He had minutes, maybe just seconds. Glancing around, he saw a fast-food sign jutting up out of the snow. They must be the tombstone of a highway rest stop. If he could dig down, he could maybe find shelter—assuming that it hadn’t caved in.
The whistling was becoming a rushing sound. Far overhead, he knew that a supercold mass of air was crashing toward the earth, a descending banshee of instant death.
He was almost to the arches when he felt something hard beneath his right snowshoe. He bent down and began digging, pushing away snow, clawing until he saw a large, mushroom-shaped exhaust vent. He threw his arms around it as if it were the loveliest woman in the world and, with a growl of rage and urgency, ripped it from its moorings.
An aluminum shaft now lay exposed to the air. He leaped over to the sled, pulled Jason off, and pushed him into the shaft.
Now the freezing wind hit. An American flag that was visible on the top few feet of a pole near the arches suddenly began to flap its tattered hem—and then froze solid, jutting out as rigidly as if it had turned to steel.
Jack dove into the shaft, reached up, and pulled the sled over the opening. Then he dropped down with Jason, pushing him along as tendrils of what felt like searing heat went up his trouser legs and worried the bottoms of his boots.
They went crashing down through the exhaust vent over the grill and fell in an ungainly heap on the cold altar of the hamburger. Jack checked himself for broken bones, then Jason. He pulled Jason off the grill and raced around the kitchen looking for—-and he found them, matches!
Would the grill light? This far out on the road, the restaurant would have its own propane tank. But were the lines frozen?
He turned one of the burner switches, struck a match, and held it out.
The match went out. Overhead, there was a loud crinkling sound. The surface of the grill suddenly turned frost white. He felt freezing air pouring down around his feet. He struck another match—nothing.
Whoompf!
Fire! It was working. Frantically, he opened up all the burners.
The grill turned black again. Soon, it began to smoke. The temperature began to rise. Jack drew off his boots, looking for frostbite.
His toes were red, and there was some bite, but it was not all that bad.
He lay back on the floor. His body took oyer then. Jack’s eyes closed. He thought, This is like anesthesia—
That was all he thought for a long time.
Gradually, the kitchen heated. The grill smoked. Fortunately, there was sufficient heat that the snow above melted and the fumes the grill was making escaped.
Jack woke up as suddenly as he had gone to sleep.
One moment there was the blackness of death itself, the next there was full consciousness.
And hunger, he was full of damn hunger, too. Jack was a big man who had used just about every microgram of nutrition his body possessed, and he found himself so hungry that it was almost fantastic.
He was on the floor of a kitchen, though, with a hot grill ten feet away, and a freezer that might not have power, but certainly wouldn’t have spoiled anything. He went in and found neat stacks of various types of hamburger patty, arranged according to the type of burger they were for. Even the refrigerator was good news: the vegetables were still nice and crisp, not frozen solid as he had feared.
He took ten hamburgers to the grill and laid them out, then found buns—very cold—and put them facedown to warm. He’d done plenty of grilling. They had equipment a lot like this on some of the antarctic stations where he’d worked.
Jason suddenly said, “How long have I been out of it?”
Jack smiled. He looked at his watch. “About twelve hours.”
Jason sat up, rubbed his head. “What happened?”
Jack pointed toward the vent hood. “We had to get inside in a hurry, so I kind of pushed you in.”
Jason, still rubbing the part of his head that had hit the grill, said, “I should be used to you pushing me around.”
Jack thrust one hell of a nice-looking approximation of a hamburger into Jason’s hand. He stared at it. Jack began to wonder if Jason had a concussion. “You don’t like my cooking?”
Jason looked up at him, his face stricken. “I’ve been a vegetarian for six years. My old girlfriend convinced me it’s better for the environment.”
Jack just stared. This was not a world that was going to be treating vegetarians real kindly. He bit into his own hamburger.
“What the hell,” Jason said at last. He took a bite, chewed, then wolfed it down just as Jack was doing. As he ate, he asked, “What’s going to happen, Jack?”
Jack could have answered the question in a lot of ways, beginning with “I have no damn idea whatsoever.” But he tried science instead. “A nass extinction cycle. Large mammals will go first, probably on the order of the Cretaceous event; maybe eighty-five percent of species will go down. This ice age might last a hundred years, or a hundred thousand.”
“No, I mean what do you think will happen to us?”
To me, Jason meant—the primary question on the mind of any young person, especially one in trouble, and Jason and Jack were certainly in trouble. Jack’s answer might once have been little more than “Who the hell knows?” But he owed Jason more than that. The world may have forgotten that the young are owed a debt of responsibility, but Jack had not forgotten.
