CyberStorm (32 page)

In the dim light of the stairwell, desperate eyes stared up at me from sunken sockets. Bending over, she pulled a stained and ragged blanket around her shoulders, exposing thin, gray roots in her hair that were littered with louse eggs.

She glanced furtively behind, and then turned to look at me, trying to smile from between cracked and swollen lips. Her teeth were yellow, caked with grime, and with a skeleton hand she touched an angry, red lesion on the side of her face. Her skin was so papery thin that I imagined it sloughing off as she rubbed at the sore.

“Please, Michael,” she whispered.

“Ah, sure,” I mumbled, horrified. I tied off the rope so the load of snow wouldn’t fall. In my pocket I was holding a prize, a lump of cheese that I’d been saving for Luke. I handed it to her, and she greedily stuffed it into her mouth, nodding and thanking me.

“SARAH!”

Like a frightened animal she cringed. Richard appeared in the doorway, and she cowered down and away from him against the railing of the stairs.

“Come, Sarah, you aren’t well,” commanded Richard, reaching toward her and ignoring me.

She shakily held up one skin-and-bone arm, mottled with purple and black bruises, to fend him off. “I don’t want to.”

Richard stared at her, and then turned to smile at me with a mouthful of shining, white teeth. He was wearing a comfortable-looking fleece and North Face pants, and his pink, closely shaved skin radiated health.

“She’s been sick,” he explained with a shrug.

He moved forward and grabbed hold of the blanket around her. She mewled while he leaned down and picked her up. He turned to me, with her pinned in his arms.

“Do you think you could drop some water at our end of the hallway when you’re done?”

Dumbly, I stared at him, and then he was gone.

“What was that about?”

Chuck appeared, walking up the stairs, holding a four-gallon tank of diesel in his good hand.

“Sarah wanted food.”

“Don’t we all,” laughed Chuck humorlessly. He waggled the container in front of himself as he started up the last set of stairs. “Just a few more of these and that’ll be it.”

“She’s not well,” I said, still staring at the open doorway.

“None of us are well,” replied Chuck, clunking up the stairs. “Have you seen what they’re eating?”

Some of the hallway refugees had started catching rats in the downstairs lobby. Irena showed them how, by leaving ground-up sleeping pills and other poisons in garbage piles—they were too fast and aggressive to catch by hand. And if people were eating the rats, then they were eating the poisons in the rats as well. I’d found a large pile of well-cleaned rat carcasses in a corner of one of the latrine rooms.

I heard another door close. It must have been the door to Richard’s apartment.

“Have you been in their place lately?”

He looked at me and stopped, putting the container down.

“You sure as heck don’t look good.”

I
wasn’t
feeling well, but then nobody was. The world began to spin, and I reached out to grip onto the railing to steady myself.

“Whoa, you okay?”

Taking a deep breath, I nodded.

“Just need to get this load of snow up and into the melt buckets, and I’ll go lie down.”

Chuck stared at me.

“Why don’t you go lie down right now, and get some more to eat?”

That morning we’d pan-fried some of the chicken. Thinking about it made me start to salivate painfully. We’d tried to conceal what we were doing, cooking it up over a small butane stove in the corner of Chuck and Susie’s bedroom, but I was sure that the smell of the cooking had permeated through the walls.

It was probably what brought Sarah out of her hiding place.

“Seriously, why don’t you go and get some more to eat?”

I was in a daze.

“I’ll finish this,” offered Chuck.

He put down the container of fuel and looked over the railing at the bucket of snow I was hauling up. Vince and I were trying to bring up as much snow as we could.

We needed more water.

When I’d come out of our apartment that morning, I’d almost gagged at the stench. If I thought I was used to it, that it couldn’t get any worse, I was wrong. Two of the refugees sleeping in the hallway had defecated right in their clothes, under the sheets, and were in terrible shape.

