Digital Winter (10 page)

“Me too,” Roni said. “I'm getting a bit of a headache.”

“Need some ibuprofen?”

“I was thinking of morphine.” Roni didn't move her eyes from the patient with a rib sticking into his lung. “Someone get me an update on pending surgeries. Who have we got in the halls?”

One of the other nurses stepped to the phone on the OR wall. She hung up a moment later. “It's official—power is back on.”

“And the surgeries?”

“There are eight more waiting for ORs to open. Admitting says Dr. Hall lost a patient about half an hour ago. He took the next one in line, which was yours. You have one less on your list.”

“Remind me to kiss the man.” Ronni called for another instrument. “So that means—what, three more?”

“Yes,” the nurse said.

“And here I thought it was going to be a tough day.”

Loren grumbled. “The day ain't over yet.”

“No wonder people call you a ray of sunshine.” Roni stopped long enough to stretch her back and move her head side to side, trying to untie the knots in her neck.

She allowed herself to relax for a moment. Things were looking up. She might even get to go home tonight.

Stanley sat in his car, letting time and the world pass by. In some ways he was a prisoner. His office was twenty-five floors above, a long trek in a stairwell lit only by battery-powered emergency lights. His home was across the bay, near but made far by traffic that had turned roads into parking lots. His wife was in La Jolla at UCSD. He had little to do but listen to the car radio.

Hope surfaced when the news announced that some power had returned to the East Coast. Washington DC now had power, as did parts of Virginia and Delaware. Upstate New York had electricity flowing, as did Albany. Soon the lights of Broadway would be blazing in the Big Apple again.

He smiled. This would be the talk of friends and family for weeks.

A few people near Cody Broadway cheered as word spread about the return of power. Most, however, seemed lost in their own pain. Cody couldn't blame them. All he could think about was his mother.

More people arrived in the ER, but the stream seemed to have slowed. Maybe he would be able to see his mother soon.

Rosa had the radio on in the condo and had been following reports closely. The San Diego news station had kept up a constant flow of conversation, most of it repetitious, about the outage. When they reported that parts of the city had power again, she felt a flood of relief. Rosa liked things orderly and consistent. Change made her nervous.

Donny wheeled out of his room, stopped a foot short of the window, and fixed his gaze on downtown San Diego. He seemed content but was no longer laughing.

He didn't move. He just stared.

Rosa stepped to him and placed a hand on the young man's shoulder. “Quite a day, Donny. Quite a day.” When she turned to walk away she caught a glimpse of Donny's reflection. It didn't look right, didn't look like him.

She did a double take.

The reflection turned and looked at her.

President Nathan Barlow returned to his schedule. Several meetings had to be canceled because of road congestion, which was fine with him. He had a mountain of information to read. He might even set aside thirty minutes to read something other than government documents.

He was tired. He, like anyone who followed the presidency, knew that presidents aged at twice their normal rate. The weight of responsibility, the long days, the overflowing schedule, and the inability to please everyone—sometimes anyone—pressed him down.

Still, he loved the job. It had been the only thing he truly desired. As a boy, his great-grandmother had said what grandmothers had been saying for generations: “In this country, a boy like you could grow up to be president.” Barlow had taken those words to heart, and politics became his only passion.

Born to wealthy parents who made their money in banking, Barlow attended the best schools in Massachusetts, including Harvard. After his undergrad work, he studied at the London School of Economics, where he excelled. His father set him up in banking, and he spent the next ten years earning a fortune as an expert in international finance. Even then, his mind ran to the halls of congress, and on those days when he felt especially resourceful, the Oval Office.

It had all worked out, and at times he thought some higher power had scripted his life for him. As if he were in a dance class that painted footprints on the floor to teach the waltz, all he had to do was step where guided.

Part of his daily routine was to allow time for reflection and reminder. Each day, he sat in the Oval Office, or the private study next to it, or on Air Force One and said, “I am the president of the United States.”

Most days, he didn't believe it, but then some crisis would arise, and everyone in the country looked to him as if he had answers at the ready. It was the only thing he hated about the job—the way people looked at him when things went wrong.

Troops in Afghanistan had been reduced to a handful, but the Middle East was still a mess. Iran and North Korea seemed to be in a contest to see which government was most loony. The economy was better but not great, and the mountain of impossible-to-pay debt threatened to send the economy spiraling back down. Greed was still normal in the institutions that nearly bankrupted a dozen industries. The two-party system continued to be more obsessed with who got the last word in than achieving meaningful legislation. The country that once demanded the world's respect was slowly becoming a joke. He wouldn't allow that.

Or so he had said.

He knew enough history to know that the bigger the country, the harder the fall. Historians noted that ancient Egypt and Rome supposedly could not fail but did anyway. The Soviet Union had been a force to reckon with but then fell apart. The British Empire had been an empire for a long time. Even mighty China was marching toward history's banana peel.

At least the US had some moral sense. Not much, but some. In his dark hours, he wondered if the best days of the country were behind it.

He pushed those thoughts away. Negative thinking never achieved anything in his life. Focus did. Dedication did. Determination did. Optimism—well, that just made life a little more pleasant. But the dark cloud that hung near the ceiling of the Oval Office couldn't be blown away by the winds of positive thinking. It was nearly impossible to be an optimist in this city, in this building, in this famous office. At least one problem was off his plate. He had never been so happy to see the lights come back on. To prove the point, he pulled the chain on the green-canopied banker's light at the edge of his desk. The lamp was a cheap knockoff of the old lights popular decades ago, but his daughter had given it to him when she was twelve and he had won his first term in congress. She had saved her allowance to buy it, and the lamp had sat on his desk ever since. When he took the White House, he saw no reason to change the tradition.

The 60-watt bulb glowed beneath the curved green diffuser. Larger 100-watt light bulbs became illegal to sell in 2012, and 60-watt incandescents followed suit earlier this year. He wondered what the political repercussions would be if the country learned their commander in chief harbored an illegal product right on his desk. The thought made him smile.

Then the light went out. All the lights went out.

The door to the office opened, and Frank Grundy poked his head in. “Mr. President—”

“I know, Frank. We're on lockdown.”

Three Secret Service agents poured into the room. Barlow had a bad feeling.

NEW YORK CITY
POPULATION 8.5 MILLION

R
udy Watt was one in a million. Maybe one in a hundred million. He spent his life in what his grandparents would have called an iron lung. But there was no iron in his cocoon. He was in a clear acrylic cylinder with a suitcase-sized ventilator resting on the floor.

Rudy had spent the last two years in the device—a small amount of time compared to those who lived during the days of polio. Some, he had been told, had lived for years on devices that did their breathing for them.
Negative pressure breathing
they called it.

He called it prison.

His mother and father reminded him daily how lucky he was to be alive. He didn't feel lucky. Instead he cursed fate for not letting him die in the gutter where his head hit the curb after he fell from his motorcycle. Back of the head, above the Atlas vertebrae. His spinal cord remained intact but not the portion of his brain that governed autonomic respiration. The fall killed the medullary respiratory center but left the rest of his brain alive.

Most people in his condition would be attached to devices that forced air into their lungs. He had been on a ventilator like that for a while, but it failed to do the job. This was his only other choice.

Yep. Lucky.

When the lights went out for the second time that day, Rudy prayed they would stay off just long enough for the battery backup in his respirator to die. A thirty-year-old man shouldn't have to live with his parents and be cared for day and night.

The backup generator kicked in again, and Rudy cursed his luck.