“Me too. But maybe Hexter is right. Maybe after the Hussar it’s all downhill.”
Roberto sighed. “I hope not. We’re only twelve.”
“I’m twelve. You only think you’re twelve.”
“Whatever, it’s too soon to be going downhill.”
“We’ve got to change careers, I guess. Change our focus. You were gonna get drowned at some point anyway, so maybe it’s a good thing.”
“I guess. I liked it, though. And there are jobs down there, like what Vlade did.”
“True. But for now. Maybe we could look up rather than down. There are those peregrine falcons nesting on the sides of the Flatiron, and lots of others.”
“Birds?”
“Or animals. The otters under the docks. Or sea lions, remember the time sea lions took over the Skyline Marina and all of them got on one boat and sank it?”
“Yeah, that was cool.” Roberto rubbed his hand over Melville’s gravestone, thinking it over.
Suddenly it was darker, and cooler. A black cloud had come up from the south and was covering the sun. The air was just as steamy, maybe more so, but because of the cloud they were in shade now, and it looked like it would only get cloudier. A big black-bottomed wall of cloud, in fact, rolling in from the south.
“Thunderhead?” Stefan said. It was too much of a wall to be a thunderhead. “We better get back.”
They hustled back to their boat, untied and hopped in, and headed down the middle of the channel that split the Bronx. The wind was in their face and they slapped over wave after wave, knocking sheets of water left and right as they crashed down onto the waves’ back sides. They ducked down to give the boat a lower profile. Wind and waves both came out of the south, so they could head straight into them. That was lucky, as the tops of the waves were now tumbling forward in the wind, creating major whitecaps. It would have been difficult or impossible to run sideways across waves as high and broken as these. Even heading straight into them was making the boat bounce up hard as it crashed into the white water, and they both moved to the back of the boat and sat on each side of the tiller, watching anxiously as the short white walls came rushing at them and the boat made its improbable tilt and lift. The slushy roar was so loud they had to shout in each other’s ears to be heard. The uptilt in the bow that was built into every zodiac’s design proved their salvation time after time, but even so, waves only a few feet higher would certainly rush right over the bow onto them, or so it seemed.
Still, buoyancy was a marvelous thing, and for now they shot up over each wave in turn. And surely the waves couldn’t get much bigger, not here in the Harlem River anyway, where they had no fetch to speak of. The boys could hardly believe they were as big as they were, nor that the wind had gotten so strong so fast. Well, summer storms happened. And now they were seeing that the waves did have a bit of fetch, coming up the East River and curving into the Harlem. They were really bouncing hard.
“We should have waited it out!” Stefan shouted as one particularly big white wall tilted them almost vertically before it passed under them, and the bow then flopped down so hard they had to hold on to avoid being tossed forward.
“We can make it.”
“Maybe we should turn around.”
“I don’t know if the stern would rise as well as the bow.”
Stefan didn’t reply, but it was true.
“Maybe we should take our wristpad with us next time.”
“Maybe. We’d only ruin it though.”
“Look at that one coming!”
“I know.”
“Maybe we have to turn!”
“Maybe so. The boat will stay floating even if it’s filled with water, we know that.”
“Will the motor keep running if it gets wet?”
“I think so. Remember that time?”
“No.”
“It did one time.”
The next big wave shoved them up and back until they were vertical, and they both instinctively threw themselves forward against the bottom to help knock the boat forward. Even so they hung there upright for a long sweeping moment, hoping that the wave wouldn’t capsize them backward and dump them in the roil. Instead the boat flopped forward again and slid fast down the back side of the wave. But more were coming, big white walls, and the wind was howling.
“Okay, maybe we should come about. We don’t want to capsize.”
“No.”
“Okay, so …”
Roberto was staring ahead, round-eyed. Seeing his look, Stefan grew afraid. All the waves were about the same distance apart, just as always with waves. They had seven or eight seconds between each impact. It wasn’t a lot of time to turn around, but they couldn’t afford to get caught crossways.
“Next one,” Roberto said. “I’ll start the turn as soon as the crest is under us. Toward you.”
“Okay.”
The next wave was about the same size as all the others. Not a monster, but close enough. It lifted them, the boat tilted nearly upright, they threw themselves forward. As the bow dropped forward under the impact of their bodies, Roberto twisted the tiller toward Stefan, and as the boat slid down the back side of the wave he gunned the motor to its max. The boat turned sharply, it was impressively tight, but not super fast, and the next wave was coming. Nothing to do but watch the disaster unfold.
The broken wall of water hit when they were about three quarters turned to it, and Roberto pulled on the tiller so that as the boat skidded forward it straightened in orientation to the wave, the stern rising slower than the bow had, they were in the broken foam and it seemed they would be swamped, but aside from a splashing they were spared, as the boat was buoyant and the wave orderly. The boat rode this wave for a while, and then the wave passed under them and they were motoring back toward the Bronx at full speed, pushed by the wind and shoved time after time by the broken waves, which passed just barely under them, splashing them but not swamping them, the waves moving somewhat faster than the boat. But they weren’t getting swamped, and the Bronx shallows, with all their cluttered broken buildings and rooftops, were quickly approaching. It was a field of waves and bubbles and black roof reefs and white lines of foam, and looked horrible. But they could dart in some gap, then quickly get into the lee of something protruding from the water. And the waves would quickly dampen as they moved into the wreckage of the borough.
