Idelba herself didn’t care. “So many animals are going to get killed,” she said. And of course that made them both think of Stefan and Roberto. They glanced at each other, or nearly, but said nothing.
Later when they were alone Vlade said, “I’d feel a lot better if I knew where they were.”
“I know. But they can find shelter. They know to do that.”
“If the surge doesn’t catch them off guard.”
“Most of the shelter they would take would be taller than that.”
This was not necessarily true. “Roberto is not too good at risk assessment,” he said.
Idelba said, “You have to hope a storm like this would put the fear of God in him.”
“Or that Stefan will stop him from doing anything too stupid.”
Idelba put a hand to his arm. Vlade sighed. Sixteen years since she had last touched him. This moment of the storm.
The hours passed, the storm kept howling. Vlade spent some time looking for ways to cut more power without making people uncomfortable. He walked the building a few times, and at sunset he stomped back up to the tower to have a look around. It was black up there; he had arrived too late, unless it had looked that way all afternoon, which was possible. The great city was now a mass of rectilinear shadows, enduring under the flail of rain and wind. The south side of the Empire State was no longer a single white waterfall, but it was still crazy-looking, with spray dashing down its central chute and then being blown up on gusts. The western sky was no lighter than the east; it looked like an hour after sunset, though it was actually an hour before. But day was done. It never had managed much on this day. Someone on the radio had said that sometime that night they would be passed over by the eye of the storm. That would be interesting to see from up here. If the eye passed over the center of New York harbor, the great bay and the eye of the storm might be about the same size. He wanted to come back up here to see if that happened. He wondered if he could power one elevator twice an hour, just to come up here and take looks. Would be nice not to hike the long haul up and down the stairs. Down was harder, or more painful. He was tempted just to lie down and sleep up here. All of a sudden he was very, very tired.
But Idelba came up and got him, and walked him back down to the office, and she slept on the couch there while he crashed in his room. For which he was grateful. Sixteen years, he thought as he fell asleep. Maybe seventeen now.
The center of the hurricane passed in the night, and there was the classic lull that occurred at the eye of the storm, audible even from Vlade’s bed, in the negative sense that the background roar went away for a while. Barometer reading crazy low, it bottomed out on Vlade’s barometer at 25.9. Storm surge possibly rose a bit in the eye, but no way to tell what was causing what.
In the night the clouds came back, and at dawn NOAA said the other side of the hurricane would be hitting soon. Wind would now come from the southwest and would be strongest at the start, when the eyewall passed over them. So Vlade and Idelba got up and climbed the stairs to the tower again to have a look.
At sunrise the sun blazed in a crack between Earth and cloud, looking like an atomic bomb. Then it rose behind the mass of low cloud, and the day went as dark as the day before. Winds quickly grew ferocious, this time coming in from over the Hudson. The change seemed to be some kind of last straw, because buildings all over lower Manhattan began to fall into the canals. Radio reports came in of people taking refuge in skybridges, rafts, life jackets—huddling on exposed wreckage, or nearby rooftops—swimming to refuge—drowning.
“Damn,” Idelba said, listening to a Coast Guard channel. “We’ve got to do something.”
Vlade, focused on the problems of keeping the Met secure, was shocked at the notion that anything could be done. “Like what?”
“We could take the tug out into the canals and bring people to hospitals or something. Either around here or up to Central Park.”
“Shit, Idelba. It’s crazy out there.”
“I know, but the tug is a brick. Even if it sank it would still be sticking up out of these canals.”
“Not in this surge.”
“Well, it won’t sink. And if we could keep it centered in the canals, we could move a lot of people. Just run around like a giant vapo.”
Vlade sighed. He knew Idelba would not let go of an idea once she had it. “Let’s get your guys. Are you sure they’ll go for it?”
“Hell yeah.”
So they rousted Thabo and Abdul, who said they had already been wondering when Idelba was going to think of this. Then they went down to the utility door under the skybridge to North, where they could get out just above the storm surge, still fifteen or twenty feet above the normal high tide. Idelba and her team hauled on the westernmost hawsers until the tug was angled in the canal, and then they could jump down onto its bow and go to its bridge.
Even that minute of exposure soaked them despite their rain gear, and the noise out in the open air was simply stupendous. They couldn’t hear themselves even when shouting in each other’s ears, until they had clawed their way up to the bridge and gotten inside. Even opening and closing the bridge’s door was a terrifying endeavor, only possible because they were between the two big buildings. Once inside and with the door closed, shouting worked again. Thabo turned the motors on, and they felt the vibration of them without being able to hear them.
So there they were, out in the storm. But navigating something as wide and long as Idelba’s tug through the canals was very difficult. The only thing that made it possible was that there were multiple motors and props at both ends of the beast, and rudders too, which allowed them to push hard in all directions, from both ends of the tug. Whether these would be enough to counteract the wind and waves, they would only find out by trying.
