The city was barely recognizable.
At the corner of Ninth and Fourteenth, right outside the Apple Store, was an urban park I"d often visited to enjoy a coffee, to watch the hustle and bustle of people coming in and out of Chelsea. The tops of the park"s small trees poked forlornly out of the snow at our feet, with snow-covered traffic lights swinging at head height above mounds of frozen garbage.
The wedge-shaped building forming the corner of Ninth and Hudson hung in s.p.a.ce like the prow of a ship, the snow and garbage piling up against it like water swelling up from the dark depths of the underground city. Jutting up from what looked like the center of the ship was the burnt-out husk of the Gansevoort hotel. Out of each smashed window, dark smudges rose up the side of the building, its blackened walls a testament to a fire that had raged within.
Hanging in front of the hotel was a billboard, still perfect and untouched. It was an ad for a premium vodka, and the smiling images in the advertis.e.m.e.nt, a man in a tuxedo and woman in sleek black dress, seemed like alien creatures, laughing as they surveyed the wreckage at their feet while they enjoyed a drink at our expense.
Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I looked sideways to see someone looking down at us from the second floor of the Apple Store. Trash was piled against the floor-to-ceiling windows. As I watched, another person appeared, looking down on us.
I pulled on Chuck"s arm. "We"d better get moving."
He nodded, and we continued on.
We were traveling light, stripped down, with nothing to offer, or more importantly, with nothing that looked worth stealing. No backpacks, no packages, and we wore as ragged-looking clothing as we could manage. The only things plainly obvious were our weapons, my .38 in a leather holster and Chuck"s rifle slung over his back.
The weapons spoke to people watching us. They said that we didn"t want to be disturbed. I felt like a Wild West gunslinger in a lawless, icy outpost.
The pace of decline in the hallway had taken an abrupt downward turn when the cholera outbreak had been reported at Penn three days ago, and all the emergency shelters had been quarantined.
Those daily trips for food and water had given the days a schedule, a pattern, a reason to get up and get moving for most of the people on our floor. Now they lay inert on the couches and chairs and beds, completely cut off from external contact.
But it wasn"t just the removal of outside support.
Up until a few days before, we"d been coasting. People had been managing on what they could scrounge within the building for sc.r.a.ps of food, clean clothes, and clean bedding and blankets. But we"d reached the end of that supply-the clothes and bedding and blankets were stale and infested with lice, and every sc.r.a.p of food from the apartments was gone.
More importantly, the system of bringing up and melting snow for drinking and cooking had worked well for the first week, and been manageable for the second, but as we entered the third week, it was hopeless. The barrels and containers of water were dirty, and the snow outside, filthy. We"d tried going over to the Hudson River, but the water at the edges of the piers was encrusted with ice.
We"d initially quarantined the people returning from Penn downstairs, but we"d given up after capturing Paul"s gang. At that point, a half dozen of us were holding nearly thirty people at gunpoint, and anyway, it had been impossible to guess if they were exhibiting signs of cholera. Almost everyone was ill in one way or another, most with diarrhea from drinking infected water.
The latrines on the fifth floor were beyond disgusting, and people had migrated from bathroom to bathroom in each abandoned apartment, floor by floor, looking for anything clean. Very quickly, each had become as filthy as the next.
And we had nine dead people on the second floor. I felt responsible, and it haunted me.
I"d never even seen a dead person before. We"d opened the windows, turning the second floor apartment, with them in it, into a cold meat locker. I hoped the scavengers wouldn"t get in-human or otherwise.
Surveying the outside world, it seemed our situation was the same as the rest of the city.
Hope was rapidly evaporating into the cold winter air, even as the government radio stations kept insisting, day after day, that power and water would be restored soon, and to stay indoors, stay warm and safe. The refrain had become a joke: "Power on soon, stay warm, stay safe!" we"d say to each other as a greeting.
The joke had worn thin.
