CyberStorm (39 page)

I shook my head and began walking back down the other side.

What should I do?

I realized how thirsty I was. It was raining harder now, and my tongue was sticking to the back of my throat. On the streets out back of the cemetery, water was flowing in the drains, and I kneeled down with one of my empty bottles, trying to fill it. Someone walked along the sidewalk toward me but gave me a wide berth as he passed.

How I must look, groveling here like an animal, my clothes ragged and sodden, head shaved.
I wanted to scream at him, my anger boiling up and out.

Why is he walking so slowly? Where is he going?

Couldn’t he
see
the world had ended?

The adrenalin began to wear off as I made my way back to the highway, and the immensity of the road ahead weighed upon me. I was weak and soaking wet. There was no way I could make the walk all the way back. Cold and exhaustion gnawed at my bones and muscles as the anger ebbed, and I limped along.

I wasn’t just incapable of walking all the way back—I wouldn’t even survive it.

Reaching the on-ramp to the highway, I decided to try and get a lift. I’d have to risk it. My head down, I limped along, holding my thumb out. I was shivering violently.

I need to get inside somewhere soon.

Lost in my thoughts, I hardly noticed when a pickup truck slowed down and stopped right in front of me.

A man stuck his head out of the side window.

“Need a lift?”

I tried my best to jog up to the pickup truck’s window, nodding my head. The temperature was dropping, and I was soaked.

“Where to?” asked one of the kids in the front. There were three of them, listening to country music on the radio.
Good old boys.
I involuntarily shrank back.

“Whoa, you okay, buddy?”

“Yuh-yeah,” I stammered. “Exit eighteen, past Gainesville.”

He turned to the others in the car, saying something.

I stood in the rain and waited.

“You alone?” he asked, turning back to me and craning his neck out of the window to look down the side of the highway.

I nodded. “I’m alone.”

He cocked a thumb toward the back of the pickup.

“We can drop you there. Got no space up here, but there’s room in the back. You’ll be sitting in the bare box with a few other people, but at least it’s covered. That work for you?”

I nodded and thanked him, deciding I had no choice. Walking around the back of the truck, I saw that someone had already pulled down the tailgate, so I jumped up and inside, closing it behind me as we began accelerating away.

In the darkness, I could see the other people crowded in the back. Picking a spot at the rear, away from everyone else, I pushed myself into the corner of the truck bed. I sat silently for a while, and I meant to stay quiet, but I couldn’t.

“How long have the Chinese been here? How long since they invaded Washington?”

Nobody said anything.

In the dim I could see five people huddled together in the bare metal box, sitting on soiled sheets and clothing. One of them threw me a blanket, and I took it, mumbling my thanks while I covered myself, shivering.

Can I trust them?
I didn’t have much choice. Freezing cold and wet, I’d die out there on my own. This small box was as close to salvation as I had anymore.
How can I fight back when I can barely survive?
I had to get back into the mountains.

“How long have they been here?” I asked again, my teeth chattering.

Silence.

I was about to give up when one of the occupants sitting in the corner away from me, a kid with blond hair and a baseball cap, replied, “A few weeks.”

“What happened?”

“Cyberstorm, that’s what happened,” said a kid with a Mohawk sitting next to him. He had about a dozen piercings, and that was just what I could see. “Where have you been?”

“New York.”

A pause. “That was pretty intense up there, huh?”

I nodded—all the horror summed up in one tiny gesture.

“Where’s our military?” I asked. “How could they let us get
invaded
?”

“I’m
glad
they’re here,” replied Mohawk.

“You’re
glad
?” I yelled. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Blondie sat upright.

“Hey, man, calm the hell down. We don’t want any trouble, okay?”

Shaking my head, I pulled the blanket up around me.

These kids are the future?
No wonder all this had happened. Just weeks ago, America had seemed indestructible, but now...

Somehow, we had failed.

All that remained important was to find my family, to keep them safe.