Pam said it was from dehydration, and I hoped it was just that. She’d bravely tried to clean them, but it was an impossible task, and while she was doing that, we’d commandeered who we could for getting more water.

I
really
wasn’t feeling well, and a wave of nausea suddenly overcame the knotted hunger burning my stomach. Steeling myself, I waited for it to pass.

“Are you still thinking of hunting Paul down?” I asked.

Chuck nodded. “But let Tony and me handle it. We owe it to everyone to get that laptop back.”

He was talking a lot about the laptop, about how important it was to get the record of all the events on it that people had sent in. But we knew it was personal, that Chuck had an ax to grind.

With the collapse of government authority, responsibility for justice had reverted into the tribal groups we’d spontaneously created. Restraining hotheads in your clan required a strong, centralized force, but what if that central force was the hothead?

About the only thing we had a lot of was time to think, and the thought of Paul out there was circling around and around in Chuck’s head, one hunger replacing another. I was unable to muster the energy to argue with him anymore. We needed to focus on surviving, not dangerous goose hunts, but I didn’t say anything.

“I’m going to go and lie down for a bit.” Smiling at Chuck, I turned to walk into the hallway and back to our place.

“And no,” said Chuck, “I haven’t been back there, in Richard’s place. He says we have our end barricaded, so he won’t let Susie or anyone in there.”

I nodded without turning, taking a deep breath before going into the hallway. The radio was playing at low volume.

“—at least a dozen more people have been reported drowned as rescue workers try their best to save—”

What a joke—
trying their best to save us
.

The quarantine that was supposed to last only for a day or two was now into its fourth, and people were trying to escape out over the rivers. With the extreme cold, a thick layer of ice ringed the island of Manhattan, making it impossible to just step into boats, so people were walking out onto the slushy floes, pushing and dragging whatever floating contraptions they could. Many were falling through the ice or capsizing into the frozen waters.

Their desperation spoke to how impossible the situation had become.

With the big emergency centers closed, the homeless population on the streets had exploded. Some new centers had opened, but it was hopelessly too-little-too-late for the scale of what was unfolding. More buildings had burnt down, and with no heating, no water, no food, the fighting over air-dropped containers had become fierce.

We stayed out of the streets entirely.

Tens of thousands dead
. The official radio stations weren’t saying anything, but those were the numbers floating around on meshnet tweets, the number dead in Penn and Javits and other centers. A deadly epidemic was raging.

Reaching the door to Chuck’s apartment, I opened it. The girls were busy preparing their noon tea for everyone, and Lauren looked at me, smiling, but her smile quickly faded.

“My God, Mike, are you okay?”

I nodded. My legs were weak and nearly buckled underneath me.

“I’m good. I’m just going to lie down for a minute.”

My phone beeped in my pocket, and I pulled it out. It was a message from Sergeant Williams:
“I’ve found a way I can get your family off the island, but I will need to come over there.”

I had trouble focusing on the screen, and leaning against the doorframe, I carefully responded, telling him okay.

A way to get out of here!

I looked up at Lauren, smiling, wanting to tell her, and took one step forward.

The next thing I knew, my face hit the ground, and the girls began yelling.

My vision faded to black.

Day 25 – January 16

SCREAMING, THE BABY was screaming in my arms again.

With dirty hands, I tried to clean it, wiping and wiping. I was wandering in a forest, stepping across a carpet of yellow leaves between the white stalks of birch trees. The baby was wet, I was wet, and it was cold.

Where is everyone?

I entered a village of thatched huts and mud alleys. Smoke was rising up from cooking fires, and children appeared, their faces caked with dirt—curious little animals. It was a long way to the next village.

Perhaps I should stop?

I needed to keep moving.

And then I was flying, bounding up into the air and leaving the village behind. Below me the tops of the birch trees fluttered in the wind, their last remaining leaves hanging fiercely to the topmost branches. The big difference between the modern world and the ancient world was how connected we’d become—how something could happen in one spot and then spread instantly to the entire world.

