CyberStorm (9 page)

“Sorry. We just got this,” lied Chuck. “Left over from a job site I was working on.”

“Oh yeah?”

Chuck stared at him. The pause became uncomfortable.

“Yeah. And if you don’t mind, we need to get going.”

Paul shrugged. “Okay, just looking for a little neighborly help. This is some weird shit going on. Have you seen the snow outside? You can barely see the cars anymore.”

Another pause.

“Well, good luck,” said Chuck, motioning for me to pick up my end again. He picked his up with only one hand this time. “I’m sure the power will be up soon and we’re just wasting our time.”

We started up the stairs, and Paul went down, opening the door on the fourth floor and disappearing. As soon we reached our floor, Chuck dropped his end.

“Did you see his pants?”

I shook my head. “Why?”

“Soaked from the knees down, and his sneakers were soaked as well. He must have been outside.”

“So what? Maybe he went out to have a look.”

Chuck shook his head. “At seven in the morning? I’ve never seen that guy before. Tony must have left the front door to the building open. And why in the hell did he go straight onto the fourth floor like that?”

“Maybe it’s just a neighbor you don’t recognize,” I countered, but the hair on my neck prickled.
An intruder.

“You drag this the rest of the way into our place. I’m going downstairs to lock things up.”

Chuck rushed off down the stairs, bounding two at a time, and I watched him vanish as the hollow echoes of his footsteps faded. Opening the door to our floor, I leaned down, grunted, and pulled on the generator.

10:05 a
.
m
.

DESPITE THE SITUATION, the rest of the morning gradually took on a festive air.

As soon as Chuck returned from locking up downstairs, I went over to knock on Pam’s door and asked her to have a look at Luke. Tony went down and double-checked the front door, leaving a note saying he could be found up at our place.

Chuck instituted a strict rule that only our gang, which included Tony, would be allowed into their apartment. He made an exception for Pam, and after some protest, for her husband, Rory. Firing up a kerosene heater, the apartment quickly warmed, and we woke up Lauren and Luke and moved them into Chuck and Susie’s spare room.

After a quick inspection, Pam declared that Luke definitely didn’t look symptomatic of bird flu, at least from what she understood, and that his fever was breaking. He still had a fever of 102, dangerous but manageable, and she promised to stay close and check in on him.

Pam said that she’d been up all night at the Red Cross blood bank. It’d transformed into an emergency clinic, with volunteer doctors appearing almost as quickly as the flood of people claiming symptoms.

One of the doctors there had worked at the CDC doing research on avian flu. Pam had a long chat with him about what was going on, and he’d explained that the news didn’t make any sense—incubation, transmission, symptoms, and so on.

It looked like it really was a false, or fake, alarm.

Our run-in with the suspected intruder was quickly forgotten, and Chuck insisted on opening a bottle of champagne to pour mimosas for everyone. It was Christmas Eve, he toasted, and a white Christmas at that, he added, looking out the window at the driving blizzard beyond.

We all managed to laugh.

All together in the room that morning, warm and safe and unpacking Chuck’s equipment as if we were on an indoor camping trip, the sense of danger disappeared. My baby boy was sick with a serious fever, but relieved it was just a regular flu or cold, I felt almost overjoyed.

In the background we kept a radio turned on. The broadcaster detailed the road closures—I-95, I-89, New Jersey Turnpike—and the running tally of homes without power, estimated at ten million and counting across the Northeast. The subway system was shut down. They said the power failure was some kind of electrical cascade in the network, same as had happened a few years ago, and the snowstorm was making it worse.

The voice of the radio announcer, this small connection to the outside world, lent the morning a feeling of familiarity, the same as any other disaster day that New Yorkers would rally from to begin the process of rebuilding. Reports coming in on the bird flu scare were bearing out our feelings—the CDC couldn’t confirm any cases, and they hadn’t been able to identify the source of the warning.

