CyberStorm (26 page)

Within seconds Irena opened the door. Aleksandr was asleep on his chair, and Irena was just preparing a hot pot of tea. She asked me if I needed anything, telling me they were fine, and then she asked how Lauren was feeling. I mentioned the lice, and she nodded, saying she would prepare an ointment for Lauren and that it was easiest if the men shaved their heads.

It was interesting that nobody begged from the Borodins. They had a seemingly endless supply of tea and hard biscuits, but they made it clear that they wouldn’t bother anyone, and even more clear that they didn’t want anyone bothering them. Despite that, I would often catch Irena sneaking a biscuit to one of the children in the hallway, or to Luke, who was smart enough to keep it a secret even from me. After ten minutes and nearly as many biscuits, I refilled my cup of tea and went back into the hallway.

Vince was awake but looking dazed.

“You okay?” I asked.

“No,” he replied groggily. “I’ve got a pounding headache, aching joints…I feel ill.”

I took an involuntary step back.

Bird flu? Maybe we’d been wrong.

Vince laughed.

“I don’t blame you. Go get the masks. Even if it’s just a regular cold, this isn’t the time to take chances.”

Looking up at me blearily, he began scratching his head.

Maybe I should mention the lice?

“Want me to get you some water, maybe find some aspirin?”

He nodded and collapsed back into the couch, still scratching.

“And some bacon and eggs?” I joked.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he laughed weakly from beneath his covers.

Going back into Chuck’s apartment, I crossed over to where Tony was still snoring and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Vince isn’t feeling well, and neither is Lauren,” I whispered urgently as Tony shook himself awake, looking at me. “Keep the door to this place closed, and wear a mask if you go out.”

Rubbing his eyes, he nodded. Going into the bathroom, I retrieved some masks and aspirin and a bottle of water from our stash, and then went and whispered the same warning to Susie, asleep with Chuck.

Vince was at his computer by the time I made it back out, my mask already on. I poured some water into a cup next to the laptop, and he took the aspirin from me, washing them down with the water. He put the mask on.

“The bad guys staying away?” I asked.

He keyed up some maps.

“So far.”

I paused, feeling sheepish about my next request.

“Do you feel well enough to help me with something?”

He stretched and sighed.

“Sure. What do you need?”

“A bath.”

§

“Can I come in?”

“Uh-huh,” came the muffled reply.

Opening the door to the bathroom, I smiled as I found my wife lounging under a mass of bubbles in a steaming bath.

Irena had given me an ointment and a fine-tooth comb, and instructed me on the best technique for brushing lice out of hair—making sure to go from the roots, and working quickly from front to back.

It had taken a lot longer than my promise of an hour or two to get the bath going.

To start with, the barrels of meltwater in the elevator hallway were nearly completely empty. I’d been annoyed, and Vince hadn’t said anything while I’d stormed downstairs and outside with him, ready to fill up more buckets of snow and haul them up.

Exiting the backdoor, I’d quickly understood why they were empty. The snow outside was filthy and encrusted with a thick layer of dirty ice. All of the snow near the front and back entrances had been dug out and hauled up, and trying to dig out new, clean snow was no easy task.

For my purposes, I didn’t need drinking water, just something to bathe in, so I began filling up some barrels while Vince hauled them inside.

With a little fresh air, Vince had begun to feel better, but laboring with the masks on was hard work.

Richard was standing guard duty in the lobby that morning, but I didn`t feel comfortable telling him that I was preparing a bath for Lauren. I just said we were refilling the water barrels upstairs and left it at that. He could see we were up to something, but he just watched us hauling one load after another without saying anything.

In making my promise, I hadn’t quite understood what would be involved.

Chuck’s bathtub was of medium size, but I quickly discovered it needed fifty gallons to fill it. Melting snow to water reduced it in volume by a factor of ten, so filling the bathtub required hauling up twelve loads of snow in the forty-two-gallon barrel we had hooked up to the pulley-and-winch system in the stairwell.

