CyberStorm final Mar 13 2013

by Matthew Mather

  That’s Chuck.

  Sitting up quickly, I immediately felt dizzy, and I had to lie back down.

  Rolling over toward Luke, I cooed at him, telling him it was okay, but I didn’t touch him. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me, but neither was I sure that everything was okay. With all my strength, I slowly sat myself up in bed and swung my feet over the side.

  My smartphone was plugged in next to the bed. I picked it up. 8:13 p.m. No messages.

  The screaming had stopped in the hallway, replaced with someone crying in heaving sobs. Outside the windows it was dark.

  No, wait, it’s snowing.

  Tiny, crystalline flakes swept by the windowpane in the faint light coming from a lamp. Our room was littered with boxes and piles of discarded clothing and sheets and blankets. I could hear the purr of the generator in the background.

  With an effort, I leaned forward and found my jeans. They were filthy, but I put them on anyway, rummaging around to find the cleanest socks to layer together on my feet. Grabbing a sweater, I stood up and steadied myself, testing my balance, and walked out into the main room, which was empty of people, and then stuck my head out into the main hallway.

  Chuck, Susie, and Lauren were sitting around Sarah on the couch immediately outside our door. They looked up at me with surprise as I opened the door.

  “What?” I said weakly. “You were expecting Luke? What happened?”

  Chuck got up from kneeling in front of Sarah. He was holding a large handgun.

  “Let’s leave them alone for a minute,” he said to me, pushing open the door I was leaning through. He looked back down at the girls. “Do you want some tea?”

  Susie looked up at him and nodded.

  Ellarose was cradled in Susie’s arms. Her little eyes looked sore and red and were encrusted with pus, and her skin was wrinkled, flaking, paper-thin. She was quiet but looked scared, and she was tiny, shrunken.

  “What’s happening?” I repeated as he pulled me back through the door into the main room of their apartment. “Is Ellarose okay?”

  He sighed deeply. “Pam says she’s okay, just losing a lot of weight. She won’t eat.”

  Chuck looked like he’d aged ten years in the past week.

  “Where’s Vince and Tony?” I asked.

  “Over at Richard’s, or what used to be Richard’s.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I followed him over to the kitchen counter where he filled a pot with water and clicked on the flame to a camp stove. He shook his head. “Nearly out of butane.”

  He looked at me.

  “Sarah killed Richard.”

  “What?”

  My mind struggled to process what he was saying.

  “How?”

  “With this.”

  He put the gun he was holding on the counter. It wasn’t one of ours.

  “She says he stole the laptop, not Paul, and he was the one talking to them.”

  I sat down at one of the kitchen stools, still woozy.

  “So Richard’s dead?”

  Chuck nodded.

  “And he was the one talking with Paul? That helped organize the attacks on us?”

  He nodded again. I’d never really believed someone from our building had been helping Paul. It seemed better that it remained a figment of Chuck’s paranoia.

  “Why?”

  “Not clear yet, but seems like he was starving the people at his end, his wife included. Keeping everything for himself. Sarah said he’d been involved in some identity theft scheme with Stan and Paul, and that things got out of hand.”

  I sighed and leaned down into the counter, rubbing my eyes. I had a terrible headache.

  “Good to see you’re up and about, buddy.” He adjusted the pot with his good hand. “You’ve been out for more than two days.”

  Coughing, I looked back up at him blearily.

  “How have you been managing?”

  “Vince has been sick too. The girls have been taking up the slack, and Tony went and got more food outside last night. But the hallway, it’s getting much worse, and the city…” He didn’t finish his sentence, just stared at the pot as it began to gently boil.

  Getting much worse?

  “Your buddy Williams showed up.” He rubbed his eyes and pointed toward the couch and a pile of yellow plastic clothes on it. “That’s our ticket out.”

  Squinting, I looked more carefully.

  “Hazmat suits?”

  “Yep.”

  He dropped a tea bag into the pot of boiled water and turned off the butane.

