CyberStorm (15 page)

Instead, I was met by a mob of scared, unknown faces.

A large homeless man was spread out on the couch outside my apartment door, and a mother and two young children cowered on the Borodins’ couch. At least a dozen more people I didn’t know were crowded into the hallway.

A young man, wrapped in one of Richard’s expensive duvets, got up and extended his hand toward me, but Chuck appeared through the door and pointed his .38 right in the kid’s face.

“What have you done with Susie and Lauren?”

The kid held his hands up and gestured toward Chuck’s apartment.

“Everything’s fine. They’re in there.”

Behind us, Tony came charging up the stairs.

“Wait, wait, I forgot!”

Chuck was still pointing his gun at the kid’s face as Tony appeared in the doorway behind us, huffing and puffing. He reached out and put a hand on Chuck’s gun, lowering it.

“I let these guys in.”

“You did what?” yelled Chuck. “Tony, that is not your decision to make—”

“No, it was my decision,” said Susie, appearing out of their apartment.

She ran out and bear-hugged Chuck, and Lauren appeared out of the same doorway with Luke at her feet. She ran to embrace me as well.

“I thought something had happened to you,” she whispered in my ear between happy sobs.

“I’m fine, baby, I’m fine.”

With a deep breath, she released me, and I leaned down to kiss Luke, who was hugging one of my legs.

“We okay?” asked the kid, his hands still in the air.

He looked like he’d had a rough time of it.

“I guess so,” Chuck replied, putting his gun away. “What’s your name?”

“Vince,” said the kid, reaching out to shake my hand. “Vince Indigo.”

Day
5 – December 27

9:00 a
.
m
.

SUNLIGHT STREAMED IN through the window. It was morning, but I had no idea what time. My phone was out of power, and it’d been years since I’d worn a wristwatch.

Then it dawned on me—blue skies. I was staring out the window at blue skies.

Lauren was curled up under the covers, with Luke wedged between us. Leaning over, I kissed her cheek and tried to pull my arm out from under her head.

She sleepily protested.

“Sorry, baby, I gotta get up,” I whispered.

She pouted but let me go, and I swung out of bed, carefully tucking the covers back around the two of them. Shivering, I pulled on my stiff, cold jeans, put on a sweater, and quietly exited Chuck’s spare bedroom.

It was our bedroom now.

The generator was still purring reassuringly outside the window, but the small electric heaters running off it weren’t keeping out the cold very well.

Even so, I admired the clear blue skies outside again.

They were beautiful.

Grabbing a glass from Chuck’s cupboard, I leaned down to the sink to fill it with water.

Blue skies, nothing but blue skies, coming my way.

I turned the tap but nothing happened.

Frowning, I turned the tap off and then back on, and then tried the hot water, but nothing.

The front door to the apartment creaked open, and the noise of a radio announcer spilled in. Chuck’s head appeared through the door, and he watched me playing with the taps.

“No more water,” Chuck confirmed, dropping two four-gallon cans of it on the floor. “At least, not in the taps.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

He laughed.

“Water was off at five when I got up. Not sure if the city pressure can’t make it up six floors with the pumps off, if the pipes are frozen, or if the city mains are off, but one thing’s for sure.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s goddamn freezing outside, at least ten below and windy as hell. Blue skies bring cold weather. I liked the snow better.”

“Can we fix the water?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Do you want me to get some water with you?”

“Don’t think so.”

I waited. I could see he had something unpleasant in store for me.

“I need you to get gas for the generator.”

I groaned. “What about Richard, all those people out there?”

“I had Richard go last night, and it was hopeless. He’s about as useful as tits on a bull for stuff like that. Take the kid.”

“The kid?”

“Hey, Indy!” yelled Chuck, leaning back into the hallway. From the distance a “yes?” echoed into the room.

“Get some weather gear on. You and Mike are going on an adventure.”

Chuck turned to leave but stopped and smiled at me.

