CyberStorm (27 page)

“We have a picture of the attack—”

“You stopped to take a
picture
?
”

It was easy to forget that, after being out of it for a few days, Chuck had only seen the start of the meshnet. Vince estimated that over a hundred thousand people were now connected.

“No, not me. Someone watching took a picture. It’s what people do now, how we’re helping keep things under control.”

Chuck stopped and stared at me for a second, absorbing what I was saying.

“Maybe you’d better back up and explain what’s going on.”

“How about some hot tea?” suggested Lauren. “And we can leave you guys to catch up?”

“That’d be great.”

Susie nodded and picked up Ellarose from the bed.

While the girls took the kids and left to get some tea and breakfast, I started explaining to Chuck how neighborhood watches were evolving on the meshnet, the emergency service tools, and how we were keeping a record of everything that happened out there on centralized laptops like Vince’s.

“So you managed to go and get more of that food?”

Food was a topic never far from anyone’s mind.

With the emergency centers quarantined, the trickle of new food had come to a halt. We’d even emptied all the ketchup and mustard bottles scrounged from the apartments, all of which had been opened and plundered for whatever we could find.

Hunger had a way of focusing the mind on every crumb of sustenance, and you couldn’t help going and looking to see if something had been overlooked, or some corner forgotten.

“We have about three days of food left at starvation rations,” I explained. We’d become experts at rationing out calories. “I went out at night, with darkness for safety, using the night-vision goggles and augmented-reality glasses to get around.”

“You did what? I leave you guys alone for a few days—”

I smiled. “And something else.”

“Eggs and bacon?”

I shook my head, still smiling. “I wish.”

“So?”

“The kid figured a way to get your truck down.”

“Time to get out of here, huh?”

I nodded.

“So what’s the idea?”

I started to explain Vince’s plan, but before I could finish there was a loud commotion in the main hallway.

“Mike! Chuck!” yelled Vince.

Getting up, I opened the bedroom door, and Vince’s head appeared again through the main doorway.

“They’re all dead.”

“Who’s dead?” I asked, horrified, imagining a flash cholera outbreak that had wiped out everyone in quarantine. “The first floor?”

Vince’s head sagged.

“The second floor. I just went to check on them, and they’re all dead.” He stared at me. “They had a kerosene heater, cranked all the way up with all the windows shut.”

I’d been down and visited them just the day before, and they’d been heating their place with an electric generator outside their window, just like us.

“Where’d they get the kerosene heater?”

“I don’t know, but we have a bigger problem.”

A bigger problem than nine dead people?

The look in Vince’s eyes made my stomach knot painfully.

“Paul’s on the move.”

Day 18 – January 9

“THEY’RE COMING.”

My stomach growled.

In a crazy part of my mind I hoped they were bringing food
.

If we have to fight, at least there should be a food prize at the end of it.
A random, illogical thought—like realizing you could shift the wheel and slam into oncoming traffic when you were driving. I usually had no idea why thoughts like this came to mind. They just did.

This time I knew why.

It was crowding out the thought that I was being hunted, that my family was being hunted.

Hunger crept into every thought. I was steadily eating less and less, making a show to Lauren of pretending to eat, but stashing away my crumbs and bits and pieces.

When Luke and I would play in the hallway, I’d produce my hidden treats for him to squeals of excitement. Anything was worth seeing a smile on his little face.

“Are you paying attention?” asked Chuck. “It looks like there are six of them.”

I nodded, watching a collection of dots begin to move across Vince’s laptop screen, and then popped a glass bead from a decorative bowl on the kitchen counter into my mouth and began sucking on it.

A cold wind blew in from the open window in Chuck’s bedroom.

The girls and children had already gone out through there onto the neighboring rooftop, and Vince was just helping Irena and Aleksandr out. From there we could go down the back fire escape and reenter our building at a lower level through exterior doors we’d left ajar.

We were going to trap Paul and his gang. The hunters were becoming the hunted.

