CyberStorm Part 18

The electric heater whirred. I slipped my hand around to the small of her back and pulled her toward me, kissing her cheek. She trembled.

"No, because you're amazing."

"I am horrible, Mike, I'm so sorry."

"It's me that needs to apologize. I wasn't listening to you, and I wrongly accused you."

"It's not your fault."

Tears filled her eyes.

"That kid, Vince" I said quietly, "he lost his fiancee in the Amtrak crash."

"My G.o.d."

"And it made me think, if I ever lost you-"

Luke squealed between us. I smiled and looked at him, fighting back my own tears.

"One second, buddy, I just need to talk to your mommy, okay?"

I looked back at Lauren.

"You are everything to me. I'm sorry I didn't listen. When this is done, if you want to go back to Boston, I'm there with you. I'll be a stay-at-home dad, you get that job, whatever you want. I just want us to be together, to be a family."

"I want that too. I'm so sorry."

The gulf between us disappeared, and she reached up and kissed me. Luke squealed again.

"Okay, let's get you some breakfast," Lauren laughed, still kissing me.

I pulled away, pausing.

"It's falling apart out there, Lauren. People are dying."

She leaned in and whispered in my ear, "I know you'll keep us safe."

The main hallway had become a communal s.p.a.ce, with couches serving as beds toward each end and chairs arranged around two coffee tables in the middle. On one side, someone had pulled out a bookcase that served as a stand for some lamps, the radio, and a coffeemaker. The kerosene heater stood in the middle of one of the coffee tables, filling the s.p.a.ce with warmth.

The homeless man was gone, but the young woman and her kids were still there, curled up in a nest of blankets on the couch in front of the Borodins'. Rebecca, the woman from downstairs in 315, had spent the night up in our hallway. The Chinese family was staying in Richard's place, and Tony was spending his nights sleeping in the main room of Chuck's place, on the couch in front of the door to our bedroom.

By the time I got up, the kid, Vince, had already jury-rigged a rope and pulley system in the stairwell, and had banded together a work team. The elevator hallway, at right angles to the main hallway about halfway down, was stacked with containers of snow they were hauling up to melt for drinking water.

Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I waved to Tony as he appeared from the stairwell door with two buckets of snow, and I made for the steaming pot of coffee on the bookshelf. Pam was filling up a cup, and she handed it to me.

"Could I speak to you a second?" she whispered.

I mumbled, "Sure," as I took the cup, and she pulled me to one side. I drank a mouthful of coffee and savored it hitting my tongue.

"You're going to need to be very careful with Lauren. Even moderate dehydration and malnutrition can induce miscarriage."

"Of course I'll make sure." I took another sip of my coffee.

"That unborn baby is counting on you."

"I know that, Pam." Now I felt annoyed. "And I appreciate your concern."

She looked me in the eyes. "You come to me if anything-"

"I will."

We stared at each other for a few seconds, and then she looked down and turned to go back to helping with hauling up snow. Rory and Chuck were sitting on the couch near our door, playing with their phones.

"Cell phones working?" I asked hopefully as I refilled my cup, glad to switch topics.

"Not exactly," replied Chuck without looking up.

"More hospital shutdowns are scheduled for today," said the radio announcer, "and the NYPD is asking for volunteers-"

"Not exactly? What does that mean?"

"The kid showed me how to use a point-to-point messaging app. I'm installing it on Rory's phone."

"A point-to-point messaging app?"

"It's called a mesh network."

"-heavy snowfall and high winds are predicted, hampering efforts of the military-"

Taking a sip from my coffee, I sat down next to them, leaning in to see what they were doing. Chuck pulled a small memory chip from the back of Rory's phone, clipped the battery back in, and turned it on.

"We've collected a bunch of useful stuff on this," he said, holding the memory card between his fingers. "The kid's messaging app is amazing. We can text message each other, directly phone-to-phone, as well as across a network of phones, as long as they're within a few hundred feet. Doesn't need the cell network. There's even a Wi-Fi version of it."

"This radio station will be shutting down at four p.m. today in advance of the heavy weather and lack of refueling for our antennae transmission station. For continuing emergency broadcast tune into-"

"Can you stick it on my phone?"

He motioned toward a Tupperware filled with cell phones on the shelf under the coffeemaker. Each one was marked with masking tape.

"Already did yours and charged it up, and going to put it on as many phones as we can. They need to be unlocked, and doesn't work on all models, but works on enough of them."

"Guess you heard about the new storm?"

He nodded. "Another foot or two of snow coming. We're going to head out soon to help evacuate Beth Israel over to the Bellevue and Veterans. Can you come?"

These were large hospitals over on the east side, next to Stuyvesant Town and Alphabet City.

"As long as Lauren's okay with me leaving."

Chuck looked up at me and smiled, and the cell phone in his hand beeped to life. He began typing something.

"You sure you're up for going out?" I asked him.

"Yep. The kid is going to stay here and get all these phones done, talk to the neighbors."

He was gamely trying to use his broken hand to hold the cell phone while typing with the other. The bad hand was purple and swollen.

I shook my head and then thought of something.

"Have you checked on Irena and Aleksandr?"

"Check on them yourself," replied Chuck, nodding toward their door. "Oh, and one more thing. Can you cross-country ski?"

"Sure, if you can lend me another jacket."

3:30 p.m.

THE SNOW BEGAN again as the day slipped toward darkness.

