CyberStorm Part 36

More m.u.f.fled voices and then clearly: "Give me the gun," said someone else.

That's Chuck.

Sitting up quickly, I immediately felt dizzy, and I had to lie back down.

Rolling over toward Luke, I cooed at him, telling him it was okay, but I didn't touch him. I wasn't sure what was wrong with me, but neither was I sure that everything was okay. With all my strength, I slowly sat myself up in bed and swung my feet over the side.

My smartphone was plugged in next to the bed. I picked it up. 8:13 p.m. No messages.

The screaming had stopped in the hallway, replaced with someone crying in heaving sobs. Outside the windows it was dark.

No, wait, it's snowing.

Tiny, crystalline flakes swept by the windowpane in the faint light coming from a lamp. Our room was littered with boxes and piles of discarded clothing and sheets and blankets. I could hear the purr of the generator in the background.

With an effort, I leaned forward and found my jeans. They were filthy, but I put them on anyway, rummaging around to find the cleanest socks to layer together on my feet. Grabbing a sweater, I stood up and steadied myself, testing my balance, and walked out into the main room, which was empty of people, and then stuck my head out into the main hallway.

Chuck, Susie, and Lauren were sitting around Sarah on the couch immediately outside our door. They looked up at me with surprise as I opened the door.

"What?" I said weakly. "You were expecting Luke? What happened?"

Chuck got up from kneeling in front of Sarah. He was holding a large handgun.

"Let's leave them alone for a minute," he said to me, pus.h.i.+ng open the door I was leaning through. He looked back down at the girls. "Do you want some tea?"

Susie looked up at him and nodded.

Ellarose was cradled in Susie's arms. Her little eyes looked sore and red and were encrusted with pus, and her skin was wrinkled, flaking, paper-thin. She was quiet but looked scared, and she was tiny, shrunken.

"What's happening?" I repeated as he pulled me back through the door into the main room of their apartment. "Is Ellarose okay?"

He sighed deeply. "Pam says she's okay, just losing a lot of weight. She won't eat."

Chuck looked like he'd aged ten years in the past week.

"Where's Vince and Tony?" I asked.

"Over at Richard's, or what used to be Richard's."

"What do you mean?"

I followed him over to the kitchen counter where he filled a pot with water and clicked on the flame to a camp stove. He shook his head. "Nearly out of butane."

He looked at me.

"Sarah killed Richard."

"What?"

My mind struggled to process what he was saying.

"How?"

"With this."

He put the gun he was holding on the counter. It wasn't one of ours.

"She says he stole the laptop, not Paul, and he was the one talking to them."

I sat down at one of the kitchen stools, still woozy.

"So Richard's dead?"

Chuck nodded.

"And he was the one talking with Paul? That helped organize the attacks on us?"

He nodded again. I'd never really believed someone from our building had been helping Paul. It seemed better that it remained a figment of Chuck's paranoia.

"Why?"

"Not clear yet, but seems like he was starving the people at his end, his wife included. Keeping everything for himself. Sarah said he'd been involved in some ident.i.ty theft scheme with Stan and Paul, and that things got out of hand."

I sighed and leaned down into the counter, rubbing my eyes. I had a terrible headache.

"Good to see you're up and about, buddy." He adjusted the pot with his good hand. "You've been out for more than two days."

Coughing, I looked back up at him blearily.

"How have you been managing?"

"Vince has been sick too. The girls have been taking up the slack, and Tony went and got more food outside last night. But the hallway, it's getting much worse, and the city..." He didn't finish his sentence, just stared at the pot as it began to gently boil.

Getting much worse?

"Your buddy Williams showed up." He rubbed his eyes and pointed toward the couch and a pile of yellow plastic clothes on it. "That's our ticket out."

Squinting, I looked more carefully.

"Hazmat suits?"

"Yep."

He dropped a tea bag into the pot of boiled water and turned off the butane.

"He says that if we can get the truck down, he'll put our names on the emergency worker list, and drive with us out to the barricade on the GW. Everyone going in and out has hazmat suits on, so we wear these, we're on the list, we get out."

That makes sense, as long as he can get us on the list, but- "What about the kids?"

"We'll have to hide them."

"Hide them?"

He nodded. "Lauren's dead set against it. Thinks it's too risky. Can't blame her." He looked toward the ceiling. "The radio says that power and water have been restored to some areas of Manhattan, but I'll be d.a.m.ned if any of our taps turn on."

