'These should help keep you warm,' the man said. 'Just wrap them around yourselves, and keep them closed as much as possible.'
Garth and I nodded our thanks, then hurried out the door after McCloskey and Frank Palorino. The amphetamine was already starting to kick in; it was putting strength in my legs, but I felt giddy, with a strong metallic taste in the back of my mouth.
'How are you feeling?' Garth asked as we followed the two policemen down a corridor I hadn't had time to explore.
'Don't ask-but the answer is probably no worse than you.'
Garth grunted. 'I didn't take a dunking through the ice in the Hudson,' he said in a low voice. 'Maybe you should take a pass on this, brother. It's not going to do anybody any good if you fall off a snowmobile in our travels. You know I'm not going to leave you behind; but if you agree to stay here, you'd be in a position to get right through to Kevin Shannon or Mr. Lippitt as soon as the telephones come back on line.'
'No. You had it right the first time. Either of us can call Shannon or Mr. Lippitt anywhere along the line. I won't fall off any snowmobile-and I won't slow us down; if I do think I'm slowing us down, then I'll bail out the first chance I get. There must be emergency shelters all over the place. In the meantime, all I have to do is keep truckin' along for a few hours. After that, it won't make much difference, will it? At least not for millions of other people.'
'Okay,' Garth replied simply.
I'd hoped to have time to look for my sneakers and my Seecamp, but we were going out another way and, as I myself had pointed out, at the end seconds could count. I, at least, was wearing heavy wool socks, and I knew I was just going to have to make do.
There was another elevator at the end of the corridor, and it took us express all the way down to street level. It opened into a wood-paneled vestibule; three doors-smashed in by McCloskey on his way to our rescue-later, we were out on Fifth Avenue, which I barely recognized.
Wind screamed all around us, and in the whipping, swirling gusts of snow we could barely see each other. Garth wrapped the silver, life-preserving shroud tightly around me, then lifted me up in his arms in order to keep my stocking-clad feet out of the snow. We might have been somewhere in a blizzard-whipped Arctic, except for the huge, towering black shapes of surrounding buildings which occasionally came into view when the wind shifted. Off to our right, McCloskey and Palorino were conferring with three parka-clad policemen. When they had finished, the three men nodded, then walked away, quickly disappearing into the blinding snow. A few moments later we heard an approaching roar, and then we were surrounded by men on snowmobiles. McCloskey and Palorino replaced two of the drivers. At McCloskey's signal, Garth sat me down on the seat behind Palorino; I pulled my feet up as far as possible, adjusted my silver shroud, then wrapped my arms tightly around his waist, burying my bare hands in the deep pockets of his down-filled parka. Garth climbed on behind McCloskey, and then we were off in a roar of unmuffled engines.
Speeding, bumping, sliding, carving through the Arctic night that had somehow descended over New York City, I was completely disoriented. I knew where we had to go, and how to get there, but it was as if the world had been turned upside down, and the swirling white made it impossible-for me, at least-to tell direction. But McCloskey and Palorino somehow managed to keep going. Occasionally we swerved sharply, or flew through the air; after a few of these tricky ground and aerial maneuvers, I realized that we were running an obstacle course of abandoned cars that were three-quarters buried in the snow. With my cheek pressed tightly against Frank Palorino's back, I could see only to my right, and, although we were making our way through midtown Manhattan, I could not make out a single landmark through the slit in my silver wrapping. I wasn't exactly warm; but, with Palorino's body acting as a wind screen, I wasn't exactly cold, either, and I knew that I would be all right as long as I kept the foillike material wrapped around me. I felt like a candy bar. Oddly enough, my feet were giving me the most problems-not from cold, but from the heat from the manifold on which I was resting them; I kept pulling them up and trying to lock my knees against the front of the carriage rack.
The amphetamine and antibiotic injection notwithstanding, I kept passing out for brief but dangerous periods; wrapped in my thin cocoon in a world of darkness, I kept segueing in and out of semiconsciousness. Every once in a while I was conscious of Palorino's hand on my hip or thigh as he reached back to make certain I was still centered on the seat behind him. Once I woke up to find that we had stopped, and we were surrounded by a number of National Guardsmen who were talking to us excitedly-nodding, gesturing, pointing. There was the acrid smell of gasoline, and then the delicious aroma of coffee right under my nose. I grabbed at the Styrofoam container and drank greedily, burning my tongue and the roof of my mouth and not caring. Then came the deafening roar of the motors, and we were once again on our way.
Sometimes I dreamed fever dreams, and in one of my dreams I glimpsed a great silver object in the snow, white on white, a potential weapon in our thus far decidedly one-sided battle against insane men and mindless nature. 'SST!' I shouted against the thick material of Frank Palorino's parka. 'SST!'
But Palorino couldn't hear me over the roar of the engine, or maybe I was only dreaming that I was shouting, because there was no response. Time lost meaning, and I just focused all my attention on the need to hang on to my driver. Once when I woke up, my surroundings seemed clearer, and I realized that it was dawn. I drifted back to sleep.
14
I awoke with a start, started to sit up, and grabbed at my head as a sharp pain shot through my skull. For a moment I couldn't figure out where I was or what had happened-and then I remembered. I sat up straight, ignoring the pain in my head, and looked around me. It took me a few moments to orient myself, and then I realized that I was alone on the backseat of an olive-drab-colored National Guard Sno-Cat, which had been left with the motor running and the heater turned on full blast. Above the steady, throaty growl of the Sno-Cat's engine, I could hear wind screaming outside the frosted Plexiglas windows. The storm had not let up, but the milky light pouring in through the windows told me that it was day. I glanced at my watch, then realized that it had been thoroughly disabled during my tussle and dousing with Tanker Thompson.
Cursing under my breath, I yanked on the door handle and pushed open the door with my shoulder; the door was promptly caught and yanked back off its hinges by a powerful gust of wind. I stuck out my head, squinted against the swirling snow; the Sno-Cat, along with the two snowmobiles we had been riding on, was parked atop a massive snowdrift near the entrance to the control tower at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Still cursing Garth for leaving me behind, I eased back into the interior of the Sno-Cat to take stock of myself. I felt groggy, to be sure, but I thought that my fever might be down. I took the plastic bottle of amphetamines out of my pocket, shook out one of the green pills, and swallowed it. Then I rewrapped myself in my foil shroud, slid back across the seat, and fell out into the snow. I slid down the face of the drift on my back, got up, hippety-hopped and waded through the snow in my stocking feet to the entrance to the control tower. I went through the door, paused long enough to brush as much snow as I could off my socks, then hurried up the stairs.
I found Garth, McCloskey, Palorino, and two National Guardsmen up in the glass dome at the top of the control tower talking to two unshaven, obviously exhausted air traffic controllers who kept shaking their heads and gesturing out the windows.
Garth turned and saw me as I came through the door. 'Mongo!'
'What time is it?'
'Four o'clock,' Garth said quietly.
Eight hours left.
'Are the telephones working?'
Garth shook his head.
'We can't wait.'
'Mongo, there's nothing we can do but wait and hope,' McCloskey replied in a weary voice. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark circles around them. 'Nothing can get out of here; even if it could, it's debatable whether we could get to Idaho in time to do anything. Our only hope is that we'll get telephone communications back in time for the Air Force to send planes to find and destroy the place.'
