CyberStorm Part 39

"No!" shouted Chuck from inside.

We all froze, and Tony pulled out his .38.

"You okay?"

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

"Chuck, are you okay?" repeated Tony.

I picked up Luke and Ellarose and began backing away toward the truck, which was still running. Lauren and Susie followed, all of us watching the doorway. Chuck's face appeared, contorted and angry.

"What is it?" asked Susie quietly.

"It's all gone."

"What's gone?"

Chuck's head sagged.

"All of it."

Day 30 January 21.

"WE WAITED TOO long."

"That's not the right way to look at it."

It was midmorning, and we were out back of the cabin, filling the wood-fired hot tub with logs.

Who else but Chuck would have a wood-fired hot tub? I laughed to myself.

The fresh mountain air was incredible, and it was warm, at least ten degrees above freezing. Through the birch and fir trees, the sun was shining down on us. Birds were singing.

"We're all here, we're mostly healthy," I continued. "So what if we're missing some supplies?"

There was fresh water, from snowmelt on top of the mountain, bubbling down a creek right next to us, and we had a few days' worth of food. Chuck had shown me how to use another app he had on his phone for recognizing edible plants in the woods, and we could fish and trap animals as well.

I had no idea how to trap, but there was an app for that too.

Chuck picked up another log with one hand, carefully holding his bad hand against his body. He threw it into the woodstove at the side of the hot tub. The cabin was on fairly flat ground. We were grabbing wood from a pile under the back deck, standing in the leaves. The deck with the hot tub was about shoulder height to us.

"You're right." He laughed and shook his head. "Unbelievable, isn't it?"

Luke was at our feet. He'd found a stick and was running around, joyfully whacking leaves with it. With his ten-word vocabulary, he couldn't tell us how happy he was to be out of that hallway, but the smile on his face said it all. I smiled as I watched him, but then I looked more closely. The dirt on his face, shaved head, grubby, ragged clothes, squealing in the woods-he almost looked like a little wild animal.

But at least he looked happy.

Whoever had raided Chuck's place hadn't taken everything. They'd blasted open his storage safe-room, but there were still spare clothes in the upstairs closets, and the bedrooms were intact. They took most of the food and emergency equipment from the storage lockers, drained all the fuel from the generator and taken the propane canisters.

But they'd left coffee.

After sleeping like a baby on fresh sheets, I'd gotten up early and spent the morning sitting on the swinging loveseat on their porch, boiling a pot of coffee over an open flame in a fire pit in front of the house. We were at over two thousand feet in elevation, and from the porch in the front, there was a beautiful view eastwards, down the mountain ridge toward Maryland.

It was more than a week since I'd had coffee, and drinking a cup of it now, sitting in the swinging chair, breathing the mountain air under a blue sky-it was magic.

I remembered reading that some people thought that the Renaissance had partly been due to the introduction of coffee in Europe, to the invigorating effect that caffeine had on the psyche. I laughed. That morning I could believe it. It was almost enough to make me forget the horror we'd lived through, to stop wondering if the world was burning down around us.

Drinking my coffee, I'd noticed a black smudge of smoke rising in the distance. Chuck told me it must have been from the chimney of his neighbors, the Baylors.

"How long do you think he'll be?" I asked.

We'd promised Vince that we'd drive him to his parents' home nearby. Tony had volunteered to drive him down to Mana.s.sas, where they lived, or as close as he could get to it safely. They'd left about two hours ago. Chuck and I had debated whether one of us should go along, but I didn't want to leave Lauren and Luke, and neither did Chuck want to leave Susie and Ellarose. The GPS was working, so finding his way back wouldn't be a problem.

"Should be back anytime, depending on how far he got." Chuck raised his eyebrows. "If he comes back."

Chuck had half an idea that Tony might try to take off and drive down to Florida, where his own mother was.

Just then we heard the growl of an engine. Reflexively, Chuck reached for the shotgun propped up on the woodpile, but then relaxed. It was the sound of our truck. Tony was back.

I laughed. "If he comes back, huh?"

"You boys heating that up for me?" came a singsong voice as the deck door slid open.

It was Lauren.

She laughed as she looked at us, self-consciously rubbing the stubble on her head.

When we arrived the night before, after calming Chuck down, we all stripped down and left our lice-infested clothes in a pile at the side of the front deck, dressing in whatever new clothes we could scrounge from the closets inside.

We all shaved our heads too, even the girls.

"This is just for you, baby," I laughed, banging on the side of the hot tub. It was the first time in my life that I'd shaved my head, and I rubbed my sweaty, bald pate and smiled at her.

Luckily, the hot tub had been covered and was still full of water when we'd arrived. There was no water pressure coming up from the city pipes snaking up the side of the road, and filling it from the trickle coming down the stream would have taken forever.

We weren't heating the hot tub to lounge around in, but for cleaning. Chuck had done an inventory in the cellar, and the chlorine tablets for the hot tub were still there, so we were super-dosing the water to try and clean our clothes, and ourselves.

Around the front of the house, I could hear the truck crunching across the gravel in the driveway, and then the engine switched off.

A car door opened and slammed shut.

"We're back here!" I yelled.

After a few seconds Tony appeared in the dappled sunlight at the side of the cabin.

He looked comical. Tony was a few inches taller, and quite a bit meatier, than Chuck, so the clothes in the closets barely fit him. The jeans were two inches too short, and way too tight, and the jacket and T-shirt were much too small. Combined with the freshly shaved head, he looked like an escaped convict on vacation.

