Margaret's Ark (21 page)

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.

Nothing more.

He pushed through the door into the heat of Maheba’s Grille, and wondered why he was so shaken up.

“Well, look who’s back! It’s Greg, right?”

Dora was a heavy, fleshy woman with the Mongol features of her Inuit tribe. She had the most welcoming smile on the island, and she always remembered his name. She remembered
everyone
.

“Morning, Dora,” he said, and unzipped the parka, throwing the hood away from his curly, salt and pepper hair. He hadn’t fastened it tight enough and both ears burned in the sudden warmth. “At least, I think it’s morning. Hard to tell these days.”

She laughed politely and tossed a frayed menu on a table across the room. He accepted the implied invitation, shrugged the coat completely off and laid it over the back of the chair before sitting. Dora held a steel carafe and said, “Coffee?”

“Please, thanks.”

She poured. “You up here to fix my satellite TV? Been nothing but fuzz the last couple of days.” He heard, or thought he did, the
worry.
The one thing he did not want to hear from anyone in this place, this last bastion of sanity.

“Sorry, no. I don’t do televisions. Just up tracking my wandering pole, as usual.” He hesitated. “Reception’s bad here, too?”

She pursed her lips, nodded. “Hmm, mm. Cell phones, you name it. If it needs a satellite, it sucks wind last few days. But I guess you know that already....”

He did. Satellite interference was one of the most irritating side effects of an overactive magnetic field. The coffee was stronger than he liked it, but it was
hot
. The stinging of his ears slowly faded. “Yep. Declinations a little extreme right now. Jumping all over the place. Not to worry; does this all the time. You should know that, Dora, being around us tech heads all the time.”

She nodded, poked the menu. “Let me know what you’d like, Honey. Things are slow with the weather. You got here just in time for a doozy. I doubt anymore flights will be coming for a while.”

On cue, the wind slammed against the side of the building, picking up intensity as he studied the menu. Nothing new, he reminded himself. By the time he finished his meal, it would have calmed then started back up again at least twice. “Sounds like it,” he said and continued studying the menu, seeing none of it. Seeing the compass hidden away in his pocket, Dora watched him.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

He gave up any pretense of reading and sat back in his chair. “I assume you mean the pole, not the weather. It’s just a bit mischievous. This kind of thing has never been a bad omen before. It’s perfectly – “

“Some folks,” she said, interrupting, looking out the window at the storm whipping by like gray-white smoke, “they say there’s some giant, supernatural storm brewing everywhere, all over the world. Like the Great Flood in the Bible, you know?”

He nodded. “Yeah, Dora, I know. The pilot was rambling on about it during the descent. But what we have going on up there,” he pointed to the nicotine-yellowed ceiling, “has nothing to do with that, if that
is
what’s going on and not just some overblown news reaction to a rainy day. Just a coincidence. How’s the beef today?”

“What?” Her eyes came back into focus. “Oh, fine, fine. Got fresh chuck in day before yesterday.” She raised her pad, grateful for the distraction. So was he.

“A burger then, My Good Lady, with fries if you got ‘em. Just keep the coffee flowing. Anything else will just freeze in my gut on the walk back to the hotel.” He smiled, kept his tone light. She smiled distractedly, wrote the order and was soon the old Dora he remembered before everything in the world went insane. During the plane’s descent to Resolute Bay’s small airport, minutes before the clouds rolled in, he’d scanned the horizon for signs of any arks. He saw none, and wasn’t about to ask now.

Dora walked back to the counter, slid the order through a large rectangular window where a grizzly bear of a man glared at it from over the grill. He nodded silently before moving out of sight. Greg reached behind him, felt the compass in his coat pocket. He wanted to check again, see if anything had changed. Of course, even if magnetic North had moved in the few minutes since he’d taken his initial, baseline reading in the airport’s terminal, he’d have to assume something was wrong with the instrument. His time was booked at the Howison Building’s facilities for nine-thirty tomorrow morning. He’d get his most accurate readings there, before trekking further north when the storm let up. Still, the itch to check one more time was strong.

Dora was back. Greg pulled his hand from the pocket. He wouldn’t check, not with her waiting for him to tell her the end of the world was coming.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Some folks had been saying on the news –” she sighed, “maybe they still are but my satellite’s busted... anyway, they say that we’re due for one of those, you know, pole flips. North becomes South, and vice-versa? They say with things getting all fuzzy lately, and –”

“Dora,” he raised a hand. He hoped he wouldn’t have to repeat this to every local while he was up here. “I promise you one thing, if I can’t promise
anything
else about what’s happening lately – aside from the fact that we probably have another few thousand years before that ever happens...
if
it ever happens... the media is going to put more meaning on it than it deserves. The poles are driven by hydrodynamics in the Earth’s core, not the weather. If anything, the weather’s driven by the
poles
, not the other way around. Even if such an astronomically rare event should happen tomorrow, the most amazing thing you might notice are auroras over Africa.
Nothing else
.”

Her large body sagged with relief. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.” It was a speech he and the rest at the GSC repeated over and over to the press, the same one they’d been giving for years since the media caught on to the whole pole-flipping nonsense.

“I’ll go check on your order, Hon.” She stepped lighter across the floor towards the serving window. If he was going to be stuck here for a while, he wanted to at least live with the illusion that, here at least, life was semi-normal. Maybe it still could be.

Eating a heavy, grease-laden meal would be a good first step.

Later, when he returned to his hotel room... maybe
then
he could check the compass’ reading. Just one more time.

*     *     *

Jack felt the Lord’s breath whip through his long coat, tear at his shirt, squeeze and control him like the puppet he knew he was. He was only a vessel, God's voice to the frightened people.