Vince had hatched the plan of how we could trap them, and it had been the tipping point in deciding to stay today rather than just making for the truck, to try to get it down and escape. We didn’t have enough time to prepare for the trip, not knowing when Paul and his gang might be coming, so we’d decided to stay and fight.

Once we made the decision, we started telling everyone in the hallway, and the quarantine on the first floor, that we were having a birthday party for Luke. It was a private party, we’d said, only our gang was invited, and we’d be off watch and not available.

If it had seemed odd, nobody had said anything, with only a few grudging stares from people thinking that we were going to have a feast and we weren’t inviting them.

Telling everyone that we were having a private party had been Chuck’s idea. I was sure it would come to nothing, but just before five p.m., right when we’d said that Luke’s party was supposed to start, the gang of dots had coalesced on Vince’s meshnet location map.

They began to move this way.

Noisily, Chuck had gone around to tell everyone that we were going into his apartment and that we didn’t want to be disturbed for a few hours. We didn’t tell anyone else what we were up to, or even that Paul was coming, but it seemed somebody on our floor was talking with him.

“They’re going to leave at least one man at the entrance when they come in,” said Tony.

He was the only one among us with combat training, so he was leading the mission.

“We’ll get Irena and Aleksandr to handle that one, and then the four of us wait until the rest of them are up on this floor, and we come up behind them.”

“You guys stay to the back, right?” added Tony, looking at Chuck and me.

We had children and wives, he insisted, so he and Vince would bring up the front. Vince hadn’t objected, but he was very quiet the whole time we were planning this.

We were already dressed for outdoors, and Tony made straight for the open window and began to climb out onto the rooftop.

“What if they split up?” I asked.

Vince disappeared for a second to put his laptop back at its station in the hallway. He quickly returned, opening up his smartphone and handing me the AR glasses.

“That’s where you come in. You’re used to using these to spot those buried packages—now the packages are the bad guys.”

I put on the AR glasses and looked out the window where he was pointing. Out in the darkness, six small red dots were moving along Ninth Avenue toward us. The building across from us obscured Ninth, so the dots were superimposed where Paul and his gang were, as if I could see through the building.

“Dots on a screen are good, but with these you’ll be able to see through walls, see where they are.”

“What if one of them doesn’t have a smartphone on the mesh?”

Vince considered this for a moment. “We’ll do a visual check from the roof.”

I pulled myself out onto the roof, landing nearly waist deep in snow, and then helped Vince out. We’d already tramped down a path toward the fire escape and the rooftop entry where Lauren and Susie had taken the kids. It was dark out, but not yet night, and it was clear. We hid on the rooftop in the snow and looked down Twenty-Fourth, waiting for them to appear.

As soon as they did, I gave the thumbs-up. Each of the augmented-reality dots overlaid exactly with one of the men who rounded the corner.

We watched them walk up our street, and the tension mounted. For the first time in days I forgot I was hungry. The group of men arrived at our back entrance, not a hundred feet away from where we were, and I could see their faces. Paul produced something from his pocket, keys, and then leaned down to open the back lock.

“I pulled Manuel off duty,” whispered Tony. “There isn’t anyone guarding the stairwell.”

As soon as the men entered the building, we got up from our hiding spots in the snow and began to hurry down the fire escape. My breathing was heavy, my heart pounding. Barely looking down at my feet, I watched the red dots through the wall of our building.

“One of them had a shotgun,” said Tony quietly. “Can you still see them? Where are they?”

“Still in the lobby.”

Our plan was to cross over from this fire escape onto ours at the third floor. The dots began to move.

“No, wait, they’re starting up now.”

As Tony had predicted, one of the dots remained behind to guard the entrance. We’d reached the third level by then, and while the rest of the guys climbed over to our building’s fire escape, I stopped to text the location of the guard to Aleksandr and Irena, who were hidden on the second floor.

“Did they stop at quarantine on first?”

