Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Recommended by Kirkus Reviews

"Sachs keeps the story moving full-steam-ahead, balancing his fleshed-out portraits of memorable characters with visceral action scenes... ...An engaging and ultimately devastating disaster novel."

-Kirkus Reviews

*

“The Flood is an epic thriller and a remarkable work of art – you’ll read it fast, but think (and dream) about it for a long time.”

-Matthew Mather, bestselling author of CyberStorm

***

 

More Early Praise for The Flood

“I feel honored to have been a beta-reader. The Flood was unlike anything I’ve ever read before.”

–Victoria L.

*

“Intriguing thrill-ride that never stops until the last page”

–Tia S.

*

“Master storyteller”

“You wind up changing who you're rooting for.... You see yourself in these characters. It's an action book and a psychological thriller at the same time, written with intelligence and courage."

–Joe M.

*****

Table of Contents

Early Reader Praise – 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 –15 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 22 – 23 – 24 – 25 – 26 – 27 – 28 – 29 – 30 – 31 – 32 – 33 – 34 – 35 – 36 – 37 – 38 – 39 – 40 – 41 – 42 – 43 – 44 – 45 – 46 – 47 – 48 – 49 – 50 – 51 – 52 – 53 – 54 – 55 – 56 – 57 – 58 – 59 – 60 – 61 – 62 – 63 – 64 – 65 – 66 – 67 – Give Feedback and Keep in Touch – About the Author – How This Story Came to Be – Thanks – Book Description – Copyright Information – E-BOOK EXTRA SHORT STORY: Locked in the Trunk of a Car

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The end of the world came

And we no longer asked, who to die by fire and who by sword

We all died by water.

–Gerry Adamson

1

A man leaned over a power auger, listening to the motor echo over the snow. Behind him, a fragile tent stood out on the wide white landscape. Inside the shelter, the two scientists examined ice samples. They searched for clues in a 65-million-year-old puzzle, the great die-off of dinosaurs and half the species on earth.

One day, the ground shook.

The table in the scientists’ shelter vibrated and slid towards the wall. The lamps swung from the roof. There was a booming noise from outside.

The world began to lean, until the table danced across to the opposite wall. Then the world flipped, the lights went out, and the sound of tearing filled the tumbling shelter.

They were the first to die.

2

 

It was a different world to wake to.

Travis Cooke was a paramedic and when he slept, coming off a long night shift, he still heard the ambulance siren in dreams. It confused him to be awakened by the noise. Sirens of all types, coming from all sides. His blurry eyes set on the bottle of sleeping pills and found their focus.

The clock on the nightstand said 7:15 a.m. He looked out the window and thought of zero hour. The streets of Brooklyn were filled with men, women and children running and cars almost at a standstill, horns honking in desperation. The end of the world. Terror. Terrorists, he thought.

Stressful and high-intensity events were his work. The reaction from his body should have been immediate. Instead, he was sluggish from the pills, uncoordinated. He fell from the bed. He thought of his son and ex-wife as he came to his feet. He turned on the TV as he began to dress. Before he could change the channel to the news station, he heard the president’s voice.

“…urge you to move inland…”

The picture came a moment after the sound. President Crawford was in an unfamiliar room. His seal was on the floor, and a flag stood next to the desk, but it was not the Oval Office.

“…as far as possible. This is a national emergency, an international emergency. The tsunami will be reaching Florida in under four hours, and will reach New York City by late this afternoon, before five o’clock, according to the best estimates we have right now. This will not be a survivable event. The National Guard will be directing transport airships to major hospitals. We ask all of those with cars to leave the coast immediately. We have asked that all transit companies, buses, trains, and airlines cancel all scheduled routes to assist in the evacuation process. We face a dark period in the next twenty-four hours.”

The pause seemed to last for hours. The president was saying something he knew would cause panic, possibly worldwide. That was the first thought that came to Travis.

“In other countries, tens of thousands may already have been killed. Only by acting quickly can we avoid losing hundreds of thousands.”

Travis tried phoning his ex-wife.

“The network is busy right now, please try again later.”

He grabbed his jacket.

Travis Cooke ran out of his apartment wondering if it would be the last time he’d see it.

3

Some felt safest in cars, others were headed for New Jersey by foot. The stampedes into each subway station that morning crushed dozens of the first New Yorkers to die.