I didn't trust the radio. "And the meshnet?"

"Meshnet's slowly dying out. People can't charge phones anymore. Some people say water is back on in the upper hundreds, but maybe it's propaganda, maybe they want to keep us here."

"What do you think?"

"I think we should get out of here. Just a few hours of driving and we can be at my cabin in the mountains above the Shenandoah."

"I think so too."

"You're going to have to speak to Lauren."

Nodding, I dropped my head onto the counter.

He picked up the pot of tea and poured me a cup. I glanced at his broken hand. It looked terrible.

"You gave us a real scare." He patted me on the back with his good hand. "Why don't you go lie down again?"

Lifting my head from the counter, I asked, "Can you send Lauren to see me, when, well, you know-"

The sobbing in the hallway became louder.

"We had to drive off two gangs of refugees yesterday at gunpoint," said Chuck, standing to take the pot of tea to the hallway. "Talk to Lauren. We need to leave."

"I will."

"And get some more rest."

"I will."

"d.a.m.n glad to see you're feeling better."

"Makes two of us."

Day 27 January 18.

"WHAT'S WRONG, SWEETHEART?"

Lauren was curled up in a fetal position on the chair next to the bed. It was morning, and the overcast skies outside filled the room with a flat, monotone light. I was feeling a lot better today, but upon waking up, I'd found her crying. Luke was still asleep.

She didn't respond to me.

"Are you mad at me?"

The night before we'd had an argument. She absolutely refused to consider leaving, saying that the power would be on soon, the water was coming back, and that it was too dangerous out there. There was no way she was going to stuff Luke into a bag to hide him while we cleared the barricade on the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge.

She was scared, and so was I.

"What happened? Is it about Richard?"

Even if he'd been a creep, he'd been her friend. I couldn't know what she was feeling.

She shook her head again. Taking a deep breath, she swallowed and looked at me.

"I was going over to bring them some water, Pam and Rory-" was all she managed to get out before she began crying again.

"Is something wrong with them?"

She shook her head but shrugged her shoulders at the same time. Something had scared her, but like a battle-weary soldier I found it didn't frighten me anymore.

I'd better go and see what happened.

Pulling on some clothes, I crept out into the main room. Tony and Vince were sharing the main couch, and both of them were asleep with the steady thrum of the generator in the background. Tony opened his eyes, but I whispered that everything was okay. I grabbed a headlamp and, after a second of hesitation, reached out and took Tony's gun.

He opened his eyes again, but again I whispered not to worry.

We always kept a dim nightlight on out in the hallway, and I kept my headlamp off as I picked my way through the inert bodies under piles of blankets. Coming out from our apartment, the smell hit me like an open sewer. We didn't run the kerosene heaters in the hallway at night anymore, so it was cold enough to see my breath.

As I pa.s.sed the shelves in the middle of the hall, a box under the radio reminded me of a box of donuts I'd often bring into my office for the gang, and despite the stink I found myself thinking about chocolate-covered, creme-filled donuts and hot cups of steaming coffee.

At least I'm hungry again. That familiar hunger pain was in my gut, and thirst-I'm so thirsty. The back of my throat was parched, and rolling my tongue across my lips, I could feel them blistered.

Reaching the door to Rory's apartment, I clicked my headlamp on, took a deep breath, and grabbed their doork.n.o.b and opened the door. It opened only slightly, and I had to shove it to push back whatever garbage had acc.u.mulated behind it.

The room had a different smell. Not as rancid as the hallway, still smelling of decay, but somehow sharply metallic. Memories of the days I'd spent as a teenager helping my uncle fix plumbing in the neighborhood came to mind, and I wondered if Rory and Pam had been doing plumbing work, trying to get water. It also reminded me of something else. I'd come across a particularly foul mess in one of the latrine rooms downstairs, some of it even on the walls, and the stench there had the same metallic tang.

Maybe they had an accident?

Their place was a studio. Two people, neighbors from the fourth floor, Terry and Natalie, had been staying in their place and must have been under the lump of blankets on the couch.

Rory and Pam's bed was on a raised platform at the other end of the apartment, so I quickly crossed over to there. It was covered in a pile of blankets as well, and their heads were poking out from the top of them. They were filthy, their faces smeared black.

I nudged Rory, and he awoke immediately.

"You guys okay?"

He squinted into the glare of my headlamp. "Mike, is that you?"