CyberStorm final Mar 13 2013

by Matthew Mather

  Grabbing a glass from Chuck’s cupboard, I leaned down to the sink to fill it with water.

  Blue skies, nothing but blue skies, coming my way.

  I turned the tap but nothing happened.

  Frowning, I turned the tap off and then back on, and then tried the hot water, but nothing.

  The front door to the apartment creaked open, and the noise of a radio announcer spilled in. Chuck’s head appeared through the door, and he watched me playing with the taps.

  “No more water,” Chuck confirmed, dropping two four-gallon cans of it on the floor. “At least, not in the taps.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  He laughed.

  “Water was off at five when I got up. Not sure if the city pressure can’t make it up six floors with the pumps off, if the pipes are frozen, or if the city mains are off, but one thing’s for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s goddamn freezing outside, at least ten below and windy as hell. Blue skies bring cold weather. I liked the snow better.”

  “Can we fix the water?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Do you want me to get some water with you?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  I waited. I could see he had something unpleasant in store for me.

  “I need you to get gas for the generator.”

  I groaned. “What about Richard, all those people out there?”

  “I had Richard go last night, and it was hopeless. He’s about as useful as tits on a bull for stuff like that. Take the kid.”

  “The kid?”

  “Hey, Indy!” yelled Chuck, leaning back into the hallway. From the distance a “yes?” echoed into the room.

  “Get some weather gear on. You and Mike are going on an adventure.”

  Chuck turned to leave but stopped and smiled at me.

  “And fill two four-gallon cans, can ya?”

  §

  “What kind of a name is Indigo?”

  I was crouching out of the wind and letting the kid do the work. He was quiet on the walk down, just staring into space. When I asked him to dig out the first car, he silently nodded and began methodically shoveling without a word.

  “Family’s from Louisiana. Used to farm the stuff down there. They named us after it.”

  He didn’t look African-American, but then, he didn’t look Caucasian either—dark, short-cut hair, and exotic, almost Asian features. The most prominent thing about him, unusual at least, was a gold chain that hung around his neck with a large, crystal pendent swinging from it.

  “Poisonous, isn’t it?” I asked, referring to indigo, trying to make conversation.

  We were outside on Twenty-Fourth Street, on the opposite side of the street, a few buildings down from our place. Our group had already siphoned most of the cars close by.

  The kid nodded and continued to dig.

  “Sure seems that way.”

  Looking up and down the street, I imagined the millions of people trapped in this wasteland with us. From here, the city looked abandoned, but I could somehow sense the masses huddling, hiding in the gray monolithic buildings that hunched shoulder to shoulder into the distance—a frozen desert between concrete towers.

  A hissing sound persisted, and I worried it was a gas leak until I realized it was the sound of fine particles of ice being driven by the wind across the snowy surface.

  “So how did you figure out to come and knock on our apartment complex?”

  He pointed up to where our windows were on the sixth floor.

  “Not many other lights on. I wouldn’t have bothered, but that family, they needed help.”

  He was speaking about the mother with two young children. We’d left them asleep on the couch in the hallway. They looked exhausted.

  “She’s not with you?”

  He shook his head. “But they were on the train with me.”

  “What train?”

  He stuck his shovel into the snow and leaned down to clear ice from the gas cap, banging it slightly and then opening it.

  “The Amtrak.”

  “My God, you were on that? Were you hurt?”

  “I wasn’t…” He sagged visibly, closing his eyes. “Can we talk about something else?”

  He grabbed one of the four-gallon cans. He looked at me, and the sky reflected in his clear blue eyes.

  “Doesn’t your building have an emergency generator?”

  I nodded. “Couldn’t get it started. Why? Think you could?”

  “Not sure it would do much good, and wouldn’t run the heating system even if you could get it started.”

  “So why’d you ask?”

  Propping himself up on one knee, he pointed toward our building.

  “Chuck said his generator runs off gas and diesel. Did you check how much diesel there was in the emergency generator tank in the building?”

  The wind whistled past us.

  “No,” I laughed, “we did not.”

  Not five minutes later we were standing in the apartment basement, listening to the hollow tinkle of the second canister filling up. It was cold, but much warmer than outside. We didn’t even need to siphon it since there was a release valve on the bottom of the tank.

  “Two hundred gallons!” I said excitedly, reading specifications off the side of the tank. “That’ll run our little generator for weeks.”

  Vince smiled, closing the release valve and screwing the cover onto the plastic canister. I wanted to know what had happened at the Amtrak crash, but he seemed fragile.

  “One thing I will insist on,” I whispered, even with nobody else there, “this is our little secret, okay?”

  He frowned.

  “I mean, don’t tell anyone else about this. We’ll make getting gas our job. While everyone thinks we’re off outside sucking it from cars in the snow and cold, we can sit down here and relax, have a chat. What do you think?”

  He laughed. “Sure. But won’t they notice we’re coming back with diesel and not gas?”

  The kid was quick. “Nobody but Chuck would probably notice.”

  Vince nodded and looked at the floor.

  “Feel like having that first chat now?” I asked.

  “Not so sure.”

  “Come on, talk to me.”