Travis Cooke ran down broad Flatbush, the solid lanes of cars bounded by humans moving much more quickly on the sidewalks. He found himself funneled through the streets, all the current now flowing to the Manhattan Bridge. The strangers looked at each other as they ran, confirming that this was really happening.

From Brooklyn to Manhattan and from there to New Jersey, a solid sweep of cars and bodies. The strange hush of the movement punctuated by honking horns, kids crying, and random shouts. It was a nightmare marathon, all jarring for position. Travis saw individuals and small groups huddled in the crowd’s eddy spaces, sobbing, giving up already or simply unable to act.

There was a teenage girl he saw sitting on a bench, as if she were waiting for a bus. She stared at the rush of people. He thought about stopping.

At the Manhattan Bridge, the bottleneck of escapees impeded his progress. Bodies pressed into Travis’s, a hundred voices grunting, crying, shouting in his ears. His world shrunk to those bodies immediately around him. The drugs in his body still made him dizzy, but running straight was easy and his body was waking up quickly from the emotional and physical stress.

Crossing the river took close to ten minutes, then they poured out into the streets of Manhattan, across Chinatown, where buses filled up and forced their exit through crowds, horns honking. He ran up Chrystie to 2nd Ave, his feet heavy, sweat pouring from his temples. Everyone was running now in their own direction, to tunnels, bridges, trains, buses.

He ran uptown for twenty minutes, the tempo of his footfalls searing themselves into his mind, blocking out any thoughts of the equally frantic humans he passed by.

“Travis!” he heard, and he stopped to look around.

His eyes couldn’t focus on the shape approaching him. He tried to squint, but the sweat dripped and burned, making him shut his eyes. He felt his knees trembling with weakness and he leaned over, hyperventilating.

A hand was on his shoulder.

“Travis, where are you going?”

The voice was one he hadn’t heard in a while, a drinking buddy from midtown days.

“Corrina and Darren,” Travis managed.

“Travis, listen to me.”

The hand held him more firmly then or he would have fallen over.

“Get cross-town to the piers. They’re bringing in every goddamn ship on the sea to get people out. I just spoke with someone at Grand Central and it's no use. They’ll be running trains out till we’re under water and they won’t get all those people out. But I got my cell phone, I was able to get on the Internet. The bridges and tunnels are jammed. People have started abandoning their cars, and they’re blocking everything. The president has mobilized the Navy, private ships, everything, and they’re all going to the piers. That’s the last hope, Travis. I gotta go.”

Travis’s head was down by his knees. He reached into his pocket although he knew he wouldn’t find his inhaler. His fingers dug into the palm of his hand as his chest burned with each asthma-constricted breath. How many minutes was he wasting? He forced himself upright and blinked his eyes clear. He put one leg in front of the other and began jogging again. After a few hundred yards he crossed 2nd. The security door of the building was broken, the lobby was quiet.

Both elevators waited on the ground floor. He pressed the button and got in.

In the elevator, the quiet scared him. He wondered if the doors would open, and everyone outside would be dead. Finally the elevator stopped and opened. He ran down the hall and banged the door of 1115.

“Jesus, it’s you,” a tall, thin man said, opening the door.

Travis pushed through him.

“Where’s Darren?”

“Dad!”

The boy swept into his arms and Travis closed his eyes, forgetting about the man standing over him, as he held his son so tight he knew he was hurting him but he couldn’t stop. He tried to slow his breathing down and heard his own heartbeat in his head. He released his son and stood up.

Corrina Adamson stared at him from the bedroom door.

Travis looked from her to the man and said, “I tried to call but the network was overloaded.”

“We’ve been trying to get a line too, trying to find a way out,” the man said.

His name was Gerry Adamson. He stood half a foot taller than stocky Travis. “The highways are jammed. I was able to get a text to my cousin and he’s been stuck for two hours on the Turnpike. But now I can’t get anything else, the Internet connection keeps going out. We were about to get the car and take the Tappan Zee.”

“The West side piers,” Travis said. “I ran into someone coming up here, he told me the only option left is by sea. They’re evacuating from the West side.”

“By sea?” Corrina said. “How can we escape a tsunami by sea?”

“I don’t know, Corrina, but if the president is ordering ships to pick up refugees, I would think they know what they’re doing.”

Gerry rejected the idea. They had a car. They didn’t have to risk everything on a desperation play.