I shook my head. As I stared straight at the wall in front of me, the red dots grew in size, seeming to crawl straight up the wall to stop right in front of us. The entire brick wall glowed red.

“They’re right in front of us.” I whispered.

Everyone held their breath.

The pulsing, red wall in front of me shifted, and then began moving upwards, separating again into individual red spots above my head.

“They didn’t stop anywhere else. Looks like they know exactly where they’re going.”

Chuck and Tony nodded, and on my signal we began following them up, shadowing their movement up the fire escape stairwell. The fifth floor was as high as we could go outside, so we waited.

“Describe what you see,” whispered Tony.

“It looks like they’re outside the sixth-floor door, waiting.”

“They’re going to do this fast,” said Tony, “probably send one or two of them towards Richard’s place, with the rest to Chuck’s. As soon as they open that door you need to tell us, and we’ll enter through here.”

The wind whistled while we waited.

Chuck nervously swept away a little snow that had accumulated since we’d last cleaned this spot a few hours ago. I stared up at the wall, watching the red dots, and then finally they moved, bursting through the door and dispersing into the hallway on the other side.

“Now!”

Chuck pulled open the door. Tony went in first, followed by Vince, with Chuck and me pulling up the rear.

“One of them went over to Rory and Richard’s end,” I said as we climbed the stairs to the sixth-floor landing. “The rest look like they’re waiting outside Chuck’s.”

Breathing heavily, we assembled behind the hallway entrance door. Everyone had their guns out except me, and I fumbled in my pocket to find it.

“The second they look like they’re going into Chuck’s place, you call it,” said Tony. “Vince will go to the guy at Rory and Richard’s end while the three of us go and surprise the four inside Chuck’s. Everyone good?”

I nodded along with everyone else but kept my eyes on the red dots waiting to my right. The dots were large and merged into each other.
Is that three or four people over there?
But then they burst into Chuck’s, yelling. I didn’t need to say anything. Tony opened the door silently, and we slid into the hallway.

I held back, watching, scared, but then forced myself out. By the time I got to Chuck’s door there was already a lot of screaming, but no gunshots.

“You assholes looking for us?” yelled Chuck. “Drop the guns.”

Three men stood with their hands up, staring stupidly back at us. Pulling off the AR glasses, I held my gun up and pointed it at them, and one by one they dropped their weapons. Tony rushed past me, going back to check on Vince.

“All clear!” yelled Tony after a few seconds.

“Do you have Paul?” yelled Chuck.

“No!”

None of the men in front of us was Paul.

Maybe he was in the staircase?

“Where’s the sixth guy?” asked Vince, running up behind me.

He motioned toward the AR glasses in my hands. It took me a second to understand what he meant, but then I quickly put them back on.

Three red dots hovered in front of me as I looked at the three guys in our room, and swiveling around I could see the dot of the guy they’d captured in the hallway coming toward us. Looking down to my left I could see another dot coming up toward us, which must have been Irena and Aleksandr bringing up the one they’d captured downstairs.

That’s five. Where’s the sixth?

“I only count five,” I said after double-checking.

“Goddamn it!” yelled Chuck. “Tie them up. He’s here somewhere.”

We herded the four men we’d captured into my apartment, pushing them into my small bedroom and tying them up. By that point Aleksandr and Irena had arrived, pushing ahead of them the man they’d ambushed in the stairwell.

“Where’s Paul?” demanded Chuck to one of the men, and I recognized him as the one that had hit Chuck in the video.

He knew we recognized him.

“He stayed out in the hallway,” responded the man, clearly afraid. “Don’t kill me, please.”

“What, in the stairwell?”

The man nodded.

“Why?”

“He said he was going to hang back, make sure nobody came behind.”

Chuck cursed, rubbing the back of his neck with his .38.

“Why did you come? Are you some kind of gang?”

The man shrugged. “He said you had a lot of stuff, food, equipment—”

“Yet he didn’t join you?”

“The laptop, he said it had pictures of all of us on it,” added the man quietly, “doing stuff, you know, to people—”