“Human beings are the most amazing and resourceful creatures on earth. We survived the last ice age, and we’re certainly capable of surviving this one.” Jack gestured upward, thinking of all the arrogance and mistakes in high places that had led to the catastrophe. “It all depends on whether or not we can learn from our mistakes.” He thought of Lucy and where she might be, and of Sam, his beloved son. Had Sam known how to shelter from downbursts? If he’d been in one, had he
recognized what was happening in time? Jack sighed. “I’d sure as hell like a chance to learn from mine.”
“You did everything you could to warn people.”
“I was thinking about Sam. I never made time for him.”
“C’mon, I’m sure that’s not true.”
“The only vacation I ever took him on was a research trip to Greenland… which was a fiasco.”
“What happened?”
“The ship got stuck for ten days.”
Jason chewed for a minute. “Yeah, well, he probably had a good time anyway.”
Jack wished he believed that. He wished to his very marrow that he did not have to look back on this unfinished life he’d had with a son he’d probably never see again, who’d probably died a lonely, cold death among strangers.
“I’m gonna get some sleep,” Jason said. He lay down on his side and, in the manner of the young, was instantly asleep.
Jack followed him and despite that he usually had a rough time at night, fell just as fast into a deep, deep sleep.
The next thing he knew, he was being tossed on a stormy sea. But if only he just kept calm, everything would be fine, the crew would take care of the ship, he could stay asleep.
“Listen! Jack!”
His eyes shot open and the dream receded. He sat up. “I don’t hear anything.”
“That’s what I mean! The storm must be over.”
Jack got to his feet. Best to go up and take a look around. If there was any sign of another downburst,
they could duck back tout de suite. He got up on the still-warm grill and pulled himself into the vent. Actually, the grill was pretty damn hot. If he’d stood on it any longer, he would have gotten burned—which would have been just about the most ridiculous thing that could happen to somebody, given the circumstances.
He slid up the warm vent and pushed himself up through the crust of ice that covered most of it.
He was so amazed that he cried out, then he felt reverence and bowed his head. They were not where he’d thought, in the middle of New Jersey on the turnpike. Looming overhead, sweeping off across the frozen mouth of New York Harbor, stood the
grandeur of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Long fingers of golden light shone like beams from heaven out across the harbor. Manhattan’s towers, frozen and dark, stood gleaming in the purest light that Jack Hall had ever beheld. Overhead, the sky went from deep orange on the eastern horizon to emerald green above the rising sun, to rich, sweet blue, the blue of a child’s eye, the blue of dreams.
And he saw stars in the retreating night, many, many stars strewn across the western sky still, and the morning star, Jupiter this time of year, hanging low in the rising sunlight, a jewel held in the hand of God.
“Can you give me a hand?”
He pulled Jason up out of the flue.
Then Jason stood, also, before the wonder of the day.
Without a word to one another, they began to walk across the harbor. There was no safety issue. Jack’s practiced eye told him he was looking at ice as solid as concrete. They made their way past the Statue of
Liberty, which had two ships pressed up against it. Jack thought that this place must have endured one hell of a storm surge.
That could happen with a nor’easter, and this had been the mother, father, and grandfather of all nor’easters. No doubt Long Island had been devastated as well, cut in two by the surge as easily as a hurricane’s surge might split a Carolina barrier island.
Another nail in Sam’s coffin. Would he have anticipated the storm surge? And even if he had, would he have been able to get to high ground in time?
They plodded along with the efficiency of practiced polar hands and were soon heading up the desolate canyons of lower Manhattan. The only sound was the whistling of a small wind in the snowy streets. Lip compression made it whip around corners, stinging their red, rutted faces with mean little needles of snow.
Passing an apartment building at about the third-floor level, Jack saw a bizarre sight. Sitting behind a frost-hazed window was what appeared to be a woman in a chair, just as calm and collected as you please.
He went over and pressed his hand against the window. It was ice-cold. He broke it with his ice axe. When the glass and frost had fallen away, he found himself face-to-face with a lady, quite old, but beautifully made up and wearing a green cocktail dress right out of 1958. On her lap was a cat, its eyes still bright, as dead as the old woman. Her eyes were closed, and on her lips was the smile of fond memory.
He turned and went on, Jason behind him. When he saw the Empire State Building, he quickened his pace. But where was the library? It was a large building.
They should see it now but—where were they, in a park? “How much farther is it to the library?”
Jason pulled out the GPS. They’d gotten it working again back at the restaurant. An excellent piece of equipment, it had recovered nicely after being frozen below its minimums. “It should be—” He stopped, looked around. “Right here.”
Jack saw that Jason was right. Ahead were the buildings of Forty-second Street. Over there—what was that? Damn, it was the rigging of a ship. But that was surely impossible. No storm surge could have gotten this far up Manhattan.,
Or no, yes, it could. It had come right up the East River and the Hudson, inundating the island from the sides, and bringing with it what looked like a very considerable vessel.
