Jack’s heart hammered in his chest. Had the kid just threatened him? Couldn’t be. He was proclaiming God’s word. He patted his left hand fingers against his right sleeve, feeling the cast beneath, fearful that the burning would spark back up. The coat no longer smelled like Mary. It smelled like cigarette, and burning fabric.
He turned for the door, intent on pouring water over the mark before he forgot. Michael was standing just to the side of the door, his black skin cloaking him in the shadows. The angel looked down the alley, and when he turned back to Jack, he simply shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m thinking I should probably spend more ‘quality’ time with you. Full time, I mean. What do you think?” The angel laid a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe get you a soda or something while you’re preaching. Keep you out of any more trouble.”
Jack smiled. The angel was with him always, and would not let anything bad happen. “He...” Jack nodded back down the alley. “He wasn’t really –”
“No,” Michael said, laughed and changed appearance, just a little. For a moment, he looked more human than Jack could remember. The blessed angel coming to Earth to help God’s children see the light. They walked together back into the shelter.
He'd said something about getting a soda, too. Jack remembered that. Amen.
40
The clouds began forming later that night, rolling out from various points across the globe. Many of these had been expected by the forecasters. The initial reports were of no concern.
“Rain starting this morning, ending by mid-day,” said the meteorologist in Providence, Rhode Island.
“Rain starting late morning, possibly continuing into tonight,” said the woman to her audience in San Francisco. “Tomorrow should be sunny and warm, in the high seventies in the Bay Area, mid- to upper-eighties across the bridge.”
“Clearing tomorrow.”
“Clearing tonight, mid-sixties tomorrow and partly cloudy.”
The reports from the Midwest began as “Sunny all day, but with a chance of a storm front moving in along the jet stream....” to “Looks like a storm is brewing from the west, and rain should be coming in tonight....” to “Well, everyone's wrong one time, ha, ha; the clouds are building now, and rain is expected...”
“Rain is expected...”
“Rain today, maybe into tomorrow, depending on when this massive storm front moves off.”
Within the various weather bureau offices, meteorologists were not smiling. There was no camera to broadcast their fear to the millions of homes across the country and the world. Phones rang from every desk and coat pocket. Inboxes filled as one regional office emailed questions of those in other arenas. Weather-related internet sites could not keep pace with the sudden changes, nor with the surge of traffic coming their way from people wanting answers.
Few associated the weather with the sudden, sporadic loss of cellular service in many phones, or the flickers of digital static on cable television stations. One man did notice these occurrences, however, and they worried him greatly.
By nine o'clock in the morning, Eastern Standard time, April twenty-ninth, the weather experts stood at their desks or those of coworkers, looked at large screen radar maps in central tracking stations, watched with growing horror the former high pressure areas push out to sea. In their wake, low-pressure symbols dotted computer-enhanced maps. These low-pressure zones appeared like ghosts over the next hour, having no valid reason to be there.
White images on the satellite broadcasts spread like milk over a kitchen table. Meteorologists stared at the screens, felt their stomachs tighten.
Over every land mass, the digitized images of clouds grew, confirmed by satellite photographs. Every ocean and major body of water was smooth, untroubled. The low-pressure over the land squeezed in, held in place by the wall of high-pressure atmosphere stalled over the seas.
As the color images changed from white to blue, the people in the weather bureaus became the first to understand what was about to happen.
God was preparing to wring these phantom clouds out over his people.
* * *
Resolute Bay isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from here . The words were printed on the front of Greg Nessun’s tee-shirt, currently buried by a thick wool sweater and insulated Canada Goose parka. He’d purchased it at one of the few shops and co-ops on his first visit to this small Arctic town and wore the shirt every time he traveled here from Quebec City. Usually, no one got a chance to see it. Greg shoved the long plastic compass into the deep pockets of his coat and glanced at the signpost in the center of town. Montreal, 2082 miles read one of a dozen placards jutting from the pole. Formerly only a weather station and military base, Resolute Bay was now home to an ever-changing population of scientists living amid the two hundred-plus Inuit natives who called this land their own. In past visits, the sense of magnificent isolation the distance marker implied gave Greg a boyish sense of adventure.
Not today. He wasn’t supposed to be here, not for another two years. But MIRP was having a nervous breakdown, and it was Greg’s job to investigate. Over the past week and a half the Magnetic Information Retrieval Program had been trying to keep up with the north magnetic pole’s declination – the amount of shift of magnetic North across the Canadian Arctic and away from true North – what everyone not in his line of business called the North Pole. The magnetic pole always shifted, slowly and invariably, southwest at a steady, predictable pace. It has been doing so since the Earth’s formation, eventually readjusting itself to a more northerly locale only to begin a new, slow trek south. Over and over, ad infinitum.
Why, then, in the past few weeks, had observers begun to report extreme and sudden shifts above the usual one-percent-per-decade declination? If reports were to be trusted, and they have been in the past, the last two weeks revealed a shift of almost nine percent. An anomaly, nothing more, but one that triggered the call from GSC chief Francois Gourmond and Greg’s hastily-made travel plans. An anomaly, yes, but one which happened often enough there was no need for panic.
So here was he was, three years early, at the northernmost point of Canada to which commercial flights still dared travel. Greg needed to take his own measurements, find the pattern, and calm the growing mania that something more was afoot than a simple shifting of the planet’s molten core. The media hadn’t caught on to this newest development, but it was only a matter of time. Every day they searched out new angles and rumors, loose or non-existent, to connect with the Great Flood frenzy around the world. When the Geological Survey of Canada picked him for this trip, it was almost a relief. In a town where the primary objective was simple survival, imaginations rarely got as out-of-control as the rest of civilization.
He walked brusquely down Main Street towards Maheba’s Grille –one of a myriad of clustered pre-built square structures huddled a few hundred yards from the bay’s frozen shoreline. Nothing was pretty here except the landscape, not even the two hotels in town. Everything practical and strong, like the people, built to withstand the harsh, unrelenting winter always swirling around the Cornwallis Islands. Nothing out of place that he could see in the now-constant daylight around him, masked at the moment by the heavy cloud cover of a typical Artic storm blowing in since the weather began warming to a balmy negative ten Celsius. Just another day at the top of the world.