Digital Winter (30 page)

“Of course.”

“Forgive me for saying so, signore, but you look weary. Did you have another bad night?”

Liam buttoned his coat to make sure it hung on his frame correctly. “Yes.”

“The same dreams?”

Liam turned from the mirror and from Benito. “They don't seem like dreams. They are so real.”

“The same people?”

He stepped to an antique mahogany dresser with a marble top and gold-plated drawer pulls. “
People
is not the right word. They are…monsters.”

The image of eyeless, human-shaped shadow creatures stabbed his brain. This time they had come at 3:25 a.m. The morning before at 2:13. The time before that at 2:31. In each instance, one shadow figure hovered over his bed, staring at him through orbless eyes. Each time he awoke, the beast would be a few inches closer. He had tried sleeping in a different room. The mansion had twelve bedrooms to choose from, but the creatures always found him.

Closing his eyes did not make them go away. It was as though his eyelids had grown transparent. Regardless of how tightly he slammed his lids shut, he could still see through them. Once he had covered his face with a pillow; another time he used his arm. Still he saw them. Staring. Hovering. Oozing closer and closer with each night that passed.

The first night, he fled from his bedroom, sprinting over the threshold, down the curved, sweeping stairway, and out the front door.

They were there in the moonlight, in the air, hovering over his mansion, over the estate like black ghosts. And each one stared at him.

At him.

Him.

Things at the hospital had improved, but the rest of DC had grown worse. A small cadre of soldiers had kept the generator going and delivered fuel. Roni had learned from one of the soldiers that the president had been working with governors and the mayors of major cities, allocating fuel to high-need facilities like hospitals, police and fire stations, and key government buildings. She also learned that the help was limited.

“I passed several empty hospitals on the way here,” the sergeant had said.

“How do you know they were empty?”

“The windows were broken, and there was evidence of fire.”

“Looters?”

“That'd be my guess. Some people are looking for meds, others for food. Druggies have been cut off from their sources. Their providers can't move around like they used to. It's not safe out there—not even for drug dealers.”

“They can't all be stoners and addicts.”

“I saw a woman coming out of one of the hospitals. She was wearing an apron.” He chuckled but it was abbreviated. Roni didn't need years of medical school to recognize a weary man. “It was like she stepped out of the
Donna Rollins Show
.”

“
Donna Rollins
?” Roni thought for a moment. “
Donna Reed
? The old television show?”

“Yeah, that's it.
Donna Reed
. That show was old before I was born.”

“Just to be clear, Sergeant, it was old before
I
was born.”

“Yes, ma'am. Of course. My grandmother used to watch reruns. I saw them when I spent time over there. Anyway, I couldn't figure why a housewife would be looting a hospital. Then it hit me—she had a sick kid or husband or something. Needed meds.”

“We get a lot of people asking for meds we no longer have. Why would she be wearing an apron?”

“Crazy, ma'am. There are a lot of crazy people out there, and I mean that literally. Bug-nuts. I've been in a couple of neighborhoods, and it's like a zombie apocalypse.”

“How's your family, Sergeant?”

He cut his eyes away. “I don't know, Doc. They live in Wyoming. I can't get a hold of them.”

Roni recalled the conversation as she poured another cup of coffee. A night that included four straight hours of sleep was a luxury. Everything was a challenge. Elective surgeries were ended the first day of the crisis. Now weeks into the Event, only the most severe cases went into the ER. Some of those were police officers shot while on duty. Meds were running short. Harris Memorial had been declared one of the “keep open” hospitals in the city. Patients from other facilities found ways to get there. The place was full, the meds few, and desertion by medical staff was on the increase—less than she anticipated but more than she hoped.

She couldn't blame them. Most of the day, Roni wished she could walk to her home in College Park. It took all her willpower not to drop Jeremy's name and new rank of general and get one of the few operating vehicles to take her home.

Logic won out. There was nothing at home for her. She had possessions, but she couldn't use them here and had no way to protect them. She had visions of her lovely little home in shambles or burned to the ground. She didn't know the facts, so her mind filled in the scene in the most garish, frightening way.

The weather had turned. Eight inches of snow had fallen the previous night. Travel had already been nearly impossible except on foot and bicycle. Now it was worse.

She wondered how many people were freezing in their homes. How many would suffer frostbite and not be able to get medical help? Her sense of powerlessness intensified.

Roni walked up the stairs to the pediatric wing to check on Cody. He was playing in one of the activity areas with a boy about his age. The boy was bald, and Roni wondered how much chemical therapy was left for the cancer patients. She doubted it was much. A brief vision of the children's ward filled with small corpses raced across her mind, and she did her best to exorcise it. She was a doctor, trained to face the truth regardless of how difficult. She had grown weary of that.

She poked her head in the room. Cody and the boy looked at her. Cody smiled, but his playmate didn't. Dark skin circled his eyes. He looked gaunt, thinner than he should, weaker than was right. The cancer had its food source.

“You okay, Cody?”

“Yes. Are you okay?”