We"d reached the parking structure.
"There she is," said Chuck brightly, pointing up in the air at his truck.
It was the first time I"d heard him excited in days.
At that moment, an army convoy rumbled by on its way uptown on the West Side Highway. Where before their presence had been rea.s.suring, now it made me angry.
What the h.e.l.l are they doing? Why aren"t they helping us?
The meshnet was reporting rumors of emergency supply airdrops, but it was hard to believe anything anymore.
Looking up and away from the highway as the convoy disappeared, I followed Chuck"s hand to see his truck, still perched fifty feet up in the air. Being so high up had turned into something of a blessing. The cars lower down had been scavenged for batteries, parts, anything useful, but his truck still looked intact.
"So you think we could attach the winch cable to that?"
His hand pointed slightly in front of the truck to a billboard platform attached to the side of a building.
"Not more than twenty feet, maybe less. Your winch is rated at twenty thousand pounds, right?"
"The half-inch cable has a twenty-five-thousand-pound breaking point, but it"ll probably take a lot more for an instant. My baby"s stripped down for improved mileage, but," mused Chuck, mentally calculating in his head, "she must weigh seven thousand pounds with the skid plate."
"It"s going to be close."
I was the only engineer in the bunch of us.
The best I could figure it, the energy of the vertical drop would be converted into a forward velocity as it swung, with maximum force at the bottom of the arc. It wouldn"t start swinging until the end of the truck was dragged off the platform, and we"d minimize the swing length by winching the truck up as it fell.
By my calculations, by being as careful as possible, the swinging truck would exert at least five times its weight in downward force at the bottom of its swing. This was about double what the winch was rated for, and even if that didn"t fail, we needed the billboard platform not to rip out of the wall of the building during the performance.
"So Vince volunteered to ride this rodeo?" asked Chuck, shaking his head as we walked right underneath the billboard.
It was better if someone rode inside the truck to control the winch if we really wanted this to work, and our lives depended on it. We could set the winch in motion and let it go without anyone inside, but this risked jamming or breaking it. I wouldn"t have done it, but Vince was more certain of my calculations than I was.
"In exchange for us driving him near his parents place near Mana.s.sas," I replied, nodding. "I figured it was close enough to where we wanted to go anyway."
Still looking up, Chuck began planning.
"Tonight you go on another one of your food runs, and I"ll start packing as much gear as we can carry."
I took out my smartphone and checked. We still had meshnet connectivity, even down here. Vince was up and running on a new laptop, but the thousands of lost images were irreplaceable.
I was texting Vince, telling him it looked like his plan would work, when an incoming message appeared from him.
"We"re going to need a lot of water," continued Chuck, "and-"
"The president is going to be speaking to the nation tomorrow morning," I announced, reading off the message on my phone. "It will be broadcast on all radio stations. They"re going to tell us what"s going on."
Chuck exhaled long and slow.
"About time."
I put my phone away.
"And if getting this truck down doesn"t work, we"re going to hot-wire something from the street, right? We need to get out of here."
"One way or the other, but my baby is still our safest bet for getting to my place on the Shenandoah."
Overhead, a low droning sound began, and we backed away from the parking structure to get a better view of the sky. The noise gradually grew in volume until a military transport suddenly growled into view, skimming the tops of the buildings. Its rear loading dock was down, and as we watched, a large palette was pushed off the back.
A parachute opened above it as it fell.
"They"re air-dropping supplies!" yelled Chuck as he jumped awkwardly through the snow toward Ninth Avenue.
I followed on his heels.
Rounding the corner, looking straight up the street, I was greeted by the surreal vision of a long line of crates slowly descending on parachutes. The wind dragged the one closest to us into a building, smashing into windows. Dozens of other planes buzzed in the distance, each dropping their loads over different parts of the city.
I watched, captivated. "I"m not sure if I should be happy or worried."
The crate nearest to us crashed into the snow, and dozens of people came from nowhere to converge on it.