  3.45 p.m.

  “CAN I COME up?”

  I looked down at the carpet, avoiding her eyes.

  “We’re already more than we can really manage,” answered Chuck for me.

  The woman in apartment 315, Rebecca, looked frightened. Everyone else on her floor had already left.

  She was wearing a shiny, puffed-out black jacket with faux-fur trim. Wisps of blonde hair escaped around the edges of the hoodie she had pulled up around her head, lending her pale complexion an ethereal halo in the light streaming in from behind her.

  At least she looked warm.

  “You really shouldn’t stay here by yourself,” I said, imagining her there at night, in the dark and cold, alone. She fidgeted with the doorframe with one gloved hand.

  I relented. “Why don’t you come up for the afternoon, have a hot coffee, and we’ll walk you up to Javits later?”

  “Thank you so much!” She almost burst into tears. “What should I bring up?”

  “Pack as much warm clothing as you can fit,” replied Chuck, shaking his head as he looked at me, “and it needs to be a bag you can carry.”

  The city was down to four radio stations that were still broadcasting, and the one doing emergency coverage for Midtown had announced that the Javits Convention Center between Thirty-Fourth and Fortieth had been turned into the evacuation hub for the west side of Manhattan.

  “Can we borrow some blankets, anything warm?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’ll bring everything I have.”

  “And any food you don’t need,” I added.

  She nodded again and disappeared into her place, closing her door and casting us into darkness. It was still light out, but with
out any exterior windows, the hallways were shadowy caverns, a hundred feet of corridor lit by just the two emergency lights, one above the elevators and the other above the stairwell.

  We were knocking door-by-door, doing an inventory to get some “situational awareness,” as Chuck had put it. Most people were already gone. It reminded me of a few weeks before when we’d gone door-to-door for the Thanksgiving barbecue—just a few weeks in time, but in a completely different world.

  “Fifty six people in the building,” said Chuck as we opened the door to the stairwell and began to climb, “and about half those on our floor.”

  “How long do you think the gang on the second floor will last?”

  Apartment 212 had their own small generator rigged up. A group of nine people had banded together in a smaller version of what we had going upstairs, but they weren’t as well equipped.

  Chuck shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  Our floor was turning into an emergency shelter as more people from other floors came up. Richard continued to impress me. He had managed to go out and find his own kerosene heater and load of fuel, as well as bring back more food supplies.

  Money was still buying stuff out there, at least for now.

  “So the water is off everywhere,” I said.

  It wasn’t a question. We’d heard on the radio that the water was off all over the city.

  “In survival situations the order of importance is warmth, then water, and then food,” said Chuck. “You can survive weeks or months without food, but only two days without water, and you’ll freeze to death in just a few hours. We need to stay warm and find a gallon of water per day per person.”

  We tramped up the stairs, our footsteps echoing around us. The temperature in the stairwell was dropping to the same as outside, and thick plumes of vapor hung in front of us with each labored breath. With one arm in a sling to protect his bad hand, Chuck was using the other to grab onto the railing, pulling himself up a step at a time.

  “There’s five feet of snow out there. Surely we’re not going to lack water.”

  “Explorers in the Arctic were just as thirsty as ones in the Sahara,” replied Chuck. “You gotta melt snow first, and that takes energy. Eating it lowers your body temperature and gives you cramps, which could be deadly by themselves. Diarrhea and dehydration are the enemy just as much as the cold.”

  I trudged up a few more steps.

  Never mind keeping hydrated, how are we going to deal with keeping clean, bathrooms, sanitation?

  I still felt guilty about Chuck staying here for us.

  “Do you think we should just leave? Take everyone to the evacuation?”

  Where most of the apartment building was empty, our entire floor was still there, along with the refugees, and only because we’d stayed and had the generator and heating. Maybe we were making a terrible mistake.

  We certainly didn’t have enough food to support the nearly thirty people in our hallway for very long. It struck me how I thought of the people who’d migrated to our floor as “refugees.”

  “Luke still isn’t well enough to travel, and Ellarose is too small to handle much. I think the evacuation centers will be total disasters. If we leave, we’ll lose what we have here, and if we get stuck out there…then we’d be in real trouble.”

  We continued walking up, and I listened to the methodical rhythm of our boots. I must have climbed those stairs two dozen times in the last two days. So this is what it took to get me to exercise. I smiled, despite everything.

  We reached the sixth floor. Before opening the door, Chuck turned to me.

  “We’re in this now, Mike, and we gotta make it work, no matter what. Are you with me?”

  I took a deep breath and nodded.

  “I’m with you.”

  Chuck reached out to the door, but before he could grab the handle, the door burst open, nearly knocking him down the stairs.

  Tony’s head appeared.

  “Goddamn it,” swore Chuck, “could you be more careful!”

  “It’s Presbyterian,” said Tony breathlessly, “they’re asking for volunteers on the radio.”

  We looked at him, not understanding.

  “The hospital next door, people are dying.”

  8:00 p.m.

  “JUST KEEP VENTILATING.”

