Her Name Will Be Faith (62 page)

Authors: Christopher Nicole

"Knocked out?" she cried. "But..."

"A long time," he said.
"A couple of hours. I don't know for sure. I
lost my watch. But then, this..."
he touched his arm and winced.

"Oh, Richard! It looks broken or something."

"It sure hurts."

"Oh,
Richard!" She wanted to scream and scream… but at least
partly with joy –
and pride. "Oh, darling Richard, you came through the storm… what a risk
you took."

He gave his crooked grin. "Well, I had to wait
for the old girl to say I could. Then she changed her mind. Women are like
that."

"You could have been
killed." She held his good arm and drew him towards the bathroom.
"And I had better set that arm and patch you up before you bleed to
death."

He had been taking in the damage. "But you… and
the children..."

"We're
okay," she said, opening the bathroom door. "We're really
quite
snug in here." She closed the bathroom door behind them and lit
a
candle. Suddenly she felt faint and weak – from exhaustion mostly, but
also from sheer relief at
Richard's presence. Despite his torn and ragged
appearance, his legs dribbling blood into the rug, his broken arm, he
was still a tower of strength. "Hey,
kids," she said, as they woke up.
"You
remember Mr Connors, the weatherman from NABS. He came
over to see how
we've been doing. Wasn't that good of him?"

"Hi, Mr Connors," Owen
Michael said. "We're doing fine. We had
no problems at all."

Richard looked at Jo.

"No problems at all," she echoed.

SUNDAY 30 JULY
Morning

By daybreak Faith had long
turned back to the northeast, and, dying, was spending the last of her vicious
energy over Cape Cod. In New York the wind was no more than fresh. The rain had
stopped, the clouds had cleared, and there was blue sky to accompany the
sunrise.

The floodwaters had
receded, and the survivors began to emerge from the hiding places they had used
for eighteen hours and more, unable to believe they were alive.

Horror gripped them as
they looked at the city. A jumbled mass of
destroyed
vehicles, uprooted trees and shrubs, shattered buildings, some
totally collapsed, even the more substantial ones
badly damaged. And
dead bodies, choked into the most unlikely places,
became too obvious.

It was time to work.

Assistant
Commissioner McGrath and a handful of patrolmen had
fought their way up to the
emergency police headquarters in the Plaza
Hotel,
along with the Mayor and most of his staff, and from here McGrath
assumed
command of the city law and order, for Commissioner Grundy
had not been seen since Police Headquarters had
been flooded out. Using
radio, McGrath began assembling his battered and
exhausted men and
women to control events,
stop looting, and begin the job of clearing up
and hopefully preventing
disease.

He did not lack help; at
dawn half the available United States Army, with their medical corps, was
airlifted into the disaster area to assist.

At
dawn, too, Chauffeur Murray awoke James Calthrop White; they
had slept shoulder to
shoulder in the back seat of the Rolls. Amazingly, although the ditch had
filled with rain, the engine started first kick, and when an army helicopter
landed nearby to see if they were all right, they managed to push the car back
on to the road.

"You want to go into
town, JC?" Murray asked.

"I want to go home,
Joe," J. Calthrop White said. "And have a large Scotch. Come to think
of it, we'll
each
have a large Scotch."

Which they did. Amazingly,
JC's house had escaped serious damage.

And at dawn too the
surviving New Yorkers, wherever they might be, gathered in church and chapel,
synagogue, mosque and temple, to give thanks for their deliverance.

At 8.00
am the President of the United States arrived by helicopter, to
be greeted by the Governor
and Mayor Naseby, and taken on a bird's-eye tour of the stricken city and its
environments. "To think that one storm could do so much damage," the
President mused. "It makes one wonder what we're doing, with our puny
little bombs and bullets, when there is that
lurking
out there, waiting to strike. But do you realize how lucky we were
that
it happened on a Saturday? And that there was adequate warning?
If all the banks and business places had been open
and crowded… shit.
Bill..." he turned to Naseby. "I have to
hand it to you, Bill, because I reckon we were lucky in having you in charge,
as well. That was some decision you took, to order the evacuation of the entire
city, while the storm was still a good distance away. But by God, if you hadn't..."

Naseby
looked down at the ruins beneath him. "Yeah," he said. "But
I
didn't make that decision, Mr President. At least, not until it was forced
upon
me. The evacuation was ordered by a television weatherman,
Richard
Connors, on his own initiative. Because he knew what was
coming, and the rest of us
wouldn't believe him."

"Then
Connors is someone I'd like to meet," the President said. "Or
is that
confidential?"

"I
think Mr President is asking, Bill, if you are going to tell that fact
to the voters," the
Governor put in.

Naseby
grinned. "I'll have to think about that. But I sure intend to
tell Mr Connors, supposing
I can find him." He looked down at the city again. "And supposing
he's alive."

