Odds Against Tomorrow (29 page)

The water in the neighborhoods along the East River—Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Sunset Park, and, to a lesser extent, Red Hook—had dropped from feet to inches. But those neighborhoods that fronted the sea, in lower Brooklyn and Queens—from Sea Gate (12.5 feet) to East New York (5 feet) and even parts of East Flatbush (10 inches)—had barely changed. By evening the numbers decreased, but in the morning they returned to their previous levels. Every time a higher figure appeared there were groans of outrage from the crowd. The FEMA woman, shrugging, blamed imprecise measurements, but Mitchell knew better. The fluctuations weren’t due to faulty equipment; the culprit was the tide. Washing in and washing out. And every time the water receded, it swept out traces of civilization—walls, furniture, bodies.

Nor were the refugees pleased to see that while their neighborhoods in the outer boroughs were turning to swamp, the water in lower Manhattan was dropping rapidly. Manhattan, however, had help. The island had been surrounded by Mosquitoes—supertankers with suction pumps built to clean up oil spills. The Mosquitoes vacuumed millions of barrels of water every hour and pumped the effluent into the bight. Another day of the Mosquitoes slurping up Manhattan’s water and, according to the whiteboard, the borough would be dry.

“How about that?” said Jane. “We could be having dinner at the Palm tomorrow night. I could use a steak. Rare. Salted and charred. Side of half-and-half. Side of creamed spinach.”

“Jane.”

“Side of thick-cut
bacon
.”

“Dry doesn’t mean safe. They’ll have to send thousands of assessors, engineers, garbage crews. Imagine the amount of trash. Millions of tons, mountains, skyscrapers of trash.”

Jane’s mouth went slack.

“What,” said Mitchell. “What is it?”

“It’s like you don’t even
want
to go back.”

“That’s not true,” he said. But it was true. He could admit that much to himself.

“I don’t get it. Would you rather stay
here
?”

“No! Of course not.”

Jane turned abruptly, advancing toward the woman with the clipboard. Her name tag read
LANORE.

“Lanore? Excuse me, but when do the buses start leaving for Manhattan?”

“I’m sorry,” said Lanore. “I don’t have that information.”

“But you work for FEMA, don’t you? You must know something. We need to get back.”

“I know. We all want to go home.”

“Jane,” said Mitchell, touching her shoulder. “It’s OK.”

“No, it’s not.” Jane shook him off with a violent twitch. Her eyes were blazing. He’d never seen her like this. “She has a
job
to do.”

“Yeah!” said a man standing behind Mitchell. “We want answers!”

“Hey lady, what about Gowanus?”

“Lady, why is the water getting
higher
in Dyker Heights?”

“She making up shit.”

Lanore looked around anxiously, as if for backup. But no other staff was near. Just a crowd of angry, scared people.

“I don’t know anything,” said Lanore to Jane. “I just don’t.”

“Do you even work for FEMA?”

Lanore shook her head, her lips trembling.

“I’m a receptionist for the Brooklyn Transit Police,” she said, unable to stifle a sob. “District Thirty-nine. I don’t know nothing. My family—I haven’t heard from them since this whole mess started. I don’t know where they are.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jane. “That’s horrible.”

“She’s crying. Look at that.”

“At least she got a fancy trailer.”

“At least she
got
family.”

Lanore, her cheeks damp, focused on Mitchell. The sight of him seemed to embolden her.

“But you—you’re the so-called Prophet. And you’re telling me that
you
don’t know what’s happening?”

The crowd turned to Mitchell. The crowd turned—and Jane turned too.

Mitchell put up his hands.

“I’m just a financial consultant,” he said.

“He doesn’t know anything,” said Jane a bit too firmly, but it was too late. No one would listen to her. At the trailer the previous evening, when he had made his apologies, Marcy Rosado and her friends had appeared unconvinced, but they had left him alone. It helped that they had recognized his name from the news. At lunch, two of the McIntyre kids had even asked him to autograph their napkins. But now the mood was different. Nobody here wanted his ink. They wanted his blood.

A circle closed around him. The shouting faces moved in, their breath hot on his neck, on his brow.

“Jane!” said Mitchell. “Jane!”

Jane was yelling somewhere, but very quietly. The other voices were louder and angrier.

“What are you keeping from us?” said an old man in a cloth cap and grimy overcoat, very close to Mitchell’s ear.

