CyberStorm (25 page)

“Are you a wise man, Vince?”

“Definitely clever, not sure about wise.”

Shivering, I zipped my coat up tighter around my neck. Irena and Aleksandr had scraped nearly all the snow off the deck up here to melt for drinking water—it was easier to carry a bucket of it down a flight of stairs than haul up six floors. The temperature had plummeted well below zero. A stiff wind began blowing, whipping up the snow, and we made for the wall at the end of the deck for some protection.

“I need a wise man tonight.”

Vince looked at me and laughed. “Then wise I am.”

I studied the void of New York below.

“No lights anywhere,” I whispered to myself. From this angle, the only evidence that a city existed around us were the dark patches where the stars were blotted out by nearby buildings.

In a small pool of shifting light from his headlamp, Vince settled on the bench against the wall and started messing around with my cell phone, attaching cables to it. I sat up on the railing next to him, gathering myself into a ball against the cold, and looked into the darkness, imagining the millions of people huddled out there around us.

“You know what desire drove the twentieth century, laid the foundation for the world as we know it?”

Vince fiddled with the phone. “Money?”

“Well yeah, that, plus artificial light.”

Without artificial light, humans were scared little animals that scurried into their nests with nightfall. Darkness brought out the monsters that existed in our primal collective imaginations, the creatures from under the bed, all of which disappeared with the flick of a switch and the warm glow of an incandescent bulb. Modern cities were filled with massive and awe-inspiring structures, but without artificial light, who would want to inhabit the dark interiors of these caverns that we built?

“Did you know that it was light that made Rockefeller into a titan?”

As an entrepreneur, I’d always had a fascination with how famous businessmen had started, and Rockefeller was about as famous as they came, especially in New York.

“Wasn’t it oil?”

Vince had the AR glasses on and was sweeping his head back and forth, muttering under his breath. Something wasn’t working.

“Oil was the currency, but light was the product. It was America’s desire for light that drove Rockefeller into, well, the spotlight.”

Vince chuckled at my unintended joke.

“Before he began supplying kerosene to New York in the 1870s, when the sun went down, America went dark. It was the first cheap, clean way to make artificial light. Before that, Rockefeller was just a down-and-out businessman sitting on a patch of soggy petroleum in Cleveland, not knowing what to do with it.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Vince, not really listening.

“Yep, Cleveland was the Saudi Arabia of Wild West-era America, and by the early nineteen hundreds he was producing more kerosene than could be used for lighting alone, so guess what came next?”

“Rock Center?”

“Cars. Did you know that the first cars were electric? In 1910 there were more electric-powered cars on the streets of New York than gas-powered ones, and everyone back then assumed that electric cars were the future—they made a lot more sense than the crazy engines that used controlled explosions of volatile, toxic chemicals. But Rockefeller funded Ford to make sure that gas-powered cars, not electric, would be the way of the future, so he would have a place to sell his oil.”

“I think I got it working,” said Vince. He had the AR glasses on again and was swiveling his head back and forth.

“And, poof, there you have the mess of the twentieth century, the Middle East, all those wars, the world’s reliance on oil, and a good chunk of global warming. Even maybe what’s happening now. It all sprang out of the desire for light.”

“That’s because being in the dark sucks,” said Vince, coming up to sit beside me and handing me the AR glasses. “Try them on.”

Taking a deep breath, I put them on and turned off my headlamp. Looking out toward the east, I saw tiny glowing dots of red appear in the darkness down at street level, spread out across the city into the distance.

“I pushed the map data from your treasure hunt app into the augmented-reality glasses,” explained Vince. “They’re connected now, wirelessly. So the spots where you buried those packages will appear as red dots through the AR glasses when you look through them.”

“Yeah, I see them.”

After what had happened with Chuck, we decided it was too dangerous to go out during the day to collect the food that we’d stashed. Lauren had begged me not to go out, and I’d promised her I wouldn’t, at least during the day.

But we’d used up just about the last of our food.

