CyberStorm (34 page)

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 over 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.

“Another foot and you’ll be at the back tires!”

The truck slid forward a little more, coming to a stop with the back tires resting just inches from the edge of the metal platform and the front of the truck suspended and swinging in the air. The Land Rover had a few feet of carriage that extended beyond the back tires, so even when they slid off, it should hold, right up until the last inch of the bumper slid off.

At least, that was the plan.

Growing packs of stray dogs and cats had joined the rats infesting garbage piles in the streets. Chuck took a few potshots at the first ones we’d seen gnawing on human corpses, but we needed to save the ammo, and the shooting attracted attention. Anyway, all the animals scattered when they saw people coming—they sensed they were in just as much danger of being eaten themselves.

We were a ragtag gang, and I was back to wearing the frilly female overcoat that I’d picked up at the hospital. Up till that point, we’d only gone out two at a time at most, but now we all needed coats, and I’d given the parka Chuck had loaned me to the nurse at Presbyterian weeks ago. We’d shuffled along, keeping our eyes down, two men each in front and back, with weapons out, guarding the women and children in the center.

It had been a long walk, and I still hadn’t really recovered. Climbing up into the parking gantry had taken nearly everything I had, but adrenaline was coursing through my veins.

Vince flipped the winch switch again.

The back tires slid off the platform, and all three and a half tons of the truck landed on its back frame with a mighty crash that shook the entire parking structure. It slid forward a foot but came to a rest.

The truck was angled nose down at about thirty degrees, with Vince suspended in space at least eight feet from the edge of the parking structure in the driver’s seat. The front of the truck, with the winch, was less than ten feet from the billboard platform.

“This is it!” I yelled to Vince. “Any last words?”

“Give me a second.”

“Those are your last words?”

Vince grinned at me, and I grinned back.

Down on the ground, Lauren and Susie looked up. They looked so small. Luke looked even smaller. A crowd of about a dozen ragged onlookers had already gathered, and I could see more coming. Tony and Chuck were yelling at them, pointing their guns, telling them to keep back, that we didn’t have any food.

“Time,” said Vince, “is just an illusion,” and with that, he flicked the switch on the winch.

What a strange kid.

One side of the bumper came free of the platform before the other, sending the truck spinning upside-down. With a lurch the other side came free, pitching the truck into a looping arc downwards, but also sideways toward the wall of the building holding the billboard platform.

I hadn’t considered that motion in my back-of-the-napkin calculations, and it probably saved the day, transferring a lot of the initial force back into the building. The sound of groaning metal filled the air, and the billboard platform bent under the strain as the truck swung in a great helical arc underneath it.

Bang! First one metal strut popped out of the wall supporting the platform, spraying bricks into the air, and then—bang!—a second one popped as the truck reached its zenith away from me.

Vince had been winching the truck up toward the platform to minimize the swing force, but as it swung around back toward me, with the nose of the truck nearly at the platform, he quickly reversed course and began lowering the truck.

It wasn’t a moment too soon, as the platform began to sag and come loose from the wall. In a mad race, the billboard began peeling off the wall as the truck, spinning like a top, descended toward the snow.

With a thud the truck landed on its rear bumper, spiraling into the snow. Luckily, as Vince lowered it the last few feet, it came down on its wheels, not its top. The billboard platform came crashing down at the same time, the end attached to the winch cable smashing into the snow just a few feet from the truck but the other end remaining attached loosely to the building.

And then silence.

“That was
awesome
!” yelled Vince, his head appearing out of the truck window, looking back up at me and shaking his fist.

The platform shuddered and groaned.

“Mike, get down here!” yelled Chuck. The ragged crowd of onlookers was growing. “We gotta get out of here!”

Exhaling, I realized I hadn’t breathed during Vince’s stunt. Regaining my senses, I walked along the metal platform to the back of the gantry, grabbing onto the ladder there. By the time I’d climbed down, Susie and Lauren were already strapped into the backseats with the kids, and Tony was throwing the last bags of food and containers of diesel into the trunk.

Vince was climbing up on the roof of the truck and onto the angled platform stuck into the snow to unhook the winch cable.