“I’ve heard about you,” said a woman with a crumpled, washed-out face, on the other side of him. She smelled of detergent. He thought she might have been one of the McIntyres.

“Tell us what you know.” This was a skinny white man with five-day stubble and a ghastly Oklahoma-shaped scab across his nose. He shook with rage, spittle forming on his lip. His fists clenched. “Tell us, kid!”

The man reached out and nudged Mitchell’s shoulder. “Tell us!”

Mitchell raised his arms in front of his face. He was trapped within a tiny chamber of noise and saliva.

And then a very strong and very large hand came down on his head.

7.

They met after midnight at the northern tip of the island, beneath the railroad overpass.

It was too dark to see faces. That was the point. If the expedition failed, they didn’t want to get arrested. Already there were rumors that the jails were swelling, that a person who stole bottled water would be tossed into the same cell as the murderers. In case they needed a further reminder, the yellow blinking lights of Rikers Island were visible across the river, the searchlights cutting scythes in the black water.

It was too dark to see faces, but Mitchell could tell that there were eight people in all, only three of whom he could identify: himself, Jane, and Hank Cho. It wasn’t difficult to pick out Hank. He was six three, about 230 pounds, with a powerful torso and a broad, flat head like a tombstone. His arms, too, were brawny, but short, as if the bulk he had added to his arm muscles caused them to contract. The general resemblance was to one of those carnivorous bipedal dinosaurs. Mitchell had felt the power in Hank Cho’s fingers that afternoon, when Hank placed his palm over Mitchell’s head.

“Leave the boy,” Hank had said. “He don’t know shit.”

The fingers exerted a remarkable pressure on Mitchell’s skull.

“And they call him prophet,” yelled one of the McIntyre men.

Hank gave McIntyre a defiant glare. McIntyre shrugged, and turned his back. The crowd dissipated, the refugees wandering to their trailers. Once the danger had passed, Hank lifted his hand.

“Thank you,” said Mitchell. “They wanted to kill me.”

“I have a proposition for you,” said Hank. He gestured at Jane. “And your friend.”

And so they ended up at the midnight meeting beneath the railroad overpass.

The plan was simple. They were going to get off FEMA island. Where they ended up would be their own business, but for safety they would escape in a single group. They’d leave in the middle of the night. The plan was simple, but the execution posed problems.

“They patrol the roads,” said one man. “You trying to swim?”

“They patrol the three highway bridges. But not the Hell Gate. That’s only for freight trains. It spans the Bronx Kill.”

“What?”

“The water between here and Queens.” Hank pointed in the direction of the RFK Bridge. “
That
. The Hell Gate is the little bridge, without the lights. In front of the big one.”

The RFK was lit brightly now, electricity having been restored, but the old railroad bridge stood in complete darkness. In the moonlight all you could see were the triangle cutouts of the steel trusses and the squat towers on either shore. Mitchell had never seen the bridge before, but he remembered it from disaster assessments of New York. The Army Corps of Engineers concluded that the Hell Gate would be the last bridge standing in New York after a nuclear explosion. Left to nature, it would outlast every other bridge in the city by a millennium.

“Hell Gate over Bronx Kill?” someone said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Looks dangerous.”

“We have to walk on train tracks?”

“This is ludicrous.” That was Jane.

Inwardly Mitchell cursed Alec Charnoble. In some way, he was convinced, this was all Charnoble’s fault.

“The Hell Gate will take us into Astoria,” said Hank. “It’s a freight track, but there are no trains running now. We stay on the track past the bridge. It goes over Woodside, then bends south to Middle Village, Ridgewood, all the way to Broadway Junction.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I work for the MTA.”

“Yeah, right. Doing what?”

“Track maintenance foreman.”

“I don’t live but ten blocks from Broadway Junction,” said someone.

“I’m two stops east.”

“From Broadway Junction,” said Hank, “you can go wherever you like. I’m planning on heading south.”

“You from down there?”

“Nope. Flushing. But I’ve been hearing that Flatlands and below got clean swept away.”

“Why you going, then?”

“I’m looking to start again.”

No one had anything to say about that.

“What are the Flatlands?” This was Mitchell.

“It’s just about the end of the earth,” someone said. “Or as close as you can get without leaving New York City.”