“We don’t have time to argue,” Travis said. “You should be gone. Obviously you didn’t like any of your options too much. The bridges are a mess, people are leaving their cars. Let’s get the Hell out of here.  If the piers plan doesn’t work out, we can find a way to Jersey from there.”

“I think we should go to the piers,” Darren said.

The three adults stopped and looked down at him. At six years old, he held his face in an aping of serious adult concentration.

“Okay, let’s go," Corrina said.

“What if there’s no way out from there?” Gerry asked.

“It’s just a few blocks,” Corrina said. “We can go there and still have time to try something else.”

She smiled at Darren, and he smiled.

Travis picked up his son’s backpack, a cartoon design covering the back of it. “Is this all your luggage, Darren?”

“Yeah,” Darren said.

“Let’s go.”

He picked up his boy. Corrina and Gerry each grabbed a large travel bag from a matching set.

By the elevator they waited, Travis glancing at Corrina and Gerry clutching their wheeled luggage by the extended handles. Travis had nothing save the jeans and sneakers, the sweat-soaked long-sleeved t-shirt and his light jacket. He didn’t think of that, though.  He thought only that he had Darren, which was then the only thing he cared to keep in this world.

4

November 19, Manhattan’s citizens gave up their hold on the levers of the earth. The stock exchanges, the banks, the boardrooms and media centers, all were empty. The action was on the street, and in the homes. The flood was an event that cut across all life stories. Everyone was doing something when it came.

The current in the streets flowed west, to the ships. To the last way out. There were faces looking out windows above them all, resigned to their fate, or skeptical of the gravity of the situation, or who just hadn’t heard and didn’t know how to ask and didn’t get what was going on at all.

Jogging straight up 51st St., Travis felt disembodied looking up and seeing the faces above. Another day, he might have been throwing himself through fire to rescue those people. Today, he hurried past, leaving them to death. For a reason he wasn’t sure of, he was leaving them now.

He had worked abroad as a paramedic with the Red Cross in Sudan and Haiti. He’d faced massive damage to the population and had worked knowing he could only save a few of the many, but he’d worked to save that few. Why not here? His son was on his back as they jogged. That was why. He was no hero. When it was expected of him in his work to help, he did so. When fleeing was called for, he fled.

All he had in his understanding of what was behind all this was the one word spoken by President Crawford: tsunami. Millions of New Yorkers fleeing their city, and he imagined few had even taken the time to discuss what was happening, how this could be possible, whether it were all somehow a mistake.

He was aware of keeping together with Gerry and Corrina as they ran, their talk clipped by expressions of disbelief, but Travis’s mind followed the buildings and street corners he passed, cutting across the heart of town past Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan’s studded body of concrete and steel, ancient masonry and mirrored glass.

As he voiced assurances to Darren, he thought that the stage his life had been played on might be destroyed forever. His would be the last generation to inherit four hundred years of Manhattan. Scenes of his New York life passed through his head. The Park. The school on Delancey and dad’s shop just down the street, the bar on Bleecker, the University, the hospitals, the rugby pitches, the nights out, Woody Allen and the Godfather movies, and Sasha’s party in Little Italy where the most beautiful girl in New York gave him her number. On this stage, his son’s life had begun, too. The set designers had something new in mind for this next generation.

At 11th Ave, the crowds were dense, blocking the view of the Hudson River a block away, but the concrete canopy of the Manhattan Cruise Terminal could be seen framed by the sky. Travis spotted several National Guardsmen watching with hands on rifles, doing their jobs while he fled without even his pager. The crowds were moving forward, pouring into the terminal buildings by the thousands. There were cruise ships visible beyond the terminals. Looking south, Travis saw a mismatched array of large and small craft docking and disembarking from Pier 86.

It was like this at the dozens of piers down the West Side, around New York, down the East Coast. Many ships were freightliners, and the crews were frantically removing the massive cargo containers to make space while armed Guardsmen held the crowds back. The White House had learned from hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and had mobilized as aggressively as the most powerful nation on earth could. From New Jersey’s naval station Earle came the AOE supply ships that were now filling their holds with New Yorkers – the USS Arctic, USS Supply, and USS Seattle.

The ships were manned with skeleton crews, and hurried from the dock with unprecedented and unpracticed urgency.

Over the heads of the crowd, Travis could see the towers of a cargo frigate pulling away.