My dear God, New York had been turned into hell, hell on earth. Poor Sam! He felt a hand on his shoulder.
Jason was looking at him sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”
Jack trudged on, crossing where the library must have stood before the snow had collapsed it or the storm surge drowned it. Here is my son’s grave, he thought, here in this place. If he dug down, he knew that he would find Sam somewhere in there, frozen in youthful perfection.
He wanted his son. He did not want to see the suffering that would be on his face.
Then he felt something beneath one of his feet—a beam. He bent down, began to push snow away. The building was far from collapsed. He began to work harder.
In the Trustee’s Room, all was quiet and dark. The snow had gotten so deep that it had eventually caved in the windows, forcing the tiny band of survivors to cling together around their dying fire. Now they lay close to one another, Buddha among them, sleeping and resting. The food from the ship was long gone, and their bodies were demanding that they not move any more than they absolutely had to.
They had reached the point that most everybody reaches, when dying in the cold. They were dreaming, drifting softly into the golden halls of death, unaware that the cold was drawing them away from life forever.
In the corridor outside, Jack and Jason found the frozen-solid carcass of a wolf. Jack bent down, examined it. How in the world had this animal gotten here? Zoo animal. Had to be. Unless some nut had been keeping wolves in his apartment. Could’ve happened, this being New York.
He noticed that the door the animal was lying beside had no frost on it. He pulled off a glove and felt it. Warm. Definitely.
Jack had to take a deep breath, steady himself. Because he was going to open that door, and if he did not find Sam in there, or he found him dead, it would be the greatest agony he had ever known, soul agony, the howling misery of a dad left behind by his child.
Jack drew the door open and stepped into the room.
It was dim and it stank of smoke and human sweat. It was a grand room, though, all mahogany and a high-beamed ceiling. Two people sat on the floor in front of an enormous fireplace. On the hearth, a fire guttered low. One of the people tossed a book into the flames.
Sam saw Buddha lift his ears, look sharply toward the door.
The wolves!
He turned, went to his feet. Two men were standing there. They were in arctic parkas. Sam knew professional equipment when he saw it. Sam opened his mouth, closed it. The taller of the two men pulled his hood back, revealing a bearded, snow-burned face that—was that—
“Who’s there?” Laura asked. She came to her feet beside Sam.
Sam felt his mouth open. He heard the words—the unbelievable words—that came out. “My father.” Just a whisper.
Then Jack Hall was crossing the room, he was walking toward the filthy kid with the ridiculous excuse for a beard on his face, and Sam was walking toward him, and then their arms came around one another, and the blood of the Halls sang joy to the world, and maybe even the good God above smiled that this love of father for son had defied the worst storm in ten thousand years to declare: I am a love beyond death, and I am stronger than death, and when we part, it will be in my time, when I say the day is come for the old man to step into memory, and the young one to lift up his own son.
There was crying, then, before the fire, in the devastated city, beneath the hard blue sky of a new day.
Tom Gomez rode bouncing along in his jeep. They had been going, it seemed for miles, beside the Fence of Hope. This chain-link fence had been hung with tens of thousands of letters, of pictures, of prayers from refugees trying to locate friends and loved ones. “Sally, me and the kids are in Chihuahua City, Highway 45, Camp Nebraska.” “George Louis Carver please call Louise my cell is WORKING!” “The children of Mary and William Winston may be reached through any Red Cross Station.” And the pictures, the ribbons, the flowers of hope and memory, on and on and on.
He listened to the jeep’s horn as the driver struggled along, being careful to avoid the milling crowd. Finally they turned onto the Paseo de la Reforma and left the Fence of Hope behind them. Here, the marine guards in their formal perfection stood before an imposing gate.
They drove through into another world, shaded and quiet, unchanged from before the storm, which had exhausted itself hundreds of miles north of Mexico City.
Tom entered the cool, beautifully elegant building and was ushered across the broad foyer to a suite of offices. On the imposing door was a neatly lettered sign, brand-new: offices of the president of the
United States.
Okay, here was his first real face-to-face with the despicable Becker. A good man had died to put this creep in office. He did not rel
ish the meeting, the probable coldhearted turndown.
He found the president standing at his window, staring through half-closed blinds at the Fence of Hope. “Mr. President?”
Becker seemed to freeze. Then, abruptly, he turned around.
Tom was shocked to his core by what he saw. The arrogant Washington insider had disappeared. In his place was a man with a face etched by deep lines of compassion and regret. Tom thought he had never seen such a sad man. Never. Or so much strength. There was strength in that face.
He was humbled. Before the president even opened his mouth, Tom Gomez knew something about him: God had touched this man. God had given him the grace and strength he was going to need.
Day After Tomorrow Page 22
