CyberStorm (24 page)

She’d made me promise to bring the point up with Chuck.

“It’s wrong to spy on our neighbors,” I continued halfheartedly. “It’s exactly what we were talking about.”

“Don’t you want to know where Paul and Stan are?”

We trudged a few more steps through the granular snow at the side of the slushy main path, sinking calf deep on each step. Every now and then my foot would sink especially deep and I’d have to carefully pull it out, usually ending with a wedge of dirty snow packed into my boot.

My feet were soaking wet.

“Of course, but it’s not the same as spying on our neighbors.”

“How’s it different if we know one of them is working with the bad guys?”

“Because you don’t know,” I replied. “You’re seeing conspiracies, exchanging someone else’s freedom to feed your paranoia.”

“Paranoia, huh? Look who’s talking. You’re still thinking Lauren is doing something behind your back.”

Sighing, I said nothing.

We walked quietly for a block.

The warm weather brought a lot of people outside, some wandering aimlessly, but most searching, scavenging. Through the broken windows of shops, we could see people picking through the empty shelves, searching for anything left behind. People were making an effort to pile trash bags together, and hills of them were growing at the intersections, glued together by windblown snow and debris.

I noticed that cables were strung from buried cars into the first-floor windows of a few apartments down the street. This was another one of Vince’s ideas—to turn on cars and use them as electrical generators. The idea had spread quickly on the meshnet.

“You know, we need criminals,” I said.

“We
need
criminals?”

“Society needs criminals. Without them, we’d be finished.”

Chuck laughed. “Now this I have to hear.”

“Any game theory simulation of society is more robust if you include a criminal element.”

“Simulation, huh?”

“The criminals force society to improve. They weed out the weak, making us strengthen our institutions and networks.”

“So they’re the wolves and we’re the lambs?”

“Sort of.”

The nearest marker on my treasure hunt app, the locations where we buried the food bags, was at the corner of Eighth and Twenty-Second, and I pulled out my phone to check the map again. The wind had begun to pick up, and I shivered, motioning that we had to go down Eighth.

“Without a certain baseline of people who take advantage of others,” I continued, “society just doesn’t function.”

“Sounds like a bad deal for the people getting taken advantage of.”

“But a good deal for society as a whole. I’m not saying that we don’t catch and punish criminals. I’m just saying that we need them.”

We were nearing the spot on the map where the bags were buried.

Chuck shook his head. “I’m not convinced.”

“Look at it this way. Something that is illegal to me might not be to you. Maybe we’re in different countries, or your moral compass is different from the laws of the place you’re in.”

“And how does that help?”

“It helps society
evolve
. Slavery was legal back when Columbus got here, so you don’t judge him, but he would be a criminal today. And Ghandi was a criminal when he broke the salt laws in India. They’re both heroes now. Criminals help push the boundaries.”

“So you think we should be admiring Stan and Paul?”

“Their kids probably admire them, and yes, there are criminals I admire.”

“Which ones?”

“Maybe those Anonymous hackers.”

Chuck shook his head. “You can keep your criminals.”

We’d reached the spot, and I stood still, taking out my camera and looking at the picture I’d snapped of the spot where we buried this load. Reaching behind me, I pulled my shovel out from my backpack.

“This is it,” I said simply. Falling to my knees, I began digging. After a few quick shovelfuls of soft snow I hit something. Pushing aside the snow with one gloved hand, I found the edge of a ragged plastic bag and pulled. Out popped a bag full of groceries.

Chuck laughed and took the bag from me. “Nice. I remember that one—steak and sausages. Jackpot!”

Digging through the snow with my hands, I found two other bags and began pulling them out. I was about to tell Chuck that I thought the others were full of the same thing when I noticed a crowd had collected around us.

“How did you guys know that was there?” asked one of them. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in a week. “I’ll give you a million dollars for those bags. I’m a hedge fund manager. I swear I’ll give you the money.”

