CyberStorm Part 33

"Everything is fine, Mrs. Strong. We're just having a chat."

She smiled. "As long as he's being a good boy."

"He's a Strong boy," I joked, ruffling Ricky's hair. "Just like his dad."

The smile on Mrs. Strong's face disappeared. "I hope not."

I said something wrong. We stood and looked at each other in an awkward silence.

Just then I received a text from Sergeant Williams asking how we were doing. I nodded good-bye to Mrs. Strong and retreated to our end of the hallway, texting him back, asking him if he had any ideas on how we could get off the island.

Day 22 January 13.

PULLING MY GOGGLES up, I stopped and blinked, looking out into the night with my own unaided eyes. The night was pitch black and soundless, and my mind suddenly felt disconnected. Alone, staring into the void, I became an infinitesimal dot of existence floating by itself in the universe. At first the feeling was terrifying, my mind reeling, but it quickly became comforting.

Maybe this is what death is like? Alone, peaceful, floating, floating, no fear- But then I thought of Luke, of Lauren, and my mind snapped back. I clipped the night-vision goggles back into place, and ghostly green flakes of snow appeared falling gently around me.

My hunger pangs had been intense that morning, almost driving me to the point of going outside during the day to hunt for the buried food. Chuck had held me back, talked to me, calmed me down. It wasn't for me, I'd argued with him, it was for Luke, for Lauren, for Ellarose, for any reason that would allow me, like an addict, to get my fix.

I laughed.

I'm addicted to food.

The falling snowflakes were hypnotic. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath.

What is real? What is reality anyway?

I felt like I was hallucinating, my mind never quite able to take a firm track before skidding off.

Get a grip, Mike. Luke is counting on you. Lauren is counting on you. The baby is counting on you.

Opening my eyes, I willed myself into the here and now and tapped the phone in my pocket to bring up the augmented-reality display. A field of red dots spread out into the distance, and, taking another deep breath, I began carefully putting one foot in front of the other, continuing on my way across Twenty-Fourth, pushing myself toward a cl.u.s.ter of dots on Sixth Avenue.

In my initial enthusiasm at digging up the bags of food, I hadn't thought to mark off which locations I'd already visited. We'd tagged forty-six locations in total, and so far I'd tried fourteen of them on four trips.

At four locations I hadn't been able to find anything. It might have been that people saw me dropping the bags at those spots, or that they'd become exposed, or even that I'd already visited them. My brain wasn't clear anymore.

In any event, I guessed that a quarter of the locations would be empty. With fourteen spots already visited, that meant about twenty locations should still yield something to eat. I was finding three or four bags per location, and with an average of about two thousand calories per bag, each location represented nearly a day's worth of food for our group on starvation rations.

The numbers spun through my head.

Lauren needs two thousand calories, and the kids needed nearly as much.

But I need to eat more.

I'd been light-headed all day, feverish. I wasn't going to be protecting anyone if I starved myself to death. Starvation rations weren't going to be enough, not in this cold. I was allowing myself only a few hundred calories a day of food, but I'd read that Arctic explorers used up to six thousand calories a day in the cold.

It was cold, and I felt like the wind could blow me over like a leaf. Looking up, I squinted, trying to make out the street sign as I pa.s.sed it.

Eighth Avenue.

The sign behind it mocked me-Burger King.

Imagine a nice, juicy burger, all the toppings, mayonnaise and ketchup. It was all I could do to restrain myself from going through the open door and digging through the snow drifted halfway up to the ceiling inside. Maybe somebody missed a burger in here? Maybe I could start up a propane grill?

Pulling my mind away from burgers, I continued walking. In the s...o...b..nks on Sixth Avenue, we'd buried food at eight locations. It was a veritable gold mine, and that's where I was heading to hunt. My mind cycled through the numbers again. If I could recover it all, from all twenty locations, we'd have twelve days until we'd be like them.

Like them.

Like the other people on our floor.