  “He says that if we can get the truck down, he’ll put our names on the emergency worker list, and drive with us out to the barricade on the GW. Everyone going in and out has hazmat suits on, so we wear these, we’re on the list, we get out.”

  That makes sense, as long as he can get us on the list, but—

  “What about the kids?”

  “We’ll have to hide them.”

  “Hide them?”

  He nodded. “Lauren’s dead set against it. Thinks it’s too risky. Can’t blame her.” He looked toward the ceiling. “The radio says that power and water have been restored to some areas of Manhattan, but I’ll be damned if any of our taps turn on.”

  I didn’t trust the radio. “And the meshnet?”

  “Meshnet’s slowly dying out. People can’t charge phones anymore. Some people say water is back on in the upper hundreds, but maybe it’s propaganda, maybe they want to keep us here.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we should get out of here. Just a few hours of driving and we can be at my cabin in the mountains above the Shenandoah.”

  “I think so too.”

  “You’re going to have to speak to Lauren.”

  Nodding, I dropped my head onto the counter.

  He picked up the pot of tea and poured me a cup. I glanced at his broken hand. It looked terrible.

  “You gave us a real scare.” He patted me on the back with his good hand. “Why don’t you go lie down again?”

  Lifting my head from the counter, I asked, “Can you send Lauren to see me, when, well, you know—”

  The sobbing in the hallway became louder.

  “We had to drive off two gangs of refugees yesterday at gunpoint,” said Chuck, standing to take the pot of tea to the hallway. “Talk to Lauren. We need to leave.”

  “I will.”

  “And get some more rest.”

  “I will.”

  “Damn glad to see you’re feeling better.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  Day 27 – January 18

  “WHAT’S WRONG, SWEETHEART?”

  Lauren was curled up in a fetal position on the chair next to the bed. It was morning, and the overcast skies outside filled the room with a flat, monotone light. I was feeling a lot better today, but upon waking up, I’d found her crying. Luke was still asleep.

  She didn’t respond to me.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  The night before we’d had an argument. She absolutely refused to consider leaving, saying that the power would be on soon, the water was coming back, and that it was too dangerous out there. There was no way she was going to stuff Luke into a bag to hide him while we cleared the barricade on the George Washington Bridge.

  She was scared, and so was I.

  “What happened? Is it about Richard?”

  Even if he’d been a creep, he’d been her friend. I couldn’t know what she was feeling.

  She shook her head again. Taking a deep breath, she swallowed and looked at me.

  “I was going over to bring them some water, Pam and Rory—” was all she managed to get out before she began crying again.

  “Is something wrong with them?”

  She shook her head but shrugged her shoulders at the same time. Something had scared her, but like a battle-weary soldier I found it didn’t frighten me anymore.

  I’d better go and see what happened.

&nbs
p; Pulling on some clothes, I crept out into the main room. Tony and Vince were sharing the main couch, and both of them were asleep with the steady thrum of the generator in the background. Tony opened his eyes, but I whispered that everything was okay. I grabbed a headlamp and, after a second of hesitation, reached out and took Tony’s gun.

  He opened his eyes again, but again I whispered not to worry.

  We always kept a dim nightlight on out in the hallway, and I kept my headlamp off as I picked my way through the inert bodies under piles of blankets. Coming out from our apartment, the smell hit me like an open sewer. We didn’t run the kerosene heaters in the hallway at night anymore, so it was cold enough to see my breath.

  As I passed the shelves in the middle of the hall, a box under the radio reminded me of a box of donuts I’d often bring into my office for the gang, and despite the stink I found myself thinking about chocolate-covered, crème-filled donuts and hot cups of steaming coffee.

  At least I’m hungry again. That familiar hunger pain was in my gut, and thirst—I’m so thirsty. The back of my throat was parched, and rolling my tongue across my lips, I could feel them blistered.