I ran across the snow, slipping and sliding, arriving just as Vince was getting back in the truck. Chuck was holding the right side door open for me, and I jumped in, closing it behind me. The winch whirred away, rolling its length of cable back onto the front of the truck.

Tony was driving. He’d driven Humvees in Iraq. Revving the truck, he looked around at all of us.

“Good to go?”

“Good to go,” replied Chuck.

I held my breath.

The onlookers were crowding right around the truck, and Tony jolted it forward, dispersing the ones in front, and then began slowly driving the truck across the snow. Some people banged against the windows, begging us to stop, to take them with us, for any food.

As we drove out onto Gansevoort Street, the only obstacle to getting free was the giant snowbank lining the edge of the West Side Highway. It was higher than head height but had been worn down in the middle by foot traffic. Tony pushed his foot down, accelerating the truck.

“She’ll make it,” said Chuck quietly to Tony, urging him onwards. “Everybody hang on!”

With a crunch, the truck impacted the snowbank and then began climbing, bouncing up, making it feel like we were nearly falling backwards, and then the front of the truck angled down, tipping forward. Sliding down the other side of the embankment, we skidded to a stop in the northbound lane of the West Side Highway—on cleanly plowed pavement.

Putting the truck into gear, Tony pulled it around and began driving north, toward the George Washington Bridge. We were meeting Sergeant Williams at the southeast corner of the Javits Center. He was going to drive us from there up to the military barricade.

“Let’s get the hazmat suits on,” I heard myself telling everyone.

Luke was sitting beside me, strapped in with only a belt strap. His little face looked scared. Looking down into his beautiful blue eyes, I unstrapped him and sat him on my lap.

“You want to play hide-and-seek?”

We needed to hide the kids in bags to clear the checkpoint. Relief workers weren’t supposed to have children with them. Luke looked at me, smiling.
How can I stuff him into a bag?
My mind rebelled, but Lauren took him from me, kissing me, kissing him.

“You get your hazmat on, and I’ll take care of Luke.”

I frowned at her.

“I made a crib for them, silly. Now get your suit on.”

Unstrapping my seat belt, I reached down for the yellow suit and began wriggling into it.

The George Washington Bridge loomed in the distance.

Day 29 – January
20

“HERE, HAVE SOME.”

Irena handed me a steaming plate of meat. Starving, I took it from her. A cauldron was steaming at full boil on her stove, and in a daze I followed her toward it as I gobbled down what was on my plate. Large bones were sticking out of the pot, the water boiling angrily up around them.
Those bones are big, too big…

“We need to survive, Mik-kay-hal,” said Irena unapologetically, stirring the bones.

Behind her, in the larder, someone was sitting.
No, they aren’t sitting.
It was Stan, from Paul’s gang, and he was cut in half, just his torso above the waist remaining, his eyes staring at me, unseeing and opaque.

A trail of blood streaked across the floor, pooling around Irena’s feet.

“You need to wake up,” said Irena, covered in blood, stirring the bones, “if you want to survive.”

“Wake up.”

Wake up.

“You’re dreaming, honey,” said Lauren. “Wake up.”

Opening my eyes, I realized I was still sitting in the backseat of the Land Rover, covered in blankets. It was dark. The sun was just rising. The interior light of the truck was on, and Susie was in the front seat feeding Ellarose. Chuck and the guys were outside, chatting, leaning on a concrete embankment.

I stretched my neck and groaned.

“Are you okay?” asked Lauren. “You were talking.”

“I’m fine, just dreaming.”

Dreaming about the Borodins.

Irena and Aleksandr seemed to have gone into some kind of hibernation mode, barely moving, surviving off their supply of hard biscuits and scraping snow for water from outside their windows. They sat in their living room with their gun and ax, watching the door to their bedroom where the prisoners were.

When we told them that we were leaving, Irena had gone and pulled the mezuzah off the front of her door and given it to me, telling me to keep it with me, to affix on the doorframe of wherever we ended up. It was the first time I’d seen her argue with Aleksandr, and they didn’t argue in Russian, but in some ancient-sounding language that must have been Hebrew. He was upset, not wanting her to take it down and give to us. I tried to refuse taking it, but Irena had insisted.