It'd been five days since the relief stations had closed, pinching off the only reliable new stream of new calories for the other groups on our floor. It was my guess that it had been nearly as many days since they'd had anything substantial to eat.

Mostly they just slept.

In the morning, I'd gone to check on the young mother and her kids, pulling away the layers of blankets from the couch in the middle of the hall. The kids had stared at me dully in the dim light, their lips horribly cracked and swollen, red and infected.

Dehydration was worse than starvation.

Vince and I had spent most of the day collecting as much snow as we could, dragging it up with the pulleys. Chuck had tried to help, but he hadn't really recovered from the blow to his head, and his broken hand was swelling up again. Susie went around offering water to everyone, sneaking out sc.r.a.ps of our food, doing what she could.

The hallway smelled of human excrement.

As brutal as conditions had become, I would still see small acts of kindness. I watched Vince bring over his own blanket, that he'd spent a day cleaning, and give it to the mother and her kids. He shared some food with them as well. During the whole day, though, I hadn't seen the door to Richard's apartment open even once. We'd knocked to make sure they were all right, but he'd told us to go away.

Arriving at Seventh Avenue, I looked up and down the street, but visibility was limited to about twenty feet in the falling snow. When I tapped the phone's screen, the heads-up display on my AR gla.s.ses switched to a top-down view of where I was.

I might as well head up Seventh and then circle down Sixth from Twenty-Third.

Carefully making my way to the intersection of the footpaths at the middle of the streets, my mind filled with images of the dead bodies we'd stacked in the apartment on the second floor.

During the day, ham radio stations had rebroadcast the audio portion of a CNN news report, one that had apparently been broadcast on television networks in the outside world. It described the situation in New York as difficult but stable, that supplies were being delivered, that the outbreaks of disease were being contained.

Nothing could have been further from our reality. The immense disconnect fueled speculation that the government was hiding something.

How can they not see what's happening in here?

I didn't care anymore.

My life had been reduced to caring for Lauren and Luke, and after that, for Susie and Ellarose and Chuck. Our situation was bringing my life into sharp relief, making me shrug off any artificialities, cleaning away all of the unimportant things I'd thought of as essential before.

A strong feeling of deja vu gripped me when I sat in the hallway, but not from anything I'd experienced before. I felt like I was reliving the stories Irena had shared with me, of the siege of Leningrad seventy years before.

This cyberwar felt like it had nothing to do with the future, but was a part of the past, as if we were burrowing backwards, like a diseased worm, back into the essence of humankind's unending ability to inflict suffering upon one another.

If you wanted to see into the future, you just had to look into the past.

Reaching the corner of Sixth and Twenty-Third, I came upon the strewn remains of an air-dropped container. We'd gone out to see what we could get when each airdrop was announced, but they'd turned into violent scavenging wars. Rory had been injured in return for some meager supplies, half of which, things like mosquito netting, were nearly useless.

A large, red circle glowed under one corner of the airdrop container in front of me. I clicked my phone for the image that would mark the exact location. Walking around the container, I found the best spot and then dropped to my knees and began digging. After about ten minutes of foraging I was rewarded.

Potatoes. Cashews.

Random items we'd grabbed off shelves in another world.

My mouth salivated as I imagined eating some of the cashews-just a few, n.o.body will notice-but I stuffed everything into my backpack and continued on to the next red circle just down Sixth Avenue.

After an hour I'd recovered all the bags from that location. I rested and treated myself to a few peanuts and the bottle of water Lauren had packed me.

I continued on.

The next red circle glowed under a scaffolding overhang at the edge of a burnt-out building. As I approached, the strong smell of scorched wood and plastic forced me to pull my bandana over my nose. Within a few minutes I found the prizes, and began pulling them out of the snow. It was bags and bags of chicken.

That's right-this was when we raided the butcher's shop on Twenty-Third.

My back was aching intensely from bending over. The backpack was stuffed, probably weighing fifty pounds.

Time to go home-chicken for breakfast.

"Who's there?"

Awkwardly, with my backpack half on, I wheeled around and fumbled for my gun.

