CyberStorm Part 38

I ran across the snow, slipping and sliding, arriving just as Vince was getting back in the truck. Chuck was holding the right side door open for me, and I jumped in, closing it behind me. The winch whirred away, rolling its length of cable back onto the front of the truck.

Tony was driving. He'd driven Humvees in Iraq. Revving the truck, he looked around at all of us.

"Good to go?"

"Good to go," replied Chuck.

I held my breath.

The onlookers were crowding right around the truck, and Tony jolted it forward, dispersing the ones in front, and then began slowly driving the truck across the snow. Some people banged against the windows, begging us to stop, to take them with us, for any food.

As we drove out onto Gansevoort Street, the only obstacle to getting free was the giant s...o...b..nk lining the edge of the West Side Highway. It was higher than head height but had been worn down in the middle by foot traffic. Tony pushed his foot down, accelerating the truck.

"She'll make it," said Chuck quietly to Tony, urging him onwards. "Everybody hang on!"

With a crunch, the truck impacted the s...o...b..nk and then began climbing, bouncing up, making it feel like we were nearly falling backwards, and then the front of the truck angled down, tipping forward. Sliding down the other side of the embankment, we skidded to a stop in the northbound lane of the West Side Highway-on cleanly plowed pavement.

Putting the truck into gear, Tony pulled it around and began driving north, toward the George Washington Bridge. We were meeting Sergeant Williams at the southeast corner of the Javits Center. He was going to drive us from there up to the military barricade.

"Let's get the hazmat suits on," I heard myself telling everyone.

Luke was sitting beside me, strapped in with only a belt strap. His little face looked scared. Looking down into his beautiful blue eyes, I unstrapped him and sat him on my lap.

"You want to play hide-and-seek?"

We needed to hide the kids in bags to clear the checkpoint. Relief workers weren't supposed to have children with them. Luke looked at me, smiling. How can I stuff him into a bag? My mind rebelled, but Lauren took him from me, kissing me, kissing him.

"You get your hazmat on, and I'll take care of Luke."

I frowned at her.

"I made a crib for them, silly. Now get your suit on."

Unstrapping my seat belt, I reached down for the yellow suit and began wriggling into it.

The George Washington Bridge loomed in the distance.

Day 29 January 20.

"HERE, HAVE SOME."

Irena handed me a steaming plate of meat. Starving, I took it from her. A cauldron was steaming at full boil on her stove, and in a daze I followed her toward it as I gobbled down what was on my plate. Large bones were sticking out of the pot, the water boiling angrily up around them. Those bones are big, too big...

"We need to survive, Mik-kay-hal," said Irena unapologetically, stirring the bones.

Behind her, in the larder, someone was sitting. No, they aren't sitting. It was Stan, from Paul's gang, and he was cut in half, just his torso above the waist remaining, his eyes staring at me, unseeing and opaque.

A trail of blood streaked across the floor, pooling around Irena's feet.

"You need to wake up," said Irena, covered in blood, stirring the bones, "if you want to survive."

"Wake up."

Wake up.

"You're dreaming, honey," said Lauren. "Wake up."

Opening my eyes, I realized I was still sitting in the backseat of the Land Rover, covered in blankets. It was dark. The sun was just rising. The interior light of the truck was on, and Susie was in the front seat feeding Ellarose. Chuck and the guys were outside, chatting, leaning on a concrete embankment.

I stretched my neck and groaned.

"Are you okay?" asked Lauren. "You were talking."

"I'm fine, just dreaming."

Dreaming about the Borodins.

Irena and Aleksandr seemed to have gone into some kind of hibernation mode, barely moving, surviving off their supply of hard biscuits and sc.r.a.ping snow for water from outside their windows. They sat in their living room with their gun and ax, watching the door to their bedroom where the prisoners were.

When we told them that we were leaving, Irena had gone and pulled the mezuzah off the front of her door and given it to me, telling me to keep it with me, to affix on the doorframe of wherever we ended up. It was the first time I'd seen her argue with Aleksandr, and they didn't argue in Russian, but in some ancient-sounding language that must have been Hebrew. He was upset, not wanting her to take it down and give to us. I tried to refuse taking it, but Irena had insisted.

I was holding it in the pocket of my jeans.