“We’re going to make it,” Roberto declared. It was the first thing he had said since they came about, many waves ago.
“Looks like it,” Stefan agreed. “But what then?”
“We wait it out.”
PART SEVEN
THE MORE THE MERRIER
One invests affection in places where it will be safe when the winds blow.
observed Mencken
a) Vlade
As part of his job Vlade kept the NOAA weather page for New York up on one of his screens, in a box next to the tide screen. In fact it was the weather’s effect on the tides that interested him, because tides mattered to the building. Beyond that he didn’t really care what the weather was doing.
But for a week or more he had been tracking a hurricane coming up the Atlantic, headed for Florida it looked like; but now what NOAA was showing caught his full attention. This Hurricane Fyodor had just in the last few hours veered hard northward, and now it looked like it was going to hit the New York area. Its whole run it had looked like it was heading for North Carolina at the very north end of its impact zone, but now it was trouble for sure. Hurricanes had struck New York several times in the past, but never since the Second Pulse.
Vlade had a page in his files for stormproofing the building, and he called it up on his main screen and alerted his team: all hands on deck! The to-do list was long and they would have to hurry. Not a drill, Vlade told his team. They had a couple of days at most. It was a lesson never to trust the NOAA modelers when it came to something this important, something he should have learned before. Their models had been getting really good, bu
t strange things still happened.
He was leaving his office to get started on the stormproofing when he recalled that Amelia Black was out there in the air somewhere nearby, and Idelba was on her barge off Coney Island. Big exposure for both of them.
He stopped to call them.
“Idelba, where are you?”
“On the Sisyphus, where else?”
“And where is your fine seacraft?”
She snorted. “In the Narrows, on my way in.”
“Ah, good. You saw the storm?”
“Yep. Looks bad, eh?”
“Really bad. Where are you going to go?”
“I’m not sure. I usually pull the barge into Brooklyn and stash it in the Gowanus, but I don’t know. The big warehouse on its south side melted, and that was my windbreak.”
“Do you want to come in here?”
“The barge won’t fit.”
“Maybe you could leave the barge in the Gowanus and come over here in the tug.”
“What makes you think your old pile will protect my tug?”
“We’ll be fine. Put it between us and the North building, like you did before. It’s kind of a private alley for us, and you’d be well protected from the south.”
“Okay. Maybe we’ll do that. Thanks.”
“Be quick as you can. You don’t want to be out when the wind hits.”
“Duh.”
So that could be checked off. Now Amelia.
“Hey Vlade, what’s up?”
“Amelia, where are you?”
“I’m up above Asbury Park Marsh.”
“Have you looked at the weather?”
“What, it’s beautiful. A bit hot and muggy. And visibility is down for optimum filming, but we’re following a pack of wolves who are trying to—”
“Amelia, how far can you see south?”
“Maybe twenty miles? I’m at five hundred feet.”
“Do you watch the weather screens?”
“Sure, but what—oh. Oh! Okay, wow. I see what you mean.”
“What was your producer thinking?”
“I didn’t tell them what I was up to, I’m just out here fooling around.”
“How fast can you get back here?”
“Well, maybe three or four hours? Why, do you think—”
“Yes I think! Start now, and hurry! Go full speed! Otherwise you’re going to be spending the night in Montreal. As a best case.”
“Okay. As soon as these wolves catch the turkeys.”
“Amelia!”
“Okay!”
So, maybe that was done. Vlade shook his head. Time to attend to the building. This stone wife of his would never talk back to him, but it had actions and reactions that resembled sulking, or grooving, or all kinds of moods. Now the building was quiet in the heat, and seemed tense. He growled and got going.
The Met was now around 230 years old, although to Vlade this meant little. The cathedrals of Europe were a thousand years old, the Acropolis was twenty-six hundred years old, the pyramids four thousand years old, and so on. Age was not a factor when it came to structural integrity. That was a matter first of design, second of materials. In both cases the Met had been fortunate. Vlade had no fear that anything could bring the tower down, it was foursquare and massively reinforced. Unlike the Chopsticks, the ridiculous glass splinters immediately to the south of them. Indeed if either of those stupid toothpicks fell north they could wreck the Met too, a thought that gave Vlade the creeps. Hopefully if they fell it would be in some other direction, although if they fell west they would crush the Flatiron, a building everyone around the bacino loved, though Vlade was glad he wasn’t its super; all those nonsquared walls were a pain, as Ettore was always saying, especially the narrow point at the north, where dogs had to wag their tails up and down, as Ettore had it. On the other hand, if the Chopsticks fell northwest they would crush across the square itself, cutting their little basin in half with a great mass of crap. Only if they fell east or south would they be no problem for the Madison Square group, although no doubt the damage in the fall zone would be severe. Alas, one had to hope they would keep standing.
