They motored into the empty Madison bacino, then turned south with a full effort from Idelba and her guys all working different motors and rudders, shouting at each other in Berber and just barely getting the tug pointed south. The waves shoved them north and their stern would have rammed the docks at the north end of the bacino, but those docks were no longer there. Seemed it was basically a south wind, now that they were out on the canals.
Heading straight into the wind was easier than turning in it, and they got down the basin and turned left again, into Twenty-third canal headed east, all at a speed of no greater than five miles an hour.
They had two things going for them in the city, counterintuitive though both seemed to Vlade: the canals were so narrow and shallow that the water in them could only become a chaos of blown spray and froth, without high waves; in effect the waves were being blown off or smashed flat. Then also, what current there was got channelized by the canals and ran as straight as the Manhattan grid itself. The avenues they crossed had a hard flow from the south; the east-west streets were flowing from the west, or were simply balked and swirling. It was something they could deal with.
The tug moved through all this wild water and wind like some kind of hippo or brontosaurus, breasting the shredded water under it without noticeable rocking. Wind affected it more than water, but while they were moving east or west the buildings buffered the wind, and when they were moving south and north they were headed either directly into it or directly away from it. So they were only shoved hard in ways that gave them trouble when they were turning in the intersections. Each turn was an experiment and an exercise in screaming Berber. It took all the power of the tug’s side jets to keep the bow from being shoved north when they nosed out into an avenue canal; they had to max the bow jets and aft jets both, in opposite directions, to get the tug to turn. They banged a few buildings with their sides, sometimes hard, but when that happened the tug then rode its own backwash out toward the middle of the canal, and on they went.
Idelba said to Vlade, “Can you go out and help get people on board?”
Vlade nodded, took a deep breath, and left the bridge, using the door on its north side. Immediately he was drenched and could hear nothing but the storm. He couldn’t hear himself think; finally that old saying was really true. So he stopped trying to think, but before he gave up, he stepped into a harness Idelba passed out to him, and buckled it tight around his waist. The harness was carabinered and knotted to a rope that was tied to an eye at the front of the wheelhouse, so he was now attached to the tug like a climber to a belay, or a steeplejack to a tower.
As they came into the East Village, they saw as they had not before that the storm was simply devastating the city. The Wall Street skyscrapers looked okay, and perhaps they even provided some windbreak to the lower neighborhoods immediately north of them, but between the veering winds and the storm surge, the smaller and older buildings north and east of downtown were being overwhelmed. It was as they had heard over the radio, and seen when the cloud was up: buildings were falling down.
So people were desperate. They waved to Vlade from broken windows or even lying flat on rooftops, and as the tug motored down Second, Vlade indicated left or right, and Idelba and her guys got the tug over next to the buildings, and people jumped onto the tug, sometimes dropping ten feet or more, which of course injured many of them. Often they climbed up the tug’s side ladders from broken windows the tug passed, or from improvised rafts blown downwind onto them.
All of the refugees from the storm were soaked and chilled, and many bloodied. There were obvious broken bones, and many cuts and bruises. Lots of people in shock. It had been a bad night, and yesterday worse, and now the tug represented the first chance these people had seen to get to shelter.
The tug had an open deck, but Vlade got people tucked under the high taffrails and sent the worst into the cabins under the bridge, although he didn’t like opening those doors. After a while he ran up to the bridge and yanked the lee door open and crashed back into the big glass-walled room.
“The nearest hospital is Bellevue,” he shouted to Idelba with unnecessary volume.
“What about up to Central Park?”
“No! It won’t be possible to land people there, the street docks will be wrecked.”
“Where to then?”
“Bellevue hospital is at Twenty-sixth and First,” Vlade said.
“Bellevue? Isn’t that a mental hospital?”
“Well, NYU hospital is at Thirty-second and Park.”
“Let’s go there.”
“For people who aren’t hurt, we can just take them back to the Met, or any solid building that will take them. We can do a rectangle like a vapo.”
“Okay.”
Vlade leaped back out into the onslaught. In only ten blocks of going east on Houston they had picked up a couple hundred people, now filling the deck of the tug, seated and huddled together. Idelba and her guys managed a particularly difficult left turn at Houston and C, extremely exposed, the three of them working the props desperately to keep turning without getting blown too far across the Hamilton Fish bacino. Having managed that, they rode the wind and canal current up C to Fourteenth, fought through the left turn there and headed into the wind to Park, then turned right up Park and rumbled up to Thirty-second, where the NYU hospital, looking as crowded as their tug, took in all their wounded people through a north-side window on the fourth floor, broken open for that purpose, as it was now the current water level, and there was no other way to get people in. The surge was a big problem, and a big part of every other problem. It was indeed a vision of what a Third Pulse would do, or a nightmare flashback to half a century before. This was what it must have been like: the ground floor underwater, that entire part of the built environment devastated, after which a desperate improvisation to make use of the higher floors.
Injured passengers unloaded, they motored on along Thirty-second to Madison and another wicked left turn there, and after that pushed on in a tough but steady slog directly upwind. Back down to their building, where they could make an easier left turn on Twenty-fourth, and stop right under the utility door they had used to get on the barge. Vlade had called ahead, and many of the Met’s residents were there to help the remaining passengers into the building. When the Sisyphus was empty Idelba started out into the storm again.
“We’ll run out of fuel in about five runs,” she shouted to Vlade when he came into the bridge.
Their first circuit had taken about three hours, so fuel was a problem for the next day, it seemed. Vlade wondered if any fuel depots would still be operating. What would people do without fuel? Batteries couldn’t be recharged with the power down.
Into the wreckage of Stuyvesant. They couldn’t penetrate Peter Cooper Village, too many of the old towers had fallen into the narrow canals around them. Even out in the largest canals, they often ground onto submerged piles of something and had to back off and try a different way. Any way would do, as everywhere there were people desperate to be rescued; they merely made a single rectangular circuit and they were full again.
The flotsam and jetsam shoving around on the dirty flying foam of the canals now included dead bodies, some of people but mostly animals: raccoons, coyotes, deer, porcupines, possums. Lower Manhattan had been a lively habitat.