CyberStorm (21 page)

It wasn’t just a lamp or streetlight, but an illumination that lit the entire street and building facing us. From this angle, between the buildings, we couldn’t see the lights, just their flickering reflection. Looking up, I saw that even the sky was lit up.

The entire next block must have power, just like they promised.

“Come on!” yelled Chuck. “Let’s get downstairs and have a look!”

“I’ll stay here with the kids,” said Lauren. “You go and look.”

Gripping her tightly, I kissed her again.

“No, come on, I want Luke to see this!”

In a mad rush fueled by the alcohol in our systems, everyone in the room searched for something to put on. It wasn’t that cold out, so I grabbed what I could find, taking care to bundle Luke up, and then clambered down the stairs with everyone else. In the lobby, the front door was too jammed up with snow, so we began squeezing, one by one, out through the back door and onto Twenty-Fourth Street.

Luke was confused but smiling at all the action.

Carefully, with my headlamp in one hand, I picked my way to the center of Twenty-Fourth. The path there was packed down and rough, and in the semidarkness I took my time, watching my footsteps, holding onto Luke. Chuck and Tony were right ahead of me, with Vince following behind. The light was spilling onto Ninth Avenue ahead of us, and a crowd was already in the street, staring down toward Twenty-Third Street.

It began snowing harder, and the wind was picking up. Finally, rounding the corner, I pushed past Chuck and into an open spot and looked up, expecting to see street lights, neon signs.

I was greeted by smoke and flames.

The high-rise on the corner of Twenty-Third and Ninth was ablaze. Luke looked up, his small face reflecting the flames. Seeing the fire, he smiled and pointed, just as someone jumped through the smoke from a top-floor window, sailing silently through the air and hitting the snow below with a sickening thud.

The crowds backed away, and then two people ran to try and help the person who’d jumped. Lauren was behind us, and I looked back at her as she walked toward us, still in the darkness. She was smiling, not seeing what I was seeing, but when she saw my face she knew something was terribly wrong.

I hopped quickly back through the snow toward her, grabbing Vince.

“Can you go upstairs with Lauren, take Luke back up?”

Looking up in horror, Lauren finally saw the flames. I turned her away and looked straight into her eyes.

“Go back inside, baby, please go back inside with Luke.” I handed him to her.

It wasn’t just one building.

Other buildings on the block had already caught fire. Black smoke was billowing upwards into the swirling white snow, an ominous cloud lit by the inferno that fed it. Thousands of people stood huddled together in the streets, stretching off into the distance as far as the eye could see, mesmerized by the blaze.

No sirens, no noise at all except the roar and crackle of the fire fighting off the cold and snow. New York was freezing and burning at the same time.

Day 10 – New Year
’s Day – January 1

“TRY NOT TO MOVE,” I said softly. The man on the mattress groaned and looked up at me. His face was badly burned. “We’re going to get help.”

He nodded, closing his eyes and grimacing.

We’d turned the lobby of our building into a makeshift infirmary by dragging some mattresses down from the empty apartments and laying them on the floor. Pam was running the show with a doctor and some EMTs from neighboring buildings.

The acrid stench of smoke and fire mixed with the smells of body odor and fetid, open wounds. We’d brought a kerosene heater down into the lobby, but we were running low on kerosene so had started burning diesel in it. It didn’t burn clean, which added the stink of soot and petroleum to the air.

We wedged the back door open to ventilate the smell, and at least it had warmed up outside. It was above freezing for the first time in a week, and the snow had finally stopped. The sun was shining for the first time in days.

The fires outside were still burning, and I thanked God that our building wasn’t attached.

A steady wind had blown all night, urging the flames from building to building. It wasn’t just this one fire either. NYPR announced that two other fires had started in Manhattan during the New Year festivities—fires and candles didn’t play well with alcohol. The authorities were now warning people not to start fires indoors and to be careful with candles and heaters.

Too little, too late, and besides, what are people supposed to do if they’re cold and in the dark?

