CyberStorm (22 page)

Taking a deep breath, I realized I had it wrong. Maybe there was something we could still do for them if they were dead.
We could give their loved ones some closure.

“That’s a great idea. Could you send me the address?”

“Already did.”

Something else caught his eye, and he ran off.

“Smart kid,” said Tony from behind me.

Up ahead, the crowd around Penn Station was much larger than two days before.

The snow was black and tramped down, covered in litter and waste, and thousands of people thronged the entranceways. Soldiers in fatigues had replaced the NYPD officers manning the barricades, their weapons plainly visible, with a sandbagged command post hiding heavier weaponry just behind.

As we approached, a low murmur grew into a roar of voices, sirens, and shouted instructions over megaphones.

Slowing up, we stopped and stared at the crowd.

“No way we’re getting in there,” said Tony. “Maybe we should try Port Authority or head up to Grand Central or Javits?”

“They’ll be just as bad.”

Pulling out my phone, I had an idea.

“I’ll text Sergeant Williams. Maybe he can send someone out.”

While I sent my message, Vince and Tony detached our harnesses, checking on our passengers and explaining what we were doing. Within a few seconds of hitting the send button, before I’d even put the phone away in my pocket, it pinged an incoming message.

“He’s sending someone out to us,” I said.

This mesh network is a lifesaver.

Tony looked up at me and nodded, adjusting the blankets on one of the sleds, whispering that someone was coming.

Vince stood beside me.

“Did you get any incoming messages about—” I began to ask, but was cut off by a shriek in the crowd just ahead of us.

“Give me the bag, bitch!” yelled a large man, pulling a backpack away from a small Asian woman.

The man’s blond hair was braided up in dirty dreadlocks, swinging around his head as he pulled and tugged. The woman clung desperately to one strap of a bag, and he dragged her through the dirty snow while pulling a handgun out of one pocket.

The crowd dispersed around them.

“I’m warning you,” he growled, pulling the bag with one hand and pointing the gun at her with the other.

The woman looked up at him, screaming something in Korean or Chinese, but she let go, falling into the snow.

“That’s my bag,” she wept in English, her head bowed. “It’s all I have.”

“Goddamn chink bitch, I should shoot you right now.”

Beside me, Tony stood up and pulled out his .38, holding it hidden between us. Glancing at him, I shook my head and put a hand out, holding him back. With my other hand I brought my phone up, thumbing the camera on, and took a picture.

The man stared at me, smiling.

“You like that?”

I took another picture and clicked a few buttons.

“No, I do not. I just took your picture and e-mailed it to the NYPD sergeant coming out here.”

His smile evaporated, replaced by confusion.

“There’s no phones working.”

“On that you’re wrong, and what you’re doing is wrong.”

His confusion turned to anger.

“You defending this Chinese whore?”

I wasn’t much for confrontation, and had never been in a fight in my life, but right was right. “Just because we’re going through a bad time is no excuse to start hurting people.”

The man straightened up. He was a lot bigger than I’d thought.

“You call this a
bad
time? Are you kidding me? This is the end of days, brother, and these Chinese bastards—”

“What you’re doing isn’t going to help,” I said simply.

“It’s going to help me,” he laughed.

“People will know what you did. You committed a crime, and I’ve recorded it.” I held my phone up. “This will be over one day, and you’ll have to answer.”

He laughed again.

“With all this crap going on, you think someone will care that I stole a bag from some Chinese bitch?”

“I do,” said Tony, still holding his weapon concealed. A small crowd had gathered around us.

“Does anyone else here care about this bitch?” yelled the man, looking around at the crowd. Most people stared dumbly, but many nodded, agreeing with Tony.

“It’s not right,” yelled someone from the back.

“Give the lady her bag back,” said another person in the front.

The man shook his head. “Screw all of you.”

He began walking off, away from us, and Tony started to raise his weapon, but the man threw the bag back at the woman after grabbing a few things from it.

“Let him go,” I said unsteadily, holding back Tony. I was shaking. “It’s not worth it.”

