CyberStorm (7 page)

But in the outside world, who knew? Luke probably just had a cold, and we might be walking into a mass of infected people in a hospital. It was impossible to say, but we had to be sure Luke was safe. I put some of the latex gloves into the pockets of my jeans.

Susie went down the hall to see if Pam, the nurse, was home yet. I was hoping she might take a look at Luke, or sneak us into the back entrance of a hospital somewhere, but no luck. She and Rory weren’t home. We tried their phone numbers, but the cell networks were completely jammed.

While Chuck talked about how to recognize infectious diseases, dispensing advice about not touching or wiping our faces, I combed through a White Pages looking for addresses of nearby clinics and hospitals, scribbling the information on a piece of paper. I was relieved to even find the phone book, stuck in the bottom drawer of a kitchen cabinet. I hadn’t seen one in years.

My first reaction was to search the map on my smartphone, but the map screen remained stubbornly blank. It was getting no incoming data feed. My usual stream of messages, after a brief flood of concerned e-mails from friends, had stopped as well.

I couldn’t access the internet at all.

Neither my smartphone nor laptop would load any webpages, or at least not anything intelligible. When I tried Google, either nothing would load and a “Could not find DNS server” error message would pop onto the screen, or sometimes a random webpage would load about an African tourism site, or the next time a college student’s blog would appear.

So I scribbled on paper.

As we left the apartment, half of our neighbors were out in the hallway, talking in quiet whispers with masks hanging around their necks. They spread away from us as we walked out, mostly away from Lauren, who held Luke. The Chinese family at the end of the hallway wisely stayed inside. Richard had called down for his car service to drive us, and I wanted to thank him, but as I held my hand out, he shrank away and put his mask on, muttering that we’d better hurry.

Outside, Richard’s black Escalade and driver were waiting for us. The driver, Marko, was already wearing a mask. It was the first time I’d met him, but Lauren already seemed to know him quite well.

At first we tried the Presbyterian clinic just around the corner on Twenty-Fourth. It was listed as open, but when we arrived, people were streaming out and telling us it was closed. We circled around to the Beth Israel clinic nearby, but there was a line stretching onto the street already.

We didn’t even stop.

Lauren gently cradled Luke in layers of blankets, quietly humming little lullabies to him. He’d been crying again, but had given up, and was now sniffling and squirming about. He could sense something was wrong, that we were scared.

The warmest things we could find in our closet for Lauren were a leather jacket and scarf, and I was wearing the thin, black jacket and sweater from earlier. It was warm inside the Escalade, but bitter cold outside.

I found myself worrying that Marko, the driver, would abandon us somewhere if it got too late.
He must have a family somewhere he’s worrying about too
. It would be impossible to find a taxi, with all this going on, and Lauren had said that the subways weren’t working either. I tried talking to Marko, but he just said not to worry, that everything was fine, that we could trust him.

I still worried.

The streets of New York had transformed from holiday festive to cold and desolate. Long lines of people snaked out of convenience and food stores, outside bank machines, and there were long lines of cars waiting for gas at the stations.

Memories of past storms and disasters pressed down heavily.

People hurried down the streets, loaded down with bags and packages, nobody speaking, everyone staring at the ground. None of the packages looked like Christmas gifts. New Yorkers always had the feeling that their city was a target, and now it seemed, from the hunched shoulders and furtive glances on the streets outside, that the monster was rearing its head again.

It was a collective wound that never quite healed, infecting anyone that came here. When Lauren and I had moved into the condo in Chelsea, she’d been concerned that we were too close to the Financial District. I’d told her not to be silly.
Had I made a terrible mistake?

We stopped at the emergency clinic at the Greater New York on Ninth between Fifteenth and Sixteenth. The place was swarming with people, and not just sick-looking people, but crazy-looking ones. The woodwork of the city was opening up.

I got out and tried to talk to the police and EMTs at the entrance, but they shook their heads and said it was like this all over the city. Lauren waited inside the car, her eyes following me as I walked around trying to find someone to talk to, anyone that might be able to help. One of the cops suggested Saint Jude’s Children’s up at Penn Plaza on Thirty-Fourth.

