and disembowel their prey.
Nature is a ruthless mathematician, his dad used to say, and man is always trying to make two and two come out five.
Not today. Desperate now, he came to a long hall. He threw himself down, his knife held in both fists, and slid on his back like a baseball player sliding into base. The lead wolf leaped straight at him—and he turned the tables on it, slicing it from sternum to scrotum. As the wolf howled in agony, its steaming entrails poured out over him.
Then he was on his feet again, racing down the next set of stairs. The wolves had gotten in on this level. He knew this because the snow was up to
the portholes.
They could not have come in lower or higher. Somewhere, he was going to find a door.
He ran along another hallway, now smelling the outside clearly, with its strange, hard clarity, the sharp scent of very, very cold air. Behind him, there was a riot among the wolves as they fought and devoured their own leader.
The door was wide open, light glaring into the dim ship’s interior like the glow of neon. He plunged out into the snow, struggling in the depth of it, stepping wide, pressing forward toward the ladder. He reached it, grabbed on. He began heaving himself up.
Brian had secured the galley doors by jamming a broom through their handles. He thought it might last about ten seconds. Then, from behind him, he heard pounding.
“We have to hurry!”
Sam watched Brian’s confusion and surprise. Then Brian blinked, as if he simply didn’t want to think about that now. Wise decision. The wolves would not waste any time. They would be back.
They got the inflatable life raft out onto the deck and dropped it down onto the snow. With J.D. between them, they made a precarious journey down to the snow’s surface. Finally, they reached the snow, got their snowshoes back on, and helped J.D. into the raft with the food.
From high overhead, there was a strange, high-pitched wailing sound. Sam learned what it meant to feel your blood run cold, because he thought it was the wolves. But it was not the wolves, it was something that terrified him even more: wind screaming through the rigging of the ship.
But the air—everything had changed again. Now there loomed up around the city a great, curving wall of cloud. Its calm was on the surface though. Sam thought that they must be in the eye of the supercell. Which would mean—he started to run, dragging the raft with all his might. The whistling in the rigging wasn’t just the wind blowing through it, it was what he was feeling deep down inside, this blisteringly cold downdraft.
Even as a patch of blue sky appeared behind the Empire State Building, Sam screamed to Brian, “We have to get inside! Now!”
Brian didn’t ask questions, thank God. Instead they pulled with all their might, plunging through the snow on their makeshift snowshoes. If one of the shoes were to fail—well, that would be it. Death was moments away.
There came another strange sound, a tinkling noise, and Sam saw the Empire State Building becoming an odd gray color, as if it were turning to ash.
He knew what was happening: a supercold downdraft was hitting it.
Behind them, a savage face appeared in the doorway of the ship. Then another. Then more, and the wolf pack emerged out onto the snow.
Sam and Brian reached the library. They climbed up to the window they had come out of—and couldn’t get the raft through.
“Take this and go,” Sam said, handing Brian his share of the penicillin. Brian just stood there. “Go!”
Brian dove through the window. At least the penicillin would definitely make it now, no question.
Sam got J.D. out of the raft and, supporting him as best he could, moved toward the window. Across the short distance between the library and the ship, there came a great howling. The wolves were coming and they were coming fast.
j.D. was weak, and getting him into the library was agonizingly slow. As Sam worked, he could hear the wolves panting as they plunged through the snow, panting and yapping, and he could see their breath coming in blue bursts and their flanks smoking as they worked against the deep snow.
Then J.D. was in. Sam tore off his own snowshoes and began half-dragging, half-carrying J.D. down the hall. As he hurried along, he saw frost forming on the interior walls around him. Frost! The supercold downdraft was hitting the library now.
Behind him, he heard the wolves scrambling into the library. They were growling, yapping, some of them uttering sharp, eager howls of frustration and excitement. He could hear the fear in those sounds. They were eager to reach their prey, but they also sensed something wrong, some indefinable danger.
