"What about your new friend?" continued Richard, pointing at Vince. "What do you know about him? Just accidentally landed here from nowhere, n.o.body knows who he is. If anyone is a-"
Chuck stood up.
"This kid has saved your b.u.t.t, saved a lot of lives. Without us, you"d all be out in the streets, maybe dying in Penn right now, or Paul would have stolen everything from you. A little grat.i.tude?"
"Oh, we should be thankful to you? I"m the one taking care of people." He waved his hand back toward the Chinese family, cowering behind him. "While you"re barricading yourself in your palace. We know you have a secret food supply. And who made you the police? Why won"t you give us any guns to protect ourselves?"
It had become a sore point.
From the start, we"d kept hold of the guns, and after Chuck had begun to suspect something, he"d flat out refused to let anyone else have one. The children of the young mother refugee, Vicky, on the couch in the middle of the hallway, began to cry.
"I"ll tell you why we"re the police," said Chuck, smiling. "Because we"ve got the guns!"
Rory laughed. "So the sheepskin finally comes away. The ones with the guns make the rules. You"re paranoid is what you are-"
"I"ll show you paranoid," growled Chuck aggressively, about to cross over to Rory.
"Could you men please stop this?" Susie said sharply, reaching out to hold Chuck"s arm, urging him to sit down. "There"s enough fighting going on out there without us making it worse. This is our home, and like it or not, we"re together, so I suggest you boys learn to make the best of it."
Ellarose had begun to cry loudly. Susie gave Chuck an evil look and carried Ellarose into their apartment, cooing softly to her. Chuck sat back down, his shoulders slumping, and the tension in the hallway eased ever so slightly.
In the silence, the radio announcer crackled to life: "In just a few moments, the president will be addressing the nation. Please, everyone, stand by. We will be starting in a moment."
The children on the couch in the middle of the hallway sobbed quietly, afraid and upset.
I watched the Chinese family pressed in the corner behind Richard. They hadn"t said a word to any of us, except Richard, in three weeks. They"d been thin to start with, and had become gaunt. They stared back at me with the same vacant expression that many of the other refugees had started to give me.
I always a.s.sumed it was the situation they were afraid of, but my mind suddenly flipped inwards on itself. I thought of our group-Chuck and myself-as the providers, the protectors, but my perspective shifted over to their point of view. We were the ones that had the guns, the power, and the gadgets, not them. This was our s.p.a.ce, our place, and we hid things from them, were tracking and watching them.
We"d become the ones they feared.
"My fellow Americans," came a deep voice over the radio. It was the president, and Vince leaned over to turn up the volume as Susie and Ellarose came back out to join us.
"It is with great sadness that I address you now, in perhaps this great nation"s darkest hour. I know many of you now listening are scared, cold, hungry, in the dark, wondering what is happening, and I am sorry that it has taken this long for us to reach out to you."
In the pause, the lightbulb in the hallway flickered as the generator sputtered. Chuck jumped up from his seat to go and check on it.
"Communications were almost completely wiped out in what we"ve come to describe as the "event," something we now understand to be a coordinated cyberattack on this country"s infrastructure and the worldwide internet."
"Tell us something we don"t know," whispered Vince under his breath. The generator purred back to life, and light returned to the hallway. Chuck came and stood next to Susie, putting his hand on her shoulder.
"We still do not understand the extent of it, nor the extent of the breach of our territorial boundaries by unknown intruders. I speak to you now, not from Washington, but from a secret location until we better understand our adversaries."
This brought hushed murmurs from the room.
"While all of America, indeed the entire world, has been affected by this event initiated by unknown a.s.sailants, not everywhere has been affected equally. Power failures were only temporary west of the Mississippi, and have been mostly restored in the South-but New England has been hit hard, made indescribably worse by a series of immense winter storms"
It was some comfort to hear that not all of America was in the same state as us.
"Our nation"s military was stepped up to DEFCON 2 during the event, the highest it has ever been in our military"s history, but we have now backed down to DEFCON 4. This is the reason, as many of you may have wondered, why our military has not been able to help by deploying more locally, as we have kept our eyes turned to our attackers."
"I told you," whispered Chuck. "We"re dying on the inside while they guard the G.o.dd.a.m.n fences."
"The one thing I can tell you, after weeks of investigation, is that it appears as if many, if not all, of the attacks originated with or were controlled by organizations a.s.sociated with, or controlled by, the Chinese People"s Liberation Army."
This brought a round of excited whispers. Everyone"s eyes zeroed in on the Chinese family at the end of the hallway, but then we all looked away as we realized what we were doing.
"We now have four carrier battle groups positioned in the South China Sea, awaiting the results of a multinational standoff at the UN and NATO organizations. We will not back down, nor will we let our citizens suffer any longer. I have good news-I have enacted special emergency powers to bring power and services back to New York City and the East Coast within the next few days, no matter what."
Cheers went up in the hallway.
"But," said the president, pausing and sighing, "I regret to inform the citizens of New York that in the short term, the CDC has requested, and I have granted, a temporary quarantine of the island of Manhattan due to an uncontrolled series of outbreaks of waterborne diseases. This will last no more than a day or two, and I implore the citizens of New York to stay indoors, to stay warm and safe, and we will be with you shortly. G.o.d bless you all."
The radio went silent.
Day 21 January 12.
IT WAS SNOWING again.
I went up on the roof in the morning with Tony to play with Luke, at the same time shoveling all of the new snow into a barrel for drinking water. Big, fat flakes fell soundlessly from the sky, swallowing up a city it seemed the outside world had cut off like a cancerous tumor.
