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.
“Damn, this is just like that overtopping of Bjarke’s Wall that Hexter told us about,” Vlade said to no one, looking up and down the whitewater canals. “The city’s getting trashed!”
He was on the bridge at this point, but still no one heard him, not even he himself. Or if they did they didn’t bother to respond. Idelba was focused on piloting, and on the buildings they were passing. What she saw on her sonar and radar of the canal bottoms was more important to her than any floating wreckage.
“Save what we can,” she said a while later, indicating she had heard him after all. “They’ll sort it out later.”
Vlade could only nod and go back outside into the storm to help people get over the side of the tug, and into the cabins if they were hurt.
While he was down there on the bow deck, holding on hard, helping haul people in from windows they passed, he spotted two men swimming together, to their right against the buildings. By standing on an awning frame they could just make it high enough for Vlade to help boost them up and over the side. They saw this and got on the awning. The tug was headed west on Twenty-ninth, and about to turn south on Lex, so Idelba was running as far to the right as she could already, to make more room to fight through the left turn. Just as Vlade was leaning down to grab the hands of the reaching men, a big wave caught the tug from the left, possibly a surge from a fallen building, anyway massive; it cast the tug right into the building at the corner, crushing the two men between tug and wall with a palpable thump. The tug held there against the wall, and Vlade, who had jerked up just in time to get clear of the collision himself, looked up at Idelba and screamed at her to turn left, waving his arms desperately. He saw through the bridge’s windshield that she had seen what had happened and was spinning the wheel and gunning the jets to turn left. He could feel the vibration of the motors under him, fighting the wind.