  The hospital stairwell was nightmarish. Inert bodies on stretchers lay abandoned under emergency lighting in doorways, with tubes and bags of blood held aloft in a shifting forest of metal poles and stands. Between the pools of dim light, people were shouting and jostling, flashlights and headlamps glimmering, all in a mad rush downwards and outwards into the freezing cold.

  I desperately tried to keep pace as we raced down the stairs, carefully holding a blue plastic bulb between my fingers, balancing it over the mouth and nose of a tiny baby. Every five seconds I squeezed it, delivering a fresh breath of air. The baby was from neonatal care, five weeks premature and born just last night.

  Where’s the father? What happened to the mother?

  A nurse cradled the baby in her arms, running down the stairs as fast as we could manage together. Reaching the ground floor, we rushed toward the main entrance.

  “Where are you taking him?” I asked the nurse.

  She was concentrating on looking ahead. “I don’t know. They said Madison Square Garden had services.”

  We walked through the first set of double doors at the main entrance and then waited behind a gurney two staff were trying to navigate outside. The old man on the bed looked up at me, his arms twisted around himself, trying to say something.

  I stared at him, wondering what he wanted.

  “I’ll take that.”

  An NYPD officer was reaching over to take the ventilator from me. Thank God Presbyterian was almost on Sixth, one of the only main streets they’d kept plowing. Walking outside, I could see a few police cars and ambulances and civilian vehicles through an opening dug into the massive snowbank bordering Sixth Avenue.

  The nurse and police officer continued on as I stood still, and a wave of people flooded past me. Noticing the nurse was wearing nothing but short sleeves, I ran after them, taking off my parka and putting it around her shoulders, and then jogged back inside the lobby, shivering.

  The only thing I could think of, staring at that newborn on the way down, was Lauren. It was as if that little baby in the nurse’s arms was mine, my unborn child. I was near tears, breathing quickly and shallowly.

  “You okay, buddy?”

  It was another police officer. I took a deep breath and nodded.

  “We need people outside to walk patients up to Penn Station. Can you do that?”

  I wasn’t sure, but I nodded again anyway.

  “Do you have a jacket?”

  “I gave it to the nurse,” I said, pointing out the door.

  He waved at a container next to the exit doors.

  “Grab something from lost and found and get out there. They’ll tell you what to do.”

  Minutes later I found myself wheeling a gurney up Sixth Avenue, dressed in a faded, cherry-red overcoat with stained, frilly white cuffs and wearing gray wool mittens. I’d left the heavy gloves Chuck had given me stuffed in the pockets of the parka I’d given to the nurse.

  I was regretting my decision.

  The coat was several sizes too small for me, and made for a woman, so I’d had to force the zipper to make it up past my stomach. I felt like a pink sausage.

  Where the world inside the hospital had been frenetic, outside it was a surreal calm. Nearly pitch black and almost totally quiet, the street was lit only by the headlights from intermittent traffic that passed back and forth, ferrying the sick. An ambulance swept past me, briefly illuminating the ghostly procession ahead, a ragtag parade of equipment and people staggering and shuffling through the snow.

  For the first half block the cold was bearable, but after two blocks, by the time I reached the corner of Twenty-Fifth, it was biting. Walking into a steady headwind, I war
med my cheeks by pressing the scratchy wool mittens against them. I pulled one of them off to feel something lumpy on my cheek.

  Is that frostbite? My feet were numb.

  Hard-packed snow and ice covered the street, and I had to concentrate to keep the wheels of the gurney from getting stuck in ruts, constantly reversing course and shoving forward as it got jammed.

  The woman on the gurney was barely visible, wrapped up like a mummy in layers of thin blue-and-white blankets. She was aware, awake, and looking up at me with scared eyes. I talked to her, telling her not to worry.

  A bag of liquid hung from a support on the side of the bed, swinging back and forth, its tube snaking down into her covers. I tried to steady it, cursing someone for not securing it, wondering what was in it.

  What will happen if it falls? Will it tear the tube from her veins?

  The gurney jammed in the snow again, almost tipping over, and the woman let out a small cry. With all my strength I righted it, panting, and continued on.

  Between the lights of the passing cars and ambulances, my world became a dark cocoon of ice and cold, my heart pounding and eyes straining to see in the dim light of my headlamp. It was just me and this woman, bound together for this moment in time, a spontaneous and private struggle balanced on the edge of life and death.

  The thin sliver of a crescent moon hung above me in the darkness like a scythe, and I couldn’t ever remember seeing the moon in New York before.

  Seven blocks became an eternity.

  Did I miss the turnoff?

  Struggling, I peered into the darkness. There were still people ahead of me, and then finally, up ahead two blocks, I spotted the blue and white of an NYPD van. Gripping the cold metal of the gurney, I forced us forward. While my face and hands and feet were freezing, my arms and legs were burning.

  “We got it from here, buddy.”

  Looking up, I saw two NYPD officers waving me off and coming around to take the ends of the gurney.

  I was soaked in sweat.

  As she was wheeled away toward a gap in the snowbank on Thirty-First, I heard the woman say, “Thank you,” but I was too tired to reply.

  Doubled over and panting, I simply smiled at her and nodded.