Sighing, I closed my eyes and turned away from the others, pressing my face against the cold metal, listening to the rumble that pulled me deeper into the night.

The next thing I knew, someone was poking my shoulder.

“Heya, friend,” said one of the cowboys from the front of the truck. He had the tailgate down and was standing on the side of the road. We were at an exit.

Were they kicking me out early?

“This is your exit.”

Shaking my head, I realized I’d been asleep. Nobody else was in the back of the pickup anymore. The kids were gone. I was completely covered in blankets, and one was even folded under my head.
They must have placed them around me when I was asleep.
I felt bad for getting angry with them.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, extricating myself from the blankets and grabbing my backpack. I jumped out the back. It had stopped raining but was getting dark again.

He saw me looking up at the sky.

“It took us a bit longer than I thought. We had to drop those guys off—”

“Thanks,” I said, “I really appreciate it.”

He looked up the mountain.

“You going up there?”

“No,” I said quietly, pointing toward the base of the hills. “Over there.”

I was worried they would follow, or worse, go ahead of me.

He looked at me funny, and then shrugged and took a step toward me. I moved back, thinking he was going to grab my backpack, but he reached out…and hugged me.

“You take care, you hear?” he said as he squeezed me.

I stood there, my arms at my sides while he squeezed me again.

“Okay then,” he laughed, releasing me. “Be safe.”

Mute, I watched him walk back to the front of the truck and get in it. They drove off.

I hadn’t noticed it, but tears were streaming down my face.

Putting my backpack on, I looked up the road rising into the mountain. It was getting dark, and I was going to have a hard time finding my way. It was the new moon, and there would be no moonlight tonight to help light my walk. I began the walk home, my heart heavy, but glad I would be back with Lauren and Luke soon.

There was something else, something I’d been pushing into the back of my mind. It was Lauren’s thirtieth birthday today. I’d wanted desperately to bring her back something, a gift of some kind, a gift of rescue and freedom from the pain and fear, but I was coming back empty-handed.
Worse than empty-handed,
but at least I was coming back.

I hope everything’s okay up there.

Despite the pain, my pace picked up.

Day
36 – January 27

THE GLOW ON the horizon mocked me. It was nearly ten at night, and we were on the front porch of Chuck’s cabin, staring at Washington twinkling in the distance. Just a few days before, it was shining like a halo of salvation, but now it had become a beacon of despair.

“I can’t believe it,” said Susie quietly, staring at the horizon.

I handed her my phone.

“Look at the pictures.”

She shook her head.

“I’ve seen them. I mean I can’t believe this has really happened.”

Luke was still up, and he was playing by the fire we had burning in the pit out front. He was poking a stick into the flames and then holding its tip up into the air and admiring the new spark of fire he’d created.

“Luke,” called out Lauren, starting to get out of her chair. “Don’t—”

I gently grabbed her arm, urging her to stay seated. “He needs to learn for himself. Leave him. We might not always be here to protect him.”

She was about to disagree and push me off, but then stopped halfway up, staring at Luke. She sat back down, still carefully watching him but keeping quiet.

The night before, I’d gotten lost trying to find my way up the mountain in the dark, even with my headlamp. Everything looked the same, and in the end I’d curled up in the open, piling leaves around me as insulation, waiting for the sun to rise. It had rained again, pouring down on me. Somehow I’d dropped off to sleep, and when I’d awoken I was barely able to move, my arms and legs nearly paralyzed with cold.

When I’d stumbled into our makeshift camp in the woods at twilight, Susie had almost shot me. They were expecting a rescue convoy, helicopters and hot food, but all they got was me, half-frozen to death and delirious. I’d been dangerously hypothermic, exhausted, mumbling about the Chinese, spewing nonsense.

We’d quickly gone back to the cabin and started up the woodstove, and they’d curled me up in front of it on a couch under some blankets. Susie let me sleep until the late afternoon. The first thing I did when I woke up was talk with Lauren, tell her how much I loved her, and then I played with Luke on the couch for a while, trying to imagine what his life would be like.