We only had two barrels to connect to the pulley system. After helping me with the first four loads, Vince had started jury-rigging one of the forty-gallon tin drums as a water heater over an open oil flame contraption he’d been working on in our old apartment, using oil from the main furnace in the basement. He left me to dig and haul up the rest of the snow.

After three hours of backbreaking work, I’d decided ten barrels of snow was enough for a decent bath. When all was said and done, it had taken us seven hours to haul up enough snow, melt it, and heat a tub full of water to piping hot, but seeing Lauren sitting there in the bubbles, with a smile across her face, made it all worthwhile.

“I’ll just be a minute more,” she said, seeing me enter the bathroom.

It was warm, and the mirrors were totally fogged with steam. The room was lit with candles.

What had started as an idea just for Lauren had morphed into a grand plan for all of our gang to have a good wash. We’d all been washing our hands and faces, doing sponge baths, but in the eleven days since the water had stopped, none of us had really, properly bathed.

“Take your time, baby.” I waved the comb and ointment Irena had given me. “And I’ve got a special treat for you.”

I didn’t need to mention that it was treatment for lice.

She smiled and slid forward in the tub to dunk her head and hair back into the water. As she did, her body broke the surface of the water, exposing her belly and a small but unmistakable baby bump. I remembered reading the baby development books from when we’d had Luke.

Fourteen weeks, about the size of an orange, arms and legs and eyes and teeth, a complete tiny person, and one that is completely dependent on me.

Lauren pushed herself back upright in the tub and wiped water out of her eyes, smiling up at me. I hadn’t seen my wife naked in weeks, and despite thinking about the baby, seeing Lauren there, warm and wet, I felt something growl and stir inside of me.

“You going to give me that treat fully clothed?” she laughed, smiling seductively.

She leaned over to a shelf at the side of the tub and clicked on her phone. The jazzy chords of a Barry White song began to play.

“No, ma’am.”

I began quickly undoing the belt on my jeans, which was three notches tighter than when all this began. I slid my sweater and then my socks and jeans off, briefly holding them up to my nose before putting them on the counter.

Wow, my clothes stink.
Standing half-naked in the steam of the bath, smelling the lavender of the bath soap and bubbles, I suddenly caught a whiff of myself.
Actually, that’s me that stinks.

Reaching behind me, I locked the bathroom door, and then I pulled off the last of my clothes and slid in behind Lauren in the tub. The sensation of the hot water enveloping me, soaking into my skin and bones, was indescribable. I let out a low groan of pleasure just as Barry’s deep baritone began telling us about all the love he couldn’t get enough of.

“Nice, huh?” murmured Lauren, leaning back into me.

“Oh yeah.”

Reaching over, I picked up the ointment and comb. I began applying it to Lauren’s wet hair, and then slowly started combing her hair back, carefully watching for any little critters I might capture. Lauren held herself absolutely still while I worked.

I’d never imagined that searching for lice could be sexy. An image of monkeys in a forest somewhere, cleaning nits from the fur of a loved one, popped into my mind, and I chuckled, realizing that perhaps I was feeling what they felt.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Nothing. I just love you.”

She sighed and pushed herself back into me.

“Mike, I’m so proud of you, the way you’re taking care of us, of me. You’re so brave.”

In one motion, she swiveled around in the tub, pulling herself up to me, kissing me wetly.

“I love you.”

Reaching down the length of her body, I gripped her buttocks and pulled her up onto me. I was incredibly aroused, and she smiled, biting my lip. And just then there was a loud rap on the door.

Seriously?

“What is it?” I groaned. Lauren nuzzled my neck. “Can you give us a minute?
Please?
”

“I really hate to bother you,” said Vince uncomfortably, “but it’s kind of urgent.”

“And?”

Lauren began licking my chest.

“They just announced that there’s been an outbreak of cholera at Penn Station.”

Cholera?
That sounded bad, but… “What can I do about it? I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“Uh-huh, but the real problem is that Richard is downstairs with a gun and refusing to let any of the twenty-odd people who’ve come back from Penn into the building. I think he’s going to shoot someone.”