SUNDAY 30 JULY
Afternoon

"Yeah,"
Mark Hammond said into his radio. "She's clear of land and
heading off to
Newfoundland. Winds dropping all the time. Round the center they're 80 miles an
hour. I guess by tonight you'll be able to downgrade her to a storm. That's
Faith, Doctor. We're heading back to base."

He turned the aircraft,
allowing it to sink lower as he did so. They left
the still turbulent mass of white behind them and dipped into clear
skies with only little balls of cotton wool floating gently around and above
them
as they descended.

"Still some sea
running," Landry commented, looking down at the whitecaps and the waves,
flattened by the angle but still clearly several feet high, surging up the Gulf
Stream.

"Yeah," Mark agreed. "I don't give much
for the chances of any ship caught out in that. Home, boys, where the sun
shines all the time."

"Hold it."
Mackenzie had come up to join them on the flight deck and was using binoculars.
"There's something down there."

"Where?"

"I've
lost it now. But there was something. Let's make a sweep,
skipper."

"One sweep,"
Mark grunted. He, and all his crew, were suffering from exhaustion and lack of
sleep. Mackenzie was probably hallucinating.

"There it is,"
Landry said.

"Show me." Mark
swung the plane again.

"Look,"
Mackenzie said.

"Take
her," Mark told Landry, and leveled the binoculars. By now
they
were only 500 feet above the waves, and following Mackenzie's
pointing finger he saw the
sudden spurt of orange amidst the blue and white. "That's a life
raft."

"And there are men in
it," Mackenzie said.

Landry had dropped to 300
feet, and now they could clearly see the
bodies
draped across the half collapsed raft – the canopy had blown away
and
one of the compartments had deflated.

"Shit, what a position
to be in," Mackenzie commented. "You reckon those guys can be
alive?"

"I reckon we'd better
get a helicopter out here to find out," Mark said, and thumbed his handset
again.

Afterwards

In a remarkable two weeks
life was heading back to normal. It would take months, years, completely to
restore the city to its old, sleazy, greatness,
but over the next two days, as soon as the worst of the debris was
cleared away from the streets, tunnels and
subways and all the bodies that were going to be recovered had been
found,
services were working again on a limited scale, and the airport
runways repaired and re-opened. People began to
pick up their lives
again. With massive help pouring in, not only from
the rest of the United States but from all over the world, disease was averted
and the job of cleaning away the demolished buildings was facilitated.

As soon as it was safe to
leave Park Avenue, Richard took Jo and the children to his apartment, which had
remained undamaged, and there they spent the next few days, while the roads
were being cleared and the cleanup got under way. The city was supplied with
food and drinking water by the army, using great trucks and containers; it was
rather like being under siege, but at least there was no danger involved. Jo
did not attempt to explain her situation to Owen Michael and Tamsin, who did
not question it. In the aftermath of such a catastrophe questions about
personal relationships seemed for the moment irrelevant.

But
once power was restored Richard felt it his duty to go back to work
– broken arm in a
sling – nothing further having been said about his dismissal, or indeed
heard from JC at all. With the NABS building a
shambles, news and weather reporting was to say the least, primitive,
but
a service was provided.

Jo knew she had to regain
contact with the family, but the telephones were still out. She and the
children returned to Park Avenue, and were overwhelmed with joy to find
Washington back on duty, even if the place was more of a wreck than they
remembered – but the building itself remained sound, and the repairmen
were already at work. While the
Cadillac was
still in the garage, into which, miraculously, only a trickle
of water had penetrated. Jo now discovered that
Washington had a spare
set of keys for it. She kissed him with relief.
Sadly, he had no news of Florence, and in view of the total destruction of
Coney Island the worst had to be supposed.

Nor was there any news to
be had from Greenwich Village, where the destruction and loss of life had been
massive; the entire area had been cordoned off by the army because bodies were
still being recovered from the wreckage of houses and there the risk of disease
had not yet been eradicated. "Next of kin will be informed as soon as
identification can be
made," the major in
charge told Jo. "If your sister-in-law is here, we'll
find her. But…
you'd better pray she ain't."

Jo and the children called
at the
Profiles
office and found it gutted and
deserted, so they drove up to New Rochdale to collect Nana, then went
on
out to Bognor, which had been sideswiped by the storm but suffered no real
damage; Faith, having turned north-east, had been losing force when she swept
over Connecticut. The cottage was untouched save for fallen trees. It was a
tremendous relief to find real normalcy at last. To
walk from room to room, opening doors and windows to sunshine, to
look
at each room prettily arranged with pictures, and ornaments and
undamaged furniture – drapes moving gently
in the warm air. And
clothes! Jo wanted to touch everything, flick
electric switches to be sure they worked, check out the fridge and freezer...