I jumped back in the car.

On the drive to Saint Jude’s, Luke began crying again, wailing, his face red and apoplectic with each shrill scream. Lauren trembled and began crying as well. I put my arm around the two of them, telling her it would be okay. Finally, reaching Saint Jude’s, we saw there was no crowd of people outside the emergency room, so we jumped out and ran in, only to be confronted by a mass of people on the inside.

A triage nurse gave us a quick inspection, replacing our masks with N95s, and we were immediately cordoned off into a set of rooms that were crammed with other parents and their children. I found a chair for Lauren in one corner, next to a leaking water fountain and beneath yellowing posters about the importance of the food pyramid for young children’s health. We waited for hours. Finally, another nurse appeared and led us into an examination room, saying that seeing a doctor wouldn’t be possible, but that she’d have a look.

She said it looked like a cold and that there had been no cases of bird flu in their hospital. She promised us that they had no idea what the news was talking about and gave us some Children’s Tylenol, asking politely but firmly if we could go home. There was nothing else we could do.

I felt powerless.

True to his word, Marko was waiting outside when we came out. The cold was intense. On the short walk to the car, opening the door for Lauren and Luke, my hands became numb. The wind cut through my thin jacket, and long plumes of vapor spun into the air with each tired breath.

A few tiny snowflakes had begun to fall. The idea of a white Christmas usually excited me, but now it felt ominous.

On the drive back, New York was as quiet as a morgue.

3:35 a
.
m
.

“I AM NOT leaving them here!” I heard Susie loudly saying through the doorway.

“That’s not what I was saying,” I heard Chuck reply in a quieter voice.

Hanging back in the hallway, I hesitated but then knocked. Footsteps padded toward me and the door opened, spilling bright light into the hallway. Squinting, I smiled.

“Ah, hey,” said Chuck awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “I guess you heard all that?”

“Not really.”

He smiled. “Uh-huh. You okay? You want a cup of tea? Chamomile or something?”

I shook my head and walked in. “No thanks.”

Their place, a two-bedroom apartment only slightly larger than ours, was filled with boxes and bags. Susie was sitting on the couch, an oasis in the middle of the confusion piled around her, looking embarrassed. They weren’t wearing their masks, so I took mine off.

“You get a new mask?” asked Chuck.

“They gave us N95s or something,” I replied. “I don’t know what that means.”

Chuck snorted. “N95, ha, the one I gave you was way better than ninety-five percent. You shouldn’t have let them take it. I’ll get you some more.”

“It’s like he’s preparing for World War Three,” Susie laughed. “You sure you don’t want a cup of something hot?”

“Not hot, but maybe something strong.”

“Ah, yes,” said Chuck, moving off toward the kitchen. He quickly produced a bottle of scotch and two tumblers from a cupboard. “Ice, no ice?”

“Neat is fine.”

He poured a generous dose into both glasses.

“So how’s Luke?” asked Susie. “What did the doctors say?”

“We didn’t manage to see one. A nurse looked at him and didn’t say much except it didn’t look like bird flu. He’s got a fever of a hundred and three. Lauren’s curled up with him under a blanket. They’re sleeping for now.”

“That’s good news, right? Pam came back when you were out, said we can wake her up if you want. She has a degree in tropical medicine, I think.”

I wasn’t sure how tropical medicine might help in this situation, but I knew Chuck was trying to be comforting. It was reassuring that Pam was nearby.

“It can wait till the morning.”

“So what would you think of a little vacation in Virginia?” asked Chuck as he handed my drink over.

“Virginia?”

“Yeah, you know, our old family place in the hills near the Shenandoah? It’s in the national park, only a few cabins on the whole mountain.”

“Ahhh,” I replied, the light dawning. “Time to bug out?”

He motioned toward the TV, still on but with the sound muted. The CNN headline scrolling across the top was about a bird flu outbreak being reported in California.

“Nobody knows what the hell is going on. Half the country thinks it’s terrorists, the other half an attack by the Chinese, and another half thinks it’s nothing at all.”