Evacuating Beth Israel Hospital and the Veterans over to Bellevue was a much more orderly affair than the scene at Presbyterian the previous evening. It was an organized closure, or as organized as it could be under the conditions. They knew when the generator was going to lose power and were making the transfer ahead of time. Only the critical were transferred to Bellevue, with the rest going to evacuation centers.

Emergency resources and fuel were being concentrated in just a few of the largest medical centers.

Chuck and I skied over, using the gear the thieves had left in the lockers. We weren't the first ones to get the idea. A network of cross-country ski tracks had already appeared on the streets. New Yorkers were fast adapting, and we saw all kinds of improvised snow gear on our cross-town trek, even people on bicycles going down Sixth Avenue.

Cars everywhere were completely buried, but a few adventurous souls had dug them out and ventured onto the street, mostly only to get stuck again.

After the requests on the radio, hundreds of people turned up to help the NYPD and emergency services, turning First Avenue into a buzzing beehive of activity. Where New York felt almost deserted before, today's mission had inspired a sense of camaraderie and togetherness.

The city wasn't beaten yet, not by a long shot.

I'd checked in on the Borodins before leaving. It was as if nothing had happened. Irena and Aleksandr were sitting in their usual spots-Aleksandr asleep on the couch with Gorby curled up next to him, Irena knitting another set of socks.

Irena had even offered me some sausages she'd cooked for breakfast, which of course I'd accepted along with a piping-hot cup of tea. They didn't want to come and hang out with the rest of us. Irena explained that they would just keep to themselves, that they'd done this before.

At the hospital evacuation, I ran into Sergeant Williams again. He waved to me from a police cruiser as I was going one way up First and he was going the other way down.

He even honked.

"Time to get going back?" asked Chuck as the first fat snowflakes began to fall.

We'd managed seven runs back and forth, and I was exhausted.

"Definitely."

They were still plowing First Avenue, and we walked down it to the corner of Stuyvesant Town. Its towers hung in the sky above us. The bronze plaque at the entrance listed a hundred residential buildings in this one complex, fifty thousand people within its red-brick walls.

I was intensely thirsty. The Red Cross had appeared and were handing out blankets and supplies, but they were short on bottled water. We got one bottle each, but even with the bottles we'd each packed ourselves it wasn't enough. It warmed up to about fifteen degrees in the day, still cold, but warm enough that I'd been sweating profusely. It began cooling off rapidly as the sun started to set.

Picking up our skis from the security checkpoint inside the lobby of the VA Hospital, halfway between Beth Israel and Bellevue, we strapped them on and began the cross-city trek back to the west side of the city. The evacuation had been a rumor mill, and I'd been on the receiving end of a dozen different theories about what was going on.

"So what did you hear?" asked Chuck We had a trip of nearly two miles across Twenty-Third. The snowfall was getting heavier. For the millionth time, I resisted the urge to check my cell phone for e-mail.

"Air Force One is down, and the Russians and Chinese have teamed up to invade," I said loudly. With a dusting of fresh snow, the ski tracks along the middle of the street were quick, and Chuck was setting a fast pace in front of me. "People want to know why n.o.body has heard any more from Was.h.i.+ngton, why no military."

"About the same as what I heard, but my favorite is aliens," yelled Chuck over his shoulder. "I got stuck with a gang from the Village who're about to start wearing tinfoil hats to stop them reading our minds."

"About as effective as anything so far."

"Mostly people are wondering where in the h.e.l.l emergency relief is. And frightened talk of the next storm."

We skied silently for a few seconds, looking up into the thickening snowfall.

"It's scaring the heck out of me, too."

Ahead, Twenty-Third looked like a frozen canyon. A double set of ski tracks, flanked by foot trails, disappeared into the white distance straight down the center of the road. From the middle, the snow angled upwards toward the edges of the street, covering the parked cars and blowing into s...o...b..nks against the buildings, sometimes up to the second floors and covering first-floor awnings and scaffolding.

Channels were dug into the snow at irregular intervals at doorways and entrances, burrows of the human animals struggling to survive this onslaught.

Pa.s.sing the corner of Second Avenue, we heard the sound of breaking gla.s.s, and a small mob of people materialized from the gloom. They'd broken through the window of a food market, and a gang was patiently waiting while a few of them cleaned away the gla.s.s at the edges of the window.

Apart from the smashed front window of the Apple Store in Chelsea, I hadn't seen any looting, but people had to be running out of food and water. While some had taken advantage of the situation, the average New Yorker had been holding on.

With no help in sight, though, it had taken four days for scared and hungry to trump the law. There was an inevitability to it under the circ.u.mstances, and seeing it happen uncorked horrors crowding the back of my mind-Irena's stories of Leningrad, when roving gangs had started attacking and eating people, and the police had been forced to start an anti-cannibalism unit to combat it.

Stopping outside, we carefully watched from a distance.

Far from being a mad dash of pus.h.i.+ng and shoving, however, this was an orderly, almost apologetic looting. Two men stopped to help an elderly lady step over the smashed gla.s.s of the window. Seeing us looking at them, one of them shrugged at us.

"Waddya gonna do?" he yelled through the falling snow. "I gotta feed my family. I'll come back and leave some money when this is done."

Chuck looked at me. "What do you think?"

"What? Should we try and stop them?"

He laughed, shaking his head.

"Do you want to grab something?"

I sighed and looked into the swirling white distance, toward home and my family.

"Yeah, we should grab everything we can."

Chuck nodded, and we unclipped our skis.