Tony grunted, obviously not agreeing, but put his gun away just the same. The crowd began dispersing, with two people coming to help the woman up. Several people walked over to us.

“Is your phone really working?” asked a teenage girl.

“Sort of,” I replied, motioning toward Vince. “You’ll have to talk to him.”

Within a few minutes, a large crowd had gathered around Vince. Most of them still had their phones, but they were uncharged. He started by explaining ways they could charge them, and then began taking out the memory chips from some of their phones to copy the mesh software onto them.

“That was a good idea, taking that guy’s picture,” said Tony.

We stood and watched Vince tutoring the crowd on mesh networks. He was like a cyber-Johnny Appleseed.

“With no police, people think they can get away with anything,” said Tony. “Taking pictures might make them think twice.”

“Maybe,” I sighed. “Better than nothing.”

“
Much
better than nothing, and better than shooting each other.”

In the mass of people near the Penn entrance barricade, I saw some commotion, and then Officer Romales’ face appeared, bobbing through the crowd toward us. In a minute he was pushing through the last of the crowd, with two other NYPD officers in tow. He was shaking his head.

“We can’t take any more,” he said immediately.

I motioned toward the sleds.

“These people are from the fire last night. They’re going to die if they don’t get help.”

“A lot of goddamn people are dying,” muttered Romales, kneeling down beside one of the sleds, pulling back some of the blankets. Seeing the extent of the burns, he winced and closed his eyes, standing back up.

“Okay, guys, grab these sleds,” he said to the other officers with him. Turning to me, he added, “We’ll take these two, but after this, no more. It’s as bad or worse inside there.”

He pointed toward Madison Square Garden.

“Understand?”

I nodded.
Is it that bad already?

“One more thing,” he said as he turned to leave. “That guy Paul you brought in?”

I nodded.

“His brother died last night of his injuries, and we may have to let Paul go.”

“Let him go?” I remembered Sergeant Williams’s heads-up, but I still couldn’t believe it.

Romales shrugged. “They released all the medium-security prisons today. We got nowhere to keep them all. We’re keeping everyone we bring in for a day or two, taking statements, but we need to let them go until all this is over.”

Rubbing my face, I looked skywards.

My God, if Paul’s brother died, and they let him go—

“When?”

“Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next,” said Romales, disappearing into the crowd.

I watched him go, and a sinking feeling settled into my hungry stomach.

“You okay?”

It was Vince. The crowd around us was gone. He was finished with his mesh network lessons.

“Not really.”

Tony heard what Romales had said as well, and I could see him gripping the .38 in his pocket. Vince watched the two of us silently for a moment.

“Just before that guy attacked the girl, you were asking me a question, if I had any incoming messages from somewhere?”

I laughed. “Ah, yes.”

“What was it you wanted to know?”

“Did anyone e-mail you saying they had some weed for us on the way back?”

“Yep, I had two texts.”

“Good, because I could use a joint about now.”

Day 11 – January 2

“TWO DAYS. MAYBE three.”

“Only two days?”

Chuck nodded.

“And Ellarose can’t eat just anything,” added Susie, cradling her baby in her arms. “We’ve barely gotten her off formula.” She sighed and looked down. “Not that we had much choice.”

I was going to mention breast-feeding, but it felt too awkward. Anyway, the calories would just be coming from Susie, and she was thin to begin with.

Lauren noticed things missing yesterday when we were out and she’d gone downstairs to help Pam with the burn victims. We were in Chuck and Susie’s place doing an inventory now, sitting on their couch in the middle of their main room. Luke was running around with Chuck’s night-vision goggles on, squeaking and pointing at us.

“Careful with those, Luke,” I said, gently taking them away from him.

He tried to grab them back, so I rummaged around in the bag next to the couch for something else. Picking up a cardboard tube, I gave it to him, and he immediately stuck it in his mouth.

