CyberStorm (35 page)

I was holding it in the pocket of my jeans.

“Where are we?”

My brain was still reassembling what had happened the previous day.

Crossing the military barricade on the George Washington Bridge had been tense, but in the end, almost anticlimactic. We’d met Sergeant Williams as planned. He’d slapped some NYPD magnetic stickers onto the sides of the truck, and we’d driven right up through the crowds to the checkpoint.

It hadn’t gone entirely smoothly.

We’d had to wait for an hour or so. Our names weren’t on the original list, and our driver’s licenses had residences in New York, but after a little arguing and some calls back and forth to Javits, they’d eventually just let us through.

Lauren had fashioned a crib out of some packing crates, padding it with blankets, and we’d hidden Luke and Ellarose in it. Timed just right, we’d fed them well, and they’d slept through the whole thing.

“We’re on the side of an overpass at the entrance to I-78,” answered Lauren, telling me where we were.

I’d been in a daze at the checkpoint yesterday, weak but doing my best to smile and look normal. Memories of the grand, gray arches of the George Washington Bridge floated into my mind, like a cathedral spanning the Hudson River, and then the feeling of relief after they let us through.

I remembered saying good-bye to Sergeant Williams. By the time we were on our way, it had been late afternoon.

We’d followed the I-95, nearly the only main highway they’d kept clear, down through New Jersey toward Newark Airport. The spire of the Empire State Building had stood in the distance, the Freedom Tower further down, with New York cradled in between.

We’re free,
I remembered thinking, and then I must have fallen asleep.

“That’s pretty much where I remember us getting to. What happened? I thought the idea was to get as far from New York as possible?”

“When we turned off 95 onto the 78 overpass, the road got a lot worse, and the sun was setting. Instead of risking it in the dark, Chuck picked this spot on top of the overpass to spend the night. You were out of it.”

“How are Luke and Ellarose?”

“They’re perfect.”

Thank God.

I stretched. “I’m going to talk to the guys, okay?”

Leaning forward and pulling back the blankets, I grabbed a bottle of water and kissed her.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, kissing me back.

“Good.” I took a deep breath. “Really good.”

I gave her another kiss and opened the door to the truck, looking out toward the horizon.

The sun was rising over the Financial District. The Freedom Tower shone in the distance, beyond the frozen docks and cranes of the Port of New Jersey spread out below us. Looking slightly to the left, I tried to make out the familiar buildings of the Chelsea Piers near our apartment, our prison for the past month.

We’re free, but—

“How do the roads look? Can we drive them?”

The guys turned around, deep into some discussion.

“Hey! Sleeping beauty!” joked Chuck. “Decided to join us, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You feeling good?”

I nodded. Maybe it was just the fresh air, but I was feeling better than I had in weeks.

“Unplowed in a while, but passable,” replied Chuck, answering my original question, “at least for my baby. Get ready. We’re leaving in five.”

Leaving them to it, I stretched, walking around the truck, waking myself up.

The snow was deep at the shoulders of the highway, but the middle was rutted with tire tracks. Other people had passed through, even when the plowing had stopped, and the snow was melting fast.

Pulling my gaze from the sunrise above New York, I looked down the overpass at Interstate 78, past a container yard, and toward New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

§

We were finally on our way.

Despite Lauren’s objections, we stopped at Newark Airport.

Chuck had insisted on at least going and having a look for her mother and father. She quietly repeated that she was sure that they’d gotten out, but we tried anyway. Passing through one of the twenty empty lanes of snow-covered tollbooths, we’d looped through the overpass, stopping at the main terminal.

Vince and I had remained with the girls while Chuck and Tony had gone to have a look. From the outside, it looked abandoned. In under an hour they were back. Nobody had approached us while we waited, and they didn’t find Lauren’s folks. But on their return, Chuck and Tony were very quiet. We could only imagine what they’d found, and the ride back onto the highway was silent, everyone lost in their own thoughts.

The highway was littered with abandoned construction vehicles—graders and rollers and trucks—all covered in a deep layer of snow.