Chuck had his .38 in the pocket of his parka. As he swiveled around to the man, I could see him gripping his gun, about to pull it out.

“Chuck, don’t—” I started to say when something flashed out of the corner of my eye.

With a dull thud, a two-by-four cracked Chuck in the head, and he toppled forward, splaying face-first on the ground like a rag doll. The bag he was holding spilled its contents around him, and like hungry dogs the crowd around us pounced, grabbing Chuck’s backpack, dragging him through a dark-red smear in the snow where his head had landed.

Day 1
4 – January 5

“HE’S LOST A lot of blood.”

“Will he be okay?” Susie tried to ask calmly, but tears were streaming down her face.

Chuck had been in and out of consciousness all day, and hardly aware of who we were when he did wake up. We’d laid him out on the bed in Chuck and Susie’s room after dragging him back.

“I think so,” replied Pam, feeling his pulse. “He has a strong, regular heartbeat, which is good. He needs sleep, and lots of liquids…”

She hesitated.

“What?” I asked.

“And he needs to eat as much as possible.”

Nobody said anything for a few moments.

“Thanks, Pam, we’ll make sure he does.”

Leaving Susie with Chuck, I walked Pam out of the apartment and past the barricade at our end of the hall.

The hallway had been empty all day. For the past three days, since we’d made clear how dire the food situation was, everyone had been leaving each morning to go and wait in line for food and water at one of the relief stations.

The Red Cross was allotting one food pack per person in line, about a day’s supply of calories, and after three days the other groups on our floor—the group in the hallway, the ones with Rory, and the ones with Richard—had built up their supplies, surviving on starvation-level rations, where we’d nearly run out.

How quickly the tables had turned.

Susie was cooking up a rice mash for dinner, using nearly the last of our food, and nobody on the rest of the floor was in a sharing mood after Chuck made it clear we weren’t going to share with them.

We’d pinned our hopes on recovering the food we stashed outside, but we lost what we’d collected in the scuffle yesterday. Between taking care of the kids, nursing Chuck, Vince running the mesh network, and Tony handling security, nobody in our group had the five or six hours needed to go and wait in the food lines.

The thing nobody ever told me about hunger was just how much it hurt. I was making sure that Lauren and Luke got most of the rations allotted to me, so I was literally starving. Sometimes the hunger was just an ache, but often it was an intense pain that burned in my gut, making it impossible to concentrate. The worst was at night. My lack of food was also translating into a lack of sleep.

Sighing, I slumped down on a chair next to Vince. He was almost surgically attached to the laptop he had running as the mesh network control center. It seemed all he needed to survive was a constant stream of coffee, but that was almost gone too.

“So people really whipped out their phones and started taking pictures?”

“It probably saved our lives,” I replied, shaking my head. “You saved our lives.”

When Chuck was hit in the head, I’d thrown my two bags of food into the crowd and jumped forward on all fours to try and help him, grabbing one of his legs as they seized his backpack.

Fumbling in Chuck’s pockets, I’d tried to get the gun out, but it had fallen into the snow. The guy that had hit Chuck with the two-by-four had wound back up to whack me as well, and I’d cowered in the snow, holding my hands up to protect myself.

Just at that moment, someone had yelled out to stop, holding up their phone to take a picture. The man had towered above me, holding the club above his head, hesitating, and then someone else had yelled out to stop and took a picture with her phone. Under such public attention, the attacker had retreated, dropping the two-by-four and scrambling to grab some of the food.

Fishing around in the snow, I’d found the gun buried under Chuck, stashed it in my pocket, and sent out a text message saying we needed help. Tony and Vince had arrived within minutes.

By that time the crowd had dispersed, and we’d carried Chuck back to the apartment like a sack of potatoes while he bled profusely from his head wound.

“Social media as a lifesaving tool—wouldn’t be the first time. By the way, I have pictures of the guy that attacked you and Chuck.”

“Really?”

The mesh network was amazing, but up till that point it had been slow and only patchily connected.