We had one of the cell phones turned on as a radio using an app Vince had found. While yesterday Manhattan had been down to two official radio stations still transmitting, we’d discovered that dozens of local stations had popped up, “pirate” ham radio stations that were being operated by local citizens, each broadcasting over a radius of a few blocks.

“The entire country is in a shambles,”
ranted the pirate radio announcer we were tuned into, JikeMike, in the background.
“I say it ain’t just the Chinese, it’s those goddamn Russkies—”

Chuck looked at me, bemused.

“You know you just gave your son a flare, right?”

“Come on, Mike, be more careful!” exclaimed Lauren, reaching past me to grab it from Luke.

He shrieked his displeasure, but then he saw Tony in the hallway and ran off in his unstable gait toward him. Lauren looked at me and shook her head.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, still slightly in shock at what Chuck was telling me. I hadn’t really accepted that this could last, a part of me convinced that the power would come on at any moment and end the survival game we were playing. “So we only have two days of food left?”

“—round all of ‘em up in the city, Iranians, Russkies, Chinese—hell, if they got yellow skin or wear towels on their heads we should just stick ‘em in a deep, dark hole until the lights come back on—”

“Could we turn that off?” asked Susie, exasperated.

Chuck reached down to the phone on the coffee table, swiping it, and it went silent.

“About two days if we keep sharing out food with everyone on our floor, going the way we’ve been going,” continued Chuck.

“We got”—he looked toward the ceiling, counting mentally—“thirty-eight people up here now, plus four on the ground floor in the infirmary. We can’t keep sharing what we have. People have been stealing from us. This isn’t going to be over in a day or two or three, no matter what they’re saying.”

The official government radio station was still broadcasting that the New York Power Authority would have power back up to Con Edison and lower Manhattan in the next day, but nobody believed them anymore.

In the first real news of events outside of New York, we heard that a massive fire had razed the South Boston suburbs, and Philly, Baltimore, and Hartford were nearly as bad. New York was the only one without water, though, at least so far. No news of Washington, and some sketchy reports saying that Europe was in a shambles as well, with the internet still down.

Some kind of cyberattack on infrastructure had been confirmed as the root cause of the system failures, but as yet, nobody could say with any certainty where the attacks had come from. Command and control servers were located all over the world, most of them within the US itself, and they were shutting them down one by one.

But a common thread pulled through it all, pointing toward China.

“Something isn’t right,” continued Chuck. “When Paul and those guys got in here that time, there were no keys missing from the front—Tony went and checked. Somebody must have let them in.”

The US military was still jacked up on DEFCON 2, a condition signalling the razor edge of imminent attack, but attack from where and by whom was an open question. They continued searching for the unknown targets that had breached US airspace just before the first string of major power failures. Pirate radio stations were buzzing with speculation that towns all over the Midwest had been invaded like a cyber-
Red Dawn
.

The news was interesting, but it had become increasingly irrelevant to our immediate situation.

“So what are we going to do?”

“We need to start digging in for the long haul. No more trying to save the world.” Chuck held up his hand, fending off an objection from Susie. “We need to save ourselves.”

“We can’t just take everything for ourselves. We’d start a war in our own building.”

“I’m not suggesting that. I think we should divide up what we have, and explain to people that they’re on their own from here on out. With that stuff we stashed outside, we should be okay.”

“Assuming we can find it,” I replied.

It was a clever idea at the time, but to balance our survival on it seemed incredibly risky.

“So let’s go outside and see if we can recover it, and we
cannot
share it or tell anyone else.”

“This isn’t right,” said Susie, but with less conviction this time.

“This is going to get
ugly
,” said Chuck. “It’s already ugly, and so far we’ve been soft. We
can’t
afford that anymore.”

He looked at me.

“Get Vince to send out a message for a town hall meeting.”

“When?”

“End of the day, when the sun goes down.”

Reaching down with one finger, he swiped the radio back on.

“—I think we’re not getting any news from Washington and Los Angeles because they’ve been wiped out by biological attack, a new form of that bird flu. I ain’t leaving New York, no goddamn way, and if anyone comes to my door I got my shotgun—”