“It’s east of Flatbush Avenue, west of Ralph,” said Hank. “Near Mill Basin and the Belt Parkway, protected by the Rockaways from the sea. No subways go there. It was working class—mostly West Indians and Orthodox Jews. Now it’s a giant patch of dirt. You can bet the government won’t be rehabilitating it anytime soon.”

“It’s cold,” Jane whispered in Mitchell’s ear. “Can we go?”

“One second,” said Mitchell. “Let’s hear him out.”

“When’s this supposed to happen?” someone said.

“Tomorrow night,” said Hank. “We meet at the far end of the tennis courts. I’ll bring flashlights. But we don’t turn them on until we’re over Hell Gate.”

The only sound was the river slapping playfully against the rocks.

“Any other questions?”

“Yeah,” said one woman. “Why are you in charge?”

“You got a better idea, pop it.”

They waited.

“I’ll see you tomorrow midnight. Don’t let the word out. We don’t know who’s watching.”

Mitchell and Jane separated from the others and walked quickly back to their trailer.

“Who could be watching us?” said Jane after they were out of earshot. “He’s not just paranoid. He’s delusional.”

“Paranoia has its advantages. Did you see his arms?”

“Yeah. That dude is a piece of meat.”

The smell engulfed them as soon as they entered the trailer, a sour, moldering, damp animal rot—the smell of despair.

“It’s intolerable,” said Mitchell.

“I know. I’d open the windows, but then we lose the AC. Lose-lose.” She cracked open a can of water and took a swig. “We have to get out of here. But we have to be smart about it.”

“Mm.”

“You’re thinking about going,” she said. “You’re actually thinking about leaving tomorrow. With Korean G.I. Joe.”

“The man is Chinese.”

“What about me?”

“We go together.”

“And Future Days?”

“The FEMA people say it’ll be at least a week until the city opens. That’s optimistic. We have time.” He watched for her reaction. She didn’t react. “We can’t stay here.”

“Look, I don’t feel safe here either. But it’s better than the Flatlands.”

There was more to it, of course. It wasn’t only fear for their safety that made the Flatlands seem like a promising alternative. Unless he had some time to concentrate, in solitude, and consider everything that had happened, he wouldn’t be able to figure out the next thing, the big thing to which FutureWorld, Tammy, and even Ticonderoga were inexorably leading him. And there had to be something else, didn’t there? For if not, what had all this been for?

“You saw the way they went after me yesterday,” said Mitchell. “They wanted to kill me. If it weren’t for Hank Cho, what do you think would have happened?”

“I realize. But casting out into the unknown? It’s just so not like you.”

“I’m not like me anymore.”

There had to be a big, perfect thing right ahead, some pursuit more vast and profound than fear prediction. Now that his old way of life was gone, nothing remained. He was as bare as the floodgrounds. So there had to be something larger up ahead, because if not, then the only thing was destruction and chaos—

“So you would just leave me here,” said Jane. She looked frantically around the trailer: the stained cabinets, the wilted, understuffed polyester couch, the linoleum floor that curled up at the edges like a piece of burning paper.

“Of course not. I’m just saying the guy’s plan is worth some thought.”

Jane went into the bedroom. Out flew a pillow, then the extra blanket.

“You can think about the plan all you want,” she said, “over there.” She pointed to the couch.

The door closed, then locked.

He switched off the overhead fluorescent panel and spread the moth-bitten blanket over his body. That was Jane for you. Determined, devoted, never casual. She demanded full devotion in return. And she deserved it. But could he give it to her?

He had a picture of Jane carefully wiping the soot off his face outside the infirmary at Ticonderoga, cradling his head in her trembling hands. He blocked it out. He turned on the couch and tried to hit the cushions into softness, but nothing worked, and then an uncomfortable sensation covered him like a heavy woolen blanket and he couldn’t escape from under it. For the first time he could remember, he was making a plainly irrational decision. Jane’s logic was sound. Futurism, as she’d put it on Herman Loaiza’s bus, was the way of the future. After Tammy, the risk market would be at peak demand. It was important to establish Future Days immediately. Futurism was now a job for specialists, but it wouldn’t be much longer. A few more years of these new meteorological patterns, a few more disasters, and every person on the street would be able to speak intelligently about drought, methane pollution, UV poisoning. The intricacies of planetary collapse would be general knowledge. Kid stuff. So Jane had every reason to act with urgency. And Mitchell had every reason to join her.