There had been riots at the emergency centers, and I didn’t want the girls going, even with us for protection. Even so, they were planning on going up to Penn and Javits with the kids the next day to wait in the food lines. We needed the food.

That was, unless I went out and retrieved the food we’d hidden.

We’d come up on the roof to take a look at the streets, to confirm that they were as dark as we imagined, and to see if there were any lights out there.

It was pitch black.

“You sure you don’t want Tony or me to come with you?”

“We’ve only got one set of night-vision goggles. Two people in the dark would be a liability if one of them can’t see. And I’m the only one available who actually buried them, so I’m the best one to figure out where they are.”

I paused.

“Anyway, with martial law, we should only risk one of us going out.”

Vince shrugged his okay. “So you won’t need to look at your phone at all. Just walk toward the red dots.”

In the pitch black of the streets, taking out my phone to look at it would have lit up my location like a beacon, attracting attention.

“When you get near a location, just tap the screen in your pocket and the AR glasses will cycle through the pictures you took when you buried the bags. If you pull the night-vision goggles over them, you should be able to overlay the images pretty well.”

Taking my phone from him, I tapped the screen, and a series of faint, overlaid images of street pictures I’d taken when burying the packages appeared.

“What you were talking about is interesting, but that’s the past,” said Vince.

I played with my new toy, zooming in on the images and cycling through them.

“But I’m more interested in the future, in being able to predict it.”

“You’re obsessed with the future, aren’t you?”

Vince sighed. “If I’d been able to see just a little more of it, I may have been able to save her.”

It was easy for me to forget what had just happened to him.

“I’m sorry, Vince. I didn’t mean to be, well—”

“Don’t be sorry. By the way, I have an idea of how we could get Chuck’s car down from that vertical parking garage.”

I was getting very cold already, and I realized I’d have to bundle up warmer if I was going to stay outside for a few hours on my scavenging trip
.

I’d better get the .38 from Tony, just in case.

“Really? What’s the idea? In short form.”

In the light from my headlamp, Vince smiled.

“Where there’s a winch, there’s a way.”

§

Carefully, I picked each foot placement, moving slowly through the frozen landscape. It had taken me about half an hour to walk the two blocks to the nearest group of buried bags. At least with the extreme cold, the streets didn’t smell, and I wasn’t worried about falling in a pile of wet human feces if I slipped.

The night-vision goggles used a combination of low-light imaging with near-infrared illumination, so even in the pitch blackness I could see amazingly well. With the IR flashlight in my pocket I could even light up the world in a brilliant, sparkling green if needed.

The red dot indicating the nearest bag location had steadily grown in size as I’d approached, eventually expanding until it was a red circle about twenty feet across—the approximate error of the GPS reckoning.

Vince is a clever kid.

Standing in the middle of the circle, I kicked aside a garbage bag and tapped my phone’s screen in my pocket. The image associated with this spot popped up on the AR glasses. It closely matched the storefront and light pole I was seeing through the night-vision goggles in front of me. When I backed up a few paces and stepped to the left, the images lined up exactly.
Perfect.

Dropping to my knees, I reached around and pulled off my backpack, taking the folding shovel out of it. With the butt of the shovel, I whacked the frozen surface a few times until it cracked, and then pulled the big, frozen chunks of surface ice and snow away. I began shoveling into the softer snow underneath, expanding the excavated area in a concentric spiral as I dug deeper.

It was heavy work, and by the time my shovel hit the first bag, my back was killing me. Dropping the shovel, I brushed away the snow with my gloved hands and then pulled two bags out. In the ghostly light of the night-vision goggles, I looked inside one of them.

“Doritos,” I snorted, shaking my head. “I love Doritos.”

Reaching down into the snow, I pulled out the other bags and began stuffing them into my backpack while I looked to the next glowing red circle about forty yards away. The steely pinpoints of the stars shone brightly between the dark mountains of buildings that towered above me—the cybersquirrel foraging in a black and frozen New York City.