Buoyed by the alcohol in the mimosa, I went next door to check on the Borodins. I remembered that Irena’s daughter and family, who lived in a building next door, had gone away for the holidays, so they were alone. The radio was reminding us to check on the elderly, but I had a feeling the Borodins were just fine.

I went anyway.

Knocking on their door, I heard Irena telling me to come in, come in, and I entered to find them as usual. Irena was sitting in her rocking chair, knitting, and Aleksandr was sitting asleep in his lounger, in front of a blank TV, with Gorbachev at his side. The only difference was that they were bundled up under blankets.

It was freezing in their place.

“Some tea?” offered Irena. Watching her hands carefully finish another stitch, I wished I would have hands as nimble as hers when I was ninety.
I’ll be happy just to get to ninety.

“Yes, please.”

They’d set up what looked like an antique camp stove in their kitchen, and a pot of hot tea sat steaming on it. The Borodins were Jewish, but they had a large holiday tree, beautifully decorated, occupying nearly half of their living room. I’d been surprised last year when they’d asked me to help them get a tree, but I’d learned that this wasn’t a Christmas tree, but a New Year tree.

It was the nicest one on our floor, whatever it was called.

Irena got up and went to her pantry door, opening it to get some sugar for the tea, and for the first time I noticed their pantry was stacked, floor to ceiling, with cans and bags of beans and rice. She noticed me looking.

“Old habits die hard,” she said, smiling as she returned to pour the tea. “How is the little prince?”

“He’s good. I mean, he’s sick, but he’ll be okay,” I answered, accepting the cup of tea, wrapping my hands around it. “Isn’t it awfully cold in here? Do you want to come over to Chuck’s?”

“Ah,” she snorted, waving away my concern, “dis is not cold. I spent winters in shacks in Siberia after the war. Sorry for you, but I opened the windows for some fresh air.”

Aleksandr let go a particularly loud snore at that moment, adding his own commentary. We laughed.

“Do you need anything? Just come next door, anytime.”

She shook her head and smiled.

“Ah, no. We’ll be fine. Stay quiet, not bother anyone.”

Taking a sip from her tea, she considered something and looked at me.

“If
you
need anything, Mi-kay-hal, you remember, you come here,
da
? We will be watching.”

I said I would, and we chatted for a bit. I was struck by how calm Irena was. The power failure had tweaked a deep chord in me, making me feel as if I’d lost a sense, as if I was blind or deaf without the hum of the machines. Next door, surrounded by Chuck’s gadgets and gizmos and the steady noise of the radio broadcaster, I felt almost normal. With Irena it felt different, colder certainly, but also calmer and more secure.

She was from a different generation. I guessed the machines weren’t a part of them like they were of us.

Thanking her for the tea, I went back to check on Luke. A collection of neighbors had congregated in the hallway. Bundled up in winter jackets and scarves, they looked decidedly less happy than I felt.

“Goddamn building administration!” growled Richard, looking toward me as I came out of the Borodins’. “Someone’s going to lose their job for this. Do you have any heating?”

“No, but Chuck has some heating gadgets, you know how he is—”

“Could I buy one from him?” asked Richard, starting toward me. “My place is bloody freezing.”

Holding up my hand, I waved him back.

“Sorry, but this bird flu thing, you should stay back. I’ll ask Chuck, but I don’t think so.”

Richard frowned but stopped.

I opened the door to Chuck’s, immediately feeling the warmth wash over my face.
This morning is getting better and better
. Entering, I was about to have a laugh with Chuck over my encounter with Richard, when I found everyone sitting still, staring at the radio.

“What?”

I closed the door behind me.

“Shhhhhh,” said Lauren tensely.

“The extent of the crash is still unknown, if it is a derailment or a collision,”
said the radio.

“What happened?”

Chuck moved around the couch, pushing aside boxes and bags. He was favoring the hand that the door had banged into, holding it up toward his chest. The snow beat urgently against the windowpanes as the wind violently churned the air outside. I couldn’t even see the next building, not twenty feet away.

It was a complete whiteout.