Out of the darkness, ghostly faces appeared in the greenish light of my night-vision goggles-faces and outstretched fingers. In my rush to get to this spot and start digging, I hadn't really looked around. I was in some sort of a makeshift camp of people who must have lived in the burnt-out building.

"We can hear you digging. What did you find?"

Backing up, I was pinned against the plywood wall of the scaffolding.

"It's ours, whatever it is. Give it to us!" hissed another voice.

Dozens of green faces now circled me in the dark. They couldn't see me-it was pitch black-but they could hear me, sense me there. Their outstretched hands and fingers hunted through s.p.a.ce, their feet shuffling forward in the snow, their eyes blind. I held the gun in my pocket.

Should I shoot one of them?

I dropped my backpack and rummaged around in it. The nearest hands were only a few feet away from me.

"Back! I have a gun!"

That stopped them, but only temporarily.

Grabbing the packet of cashews from the backpack, I threw it at one of the closest ones. His face was emaciated, with eyes shrunken into hollowed-out orbitals, and he had no gloves. His hands were black and bleeding in the phosph.o.r.escent light of the night-vision goggles.

The cashews ricocheted off him, landing somewhere behind, and he turned and dove for them, colliding with two others who did the same. I flung a few more packets randomly behind them, and they all turned away from me.

Running out of the enclosure, I dragged the backpack behind me.

In a few seconds I was back out on the open street, under cover of the falling snow. Taking a few gasping breaths to calm my thumping heart, I began the trek back toward our building. In my escape, I'd glanced once over my shoulder to see them fighting like a pack of wild dogs over sc.r.a.ps.

The tears came from nowhere.

I was crying, sobbing, trying my best to stay quiet as I trudged through the snow in the blackness-alone, but surrounded by millions.

Day 23 January 14.

"NEW YORK POWER Authority says that power will be restored to many parts of Manhattan within the week," promised the radio announcer, and then he added, "but then again, we've all heard that before, haven't we? Stay warm, stay safe-"

"Would you like some more tea?" asked Lauren.

Pam nodded, and Lauren crossed over to her with the large pot and filled her cup.

"Anyone else?"

Not more tea, but I'd sure like some biscuits.

Sitting on one of the couches at our end of the hallway, I began to daydream about cookies.

Chocolate-covered biscuits, like the ones my grandmother used to bring on the holidays, the graham cracker kind.

"Yes, more tea, please," said one of the Chinese family at the end of the hall, the younger man. Lauren smiled and began to make her way down there, stepping carefully between legs and feet and blankets on her way.

Her baby b.u.mp was noticeable even under her sweater, at least to me-fifteen weeks. I was down four notches on my belt, as skinny as I'd been in college.

As my stomach disappeared, hers was growing.

A meshnet alert pinged my phone, and I reached into my pocket to read it. It was announcing a med-swap meet-up on the corner of Sixth and Thirty-Fourth. They better be defending it. A lot of people out there wanted what they were bartering.

Noon tea was Susie's idea. Boiling the water meant we could sterilize it, and the girls were making a fuss about trying to keep in contact with everyone at least once a day. The hallway had become like a convalescent home for a hunger strike, with rows of gaunt faces peering out from beneath stained blankets. The tea had bits floating in it, but it hydrated and warmed the body and, Susie hoped, the soul as well.

Chuck pointed out that getting as many warm bodies together in one room helped with heating. Each human body, he'd explained, gave off about as much heat as a hundred-watt lightbulb. So twenty-seven bodies equalled twenty-seven hundred watts of heating power, half as much power as our generator produced.

We didn't talk about where all that energy came from. We used less energy if we moved as little as possible, but we used much more, he'd whispered to me quietly, if it was cold.

It was cold.

After three weeks, even with us being as sparing as possible, all of Chuck's kerosene supplies were finished, and we were almost out of diesel. The two-hundred-gallon tank downstairs was nearly empty after three weeks of running two small generators and heaters and stoves, plus what scavengers had stolen.