  Reaching the door to Rory’s apartment, I clicked my headlamp on, took a deep breath, and grabbed their doorknob and opened the door. It opened only slightly, and I had to shove it to push back whatever garbage had accumulated behind it.

  The room had a different smell. Not as rancid as the hallway, still smelling of decay, but somehow sharply metallic. Memories of the days I’d spent as a teenager helping my uncle fix plumbing in the neighborhood came to mind, and I wondered if Rory and Pam had been doing plumbing work, trying to get water. It also reminded me of something else. I’d come across a particularly foul mess in one of the latrine rooms downstairs, some of it even on the walls, and the stench there had the same metallic tang.

  Maybe they had an accident?

  Their place was a studio. Two people, neighbors from the fourth floor, Terry and Natalie, had been staying in their place and must have been under the lump of blankets on the couch.

  Rory and Pam’s bed was on a raised platform at the other end of the apartment, so I quickly crossed over to there. It was covered in a pile of blankets as well, and their heads were poking out from the top of them. They were filthy, their faces smeared black.

  I nudged Rory, and he awoke immediately.

  “You guys okay?”

  He squinted into the glare of my headlamp. “Mike, is that you?”

  “Yeah, are you guys okay?”

  On more careful inspection, I saw that his face wasn’t smeared in black, but in something reddish—

  “Go away.”

  He put his hand up over my headlamp, pushing me back.

  His shirt was stained as well, and not just reddish, but blood red. I stood up, pulling the covers back more. Rory was spooning Pam, and both of them were spattered in blood, their faces covered in it.

  “Rory, are you hurt? What happened?”

  “Go away,” he repeated, pulling back the covers. “Please.”

  I stepped on something that squelched underfoot. Looking down, I saw it was a bag, a thick plastic bag that looked very familiar, and it was partly filled with a black liquid.

  Not black—red.

  There were dozens of bags littering the floor around the bed. Where had I seen those bags before?

  The Red Cross blood bank, where Pam worked.

  They were drinking human blood.

  Gagging, I backed away. The couch was littered with the bags, and against the far wall I could see dozens of them carefully stacked, but those ones were full and fat like bloody maggots.

  Despite my disgust, a part of me couldn’t help being drawn toward them. Maybe not to drink, but we could cook it, make blood sausages. Blood has a lot of iron and protein, doesn’t it? Luke wouldn’t know what it was, and Lauren needed iron. Human blood sausages.

  My stomach growled hungrily, but then I shivered. I gave blood the day this whole mess started. I imagined Pam drinking my blood, her face white, fangs out, her feline eyes watching me—

  “We gotta leave,” hissed someone behind me. “We gotta leave now.”

  I spun around, half expecting some creature of the night, but my headlamp instead found Chuck’s face.

  “They’re drinking blood,” I whispered breathlessly.

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Not an entirely bad idea, but I’ve been trying to keep it quiet and not freak people out. Blood keeps good for nearly forty days in the cold, and it’s been cold out there.”

  Why does he know things like that? The sense of unreality grew stronger, and I felt like I was receding, pulling away.

  “Mike,” said Chuck sharply. “Snap out of it and listen to me. You’ve been out of action for a while, and things have gotten a lot worse.”

  A lot worse. The way that he said it—

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “You need to convince Lauren that we have to leave. Now.”

  I continued staring at him.

  “What else?”

  Chuck took a deep breath.

  “Those nine dead people on the second floor?”

  “What about them?”

  “There are only five now.”

  I would have asked what happened to them, but I didn’t have to.

  Cannibalism.

  Human bodies were the last source of calories left in New York. I leaned against the doorframe, the blood draining out of my face, my fingers tingling. Irena had mentioned it briefly when we’d talked of the siege of Leningrad, of roving gangs that attacked and ate people.

  How am I supposed to react? What to feel? What to do?

  “And Richard’s missing,” Chuck whispered even more quietly, “or at least, parts of him are.”

  Parts of him. I shivered in horror. “Do you know who?”