"Come on," said Chuck with a nod of his head, "let"s see what we can grab."
He pulled his rifle off his back and began running toward the crowd, waving the gun in front of him.
Shaking my head, I followed behind.
Day 20 January 11.
"DID YOU KNOW that we"re the only animals with three species of lice?"
Scratching my head, I replied, "I did not know that," and then scratched my shoulder.
Vince was busy inspecting his sweater.
"Yeah, I saw a Discovery Channel special on it a few weeks ago."
We gathered everyone in the hallway to listen to the president"s message, scheduled for ten in the morning. The hallway was just warming up. We turned off the kerosene heater in the evenings. It was too dangerous to leave it on at night.
Twenty-seven people crowded together in the hallway, plus Irena and Aleksandr guarding the five prisoners in their apartment. Thirty-four souls in our building that we knew about, all up on the sixth floor-except for the nine dead on the second.
The Borodins had volunteered to use their bedroom to hold Paul"s gang. Lauren wanted us to hold them somewhere further from the kids, but spreading ourselves out wasn"t practical or safe anymore. We"d given up on guarding the entrance or stairwell and had started guarding just our end of the barricaded hallway.
Irena told Lauren not to worry, that if the door to their bedroom moved, they"d just shoot, and that in a day or two they would be too weak to put up much of a fight anyway.
"The head louse, the pubic louse, they"re not so bad," continued Vince, "but the body louse" -peering closely at his sweater, he pinched at something and held it up for me to see-"now these are little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." He crushed the louse between his fingers.
The ham-radio-sphere was abuzz with speculation about what the president would be telling us-that we were at war, that we"d been invaded, that it was the Russians, foreign terrorists, Chinese, domestic terrorists, Iranians. Everyone had a theory.
Even more sinister were the meshnet reports of hundreds or even thousands of dead inside Penn and Javits, and that the cholera had spread to Grand Central Station. There was speculation about typhoid.
"I don"t think I have any pubic lice yet," said Vince, looking down toward his crotch. "Guess it wouldn"t be a big deal if I did. Haven"t had much action lately."
He laughed and looked up at me. I smiled and shook my head.
Richard was staring angrily at us.
"Could you shut up about lice? I"m trying to listen."
If the physical environment was turning into a cesspit, the interpersonal environment was even worse. It was poisonous.
"That"s just some stupid hack," shot back Vince, shrugging. The president"s message hadn"t started yet, and we were listening to a commentator speculating about what he might say.
I looked at Richard and tried to defuse the mood. "He was just messing around, trying to lighten things-"
"We"ve had enough of your messing around," growled Richard, "using us as bait, spying on us."
It had slipped out that we"d been using Vince"s meshnet to track their movements, and that we"d planned the trap of Paul"s gang without telling them what was happening.
Richard and Rory were livid, but Chuck was just as angry.
"With good reason!" erupted Chuck. "One of you is a spy for them."
He wasn"t holding back, especially since he knew we would be gone by tomorrow morning. Just one more secret we were keeping from our floor mates.
"A spy? For them?" said Rory angrily. "Who is them? Are you listening to yourself?"
Chuck pointed an accusing finger at Rory.
"I don"t want to hear a peep from you. You"re the only one who"s been near Paul"s apartment, and those messages from here to there-"
"I already told you, I stopped and checked some garbage near that apartment. I didn"t know we were under surveillance."
"You slimeball. All that Anonymous hacking stuff, and I saw you down there talking with Stan before all this started-"
"You want to know who is buddies with Stan?"
Rory pointed at Richard.
"Talk to him."
"Don"t drag me into this," said Richard, shaking his head.
"Why not?" I asked.
Richard laughed. "I bet you were using that system to track Lauren, weren"t you?"
I couldn"t help myself. "Shut up."
Lauren was sitting beside me. She pulled her hand away from me and looked at the ceiling.