He stood on the farm floor, looking south between the splinters. Wind was already pouring through the farm and flailing the green leaves of the crops. The corn would soon lodge, and Heloise and Manuel and other farmers were busy putting up storm shutters across the south side’s open windows. But these of course were vulnerable to lodging themselves.
“People!” Vlade said to them peremptorily. “This is a hurricane coming. A big one. Winds well over a hundred miles an hour.”
“So what do we do?”
“We have to storm-shutter all four sides. Otherwise we’ll get vacuumed. We should strengthen the shutters from behind too. We’ve got today to do it, looks like from the forecast.”
Heloise said, “We’ve only got enough shutters for two sides, maybe three.”
Vlade frowned. “Let’s do the south, east, and west walls.”
They got to work shuttering the farm’s tall open arches. This was no easy task, and few of them had ever done it, so Vlade had to educate people to the system. The panels were like greenhouse windows, translucent rather than transparent, and made of graphene layers such that they were extremely strong and light. While they were screwing these in place he kept looking south to see if he could see the storm, and talking on the wrist to the rest of his crew, all working hard on other chores. Around him he could see that all the skyscrapers in the city had crews engaged in similar work. It seemed like the skybridges were going to be vulnerable. The bridges were strong, but their attachments to their buildings would be tested. Probably a lot of docks were going to be torn off too.
With the farm shuttered, he attended to the strong possibility they were going to lose power. Their batteries were charged, generator fuel topped up, the photovoltaic sheathing and paint on the building as clean as it could be, and the storm would presumably wash it even cleaner. So even at the height of the storm the building itself would provide some power, as would the tide turbines down at the waterline. All good, but not enough. So Vlade joined a conference call with the local gridmaster, who was coordinating plans for various flex contingencies across the board, from total retention to complete loss, with the latter possibility taking up most of the talk. Who had what if they were the sole generators? Did anyone have enough to shove some juice back to the local node at the Twenty-ninth and Park station, which would then spread it around to those in need?
Well, not really. The worst-case scenario was every building fending for itself in a total loss, after the juice from the local station was drained. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen, or wouldn’t last for long. Every building was semi-self-sufficient, at least in theory, but it was surprising how short a time they could go without extra power. Take the stairs, eat cold food, light candles, sure, but what about sewage? What about potable water? Their photovoltaic power would have to be devoted to those functions, and maybe to one elevator.
But these were the concerns of people in a strong building, rated 80 or above in the self-sufficiency scales. The neighborhood was good in that regard; most buildings around Madison Square, and in the LMMAS more generally, were strong. But not all of them, and there were many other neighborhoods much weaker than theirs. And when push came to shove, the people in wrecked buildings were going to have to be taken care of, if they didn’t want hundreds of bodies fouling the canals. To put it at its most practical level. Vlade didn’t say that out loud, but other supers did; this was New York, after all. “If you die your body rots in my water supply, so get a fucking grip!”
This was a direct quote. He didn’t want to know who said it. Could have been anybody. He had already thought it. Everybody had.
Nothing to do but take care of your own part of the problem. As someone else had pointed out to that speaker. As in, “Mind your own business, fuckhead.”
A call came in: “Vlade, it’s Amelia.”
He was on t
he pigs’ floor above the farm; it was windy, the sky to the south a weird green, a green infused with black. He looked out a window and scanned the horizon to the southwest, saw nothing. Visibility was poor, a kind of pulsing murk. All air traffic had disappeared from the sky.
“Where are you?” he said.
“I’m outside the Narrows, over Staten Island.”
He peered that direction, saw nothing. “Why so slow?”
“I’ve been going as fast as I can! But now I can’t get any eastness, the wind is too strong from that way.”
“Damn it Amelia, this is going to be big, do you understand?”
“Of course I do, I can see it! I’m in it already!”
“Shit. Okay then, run north ahead of it. Don’t try to come here. Run north.”
“But it’s so windy!”
“Yeah. So if you can get down before it’s blowing too hard, get down. Anywhere. If the landing situation doesn’t look good, just let it run you north until it blows out. Don’t try to fight it. In fact, go as high as you can. Get above the turbulence, and you can just ride it out.”
“But I don’t want a ride!”
“Doesn’t matter what you want now, gal. You put yourself in this situation. At least you don’t have any bears on board. Or do you?”
“Vlade!”
“Don’t Vlade me! Deal!”
He got back to the building prep. Water tanks full, new lifestraw filters at their bottoms. They could keep water quality for a while with just rain and a gravity feed. Sewage tanks empty. Batteries charged, pantries stocked or at least not empty. Candles and lanterns. Test the generators, check fuel supplies. Get all the boats inside and racked. Empty the dock, and as far as securing the dock, well, shit. He joined the other Madison supers over on the Flatiron dock to talk it over. They were mostly in agreement: the docks were fucked. Best chance would be to tie them to buildings with hawsers that would give them a little bit more play than usual, but not too much. Hope they would just bounce on the waves and hold together. The supers on the north side of the bacino were aware that they were at the fetch of their little rectangular basin, so that their docks might serve as cushions for their buildings, take some hits from detritus—or they might turn into battering rams hammering the south exposures. Nothing to be done about that but see what happened.