“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.
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, but 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.