They motored into the empty Madison bacino, then turned south with a full effort from Idelba and her guys all working different motors and rudders, shouting at each other in Berber and just barely getting the tug pointed south. The waves shoved them north and their stern would have rammed the docks at the north end of the bacino, but those docks were no longer there. Seemed it was basically a south wind, now that they were out on the canals.
Heading straight into the wind was easier than turning in it, and they got down the basin and turned left again, into Twenty-third canal headed east, all at a speed of no greater than five miles an hour.
They had two things going for them in the city, counterintuitive though both seemed to Vlade: the canals were so narrow and shallow that the water in them could only become a chaos of blown spray and froth, without high waves; in effect the waves were being blown off or smashed flat. Then also, what current there was got channelized by the canals and ran as straight as the Manhattan grid itself. The avenues they crossed had a hard flow from the south; the east-west streets were flowing from the west, or were simply balked and swirling. It was something they could deal with.
The tug moved through all this wild water and wind like some kind of hippo or brontosaurus, breasting the shredded water under it without noticeable rocking. Wind affected it more than water, but while they were moving east or west the buildings buffered the wind, and when they were moving south and north they were headed either directly into it or directly away from it. So they were only shoved hard in ways that gave them trouble when they were turning in the intersections. Each turn was an experiment and an exercise in screaming Berber. It took all the power of the tug’s side jets to keep the bow from being shoved north when they nosed out into an avenue canal; they had to max the bow jets and aft jets both, in opposite directions, to get the tug to turn. They banged a few buildings with their sides, sometimes hard, but when that happened the tug then rode its own backwash out toward the middle of the canal, and on they went.
Idelba said to Vlade, “Can you go out and help get people on board?”
Vlade nodded, took a deep breath, and left the bridge, using the door on its north side. Immediately he was drenched and co
uld hear nothing but the storm. He couldn’t hear himself think; finally that old saying was really true. So he stopped trying to think, but before he gave up, he stepped into a harness Idelba passed out to him, and buckled it tight around his waist. The harness was carabinered and knotted to a rope that was tied to an eye at the front of the wheelhouse, so he was now attached to the tug like a climber to a belay, or a steeplejack to a tower.
As they came into the East Village, they saw as they had not before that the storm was simply devastating the city. The Wall Street skyscrapers looked okay, and perhaps they even provided some windbreak to the lower neighborhoods immediately north of them, but between the veering winds and the storm surge, the smaller and older buildings north and east of downtown were being overwhelmed. It was as they had heard over the radio, and seen when the cloud was up: buildings were falling down.
So people were desperate. They waved to Vlade from broken windows or even lying flat on rooftops, and as the tug motored down Second, Vlade indicated left or right, and Idelba and her guys got the tug over next to the buildings, and people jumped onto the tug, sometimes dropping ten feet or more, which of course injured many of them. Often they climbed up the tug’s side ladders from broken windows the tug passed, or from improvised rafts blown downwind onto them.
All of the refugees from the storm were soaked and chilled, and many bloodied. There were obvious broken bones, and many cuts and bruises. Lots of people in shock. It had been a bad night, and yesterday worse, and now the tug represented the first chance these people had seen to get to shelter.
The tug had an open deck, but Vlade got people tucked under the high taffrails and sent the worst into the cabins under the bridge, although he didn’t like opening those doors. After a while he ran up to the bridge and yanked the lee door open and crashed back into the big glass-walled room.
“The nearest hospital is Bellevue,” he shouted to Idelba with unnecessary volume.
“What about up to Central Park?”
“No! It won’t be possible to land people there, the street docks will be wrecked.”
“Where to then?”
“Bellevue hospital is at Twenty-sixth and First,” Vlade said.
“Bellevue? Isn’t that a mental hospital?”
“Well, NYU hospital is at Thirty-second and Park.”
“Let’s go there.”
“For people who aren’t hurt, we can just take them back to the Met, or any solid building that will take them. We can do a rectangle like a vapo.”
“Okay.”
Vlade leaped back out into the onslaught. In only ten blocks of going east on Houston they had picked up a couple hundred people, now filling the deck of the tug, seated and huddled together. Idelba and her guys managed a particularly difficult left turn at Houston and C, extremely exposed, the three of them working the props desperately to keep turning without getting blown too far across the Hamilton Fish bacino. Having managed that, they rode the wind and canal current up C to Fourteenth, fought through the left turn there and headed into the wind to Park, then turned right up Park and rumbled up to Thirty-second, where the NYU hospital, looking as crowded as their tug, took in all their wounded people through a north-side window on the fourth floor, broken open for that purpose, as it was now the current water level, and there was no other way to get people in. The surge was a big problem, and a big part of every other problem. It was indeed a vision of what a Third Pulse would do, or a nightmare flashback to half a century before. This was what it must have been like: the ground floor underwater, that entire part of the built environment devastated, after which a desperate improvisation to make use of the higher floors.