Lauren shot upright in the tub. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

God hates me.

“Okay,” I replied in shaky voice, “I’ll be right out.”
Getting out of the tub, I said to Lauren, “We’ll finish this later?”

She nodded but reached over to turn Barry off and got up out of the tub with me.

“I’m coming with you.”

For just a moment I allowed myself the pleasure of watching her naked, wet body climb out of the tub.

“Don’t forget to put a mask on.”

Day 17 – January 8

“HOW ARE YOU feeling?”

“Groggy,” replied Chuck, “but good. You still think we need criminals in society?”

I laughed. “Not so much maybe, no.”

After three days of slipping in and out of consciousness, Chuck had come back to the land of the living. He was up and talkative, playing with Ellarose and Luke.

We purposely left him out of the loop while he was recovering, and I hoped whatever was making him “weak and achy” wasn’t the same thing that the rest of the people in our building were coming down with.

“So what did I miss?”

Susie was sitting behind him on the bed, holding Ellarose and gently rubbing Chuck’s back as he sat up. Lauren was sitting beside her, and Luke, of course, was running around the room.

“The usual—plague, pestilence, an armed standoff, and the decay of Western civilization, but nothing I can’t handle.”

Last night had been a surreal juxtaposition, jumping from a dreamscape of steam and candles and Barry White, and into a nightmare straight from a zombie apocalypse—a darkened lobby lit by headlamps, screaming and cursing, guns being waved around while a ragged, dirty gang of humans pressed against a glass wall, banging, begging to get inside.

Thankfully, when I’d let them in, no brains had been eaten.

But Richard had had a good point.

If cholera had broken out at Penn Station, and they’d been there, then letting them back into the building was risking infection for all of us. On the other hand, forcing them to stay outside was tantamount to a death sentence given the subzero temperatures.

In the end, I’d convinced Richard that we could quarantine them on the first floor for two days, well past the incubation period for cholera. I’d looked it up on the phone app on infectious diseases Chuck had given me.

We’d gone back to using the face masks and rubber gloves, and brought down a kerosene heater and sequestered them in one of the larger first-floor offices off the main lobby. When I’d gone down to check on them this morning, everyone there was sick and aching, and so was everyone in the hallway. The symptoms weren’t anything like cholera, though; they seemed more like a cold—or the flu.

I explained the situation to Chuck, and he started shaking his head.

“Have you been ventilating properly? You’ve been mixing diesel with the kerosene to make it last longer, right?”

“I had to close the windows yesterday because of the cold,” I admitted, immediately realizing what I’d done.
How could I have been so stupid?
The hunger made it difficult to think coherently.

Chuck took a deep breath.

“Carbon monoxide poisoning has symptoms a lot like the flu. We’re not sick in here because we’re using the electric heaters, but everywhere else is using the gas heaters?”

I stood up and opened the door to the bedroom and yelled out, “Vince!”

Even feeling ill, he was still manning his computer control station, monitoring the hundreds of images an hour that were arriving from all over the city and routing emergency messages to Sergeant Williams.

Vince’s head appeared through the main door to Chuck’s place. I’d made it clear he wasn’t allowed in here, so he tentatively peered around the door frame, his eyes puffy and red.

“The sickness, it’s probably carbon monoxide poisoning,” I explained. “Open some windows and text everyone downstairs, and tell Tony.”

Vince brought one hand up to rub his eyes and nodded, and without saying a word he closed the door. He was tired.

“They’ll be better by tomorrow. No lasting damage,” said Chuck. “But keeping the ones who were near Penn Station quarantined was a good idea.”

I nodded, feeling stupid.

Chuck rubbed the back of his neck while he swung his feet off the bed. “My God, cholera.”

Susie rubbed his back as he leaned forward.

“Are you sure you’re feeling well enough, baby?”

“A little woozy, but not bad.”

“That was a close call,” I said. “That guy that attacked us was no random accident. It was one of Paul’s guys.”

Chuck sat back down from standing halfway.

“What?”