Mother of Storms (34 page)
Authors: John Barnes
And it’s not just hot, both of them are giving this wonderful scattershot montage of all sorts of feelings and thoughts about each other, as if somehow …
… their lives were passing before their eyes, Porter realizes, as he starts to come down off the induced high. They’re still banging away, Candy’s head bouncing back off the wall (she’ll wonder why it hurts later, Porter figures) and Bill pushing into her with all the force of his thighs, all but lifting her off the floor.
It’s a pointlessly morbid thought. Their lives are not passing before their eyes, and besides, Porter has edited dozens of wedges that included right-up-to-death material and that never has happened.
He dismisses it and focuses on getting all those memories to edit into
a more composed montage. Who’d have thought these two lumps of cheese would have all this stuff in them? Vintage Heartland Americana mixed with good solid porn—
a more composed montage. Who’d have thought these two lumps of cheese would have all this stuff in them? Vintage Heartland Americana mixed with good solid porn—
Candy hanging out in some student bar and Bill’s first sight of her, as she looked over her shoulder at him and he got one of those perfect hair-tit-butt shots that a hundred years of movies, TV, and XV have taught most of the women on Earth to do—and poor old stupid Bill reacted as if neither he nor anyone else had ever seen such a thing before—
Long corny walk in Oak Openings Park on one of those rare October days when the sun shines and the leaves look decent in Ohio, holding hands, itching to get some privacy and scrog till they’re sore but delaying it because both of them thought this was a happy moment, and surprise, it was … amber sunlight hitting Candy’s rather ordinary enhanced-blonde hair and turning it into a movie gold.
Bill’s moment of terror on Christmas Eve when he reached into his pocket and couldn’t find the engagement ring and wondered how he’d ever explain the minuscule heap of gifts he had for her—and the moment of relief as he found it. His pleasant surprise to realize that that moment was going to be the worst of it, asking her wasn’t half as scary … and then going to the Methodist Church together and singing carols by candlelight and the hot chocolate afterward (Porter is finding this all so Mom and Pop American that he wants to vomit, but he knows the audience out there will eat this right up)—and then, fabulous! the memory includes a stolen kiss and Bill realizing he can smell his own semen on her breath—
Candy has an explosive, crying, screaming orgasm, and before it’s over Bill is spurting into her. Porter gleefully logs the works. Passionet will be making money off this a hundred years from now.
They sink slowly to the carpet, still holding each other, very tenderly now, just beginning to feel how sore they will be. Bill cradles Candy’s head in his hands and kisses her; her mouth is slack and open, and as Porter pops over to her mind he finds that she’s all but unconscious with bliss, little aftershocks of pleasure still rolling up from her aching vulva.
Then the first peak gust hits. In the high winds of a hurricane, wind can gust to double and triple velocity. This gust, coming in from the sea, shatters the windows on the building, all at once. The two newlyweds have just time enough to look up and see the windowpanes hit the pink wall and burst into dust; Candy draws breath for a scream.
Ed Porter catches the jag of fear and is himself terrified, for one moment, before he can detach to notice what a grand and gorgeous piece of material he has grabbed here.
Candy’s scream and Bill’s moan of terror are drowned as the door bursts
out into the hallway—there is a terrible thunder as all the internal doors shatter or fall through.
out into the hallway—there is a terrible thunder as all the internal doors shatter or fall through.
The force exerted on a structure by wind is a function of two things: the square of the speed of the wind, and the relative roughness of the surface presented to the wind. Anything that makes the flow turbulent will increase the drag and hence the delivered force of the wind. This is why a car with open windows must burn so much more gasoline to maintain the same speed as one with closed windows—the open windows split up and mix the airflow, pit it against itself, make it turbulent.
The gust is already dwindling back to the original wind speed, but it is too late for Bill and Candy. The force on the outside of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel would be six times what it was at the moment of their orgasm—but that was before air began to circulate through the shattered windows and the myriad doorways and corridors of the interior. The additional turbulence increases the coupling—the percentage of energy from the wind that goes into the structure instead of passing over it—by many times.