“That’s a lot of halves.”

“Glad you have a sense of humor.”

Taking a sip from his drink, he grabbed the remote from the kitchen counter and turned up the volume on CNN
. “Unconfirmed reports of bird flu have been springing up all over the country, with the latest in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where health officials have quarantined two major hospitals...”

I sighed heavily and took a big gulp of my drink. “I most absolutely do not find this funny.”

“Emergency services all over the country are screwed, cell phone networks jammed,” said Chuck, looking at the news. “It’s a total mess out there.”

“Don’t need to tell me. You should see the hospitals. Has the CDC confirmed anything?”

“They confirmed the emergency notifications, but nobody’s been able to get in to find out what’s going on.”

“It’s taking that long? It’s been ten hours already.”

Chuck took a deep breath and shook his head. “With the internet down and this Scramble virus messing with logistics, nobody knows where anyone is or what they should be doing.”

Rubbing my eyes, I took another sip from my drink and looked out their windows. It had started to snow in earnest, and a steady stream of snowflakes flashed out of the darkness, spinning and swirling with the wind.

Chuck followed my eyes.

“These storms coming, it’s going to be worse than Christmas a few years back, like a frozen Sandy.”

I hadn’t been in New York for the big blizzard in 2010 that had dumped over two feet of snow the day after Christmas, but I’d heard about it. Seven-foot drifts in Central Park with waist-deep snow in the middle of the streets, but there were snowstorms almost as bad every year now. I’d been there for Sandy, though, and a frozen version of that frightened me. New York had become a magnet for perfect storms.

“You guys should just get going,” I said, watching the snow. “We can’t leave. Not with Luke sick like this. He needs to rest, and we need to be close to hospitals.”

“We’re not leaving you here,” said Susie firmly, looking at Chuck. He shrugged and finished off his drink.

“Charles Mumford,” she continued after a pause, “don’t be ridiculous. All this is going to blow over. You’re being dramatic.”

“Dramatic?” shot back Chuck, almost throwing his glass at the TV as he pointed at it. “Have you been watching the same stuff I have? Chinese declaring war, a biological attack spread across the country, communications down—”

“Don’t exaggerate. They did not declare war. That was just some minister puffing his chest for the cameras,” countered Susie. “Anyway, look at all this stuff.” She motioned around the apartment. “By God, we could hole up in here and survive till
next
Christmas with all this.”

Finishing my drink, I waved my hands in the air.

“I don’t want you guys to fight. I think this will blow over and by tomorrow morning things will calm down.”

I turned to Chuck.

“If you want to get going, I totally understand. Do what’s best for your family. I mean it.”

I paused and looked him in the eye, smiling, trying to convey my seriousness.

Sighing, I added, “I need to get some sleep.”

Chuck scratched his head and put his glass down on the kitchen counter.

“Me too. I’ll see you later, buddy.”

He walked over and hugged me, taking my glass from my hand. Susie got up to come and give me a kiss on the cheek.

“We’ll see you in the morning,” she whispered in my ear, hugging me tightly.

“Please go if he wants,” I whispered back.

Closing the door behind me as I left, I crossed the few feet of dimly lit hallway to quietly open our apartment door. Locking the door behind me, I crept into the bedroom, softly closing that door as well.

My whole world was lying on the bed in front of me. In the ghostly glow from the LED display on our bedside alarm clock, I could just make out the forms of Lauren and Luke curled up together. The room smelled humid and lived-in, like a nest, and that thought brought a smile to my face. I stood still and watched them, feeling the wonder and joy, their rhythmic breathing soothing my senses.

Luke coughed, and he took in two or three quick, deep breaths, as if he couldn’t breathe properly, but then he sighed and quietened down.

Silently, I stripped down and gently slid under the covers. Luke was in the middle of the bed, so I curled up around him, with Lauren on the other side. Leaning over, I brushed a lock of hair away from Lauren’s forehead and kissed her. She mumbled and I kissed her again, and then, with a deep breath, I pulled one of the pillows under my head and closed my eyes.