  He shook his head. “Who looks healthiest? Maybe people here, maybe people from outside, that’d be my guess.” Exhaling, he added quietly, “Or my hope.”

  “Don’t tell Lauren.”

  She probably already knows.

  “Then get her to agree to leave.”

  The blood was returning to my face, my cheeks burning. I still wasn’t feeling well.

  Chuck looked me straight in the eyes.

  “We leave first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Day 28 – January 19

  “YOU SURE YOU want to do this?”

  Vince looked at me nervously and nodded.

  It looked a lot further down, perched up in the top of the parking garage frame, than it appeared when standing firmly on the ground. Chuck would have been better up top than me, but with his bad hand, he couldn’t climb, and neither could he drive. It took me and Vince half an hour just to clean the snow and ice off the truck.

  Tony was just getting back to ground level after climbing up to the billboard platform, dragging the winch cable along. He was the only one strong enough to pull it off—all eighty feet of the cable must have weighed more than a hundred pounds.

  Attaching it as close as he could to the wall of the billboard platform, about twenty feet in front of us, minimized the cantilever force that would try and rip the billboard from the wall of the building. The wall of the building was at ninety degrees to the parking platform, with the billboard sticking out from it, so we would be swinging into open space. Back on level ground, Tony gave me the thumbs-up, and I returned the gesture and nodded to Vince.

  Putting the truck into neutral, Vince flipped the switch on the winch. Immediately the truck pitched forward.

  “Slowly!” I yelled just as he put the brakes on and flipped the winch off.

  “Why don’t you keep the parking brake on and let the winch do the work?”

  “Good idea,” replied Vince.

  He was wearing a motorcycle helmet we found in the garage. It looked slightly comical, together with the long scarf wrapped dashingly around his neck and thrown o
ver his back.

  “I’ll just inch it forward.”

  On paper, this seemed risky but workable, but in practice—slowly winching a three-and-a-half-ton truck off a metal gantry fifty feet in the air to swing it from a billboard platform—it was ludicrous. After climbing up top and really getting a sense of it, I told Chuck it was insane, insisting that we should go back.

  But there was nothing to go back to. We didn’t have any choice, not anymore.

  Vince flicked the winch switch on for a second and then back off, looking back at me to make sure we were good.

  “Front tires have about another foot till they slide off!” I yelled.

  He nodded, reaching to flick the switch again.

  The past day had been busy. We’d hauled up enough water for us to wash and shave. Lauren had given everyone haircuts while Susie and Chuck had scavenged the apartments, looking for clean clothes. We had to look like well-groomed relief workers, not trapped natives, when we arrived at the military barricade.

  Tony went out at night to retrieve all of the food supplies he could. He’d dropped them off here, burying them under the snow, instead of bringing it all back. Carrying a lot of food would have increased our chances of getting attacked on the trek over. Like animals, somehow people knew what you were carrying. Carrying the last supplies of the diesel was dangerous enough.

  With a thud, the front tires of the truck fell off the front of the gantry. The truck skidded a few inches forward and then stopped. Vince looked back at me and smiled.

  “You okay?” I asked, shaking my head. My heart was thumping through my chest.

  Vince was amazingly calm, facing down death like this.

  “Perfect,” he replied.

  He was smiling, but his hand near the winch switch was shaking. He flicked it on and off again, moving the truck forward a few more inches.

  The walk over had been surreal.

  The last time any of us had ventured any further than Twenty-Fourth Street, just outside our back door, had been when Chuck and I had come down to check on the truck, nearly a week and a half ago. Back then New York had been a frozen wasteland, strewn with garbage and human waste, but it had since transformed into a war zone.

  The snow was trampled and blackened, covered in human filth. Burnt-out buildings framed the canyon of Ninth Avenue on our walk down, looming above the destruction of shattered windows and the wreckage of air-dropped containers. The weather had warmed above freezing, and dead bodies appeared out of the melting snow, piled together with the other garbage.