I wonder if they have any food left in them? Maybe we should stop to check?

Houses and trees lined the road, and we passed a group of people cutting down some trees. They waved, and we waved back.

I-78 was a sunken highway this close to New York, and we passed beneath one overpass after another, every one of them hung with American flags—some new, some ragged—and banners proclaiming things like “We will not break” or “Stay strong.”

I imagined the people, cold and hungry, who had placed them there, spray-painting their messages on old sheets. They were messages for me, for us.
You are not alone,
they were saying. I smiled, silently thanking them, wishing them well wherever they were struggling.

It was seventy miles along I-78 to Philipsburg and the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and then another seventy miles to where 78 met I-81 going south to Virginia. From there it was a straight 160-mile drive to the Shenandoah mountains where Chuck had his family cabin.

Under normal conditions, the whole thing would have been a four-hour drive, but as we bounced along in the rutted tracks at the center of the highway, I figured it was going to take us more like ten. Even ten hours assumed road conditions wouldn’t get worse, but Chuck was determined that we get there in one day. No matter what, it was going to be dark wherever we got to, so Chuck made sure Tony kept going as fast as possible.

It was a rough, violent drive, and I sat Luke on my lap, cradling him.

He was happy now.

It seemed like some kind of adventure again, and I think he was as glad as we were to have gotten out of the rancid confines of our apartment. It all seemed like a dream. The sun was out, and we had the windows down, enjoying the warm weather. Chuck had Pearl Jam playing on the CD player.

The landscape opened up, the highway rising up out of the ground, revealing rolling hills and countryside. We passed smokestacks and water towers and cell phone towers that dotted the terrain—all of it useless. I kept checking my cell phone, but there was no reception anywhere. Electrical transmission towers stood the tallest of all, their wires strung across the highway and stretching off into the distance, strangling the landscape.

Small towns and villages gradually appeared, with smoke rising up out of chimneys. We saw people walking in the streets.

At least they have a lot to burn.
The forests seemed endless.
Is life normal out here?

Then we passed a farm, and butchered cows stood out in red splashes against white fields. A group of people with machetes were hacking away at a carcass next to a grain silo, and one of them waved his machete at us while we drove by, urging us to stop.

We didn’t stop, and we didn’t wave back.

Vince fiddled with the radio as we drove, alternating between playing music and searching the airwaves for any broadcasting stations, but mostly we could only pull in the same government channels from New York, apart from the occasional ham radio operator. When he found these, we’d listen, sometimes to a community announcement, sometimes to a rant, but it became evident that there was no power, no communications out here either.

People were everywhere, though, walking along the side of the road, pulling loads on sleds, but we didn’t encounter even one other vehicle on the road. Gradually I began to doze again, my mind dimly registering images—McDonalds and Quiznos roadside signs, a blue train wedged in the side of a hill, the red and yellow of an amusement park Ferris wheel.

The road conditions improved as we moved away from the coast. By the time we reached 81 in the midafternoon, we were driving on pavement. I-81 hadn’t been plowed in a while either, but there was much less snow. We stopped once to refill the gas tank, with the diesel we brought in containers from the apartment. It was only a bit more than a three hundred mile drive, less than the range of the truck with its full tank, but it was better safe than sorry.

We began to see other motorists coming the other way as darkness fell, headlights that would appear from the gloom and sweep past us. The world almost seemed normal, except that the countryside was completely dark. A full moon rose up, casting the landscape in a ghostly light.

Chuck announced that we were nearly there just as night fell, and he took an exit off the main highway. It was about a half-hour drive up the mountain, he said. He was excited, talking about all the supplies he’d hidden, the great meal we were going to have and how cozy it was. Vince started talking with him about the shortwave radio, about how we could listen in on stations from around the world and find out what was really happening.

Lauren cuddled into me.

We were holding Luke together under a blanket. An immense weight was lifting from my shoulders.
A hot meal, a clean bed.
Ahead, in the truck’s headlights, I could see us following a small dirt road covered in ice. There was snow in the forest, but only in patches.