A torrent of people had run out of the burning buildings the night before. Many were suffering from smoke inhalation, and some were horribly injured, but most were unhurt. All of them, though, were terrified to be outside in the cold and dark, clutching whatever belongings they could carry, wondering where they would go.

A convoy of military Humvees had appeared from the blackness, coming along Twenty-Third from the West Side Highway, crunching through the snow. There wasn’t anything they could do about the fires. There was no water, no fire department, and no emergency services.

They radioed in what information they could, loaded the wounded, and within a half hour they were gone, replaced by a second convoy about an hour later.

A third convoy failed to appear.

By that time, a ragtag collection of local firemen, doctors, nurses, and off-duty NYPD had gathered and started organizing the situation. Not knowing what else to do, we began taking some of the wounded back to our apartment while trying to convince the residents of other buildings nearby to do the same.

The newly homeless had made tearful pleas to be let into neighboring buildings. A few of the early ones had found people willing to take them in, and we’d agreed to take two couples, but quickly the requests had overwhelmed the willingness.

Standing back, we’d watched them begin their lonely walks up toward Javits and Penn, despondent, terrified, and many with children amongst them. A steady stream of them had disappeared into the swallowing darkness and snow, begging bystanders for shelter, many with only their phones to use as flashlights to hold back the night.

A noise at the back entrance snapped my attention back into the present. Vince appeared through the back door of the lobby with a young kid from one of the adjoining buildings. He waved at Pam and me to come over. He was holding what looked to be a huge bong.

“I went around and asked for painkillers and antibiotics,” said Vince in a hushed voice to Pam. “Most of what I could come up with was Advil and aspirin.”

He held out his hand to reveal a few bottles.

“Even this was difficult to get people to give up, but I have another idea.”

“And that is?” asked Pam.

Vince hesitated.

“We get them to smoke weed. It’s a great painkiller.”

He motioned to the kid beside him. He must have been sixteen. The kid smiled awkwardly and produced a huge bag of marijuana.

“These people are suffering from smoke inhalation, even burnt lungs,” hissed Pam, wide-eyed and motioning around at twenty beds we had littered on the floor, “and you want me to get them to
smoke
?”

Vince and the kid stared at Pam.

“Wait!” said the kid. “We could make, like, brownies, or, no...tea! We could make some tea. Add a little alcohol to help dissolve the THC. That’d work.”

Pam’s face softened. “That’s actually a great idea.”

Someone on a bed cried out in pain.

“Can you get it done right away?” asked Pam.

The kid nodded, and Vince told him to go up to the sixth floor and ask Chuck for whatever he needed.

At that moment Vince’s cell phone pinged.

It had been pinging all day and night from people joining the mesh network he’d started.

After showing Sergeant Williams how to install the software, we’d asked him to get as many people as he could to start using it. The more people that were connected, the further messages could travel. Vince had also gone out to neighboring buildings with some memory chips and explained the procedure. Judging by all the incoming messages, Vince and Sergeant Williams had been busy.

The mesh network had gone viral.

Already hundreds of people had joined, with dozens more every hour. People were finding ways to charge their cell phones, whether with generators or solar cells or by digging out and starting cars. Someone posted a general broadcast message to everyone connected, explaining how to pull out a car battery and hot-wire it to charge phones.

“Could you broadcast a message asking people in our area for some more pot?” I asked Vince. He nodded and pulled out his phone.

“We can pick it up on the way back.”

We were going back up to Penn, to bring in the worst of the wounded. Two of them were in need of critical care, beyond what we could provide. Tony was rigging up backpacks with harnesses attached to makeshift sleds we could pull through the snow, and I walked over to the basement stairs to see how he was doing.

As I arrived at the stairs, he was just coming up, noisily pulling his cargo behind him. Luke had been there helping him, really just running around and arranging piles of empty water containers, but he loved being near Tony. Tony had him under one arm as he came up the stairs.

“Emergency lights have finally given out,” he said as he saw me. He put Luke down and Pam came over to take him upstairs. “We better start saving the charge on the headlamps. Batteries are scarce.”