Before their lungs empty with their shrieks of fear, the soft pink walls of the Royal Hawaiian shred and break, the great central tower cracks and begins to fall back away from the sea, the interior walls and floors, hit by aerodynamic lift in a dozen directions, break from the studs to fly against each other, and the blacktop roof peels up like the lid of a sardine can and sails away inland like a loose bedsheet in a thunderstorm, bursting into pieces as it goes.
The lurches prove too much for the structural members, and the Royal Hawaiian collapses, the great winds tearing off pieces as big as automobiles to hurl through the neighboring blocks of shops and restaurants and onto the Ala Wai Golf Course.
Bill and Candy do not have a chance to be aware of any of this. The blast of air through their room sucks the floor up and the ceiling down; Bill does not even have time to register horror or to understand what he is seeing when Candy’s head is flattened like a pumpkin on a sidewalk by the slap of the ceiling against it, for he is sailing across the room—they are still holding each other—and his head hits the wall where there’s a stud, shattering his skull instantly.
Ed Porter has it all on tape. Passionet is going to love him. And he’s way up here away from it all. He does a little dance, and, to relieve feelings he’s built up, he loops that last passionate intercourse (along with their memories of several other times) into a nonstop orgasm series of Candy, putting in the image of her head shattering between each surge. Passionet won’t want this but Ed has his connections and he knows there are some places where this will be a best-seller of a completely different kind; he plays the tape,
masturbates, ejaculates over and over at the intercut of bovine ecstasy and death like a sledgehammered steer—
masturbates, ejaculates over and over at the intercut of bovine ecstasy and death like a sledgehammered steer—
He is still sitting there, pulling on his now-sore penis, trying to get one more orgasm out of Bill and Candy, half an hour later, when a piece of old flagpole, torn from a downtown monument, pierces the Passionet offices, creating a hole for the wind to work on; moments later the building begins to crumble, but by now Ed Porter, impaled through the chest by the flagpole, his pants still around his knees, is past caring. Within an hour the records of the last of Bill and Candy are immersed, stirred violently, and float away (wedges are light and they are stored in airtight plastic), never to be found.
They’re getting low on movable satellites, and only Edwards and Baikonur, right now, can give them polar launches. The Kazakhs have been as helpful as possible, but their facility is old (hard to believe that it first launched well before President Hardshaw was born), and the Edwards launch facility was never really intended to do more than put up the occasional military package.
It’s also hard to find anything that can penetrate Clem well enough to tell what’s going on. As it scraped eastward down the northern side of the Hawaiians, winds curling in against the sheltered shores, available bandwidth fell steadily all night, so that, first, commercial XV had to go, and then television had to be switched to old-style low-def, and then phones went to audio only … . They now have occasional odd voice lines, and whenever they do get a satellite over at low altitude there are a few hams on Lanai and Molokai reporting what they can see—but the weather is far too rough for them to keep an outside antenna up, so their signal is barely reaching to low orbit, less than 100 miles away.
Admiral Singh reports immense seas and that the carrier group has had to fight for its life, but he’s drawing steadily away from Hurricane Clem and the best guess is that the Midway refugees, anyway, will be brought in alive.
Stirred by Clem, there are heavy thunderstorms up and down the West Coast, but most of the Hawaii refugee flights got in before the worst of it hit, and again there were no fatal accidents there. Jumplanes go high enough so that trans-Pacific flights are not interrupted, and there’s reportedly a booming trade in people trying to get a left-side window seat to see Clem from 100 miles up.
Hardshaw looks at the sheet in front of her and sighs. Nominally everything is going well—but this is only because absolutely no information is coming out of Hawaii. The major storm surge that has rolled out of Clem, after this change of direction, will probably roll along the south coast
of Mexico, but that’s mostly high rocky coast, with just a scattering of resorts, and the Mexican government should be able to get it evacuated. The surge that was on its way before is nearing the coasts of Washington and British Columbia, and low-lying areas are being evacuated there, hampered by the heavy rain.
of Mexico, but that’s mostly high rocky coast, with just a scattering of resorts, and the Mexican government should be able to get it evacuated. The surge that was on its way before is nearing the coasts of Washington and British Columbia, and low-lying areas are being evacuated there, hampered by the heavy rain.
And none of that answers the question “What has happened to Hawaii?” The major islands dropped off the communication links in neat order, Kauai going first, the Big Island last, hours ago—in fact, one bright boy at FEMA has arrived at what he calls the Silence Number—Beaufort 28. That is, when the winds reach Beaufort force 28, no regular communication can be expected from that site.