As we pulled up to his cabin, Chuck started telling me about fishing in the Shenandoah, how this was going to be like a vacation. We quickly jumped out and began grabbing our bags while Chuck ran up the front steps. It was a beautiful log cabin. In a flash, Chuck was inside, lighting up his flashlight and headlamp. We began piling things onto the porch.

“No!” shouted Chuck from inside.

We all froze, and Tony pulled out his .38.

“You okay?”

“Goddamn it!”

“Chuck, are you okay?” repeated Tony.

I picked up Luke and Ellarose and began backing away toward the truck, which was still running. Lauren and Susie followed, all of us watching the doorway. Chuck’s face appeared, contorted and angry.

“What is it?” asked Susie quietly.

“It’s all gone.”

“What’s gone?”

Chuck’s head sagged.

“All of it.”

Day
30 – January 21

“WE WAITED TOO long.”

“That’s not the right way to look at it.”

It was midmorning, and we were out back of the cabin, filling the wood-fired hot tub with logs.

Who else but Chuck would have a wood-fired hot tub?
I laughed to myself.

The fresh mountain air was incredible, and it was warm, at least ten degrees above freezing. Through the birch and fir trees, the sun was shining down on us. Birds were singing.

“We’re all here, we’re mostly healthy,” I continued. “So what if we’re missing some supplies?”

There was fresh water, from snowmelt on top of the mountain, bubbling down a creek right next to us, and we had a few days’ worth of food. Chuck had shown me how to use another app he had on his phone for recognizing edible plants in the woods, and we could fish and trap animals as well.

I had no idea how to trap, but there was an app for that too.

Chuck picked up another log with one hand, carefully holding his bad hand against his body. He threw it into the woodstove at the side of the hot tub. The cabin was on fairly flat ground. We were grabbing wood from a pile under the back deck, standing in the leaves. The deck with the hot tub was about shoulder height to us.

“You’re right.” He laughed and shook his head. “Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

Luke was at our feet. He’d found a stick and was running around, joyfully whacking leaves with it. With his ten-word vocabulary, he couldn’t tell us how happy he was to be out of that hallway, but the smile on his face said it all. I smiled as I watched him, but then I looked more closely. The dirt on his face, shaved head, grubby, ragged clothes, squealing in the woods—he almost looked like a little wild animal.

But at least he looked happy.

Whoever had raided Chuck’s place hadn’t taken
everything
. They’d blasted open his storage safe-room, but there were still spare clothes in the upstairs closets, and the bedrooms were intact. They took most of the food and emergency equipment from the storage lockers, drained all the fuel from the generator and taken the propane canisters.

But they’d left coffee.

After sleeping like a baby on fresh sheets, I’d gotten up early and spent the morning sitting on the swinging loveseat on their porch, boiling a pot of coffee over an open flame in a fire pit in front of the house. We were at over two thousand feet in elevation, and from the porch in the front, there was a beautiful view eastwards, down the mountain ridge toward Maryland.

It was more than a week since I’d had coffee, and drinking a cup of it now, sitting in the swinging chair, breathing the mountain air under a blue sky—it was magic.

I remembered reading that some people thought that the Renaissance had partly been due to the introduction of coffee in Europe, to the invigorating effect that caffeine had on the psyche. I laughed. That morning I could believe it. It was almost enough to make me forget the horror we’d lived through, to stop wondering if the world was burning down around us.

Drinking my coffee, I’d noticed a black smudge of smoke rising in the distance. Chuck told me it must have been from the chimney of his neighbors, the Baylors.

“How long do you think he’ll be?” I asked.

We’d promised Vince that we’d drive him to his parents’ home nearby. Tony had volunteered to drive him down to Manassas, where they lived, or as close as he could get to it safely. They’d left about two hours ago. Chuck and I had debated whether one of us should go along, but I didn’t want to leave Lauren and Luke, and neither did Chuck want to leave Susie and Ellarose. The GPS was working, so finding his way back wouldn’t be a problem.