“And fill
two
four-gallon cans, can ya?”

§

“What kind of a name is Indigo?”

I was crouching out of the wind and letting the kid do the work. He was quiet on the walk down, just staring into space. When I asked him to dig out the first car, he silently nodded and began methodically shoveling without a word.

“Family’s from Louisiana. Used to farm the stuff down there. They named us after it.”

He didn’t look African-American, but then, he didn’t look Caucasian either—dark, short-cut hair, and exotic, almost Asian features. The most prominent thing about him, unusual at least, was a gold chain that hung around his neck with a large, crystal pendent swinging from it.

“Poisonous, isn’t it?” I asked, referring to indigo, trying to make conversation.

We were outside on Twenty-Fourth Street, on the opposite side of the street, a few buildings down from our place. Our group had already siphoned most of the cars close by.

The kid nodded and continued to dig.

“Sure seems that way.”

Looking up and down the street, I imagined the millions of people trapped in this wasteland with us. From here, the city looked abandoned, but I could somehow sense the masses huddling, hiding in the gray monolithic buildings that hunched shoulder to shoulder into the distance—a frozen desert between concrete towers.

A hissing sound persisted, and I worried it was a gas leak until I realized it was the sound of fine particles of ice being driven by the wind across the snowy surface.

“So how did you figure out to come and knock on our apartment complex?”

He pointed up to where our windows were on the sixth floor.

“Not many other lights on. I wouldn’t have bothered, but that family, they needed help.”

He was speaking about the mother with two young children. We’d left them asleep on the couch in the hallway. They looked exhausted.

“She’s not with you?”

He shook his head. “But they were on the train with me.”

“What train?”

He stuck his shovel into the snow and leaned down to clear ice from the gas cap, banging it slightly and then opening it.

“The Amtrak.”

“My God, you were on that? Were you hurt?”

“I wasn’t…” He sagged visibly, closing his eyes. “Can we talk about something else?”

He grabbed one of the four-gallon cans. He looked at me, and the sky reflected in his clear blue eyes.

“Doesn’t your building have an emergency generator?”

I nodded. “Couldn’t get it started. Why? Think you could?”

“Not sure it would do much good, and wouldn’t run the heating system even if you could get it started.”

“So why’d you ask?”

Propping himself up on one knee, he pointed toward our building.

“Chuck said his generator runs off gas
and
diesel. Did you check how much diesel there was in the emergency generator tank in the building?”

The wind whistled past us.

“No,” I laughed, “we did not.”

Not five minutes later we were standing in the apartment basement, listening to the hollow tinkle of the second canister filling up. It was cold, but much warmer than outside. We didn’t even need to siphon it since there was a release valve on the bottom of the tank.

“Two hundred gallons!” I said excitedly, reading specifications off the side of the tank. “That’ll run our little generator for weeks.”

Vince smiled, closing the release valve and screwing the cover onto the plastic canister. I wanted to know what had happened at the Amtrak crash, but he seemed fragile.

“One thing I will insist on,” I whispered, even with nobody else there, “this is our little secret, okay?”

He frowned.

“I mean, don’t tell anyone else about this. We’ll make getting gas our job. While everyone thinks we’re off outside sucking it from cars in the snow and cold, we can sit down here and relax, have a chat. What do you think?”

He laughed. “Sure. But won’t they notice we’re coming back with diesel and not gas?”

The kid was quick. “Nobody but Chuck would probably notice.”

Vince nodded and looked at the floor.

“Feel like having that first chat now?” I asked.

“Not so sure.”

“Come on, talk to me.”

3.45 p
.
m
.

“CAN I COME up?”

I looked down at the carpet, avoiding her eyes.

“We’re already more than we can really manage,” answered Chuck for me.

The woman in apartment 315, Rebecca, looked frightened. Everyone else on her floor had already left.

She was wearing a shiny, puffed-out black jacket with faux-fur trim. Wisps of blonde hair escaped around the edges of the hoodie she had pulled up around her head, lending her pale complexion an ethereal halo in the light streaming in from behind her.