“Some hackers in the East Village figured out a way to upload the mesh software wirelessly, and it’s really gone viral now. Tens of thousands of people already.”

The day before there hadn’t been any uploads of our incident. I got up and stared at the screen.

“Recognize him?”

The images were grainy but recognizable.

A large man in a red-and-black-checked jacket and wool hat menacing a pathetic-looking figure cringing in the snow. My head was turned away in the image, with one hand held high to try and deflect the coming blow, but the man’s face was in full view.

Vince zoomed in.

“That’s definitely us.”

I hadn’t gotten a good look at our attacker at the time.

Where had I seen him before?

“Hey! That’s one of the guys from the garage downstairs.”

I remembered seeing him lounging next to the pallet when Chuck and I were unloading it. He’d been talking to Rory.

“You sure?”

I looked again, more carefully.
That’s definitely the guy Rory was talking to that day.

“Absolutely.”

Vince shook his head.

“The bastards are hunting us down. I’ll run a network map and see if I can filter this guy out, see if any of those nodes run into Stan or Paul’s.”

“Is Rory back yet from the food lines?”

Vince typed away on his keyboard for a few seconds before answering.

“Not yet, why?”

I didn’t want to fuel any more gossip.

“No reason.”

Giving me a funny look, Vince shrugged and continued working.

“Can you add an alert text if any of those guys comes within a hundred yards of any of us?”

“Will be tricky to get in real time, with all the delays, but yes, more or less.”

I shivered and scratched a sudden itch.

A cold draft was blowing through the hallway, even with the kerosene heater turned all the way up. The temperature had dropped dramatically again. I hadn’t been outside, but with all the melting yesterday, the sharp drop below freezing had turned the streets into a skating rink, or really more like a frozen obstacle course.

“So what else is going on?”

“I’ve hooked up with those hackers in the East Village, and they’ve already coded up a kind of mesh Twitter and set up other base stations like mine. People are creating neighborhood watches, barter exchanges, charging stations, crime reporting—communication is the key to civilization.”

“Hackers, huh?” I said warily.

Vince shook his head, still tapping away on his keyboard, and then stopped to scratch his head and look at me.

“I’m using the term ‘hacker’ in its original meaning of tinkering with code, of creating, not abusing. Hackers have gotten a bad rap. They didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Those Anonymous guys admitted attacking the logistics companies, and that was half of this mess.”

Again Vince scratched his head. “They didn’t do this.”

Shaking my head, I let it go.

He seems awfully sure of himself.

“It’s freezing in here,” I complained, itching again and shivering with another cold blast of air.

“The window down the end of the hallway is still open from when it was warm yesterday,” answered Vince, deep into coding away on his machine. “Why don’t you close it?”

Nodding, I got up, wondering how much Vince was involved with Anonymous.

I closed the window.

Day 15 – January 6

A BRILLIANT CARPET of stars hung above us.

“I didn’t think New York had stars,” said Vince quietly, craning his neck back to take them all in. “At least, not the kind in the sky.”

I stared into the heavens. “The whole East Coast hasn’t produced much in the way of pollution in the last two weeks, and the cold weather helps.”

This was the first time I’d come up onto the roof since everything had started, and the dense star field that greeted us as soon as we’d opened the rooftop door had been startling. The moonless night helped—it was the evening of the new moon in the monthly cycle—but still, these were the stars that I’d only ever met deep in the countryside.

It felt like the gods, once cast out from New York, had returned to peer down from their heavenly perches and gloat as they watched Gotham struggle below.

“You sure you want to do this tonight?” asked Vince.

I looked down at the blackness between the buildings.

“This is the perfect night to do this. Anyway, we don’t have much choice, do we?”

Thinking on gods, memories of Sunday school filtered into my mind. Tonight was the epiphany, the night when the Magi, the three wise men of legend, followed the stars to bring their treasures to baby Jesus. We would be using our own magic to find treasure tonight, and I was hoping the stars, and the gods, would be kind.