"Where are we?"

My brain was still rea.s.sembling what had happened the previous day.

Crossing the military barricade on the George Washington Bridge had been tense, but in the end, almost anticlimactic. We'd met Sergeant Williams as planned. He'd slapped some NYPD magnetic stickers onto the sides of the truck, and we'd driven right up through the crowds to the checkpoint.

It hadn't gone entirely smoothly.

We'd had to wait for an hour or so. Our names weren't on the original list, and our driver's licenses had residences in New York, but after a little arguing and some calls back and forth to Javits, they'd eventually just let us through.

Lauren had fashioned a crib out of some packing crates, padding it with blankets, and we'd hidden Luke and Ellarose in it. Timed just right, we'd fed them well, and they'd slept through the whole thing.

"We're on the side of an overpa.s.s at the entrance to I-78," answered Lauren, telling me where we were.

I'd been in a daze at the checkpoint yesterday, weak but doing my best to smile and look normal. Memories of the grand, gray arches of the George Washington Bridge floated into my mind, like a cathedral spanning the Hudson River, and then the feeling of relief after they let us through.

I remembered saying good-bye to Sergeant Williams. By the time we were on our way, it had been late afternoon.

We'd followed the I-95, nearly the only main highway they'd kept clear, down through New Jersey toward Newark Airport. The spire of the Empire State Building had stood in the distance, the Freedom Tower further down, with New York cradled in between.

We're free, I remembered thinking, and then I must have fallen asleep.

"That's pretty much where I remember us getting to. What happened? I thought the idea was to get as far from New York as possible?"

"When we turned off 95 onto the 78 overpa.s.s, the road got a lot worse, and the sun was setting. Instead of risking it in the dark, Chuck picked this spot on top of the overpa.s.s to spend the night. You were out of it."

"How are Luke and Ellarose?"

"They're perfect."

Thank G.o.d.

I stretched. "I'm going to talk to the guys, okay?"

Leaning forward and pulling back the blankets, I grabbed a bottle of water and kissed her.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, kissing me back.

"Good." I took a deep breath. "Really good."

I gave her another kiss and opened the door to the truck, looking out toward the horizon.

The sun was rising over the Financial District. The Freedom Tower shone in the distance, beyond the frozen docks and cranes of the Port of New Jersey spread out below us. Looking slightly to the left, I tried to make out the familiar buildings of the Chelsea Piers near our apartment, our prison for the past month.

We're free, but- "How do the roads look? Can we drive them?"

The guys turned around, deep into some discussion.

"Hey! Sleeping beauty!" joked Chuck. "Decided to join us, huh?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"You feeling good?"

I nodded. Maybe it was just the fresh air, but I was feeling better than I had in weeks.

"Unplowed in a while, but pa.s.sable," replied Chuck, answering my original question, "at least for my baby. Get ready. We're leaving in five."

Leaving them to it, I stretched, walking around the truck, waking myself up.

The snow was deep at the shoulders of the highway, but the middle was rutted with tire tracks. Other people had pa.s.sed through, even when the plowing had stopped, and the snow was melting fast.

Pulling my gaze from the sunrise above New York, I looked down the overpa.s.s at Interstate 78, past a container yard, and toward New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

We were finally on our way.

Despite Lauren's objections, we stopped at Newark Airport.

Chuck had insisted on at least going and having a look for her mother and father. She quietly repeated that she was sure that they'd gotten out, but we tried anyway. Pa.s.sing through one of the twenty empty lanes of snow-covered tollbooths, we'd looped through the overpa.s.s, stopping at the main terminal.

Vince and I had remained with the girls while Chuck and Tony had gone to have a look. From the outside, it looked abandoned. In under an hour they were back. n.o.body had approached us while we waited, and they didn't find Lauren's folks. But on their return, Chuck and Tony were very quiet. We could only imagine what they'd found, and the ride back onto the highway was silent, everyone lost in their own thoughts.

The highway was littered with abandoned construction vehicles-graders and rollers and trucks-all covered in a deep layer of snow.

I wonder if they have any food left in them? Maybe we should stop to check?

Houses and trees lined the road, and we pa.s.sed a group of people cutting down some trees. They waved, and we waved back.