A contagion.

Like me.

The baby was gone, left behind in the village of children.

A city appeared before me, a stone castle ringed by stone houses, rising up out of the forests against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. With two more vaulting steps I flew through the sky, landing on wet flagstones in an alleyway. A man pulling a horse and cart walked past me, oblivious, either not seeing me or not caring that I was there. His cart was piled high with dead bodies like matchsticks, and the silent screams of the cursed rang out through the empty streets.

Everything in their lives depends on me, and yet they don’t care.

Society had collapsed, another Dark Age begun.

Walking up the alleyway, I ascended a set of stone stairs at the side of the castle, climbing up its sheer wall. Seagulls squawked in the distance as the sun began to set, and I could hear men in the forest, lumberjacks, hacking away at the trees.

One after another the trees fell, each crash reverberating off the walls of the castle.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I opened a wooden door and entered. Now it was hot; I was burning up. A television was playing to an empty room.

“The latest round of climate talks have failed again, or at least failed to come up with any concrete results,”
said the news anchor on the TV.
“It looks like we will be blowing through the emission targets set twenty years ago, with scientists now predicting a global temperature rise of five to seven degrees by the end of the century. The Arctic is free of ice for the first time in a million years. Nobody knows what will happen—”

Thwack!

I knew what would happen. We were a nation of freeloaders, ninety-eight percent of us non-food-producers relying on the two percent who produced anything edible. The time had come for the ninety-eight percent to pay their share, and it would be paid in blood.

Thwack!

Suddenly back outside, I stood with the lumberjacks.

Where the forest had been, now an endless landscape of stumps lay before me, their shadows spreading like knives across the land in the setting sun. Only one tree remained, and, one of the men, laughing, was hacking away at its trunk—

Thwack!

“Come in.”

Thwak....

Opening my eyes, I saw Chuck come in through the door
.

Our bedroom door.

Lauren was sitting above me, her eyes full of fear and concern. Seeing me open mine, she put a hand to her mouth, and tears streamed down her face. In the back of my mind, I could still hear the hacking of the tree, a metronome fading away like a ticking clock vanishing in time.

“You sure gave us a scare there, buddy,” said Chuck.

He came and sat down on the bed next to Lauren.

“Drink some water,” Lauren whispered.

My mouth felt like it was filled with cotton balls, and I coughed.

I’m so weak.

With a groan, I lifted myself up on one elbow. Lauren helped, and holding my head, she lifted a cup to my lips. Most of the water from the cup spilled around my face. I managed to get some of it in my mouth, and I felt it unsticking my tongue and washing down my throat.

Sitting up fully, I took the cup from her and filled my mouth.

“See?” said Chuck. “I told you he was getting better.”

“Do you want to eat something?” asked Lauren. “Do you think you can eat?”

I thought about that.
Could I eat? Did I want to eat?

“Not sure,” I croaked. Soaked in sweat, I was naked under the sheets. Looking down, I barely recognized my own body. I was skinny. Bones were beginning to show. “But let’s try.”

“Could you get some of the rice with the chicken?” Lauren asked Chuck, and he nodded.

“We’ll get you fixed right up.”

“Did you hear from—” I started to say, but coughed before I could get it all out.

Chuck stopped at the door, halfway open.

“From who?”

“Williams, Sergeant Williams.”

He shook his head.

“Why, should we have?”

I wanted to explain, but I was so weak.

“Shhhh,” murmured Lauren. “Rest, baby, just rest for now.”

“He’ll be coming here to get us off the island.”

Closing my eyes, I heard Chuck saying, “I’ll keep an eye out. You just rest.”

And then the dreams began again, of leaping and flying above forests while the world died beneath my feet.

Day 26 – January 17

I HEARD SCREAMING.

Am I dreaming?

Willing myself awake, the ceiling of our bedroom came dimly into focus, and I blinked, listening to the silence.

What time is it?

It was dark.