Ahead, Brian stood at the door of the Trustee’s Room. His face urged them on. Behind them, the wolves scrambled quickly closer. Again Sam heard that terrible sound, pantpant, pantpant, as the leader drew within striking distance.
Sam and j.D. went through the door and Brian slammed it shut. From the other side, there came the loudest, most ferocious growling Sam had ever heard, and thudding, and scraping, but the big old door was going to hold, despite its hopping on its hinges. The past had built to last.
“What’s happening?” Judith asked, her eyes wide.
As the growling outside changed to echoing, woebegone howls, the windows of the room turned abruptly white. Ice crystals began forming on the ceiling, literally growing before their eyes.
Abruptly, the howling stopped.
“More books,” Sam shouted, hurling books into the fireplace. “Don’t let it go out!”
Then a blast of cold air laced with fog came out of the fireplace, and the flames burned low, becoming little more than coal glows in the mass of blackened paper that now choked them.
Frantically, they stoked the fire, they fed it more books, they assisted it in its straggle to survive. The room became so cold that Judith and Luther almost went into convulsions, and Buddha came back from the door, where he had been standing sentinel against the wolves.
Sam looked at Laura. She was the color of marble. She did not look alive. He reached out to her, touched her with his fingers … and nothing happened.
She was dead! They’d let her die and they didn’t even know it, look at them, look at the damn fools!
Then something touched him, grasped his hand. He turned back to her and saw that her hand had come into his. So she was alive, she was!
But for how long? Minutes? Seconds?
Patrolman Campbell’s group was barely two dozen now. They had left body after body behind them, at first stopping to speak over them and honor them, then silently covering them with snow, then simply leaving them where they dropped, as the group continued its shuffling, hopeless progress south and west along what they thought might be the turnpike.
But then something happened. The snow stopped. Tom raised his eyes, looked up at the sky for the first time in days—and saw blue!
Beautiful, beautiful blue! The storm was ending! Then a long shaft of sunlight came down and they began gathering in little knots, pointing upward and laughing.
Along with the sun and the still air came wonderful new visibility. They could see down a long slope for miles … and all along the vastness of it they saw lines of black dots in gradual motion. As they realized that these were other groups of refugees just like them, the cheering slowly died away, and then it stopped.
Tom Campbell was surprised to feel that the air was getting colder. Then he hurt all over, his skin pricking angrily. Then his bones began to ache deep within, setting off cutting bursts of pain, as if they were being twisted inside his muscles, as if they were breaking. His next breath seared his lungs, and he thought it was fire, he had breathed in fire.
A fist reached into his throat and closed it. He tried to breathe, could not… and ice formed over his eyes, an intricate tracery, frosted lace between the veins. His body did not fall over. None of them did. They remained like that in the searing cold of the burst from above, corpses like statues, that would stand there until the snow covered them and would remain standing, just as they were, across the vastness of time, to a time so far in the future that it could scarcely even be imagined, when the ice age that was starting in this place, in these days, would finally end.
NINETEEN
O
bjectively, Jack knew that, if he did not find food
and water and shelter damn soon, he was going to die trying to drag Jason to safety. His heart would burst. That was what happened to men who had the capacity to force themselves to keep on even after their body had told them to quit. Eventually, the heart simply exploded.
Still, he was adhering to his old method of just making sure that one foot always landed
in front of the other. He was navigating only by the compass. He had kept the GPS, of course, but its batteries were too cold now to power it. He had it close to his chest, under his clothing, in hopes of warming it up again. So far, no good.
He stopped. He knew he shouldn’t, but he was hearing something. A change in the sound of the storm. What the hell was that? He pulled back his parka and listened.
Whistling … in the sky.
Then he knew what it was: some kind of a wind aloft was making the ice crystals that filled the air blow against one another. But the wind was not here at the surface. Here, the air was still.
He looked up, and it was as if he were staring into the face of an angry God. He knew at once what was happening here. The storm of legend, which he had theorized and predicted, was about to break right over his own head.
Day After Tomorrow Page 21