I-78 was a sunken highway this close to New York, and we pa.s.sed beneath one overpa.s.s after another, every one of them hung with American flags-some new, some ragged-and banners proclaiming things like "We will not break" or "Stay strong."

I imagined the people, cold and hungry, who had placed them there, spray-painting their messages on old sheets. They were messages for me, for us. You are not alone, they were saying. I smiled, silently thanking them, wishing them well wherever they were struggling.

It was seventy miles along I-78 to Philipsburg and the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and then another seventy miles to where 78 met I-81 going south to Virginia. From there it was a straight 160-mile drive to the Shenandoah mountains where Chuck had his family cabin.

Under normal conditions, the whole thing would have been a four-hour drive, but as we bounced along in the rutted tracks at the center of the highway, I figured it was going to take us more like ten. Even ten hours a.s.sumed road conditions wouldn't get worse, but Chuck was determined that we get there in one day. No matter what, it was going to be dark wherever we got to, so Chuck made sure Tony kept going as fast as possible.

It was a rough, violent drive, and I sat Luke on my lap, cradling him.

He was happy now.

It seemed like some kind of adventure again, and I think he was as glad as we were to have gotten out of the rancid confines of our apartment. It all seemed like a dream. The sun was out, and we had the windows down, enjoying the warm weather. Chuck had Pearl Jam playing on the CD player.

The landscape opened up, the highway rising up out of the ground, revealing rolling hills and countryside. We pa.s.sed smokestacks and water towers and cell phone towers that dotted the terrain-all of it useless. I kept checking my cell phone, but there was no reception anywhere. Electrical transmission towers stood the tallest of all, their wires strung across the highway and stretching off into the distance, strangling the landscape.

Small towns and villages gradually appeared, with smoke rising up out of chimneys. We saw people walking in the streets.

At least they have a lot to burn. The forests seemed endless. Is life normal out here?

Then we pa.s.sed a farm, and butchered cows stood out in red splashes against white fields. A group of people with machetes were hacking away at a carca.s.s next to a grain silo, and one of them waved his machete at us while we drove by, urging us to stop.

We didn't stop, and we didn't wave back.

Vince fiddled with the radio as we drove, alternating between playing music and searching the airwaves for any broadcasting stations, but mostly we could only pull in the same government channels from New York, apart from the occasional ham radio operator. When he found these, we'd listen, sometimes to a community announcement, sometimes to a rant, but it became evident that there was no power, no communications out here either.

People were everywhere, though, walking along the side of the road, pulling loads on sleds, but we didn't encounter even one other vehicle on the road. Gradually I began to doze again, my mind dimly registering images-McDonalds and Quiznos roadside signs, a blue train wedged in the side of a hill, the red and yellow of an amus.e.m.e.nt park Ferris wheel.

The road conditions improved as we moved away from the coast. By the time we reached 81 in the midafternoon, we were driving on pavement. I-81 hadn't been plowed in a while either, but there was much less snow. We stopped once to refill the gas tank, with the diesel we brought in containers from the apartment. It was only a bit more than a three hundred mile drive, less than the range of the truck with its full tank, but it was better safe than sorry.

We began to see other motorists coming the other way as darkness fell, headlights that would appear from the gloom and sweep past us. The world almost seemed normal, except that the countryside was completely dark. A full moon rose up, casting the landscape in a ghostly light.

Chuck announced that we were nearly there just as night fell, and he took an exit off the main highway. It was about a half-hour drive up the mountain, he said. He was excited, talking about all the supplies he'd hidden, the great meal we were going to have and how cozy it was. Vince started talking with him about the shortwave radio, about how we could listen in on stations from around the world and find out what was really happening.

Lauren cuddled into me.

We were holding Luke together under a blanket. An immense weight was lifting from my shoulders. A hot meal, a clean bed. Ahead, in the truck's headlights, I could see us following a small dirt road covered in ice. There was snow in the forest, but only in patches.

As we pulled up to his cabin, Chuck started telling me about fishing in the Shenandoah, how this was going to be like a vacation. We quickly jumped out and began grabbing our bags while Chuck ran up the front steps. It was a beautiful log cabin. In a flash, Chuck was inside, lighting up his flashlight and headlamp. We began piling things onto the porch.