I nodded and reached down to help him haul the sleds up. We slid them into the lobby.

“You’re the best skier,” said Tony, picking up the harness-backpack he’d jury-rigged together, demonstrating how to use it. “I think you and I should do the hauling, and bring Vince along for backup.”

Vince shrugged. “Sorry man, surfing is more my thing than skiing.”

How does a kid from Louisiana, who goes to school in Boston, end up a surfer?

I sighed. When I put my jeans on this morning, I had to do up my belt one notch tighter than usual. On the bright side, it looked like I was going to lose some of that weight Lauren had been bugging me about. On the other hand, I was hungry, starving in fact.

Starving.

With a sinking feeling I realized I may get firsthand experience of what starving really felt like.

Tony, Vince, and I got dressed, while some of the EMTs dragged the sleds over to the two badly burned people we were taking up to Penn. Despite the muffled cries and whimpers from the injured, they began bundling them up against the cold and doing their best to secure them in the sleds.

Opening the back door, we scampered our way up to the top of the snow piled outside. The sky was a flat gray, and it felt warm. It was amazing how quickly the body adjusted to the cold. Just two weeks ago I would have been complaining about this temperature, shivering, but now, with it hovering a few degrees above freezing, it felt almost tropical.

Standing on the snow pile, our feet were even with the heads of the people standing inside the lobby. One person propped the door open, while the rest carefully pushed the sleds carrying the patients up the steep incline of the snow.

It was awkward work, and each jolt of the sleds earned a cry of pain from their occupants.

Soon we had our skis on and were heading down the middle of Twenty-Fourth in single file with Vince bringing up the rear. The two-lane ski and foot trails down the streets had become well worn, with openings cut into the snowbanks lining the streets.

Our pace was quick.

Rounding the corner of Ninth, we stopped to look down the street. The building on the corner of Ninth and Twenty-Third that had originally caught fire was now a burnt-out husk, but the fire still raged in buildings further down the avenue and around the corner onto Twenty-Second. Thick, black smoke smudged the gray sky.

Continuing onwards along Twenty-Fourth, the foot traffic became steadily heavier, with people going in all directions, dragging and carrying what they could.

The trash that I’d first noticed appearing two days ago had now become heaped along the edges of the street, and with the warmer weather each breath of wind brought the reek of human excrement that was seeping up through the melting snow. At the larger heaps of trash near the intersections, rats competed with gangs of human scavengers, combing through the garbage, searching for food.

As if in a trance, I slid through this landscape of urban decay, watching people, their faces, inspecting their bags, fascinated with the things they’d decided to carry: a chair here, a bag of books there. Someone was carrying a golden birdcage in the distance.

Peering in through the smashed windowpanes of shops, I saw people huddled inside around oil barrels with fires, smoke pouring out of the windows, blackening the sides of buildings. Despite it all, it was mostly quiet, just the soft shuffle of feet on snow and the hushed muttering of the displaced.

“Hold on a second!”

Looking back over my left shoulder, as we rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue to start the trek up to Penn, I saw Vince crouched at the side of the intersection next to a pile of garbage bags, using his phone to take a picture of someone sitting there.

What is he doing?

This wasn’t the time to start fooling around. I slackened my pace slightly, not wanting to leave him behind. In a few seconds he was back on the trail with us, jogging to catch up and then running ahead of us and darting off into the snow at the side of the street again. Poking through some bags, and not finding what he was looking for, he ran back to walk beside me.

“That guy back there was dead,” he explained, out of breath.

He began fiddling with his phone, typing something, while he walked in step with me.

There are going to be a lot of dead people, and if they’re dead, there’s nothing we can do for them anymore.

Unimpressed, I didn’t say anything.

“We should be making a record of what happened. That could be somebody’s loved one,” continued Vince, finishing typing and putting his phone away. “I created a mesh address, connected to my laptop back at our place, for people to send pictures and add text and explanations of where and when and what. When all this is over, maybe we can help piece things together, bring some resolution.”