“There’s been a crash,” said Chuck quietly. “A train crash. Amtrak. Halfway between New York and Boston early this morning, but they didn’t find it until now. At least, this is the first they announced it.”

“
— terrible loss of life, at least in the hundreds, if not from the crash itself then from freezing to death in the blizzard—”

12:30 p
.
m
.

“WHY COULDN’T WE have stuck this inside and vented it out?”

Even with the heavy gloves, my hands were numb, and I was getting tired of leaning halfway out a window nearly a hundred feet above the ground. No matter how much I tried to shake it off, the driving snow piled up on my face and neck and melted uncomfortably into the nooks and crannies where clothing met skin.

“We don’t have time to weld and pressure-test any joints,” explained Chuck.

Mounting the generator outside their living room window was proving to be harder than we’d thought. It didn’t help that Chuck could barely use one hand. His injured hand had swollen up like an angry purple grapefruit.

Tony had gone to help some residents on the second floor, and Pam had returned to the Red Cross station. We had Lauren and Susie take the kids into the spare bedroom and play with them while we opened the windows. The apartment was freezing cold and awash with melting snow.

“A slow death by carbon monoxide poisoning
is
peaceful,” added Chuck, “but not what I had in mind for Christmas.”

“You almost done?” I groaned.

“Just connecting cables.”

I could hear him fumbling around and swearing.

“Okay, you can let go.”

With a relieved sigh, I released the plywood platform we had the generator sitting on and leaned back into the apartment, swiveling closed my window as I did. Beside me, Chuck gave me a grin, his injured hand resting carefully on the generator. He pulled on the starter chord with his good hand, and the generator stuttered and growled to life.

“Hope the goddamn thing doesn’t freeze out there,” said Chuck, closing up the window with the generator hanging outside it, but leaving a small gap for the power cords to get in.

The apartment had no balcony, and we didn’t want to risk putting it on the fire escape in case someone got the idea to come up and steal it. So we’d balanced it outside a window on an improvised platform.

“I’m more worried about water getting into it,” I mused. “Not sure it’s weather proofed for sitting under a foot of melting snow.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

Leaning against the window, he gingerly pulled off lengths of duct tape from a roll, handing them to me so I could seal up the gap.

“With enough duct tape, you can fix anything,” he laughed.

“Perfect. I’ll give you a thousand rolls and send you down to Con Edison to get the power back on.”

We both laughed at that.

The radio was continuing with updates about the train crash, the increasing severity of the storm, and the power failure. All of New England was paralyzed. It was another Frankenstorm—this one a powerful nor’easter colliding with a low-pressure system rising up from the Southeast. They were predicting it would dump three or four feet in the New York area as it sat on the coast. Fifteen million people and counting were without power, and many were without food or heating or any access to emergency services.

The train accident was a mass of conflicting information. Some eyewitnesses said the military was onsite almost immediately. News outlets didn’t report the accident for several hours, leading to speculation that the military was trying to hide the accident for some reason, and no cause was reported.

As the scale of the storm became clear, and rumors around the train accident spread, the mood in the apartment had shifted from cheerful to quiet anxiety.

Pulling off my hat and scarf, I unzipped the parka Chuck had loaned me and tried to shake off the crust of snow that had wedged down the back of my neck. Chuck walked to the kitchen counter, stepping through boxes and bags, to turn up the kerosene heater, and then began rummaging around for extension cords.

Just then there was a knock on the door.

Pam appeared.

“Back so soon?” I asked. Lauren and Susie heard the knock and came into the main room.

“I had to leave.”

She looked around the room as if she was trapped.

“What happened?” asked Lauren.

“Only one doctor and half the nurses showed up today. We did the best we could, but it turned from people worrying about bird flu to people asking for medications, demanding shelter, and then the emergency generator quit.”

“My God,” said Lauren, putting one hand to her mouth. “What happened?”

“We tried closing, but it was impossible. People refused to leave. The battery-powered emergency lights came on, but people panicked and starting grabbing anything they could get their hands on. I tried stopping them, but—”