Oahu seems to have held on up to 29, and Nihau went out at 25, but as rules go it seems to hold true.
But right now, the peak wind force has just passed Oahu, with its majority of the state’s population. There is little question that many people must have been trapped on the highways, and the peak wind force was around Beaufort 35, more than enough to pick up and hurl automobiles, so there are unquestionably tens of thousands dead. In many places, roads ran near the coast; very likely some whole traffic jams were swept out to sea and are now on the bottom.
Radar seems to show ten- and twenty-meter waves forming in a circular pattern following Clem’s winds, in which case the sheltered shores have been battered to flinders. Rainfall—but again, all there is to go from is satellite radar—is so dense that it’s possible that people outside would drown, and there’s little question that there must be huge floods pouring off the central volcanoes of each island.
So there are immense numbers of dead, and many more will die of exposure, treatable injuries, and water-bome bacterial disease before adequate help can be gotten there. No structure on Earth, except those few underground military facilities supposed to be nuke-proof, was ever designed for winds like that, so although there are undoubtedly freak survivors, every bridge and building must be assumed down. All this they can know without being able to see.
Beaufort on Kauai is already down to 18—merely a very big hurricane—but nothing is back on the air and there’s no evidence that anything is moving down there except for the waters and winds. A couple of hotshot Army staticopter pilots, trained and accustomed to rough landing conditions, will try to set down in Lihue, the first big town where it’s even remotely feasible—by the time they get there the wind should be down to Beaufort 12, making it merely very difficult rather than impossible. Theoretically, with their hundreds of electrostatically charged blades, and ten replacements per blade available, staticopters are all but impossible to bring
down as long as the power source holds out—or the air doesn’t move faster than the staticopter.
down as long as the power source holds out—or the air doesn’t move faster than the staticopter.
She wishes them all the best of luck. She has nightmare visions of conditions suddenly ripping out all the blades, and then ten generations of replacements, within a second or so, and of air crews falling into the black storm. She knows staticopters have been out in Beaufort 13 and 14 winds, and the pilots are good—but right now it’s easier to worry about ten young men who might die than to think about tens of thousands of people who must already be dead.
In the dark and storm of Clem’s passing, a thousand possibilities have crossed Hardshaw’s desk. There may be immense waves confined to the super-hurricane radius, so that the whole coast of each island might have been scraped by hours of roaring water, high enough to erase Honolulu and most of the other cities; there’s even a suggestion from a couple of fuzzy radar images that such a wave might have torn across the low part of Oahu, ripping through Pearl Harbor and across Wheeler AFB at the crest, eventually flowing out through Waialua in the northwest.
Anything could be happening in there, but nothing good.
Hardshaw gets up from her chair and groans. She has been awake too long, sitting still too long. She’s had too much coffee and she’s going for more. This isn’t the first time she’s felt like President Grandma—hell, the job will make anyone feel like an old lady, it probably made Kennedy feel like an old lady.
All right, old woman, quit the griping, you could have been turning over burger or helping ranchers sue each other
. She stretches and turns to see Harris Diem coming in. His face is a sort of sick gray, and she’s not sure she’s ever seen him without a necktie before. Certainly never with his hair so uncombed and such bags under his eyes.
. She stretches and turns to see Harris Diem coming in. His face is a sort of sick gray, and she’s not sure she’s ever seen him without a necktie before. Certainly never with his hair so uncombed and such bags under his eyes.
“UN,” he says. “Rivera wants to talk to you. We’ve given him a ten-minute stall in case you want to get presentable.”
“That’ll take more than ten but let’s see what I can do.” She gets into the bathroom, thinks a moment, decides that Rivera can get used to waiting for the President, and strips out of her suit, yanks on a shower cap, and turns on the shower. She has only a glorious minute or so under the furious blast of hot water, barely time to rub a little soap here and there and to shake her head vigorously before she has to step out into the sauna, grab the big fluffy towels, and get herself dry, but she makes sure she enjoys every moment of it. At the end of the process she still feels like an old lady, but she feels like a clean old lady, and she grabs one of the spare suits from its hanger with almost a sense of victory.
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