Injured passengers unloaded, they motored on along Thirty-second to Madison and another wicked left turn there, and after that pushed on in a tough but steady slog directly upwind. Back down to their building, where they could make an easier left turn on Twenty-fourth, and stop right under the utility door they had used to get on the barge. Vlade had called ahead, and many of the Met’s residents were there to help the remaining passengers into the building. When the Sisyphus was empty Idelba started out into the storm again.
“We’ll run out of fuel in about five runs,” she shouted to Vlade when he came into the bridge.
Their first circuit had taken about three hours, so fuel was a problem for the next day, it seemed. Vlade wondered if any fuel depots would still be operating. What would people do without fuel? Batteries couldn’t be recharged with the power down.
Into the wreckage of Stuyvesant. They couldn’t penetrate Peter Cooper Village, too many of the old towers had fallen into the narrow canals around them. Even out in the largest canals, they often ground onto submerged piles of something and had to back off and try a different way. Any way would do, as everywhere there were people desperate to be rescued; they merely made a single rectangular circuit and they were full again.
The flotsam and jetsam shoving around on the dirty flying foam of the canals now included dead bodies, some of people but mostly animals: raccoons, coyotes, deer, porcupines, possums. Lower Manhattan had been a lively habitat.
“Damn, this is just like that overtopping of Bjarke’s Wall that Hexter told us about,” Vlade said to no one, looking up and down the whitewater canals. “The city’s getting trashed!”
He was on the bridge at this point, but still no one heard him, not even he himself. Or if they did they didn’t bother to respond. Idelba was focused on piloting, and on the buildings they were passing. What she saw on her sonar and radar of the canal bottoms was more important to her than any floating wreckage.
“Save what we can,” she said a while later, indicating she had heard him after all. “They’ll sort it out later.”
Vlade could only nod and go back outside into the storm to help people get over the side of the tug, and into the cabins if they were hurt.
While he was down there on the bow deck, holding on hard, helping haul people in from windows they passed, he spotted two men swimming together, to their right against the buildings. By standing on an awning frame they could just make it high enough for Vlade to help boost them up and over the side. They saw this and got on the awning. The tug was headed west on Twenty-ninth, and about to turn south on Lex, so Idelba was running as far to the right as she could already, to make more room to fight through the left turn. Just as Vlade was leaning down to grab the hands of the reaching men, a big wave caught the tug from the left, possibly a surge from a fallen building, anyway massive; it cast the tug right into the building at the corner, crushing the two men between tug and wall with a palpable thump. The tug held there against the wall, and Vlade, who had jerked up just in time to get clear of the collision himself, looked up at Idelba and screamed at her to turn left, waving his arms desperately. He saw through the bridge’s windshield that she had seen what had happened and was spinning the wheel and gunning the jets to turn left. He could feel the vibration of the motors under him, fighting the wind.
Finally the tug heaved away from the wall, water sluicing into the growing gap between it and the building. Vlade looked down; the two men were gone. He was startled not to see their crushed bodies floating on the water, but no, nothing. Only two streaks of blood on the wall of the building, right above the slapping waves. It occurred to him that bodies with the air squashed out of their lungs might have lost enough buoyancy to sink like stones. Apparently so. Anyway there was no sign of them. Just those smears of blood.
He twisted away and leaned over the bow, feeling sick. When he had mastered his features he turned and looked up at Idelba. She was staring down at him with a horrified look, gesturing to ask what was up, if she should stop the tug. He shook his head, pointed south. “Go!” he shouted, and waved at her to make the left turn and head down Lex. But what about those men? she indicated, pointing and asking something. He shook his head again. No one to save. When Idelba understood him her face contorted and she looked away. A few seconds later the tug’s motors kicked in, and i
t struggled through the left turn onto Lex and ground its way south into the wind and waves. Idelba stared downtown, her face like a mask.
Through the rest of that day they managed three more circuits. Then darkness fell, and they agreed it was too dangerous to be out and about. But then, as they were headed for the Met, the wind subsided to a mere gale, maybe thirty miles an hour, Vlade guessed; so Idelba kept them going, the tug’s super-powerful night lights glazing the immediate vicinity like a welder’s torch. By their lurid illumination they made two more circuits, after which they were out of fuel. Never did the number of people needing rescue lessen. They dropped off the injured at NYU hospital until it was bursting at the seams, then they were directed to the Tisch hospital on First, and on the circuit after that, to Bellevue. That was good in some ways, as it made for a shorter run and saved fuel and time.