At least she looked warm.

“You really shouldn’t stay here by yourself,” I said, imagining her there at night, in the dark and cold, alone. She fidgeted with the doorframe with one gloved hand.

I relented. “Why don’t you come up for the afternoon, have a hot coffee, and we’ll walk you up to Javits later?”

“Thank you so much!” She almost burst into tears. “What should I bring up?”

“Pack as much warm clothing as you can fit,” replied Chuck, shaking his head as he looked at me, “and it needs to be a bag you can
carry
.”

The city was down to four radio stations that were still broadcasting, and the one doing emergency coverage for Midtown had announced that the Javits Convention Center between Thirty-Fourth and Fortieth had been turned into the evacuation hub for the west side of Manhattan.

“Can we borrow some blankets, anything warm?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’ll bring everything I have.”

“And any food you don’t need,” I added.

She nodded again and disappeared into her place, closing her door and casting us into darkness. It was still light out, but without any exterior windows, the hallways were shadowy caverns, a hundred feet of corridor lit by just the two emergency lights, one above the elevators and the other above the stairwell.

We were knocking door-by-door, doing an inventory to get some “situational awareness,” as Chuck had put it. Most people were already gone. It reminded me of a few weeks before when we’d gone door-to-door for the Thanksgiving barbecue—just a few weeks in time, but in a completely different world.

“Fifty six people in the building,” said Chuck as we opened the door to the stairwell and began to climb, “and about half those on our floor.”

“How long do you think the gang on the second floor will last?”

Apartment 212 had their own small generator rigged up. A group of nine people had banded together in a smaller version of what we had going upstairs, but they weren’t as well equipped.

Chuck shrugged. “Don’t know.”

Our floor was turning into an emergency shelter as more people from other floors came up. Richard continued to impress me. He had managed to go out and find his own kerosene heater and load of fuel, as well as bring back more food supplies.

Money was still buying stuff out there, at least for now.

“So the water is off everywhere,” I said.

It wasn’t a question. We’d heard on the radio that the water was off all over the city.

“In survival situations the order of importance is warmth, then water, and then food,” said Chuck. “You can survive weeks or months without food, but only two days without water, and you’ll freeze to death in just a few hours. We need to stay warm and find a gallon of water per day per person.”

We tramped up the stairs, our footsteps echoing around us. The temperature in the stairwell was dropping to the same as outside, and thick plumes of vapor hung in front of us with each labored breath. With one arm in a sling to protect his bad hand, Chuck was using the other to grab onto the railing, pulling himself up a step at a time.

“There’s five feet of snow out there. Surely we’re not going to lack water.”

“Explorers in the Arctic were just as thirsty as ones in the Sahara,” replied Chuck. “You gotta melt snow first, and that takes energy. Eating it lowers your body temperature and gives you cramps, which could be deadly by themselves. Diarrhea and dehydration are the enemy just as much as the cold.”

I trudged up a few more steps.

Never mind keeping hydrated, how are we going to deal with keeping clean, bathrooms, sanitation?

I still felt guilty about Chuck staying here for us.

“Do you think we should just leave? Take everyone to the evacuation?”

Where most of the apartment building was empty, our entire floor was still there, along with the refugees, and only because we’d stayed and had the generator and heating. Maybe we were making a terrible mistake.

We certainly didn’t have enough food to support the nearly thirty people in our hallway for very long. It struck me how I thought of the people who’d migrated to our floor as “refugees.”

“Luke still isn’t well enough to travel, and Ellarose is too small to handle much. I think the evacuation centers will be total disasters. If we leave, we’ll lose what we have here, and if we get stuck out there…then we’d be in real trouble.”

We continued walking up, and I listened to the methodical rhythm of our boots. I must have climbed those stairs two dozen times in the last two days.
So this is what it took to get me to exercise.
I smiled, despite everything.