Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [148]
He could take care of himself, of course. Ceaseless motion was the key. So he hiked hard; but even so he got cold. He had forgotten what a furious assault cold made on you, he had to bury his face in the windward side of his hood, and had no idea how his nose was faring. For a while he even got lost, and worried that he had turned somehow and was headed south on the ridge trail. Narrow as it was, the park that night was too wide to cross.
He headed uphill, hoping it was west but knowing he would emerge eventually if he kept going up. He kicked right up the sides of snow drifts, noticing again what a huge difference his snowshoes made. It would have been horrible to post up a slope like that in deep snow. And yet he was one of the few people using snowshoes in the city. Only the FOG people used them, as far as he had seen. Surely the ferals must be into it, if they weren’t skiing.
He came out on Broad Branch Road, almost exactly where he had hoped to be. God bless the unconscious mind.
He was very happy to hear his van start when he turned the key. After revving the engine for a while, he drove off with the heater on high. The van rocked on the gusts. The few other vehicles on the streets were weaving like drunks. SUVs finally looked at home, as if they had all moved to Fairbanks.
After driving around for a while he warmed up. The day arrived on a broad red sky. He snowshoed back out into the park, went first to 21 to check on the bros.
“Hey, Noseman! You should have a fucking barrel of brandy under your chin.”
“I’m amazed you guys are alive. How did you do it?”
“The fire.” Zeno gestured at it, pale in its giant mound of ashes. “We sat right next to it all night long.”
“We kept it real big, we had to keep running out for more branches, shit. It was so fucking cold. I stood like six inches from this mother bonfire and even so my backside was freezing. One side of me was frying and the other was freezing.”
“It was cold all right. Do you have enough firewood, or what are you burning?”
“We have all the flood wood.”
“Isn’t it green still?”
“Fuck yeah, but we’ve got a can of gas, and Cutter keeps siphoning cars to fill it up. Car gas burns like a motherfucker, it explodes in that fire, you’ve got to be really careful.”
“Okay, well don’t burn yourself up. There’s that shelter up at UDC—”
“Yeah yeah gowan! Gowan witcha! Go help some of them poor fools out there who probably need it.”
This was a valid point, and so Frank snowshoed off. Out of the park, into the paralyzed city.
In Starbucks they said it had been fifty below zero Fahrenheit at dawn. Almost a hundred degrees below the average daytime temperature for the day—now that was climate change. Sirens were still howling all over the city.
Frank called Diane. She was already at work, of course, but only because she had spent the night there. Forget about coming in, she told him. “No one should even try. I mean, can you believe this?”
“I believe it,” said Frank.
FEMA had already declared it a disaster area, Diane said. Federal employees were now being told to stay home, along with everyone else but emergency personnel. Lines were down, and power outages had been reported; all those areas were in crisis mode. Water mains had frozen and burst, there were fires going unfought, and no doubt thousands were in danger of freezing to death in their own homes. Six A.M. and already it was a huge emergency.
“Okay Diane, I’ll stay in touch today and I’ll keep my phone on.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see how I can help at the zoo, I think. There are still a lot of animals at large.”
“You be careful! It’s dangerous when it’s this cold.”
“Yeah I will. I’ve got polar gear, I’ll be okay.”
“Good. Okay, let’s talk.”
So Frank was