He saw us smiling at him, and he laughed.

"I feel like I've joined a cult-shaved heads, hiding in the mountains."

"Just don't drink the Kool-Aid," sn.i.g.g.e.red Chuck, nodding toward the hot tub. He leaned down and closed the door to the woodstove, now burning hotly.

Luke saw Tony. He ran over, and Tony reached down, catching and picking him up.

"Everything good?"

Tony nodded. "Lot of people down there, and I didn't want trouble, so as soon as we got near his place on the main road he just jumped out."

"You see anything?" asked Susie. "Talk to anyone?"

"n.o.body's got any power, no cell signal. I didn't want to risk stopping and talking, not by myself."

There were no radio stations that we'd found to tune in to up here and, obviously, no outside meshnet or cell networks. Being here was infinitely better than being stuck in the death trap of New York, but we found ourselves cut off from what little connection we'd had before to the outside world.

We'd left the generator in the apartment-it was too heavy to carry-so the only way we had left to generate electricity was the truck. Chuck had plugged all our phones into the cigarette charger, so they were all charged up. We could use the phones to communicate with each other, as a mini-meshnet, and they were still useful as flashlights and for the survival guides.

"So what's the plan?" asked Tony.

Chuck looked at him.

"Let's get cleaned up, do some washing, get an inventory of what we have-and relax. Tomorrow we'll head over to our neighbors down the road, see how things have been here."

"Sounds good. One thing though-I think the m.u.f.fler is loose, probably from landing tail-first in the snow." He smiled. "That was pretty spectacular."

"I'll go get the tools from the cellar," I said. I knew a thing or two about cars. "I'll have a look."

"Perfect," said Chuck, grinning. "Let's get to work, then."

We hadn't talked about the missing bodies, the horror of cannibalism, but again it flashed in my mind. I wanted to forget it, to pretend it hadn't happened.

It all seemed like it was now a million miles away.

I was in a great mood, and I made my way to the cellar, looking at the yellow carpet of leaves under the thin birch trees. Something, somehow, didn't feel right, though. Taking a deep breath, I shook my head, putting it down to stress, and reached down to open the rickety cellar doors.

Day 31 January 22.

"YOU'RE GOING TO love these guys!"

Chuck was walking with me and Lauren down to the Baylors' place. Chuck's family had built here before it had been declared a national forest, and there were only a few cabins on the mountain.

We could see smoke from the Baylors' chimney curling up out of the woods again that morning, and after a full breakfast, and with all our old clothes cleanly washed and hanging out back, it was time to go down and say h.e.l.lo.

"They live here year-round, they're always here," continued Chuck. "Randy is retired military, maybe even CIA. If anyone knows what's going on, he will. They're so well equipped they probably barely even noticed that the power's been out."

It wasn't far, maybe a half mile, so we decided to walk. Susie and Tony stayed behind to refill the hot tub with creek water for the kids to have a swim. The day was beautiful. The freezing cold of Christmas had given way to unseasonably warm weather, and we were further south than New York.

The forest undergrowth at the sides of the dirt road winding down the mountain was abuzz with insects and life, its earthy dampness mixing with the smell of stones and dirt baking beneath our feet. Walking in the middle of the road, with the sun shining down hotly, I was sweating in my T-shirt and jeans.

I wish I had some sunscreen for the top of my head, I laughed to myself. It's never seen the sun before.

Kicking some rocks down the road, Chuck was in high spirits. I felt like a new man, and Lauren and I were holding hands, swinging them together as we walked down the path. As we rounded a corner, the Baylors' house appeared through the bare trees. We walked up their winding driveway, up to the two cars parked out front, and then onto their front porch.

Chuck knocked on the door.

"Randy!" he called out. "Cindy! It's me, Charles Mumford!"

There was no answer, but somebody was home. Country music was playing around the back of the house.

"Randy! It's me, Chuck!" he yelled louder.

I could smell something cooking.

"I'll check around back. Maybe they're in the yard, cutting wood or something. You guys stay here."

He jumped off the porch and disappeared. Lauren squeezed my hand. We wandered over to the other side of the front porch, following the smell of whatever was cooking. Peering through the shuttered windows into the kitchen, I could see a large pot-a cauldron-with steam coming out of it. Bones were sticking out of the top, boiling in water.

Pain shot up through my hand, and I looked down to see Lauren's white knuckles, her nails digging into me. Following her eyes to the dining room next to the kitchen, I saw a jumbled mess. Concentrating, I tried to figure out what I was looking at, angling for a better view through the shutters.

"Who the h.e.l.l are you?" I heard someone say, muted, through the windows.

It wasn't directed at us. Through the sliding-gla.s.s doors and large windows of the back of the house, I could see Chuck standing and addressing someone.

"I could ask you the same thing," I heard some other voice reply to Chuck, its owner unseen, standing somewhere on the back deck.

"Let's get out of here," whispered Lauren urgently.

"We need to wait for Chuck," I whispered back.

Her nails dug deeper into my hand.

Glancing back at the dining room, I moved my head, finally getting a clear view. It looked like someone was lying on the ground-covered in blood, hacked apart. The smell of the boiling meat enveloped me, and I almost gagged.

"Get the h.e.l.l out of here!" another voice, a new voice, yelled from the back.

Chuck was standing with his gun out, one of the .38s, pointing it at someone walking up the stairs to the back deck.