“This way,” Gerry said. “I think there’s more movement by that terminal.”

A fight erupted to their left, four men tearing at each other while a woman screamed. A Guardsman fired his weapon into the air, shocking the fighting men into passivity, but the effect on the crowd was to finalize the impression of chaos in America, that weapon fire was now necessary to maintain control. There was a surge forward under the strength of this new panic. Travis and his group were well into the crowd now, and he held Darren in his arms. Gerry held his bag with the pull-handle by his side. Corrina still pushed hers on the ground, keeping it in front of her feet. As they held themselves close, they said only with eye contact, Stick together!

“Don’t worry, Darren,” Corrina said. “Don’t worry, Darren.”

They were within fifty yards of one of the terminal entrances, and soon they were inside the vast hall. The flow of the crowd now was bounded by the building, and differentiated into streams to each stairway to the embarkation levels. There was terrific screaming, echoing in the huge room as groups argued over which ship on each side of the terminal to try for, which stairwell was flowing best. The flow had its own natural course, and individual choices were rendered meaningless by the brute power of it.

Upstairs, security had been turned inside out: doors everywhere were open, and security screening sections and metal detectors abandoned. National Guardsmen waited on the building’s exterior apron, maintaining order as Travis and the others emerged again to the open air. The ship itself loomed over them now, filling their vision, a great bulk of white and blue steel and circular windows, belted by lifeboats midway up, and capped by decorative spikes and curves of the top deck satellite globes, radar trees, the bridge, the logo-painted smokestack and other towers, just showing above the top.

A gangway rose up from the dock to an opening one floor up, and a human stream poured up and into the ship’s belly, emptying NY and filling the boat. Ships fit for thousands emptying a city of millions. Travis thought of a mosquito on an elephant.

There was a surge from the left, hitting Travis and Darren first, pushing them into Gerry and Corrina. A large circle in the surge began to fall, and in the tight space, the group was all pulled down together in the mass. Men and women were climbing over each other to get up.

“Darren! Darren!” Travis heard Corrina amid the screams.

“I’ve got him,” Travis shouted. With Darren still in his arms, he was sinking while the other bodies were pushing up around him. There were seconds until the crowd would surge again and he and his son would be under it.

A pair of black hands stretched down to him out of overcoat sleeves and white shirt cuffs. The hands grabbed his arms and pulled him upwards. Travis could see the man tensing his body to resist the pressure from behind him. He was in his fifties, dressed in a suit and overcoat, the tie gone. With his help, Travis was able to turn himself and pull himself upright behind Corrina.

Darren bawled, and Travis could just give him little squeezes on his back to calm him.

“Thanks,” Travis said without being able to see the man behind him then, feeling him pressed into his back.

“Soft spot for kids,” the man said.

Travis turned his head and just caught the forced smile that lit up the man’s furrowed face.

He saw that Gerry and Corrina’s suitcases were gone.

They could see armed National Guardsmen in the space between the stairs and the ship’s hull. The Guardsmen themselves had a desperate look; they were there to protect these people. How would they act if the people became the danger? Travis could see another ship beginning to pull away. He couldn’t see the crowd beneath that ship. He heard gunfire, and then screaming filled the air. Pushing Corrina ahead of him, with the stranger pushing him from behind, he was on the gangway stairs. The move up was halting, but manageable.

There was shouting around him now distinct above the other screams.

“This way, this way!”

“Matthew! Matthew!”

“Don’t lose me!”

“This way! Please follow the crew!”

This was a voice with authority. The voice assured Travis, and he felt the tension around him ease, too, with the voice. Looking out at the Hudson, he saw another cruise ship on its way down river, following closely behind a freighter whose deck was packed with escapees.

Travis heard all the voices around him going up the stairs. It was a habit he could not break. He was an observer of people and a listener, and he always heard the voices around him.

“I have to go back!”

“Oh God, help me!”

“This way, through here!”

“Please, I have to go back!”

“My leg is broken! Please help me!”

“Follow the crew!”

“Please, I have to go back!”

Corrina was suddenly gone ahead of him, and Travis was pulled off the gangway through the opening into a great hall by white-sleeved arms. He was shoved to the left. He was aware of soft light and colors around him, weird on this dark day.

“This way! Follow the crew inside!”

“Please, I have to go back!” he heard one last time from behind him.