They wanted to know what had happened, but I’d asked for a little time to myself, to process, to think how best to explain that there was no help coming, that we were on our own.

How to explain that maybe we didn’t live in the United States anymore?

In the end, I’d asked them to come out on the balcony and showed them the images on my phone. There were a lot of questions, but I didn’t have answers.

“So they just let you go?” asked Chuck.

He wasn’t healing very well, and being out in the woods for two days had made things that much worse. Susie wasn’t able to get all the buckshot out of his arm, but at least it was the same arm as his bad hand. The whole thing was in a sling.

“Yeah, they did.”

“So you saw our military, our police there? And nobody was doing anything?”

I thought back, remembering my walk in. Everything that I’d seen before had taken on a new meaning once I’d seen the Chinese army base. I was replaying everything in my memory, trying to tease out details of things I’d seen but perhaps not understood.

“Our police were there, definitely Americans who were directing the stream of refugees. I saw some military on the road, but I think they were Chinese.”

“Did you see any fighting?”

I shook my head. “Everyone looked beaten, like it was already over.”

Luke was finished with his stick and ran up the stairs and jumped into Lauren’s lap.

“So no bombed-out buildings? It was all intact?”

I nodding, trying to remember if I’d seen anything.

“How could they have just given up without even a fight?” said Chuck angrily.

He was having a hard time believing it. Not that he didn’t believe me, but he couldn’t fathom how it could be over so quickly. I still couldn’t believe it either.

“It would be hard to fight back if the Chinese incapacitated the military’s communications and weapons systems electronically.” I’d thought about it too. “We’d be reduced to cavemen trying to fight back against a modern army.”

“So Washington just looked normal?” asked Lauren, cuddling Luke, trying to get her head around it. “Did you go to the Capitol?”

“No. Like I said, I was scared. I think they were funneling us into a detention camp. I didn’t think I would make it back.”

“But there were people, Americans, just walking around.
Driving around?”
said Chuck.

I’d described the people I’d seen on the streets, some of them walking around as if nothing had happened. I told them about the cowboys that had driven me up here.

Susie sighed.

“It’s hard to imagine, but I guess life goes on.”

“Life went on in occupied France in the war,” I said sadly. “Paris gave up without a fight too. No bombs, no fighting, just free one day and then occupied the next. People still went out and bought baguettes, drank wine—”

“It all must have happened when we were in New York,” said Lauren. “It
was
over a month that we were isolated. It explains the strange way we didn’t get much information, the way things happened.”

It did explain everything.

“So we were right,” she added quietly, talking about the night in the hallway when we’d all guessed what had happened. “It was the Chinese.”

There was no snow anymore, but it was still winter, and there weren’t any bugs or crickets singing in the dark forests. The silence was nearly deafening.

I sighed.

“No matter what, it’s better that we got out of New York. It looks like they’re going to let it rot.”

“Bastards!” yelled Chuck, standing up from the chair we’d set him down in. He was waving his good fist at the bright smudge on the horizon. “I’m not going down without a fight.”

“Calm down, baby,” said Susie softly to Chuck, standing to wrap her arms around him. “No fighting for now.”

“We’re barely surviving,” I laughed grimly. “How are we going to fight back?”

Chuck stared at the horizon.

“People have done it before. The Underground, the Resistance.”

Lauren looked at Susie. “I think that’s enough for today, don’t you?”

Susie agreed. “I think we should get some sleep.”

Chuck’s head sagged, and he turned for the door. “Tell me when you come to bed, Mike, and I’ll come down and stand watch.”

Lauren leaned down to kiss me.

“I’m sorry I missed your birthday yesterday,” I said quietly.

“You coming back safe to us was the greatest gift I’ve ever had.”

“I wanted so much—”

“I know, Mike, but what’s important is that we’re together.” She kissed Luke and stood up, cradling him in her arms. He was asleep.