The question made her smile. Lately, Cody had begun showing concern for Roni's health. No doubt he was seeing what she refused to acknowledge. “Yep. I'm good. I'm going to the doctor's lounge for a bit and then to the cafeteria. You know how to find me, right?”

It was a useless question. Cody moved around the facility like he owned the place.

Roni went to one of the lounges. The door was left unmarked in an effort to give doctors a place to rest from the constant pressures of hospital medicine. The place was empty.

She sat, removed Jeremy's letter, and read it again. She had quit counting the number of times she had read the missive at twenty-five. His handwriting comforted her, and his unfaltering concern for her soul was endearing. Still, she wasn't ready to adopt a belief in God. The more she saw, the less she believed.

Where was God in all of this? That young cancer patient playing with Cody could use a God. Cody could have used a little help from the Almighty before his mother and father were killed. Millions were hungry. She rethought that. She had learned that the problem was global. In that case, the better part of seven billion were hurting. How could Jeremy's God allow that?

She folded the letter and clutched it to her chest. Over the years, she had accepted the incongruity of their relationship and never felt his faith was artificial or contrivance. It was as much a part of her husband as his skin. Although she knew it made him a better man, it wasn't something she could adopt. It just didn't make sense.

But then again, what did?

S
tanley Elton had always considered himself a resourceful man, intelligent, insightful. He had gone head-to-head with the IRS, financial lawyers, district attorneys, and others who tried to bring down a client. To date, none had succeeded. Part of that was due to his long-lasting commitment to never take on a client with shady business practices. For him, the first principle of accounting was “Never do books for crooks.”

Years of hard work and a superior education equipped him for life in the high end of the business world, but an MBA couldn't prepare him for what he and his family now faced.

He sat on the sofa and stared west over the ocean. The sun had burned off the morning clouds, revealing a cerulean sky through which white-and-gray California gulls rode air currents as they searched for food. Their smaller brethren, California least terns, provided competition. Before the Event, the gulls had grown lazy, able to find food from garbage on the beach or in landfills. But there was less of that now. The birds had to hunt the shore the way they had been designed to do. The gulls, the terns, the brown pelicans, the ocean, and the fish that swam in it went about their business as if nothing had changed.

But things had changed.

Stanley was a wealthy man, used to getting what he wanted by handing over a plastic credit card and knowing he could pay off the balance each month. But now there were no credit card companies. No machines to process transactions. No functional ATMs. No operational banks. His millions no longer existed. Being an accountant, he knew more about banking than most. Paper money was an anachronism. He seldom carried more than a hundred dollars in his wallet, and that only for the rare times he couldn't pay for something with a plastic card. His money was kept in zeros and ones, a binary representation of everything he built over two decades of work.

The money was gone, at least for now. It disappeared when the world's power went out and its digital records were erased. Such information was kept in computer server farms around the country. Very few electronics survived whatever happened, so he doubted that those servers had been secure enough to keep such information safe. Big banks promised such security, but he knew enough bank CEOs not to believe the promises.

So what if they were right? What good was money now? He couldn't access it, and even if he could, people who had what he needed—food—no longer needed money. In only a few weeks, people had quit trading money and started bartering.

Still, he was better off than most. For reasons he had been unable to uncover, his condo still had power, something he kept secret. Stanley couldn't explain it and didn't want to answer questions. He struggled to be thankful for electricity, but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was…unnatural.

He had other concerns. Donny's behavior had changed. He spent less time in the wheelchair. He paced in his room. He paced in the living room, pausing only to eat oatmeal and whatever else Royce could get down the boy. Of the four—Royce insisted that Rosa stay with them until things settled and her husband could find a way to cross the country back to their home—only Donny ate three times a day. The rest rationed their food.

On the second day of the blackout, Stanley became concerned about food. He and Royce were busy professionals, so they tended to buy food in bulk to cut down on trips to the store. All perishable food they kept frozen. Dry and canned goods they used sparingly.

They did their best to keep a low profile. Cooking created aromas that could attract attention. Like many in the building, they used barbecues to cook meat even though their stove worked.

First they ate anything that could not be frozen—mostly fruit and vegetables. Rosa made large pots of stew before the vegetables and potatoes went south. The stew could be frozen and left in the freezer. Stanley didn't know why his appliances still worked, but that didn't keep him from using the freezer.

By the second week, people began knocking on doors of the condos, begging for food and medicine. Stanley opened the door only once. A man charged in, knocking Stanley to the floor. He carried an ugly-looking knife stained with a dark substance Stanley assumed was blood.

“Give me food or I'll kill you.” His eyes were wild. He looked ferocious and scared.

Stanley raised a hand as the man leaned over him. Then came a thud, a snap, a cry of pain. The man stumbled to the side, his back arched. Rosa stood next to him with an upright vacuum cleaner in her hand. She lifted the heavy device again and swung it in a wide arch, catching the intruder square in the chest.

The man screamed again and scrambled out the door. Rosa slammed it shut and shouted something in Spanish. Stanley had no idea what she was saying, but he got the idea it was something that wasn't uttered in polite company.