Day 16 – January 7

ITCHING AND SQUIRMING, I tried to find a comfortable position. My dreams had been fitful, half-in and half-out of sleep. I’d lain down just before dawn. Exhausted, I scrunched up my pillow, trying yet another angle on the dirty sheets.

Someone or something was crying in my dream…

That’s not a dream.

Opening my eyes, I saw Lauren sitting on a chair next to the bed, wrapped up in a flower-patterned synthetic blanket she’d adopted. She had her legs crossed up under her, leaning on Luke’s crib where he was sleeping soundly. She was pulling strands of her hair in front of her face and inspecting them, one by one, in the thin, early-morning light.

She was the one who was crying, and she was rocking back and forth. Taking a deep breath, I tried to wash the fog of sleep from my brain.

“Baby, are you okay? Is Luke okay?”

Sweeping the strands of hair she was inspecting back onto her head, she wiped the tears from her eyes and sniffled. “We’re okay. I’m okay.”

“You sure? Come on, come to bed and talk to me.”

She looked down at the floor. I took another deep breath.

“Are you mad that I went out last night?”

She shook her head.

“I was going to tell you, but—”

“I knew you were planning on going out last night.”

“So you’re not upset about that?”

She shook her head again.

“Are you hurt, not feeling well?”

She shrugged.

“Lauren, what is it, talk to me—”

“I don’t feel well, and my teeth hurt.”

“Is it the pregnancy?”

Looking up at the ceiling, she nodded and began sobbing again. “And I have lice. They’re everywhere.”

All the itching of the past week abruptly took on a new dimension. My hand shot up to scratch the back of my head, and my entire body suddenly felt like it was crawling with foreign invaders.

Sitting up in bed, I shivered awake.

“Luke’s covered in them too,” she said, crying. “My baby.”

I got up and sat next to her on the chair, holding her and looking down at Luke. At least he looked peaceful. After a few deep breaths she quieted down and straightened up.

“I know it’s just lice,” she sighed, “not the end of the world, and I’m just being a silly girl—”

“You’re not being silly.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever even gone a day without having a shower before, not for as long as I can remember.”

“Me either.”

I kissed her.

“And Luke and Ellarose have terrible rashes.”

We both sat silently and watched Luke for a few seconds.

I turned and looked directly into her eyes.

“You know what today’s project is?”

She sighed. “A new pulley system for bringing water up? I heard Vince talking about it yesterday—”

“No,” I laughed, “today’s project is a nice, hot bath for my wife.”

She bowed her head. “We have much more important things.”

“Nothing is more important than you.”

I nuzzled her. She laughed.

“I’m serious. Give me an hour or two and I’ll have a steaming-hot bath ready.”

“Really?”

She started crying again, but this time they were happy tears.

“Really. You can soak as long as you want, relax, and give Ellarose a proper cleaning, bring Luke in with his rubber ducky. When you’re done we’ll use the water to wash some clothes. It’ll be great.”

I hugged her, and she squeezed me back, the happy tears still streaming down her face.

“Why don’t you relax. I’m going to talk to Vince and see how everyone is doing.”

While she lay down on the bed, curling into the blankets, I opened the door to our room and went out, closing the door softly behind me.

In the main room between Chuck’s bedroom and ours, Tony was snoring loudly on the couch, covered in a deep pile of blankets. He regularly took night watch duty and had been at the door when I’d returned just before dawn. The shades were drawn, keeping the room dark, and I didn’t wake him.

Out in the hallway, nearly everyone was already gone, off on their daily treks to the relief stations to line up for food and water. It was quiet.

Rory was reaching into one of the water barrels at the corner of the elevator hallway, refilling a water bottle. I nodded to him, and he stared at me for a moment but then nodded back and whispered good morning before he left to go down the exit stairwell. Two people were still asleep under a bundle of blankets at the other end of the hallway.

Behind the barricade of boxes that demarcated our end of the hallway, Vince was soundly asleep, so I quietly crossed over and rapped on the Borodins’ door to check on them.