Yet there we were.
The rest of the day before, after the president"s message, we"d lain together in the hallway, listening to the ham-radio-sphere explode. First came shock and denial, but after reports of the military checkpoints turning people back, this quickly shifted to anger and bargaining. A good chunk of the best lawyers in America were trapped on Manhattan, and threats of lawsuits about corruption of human rights and the Const.i.tution flooded the meshnet and airwaves.
But what made for the most colorful listening were the conspiracy rants. If there was anything that Americans were best at, it was conspiracy theories.
"This has nothing to do with the Chinese or Iranians or anything else on Earth. The government is hiding an alien invasion, pure and simple."
The alien invasion theorists were my favorite, but even they failed to lighten the mood.
Chuck declared he was going to storm the bridges, gun in hand, and would be d.a.m.ned if anyone would stop him. The futility of our circ.u.mstance began to dawn on us just as the first news of fighting and casualties on the George Washington Bridge came over the meshnet. By evening, the mood of New York had shifted from anger into one of depression and loneliness.
Where most people had been resigned to waiting it out, when it was announced that they couldn"t leave, that they were penned in like animals, suddenly everyone needed to leave. Pictures of people falling through the ice on the East River appeared on Vince"s laptop, images of small boats getting stuck in the ice, of people drowning like rats.
The subway tunnels were useless. Without power, most of the tunnels in Lower Manhattan, and up past Chelsea, had flooded after a few days. With the cold temperatures, most of that was now frozen as well. Some people must have been attempting to hide down there, but we didn"t hear anything about it, and we certainly didn"t go exploring to find out.
Morning brought a listless agitation to the hallway.
I"d slept out there, with Lauren and Luke curled up with me on the same couch as Vince. A sense of abandonment by the outside had made us all want to stay together, in close contact with the last shreds of humanity we had left.
We didn"t even bring up canceling the plans for getting the truck. It was useless.
Chuck sat dumbly, staring at the walls, while Vince stared nearly as catatonically into the screen of his laptop. It was nearing midday, and I was lying in the hallway, fiddling with the station app on my smartphone, cycling through the ham radio operators.
"I don"t believe a word of what the president said. I think there"s something else going on they"re not telling us about. That was just a broadcast for New York, to keep us in line, to explain why they"re keeping us in-"
I switched the station.
"-bring those a.s.sholes down to the East Village and show them what"s going on. How can they leave us here? Why is n.o.body helping-"
I switched again.
"-believe it? If the rest of America is all right, do you think that the president would be hiding? We can cure cancer, for G.o.d"s sake, why are they so afraid of some ancient-"
"Can you switch it to public radio?" asked Vince, sitting up. "Quick."
I flipped through the stations and turned up the volume. Rory reached over and turned the volume up on the main radio in the middle of the hallway. Pam had been up all night, administering what care she could-infections, upset stomachs, colds-and was asleep beside Rory.
"-the Iranian Ashiyane hacking group is now claiming responsibility for the Scramble virus that brought down logistics systems, with the Ashiyane group saying they initiated-"
"See, I told you it was the Arabs," said Tony, sitting up.
"They"re not Arabs," said Rory.
"-retribution for the United States attack on Iran with the Stuxnet and Flame cyberattacks of the years before-"
Susie perked up beside Chuck. Ellarose and Luke were asleep together in a small improvised crib in front of her in the middle of the hall.
"So it wasn"t the Chinese?"
"-the initial attack was targeted at US government networks, it quickly spread to secondary systems-"
"Iranians are Persians, not Arabs," repeated Rory. "They pretty much invented science and mathematics. And the Ashiyane group they"re talking about isn"t the Iranian government."
"-NATO is still considering a motion of common defense while the US government is on the brink of taking unilateral action-"
"You seem to know a lot about these guys," said Chuck to Rory.
Rory shrugged. "I cover it for the Times. It"s my job. The IRGC has an extremely sophisticated cyber-unit."
"-while global internet traffic is at a crawl, Europe has begun to bounce back and land-based mobile radio restored in most of the East Coast-"
"The IRG what?"
Rory reached up to turn down the volume on the radio.
"Iran"s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it"s like a mix of the Communist Party, the KGB, and the mafia. Imagine if Halliburton and the Gestapo got married-the IRGC would be their love child."
"Are they that good? Could they have done all this?" I asked.
Maybe it was some sort of ploy. A Middle Eastern group trying to claim responsibility for something beyond their scope, making noise, diverting us from where we should be focusing.
Rory laughed.
"Commander Rafal who runs the cyber-section is world-cla.s.s."
He looked at the ceiling.
"The thing you need to understand is that the US has no technical edge when it comes to cyber. Our military thinking is based on the idea of overwhelming technical and numerical superiority, but in the cyberworld, all that goes away."
"But we invented the internet, didn"t we?"
"Sure we did, but now it"s global. You can spend ten billion dollars on a new piece of fancy military equipment, but all it takes is one especially bright kid with a laptop from Best Buy to disable it."
"So you"re saying they could be the ones?"
"The Iranians changed the rules of the game by attacking civilian targets using cyberweapons-the Shamoon attack that wiped out fifty thousand computers at Saudi Aramco in late 2012-so this wouldn"t be out of line with their operations, especially as retaliation for the US cyberattacks."
"So you think this is justified?" said an incredulous Chuck.
"Of course not. I"m just saying it makes sense. But what you don"t realize is how important it is that someone finally admitted to something. Maybe they can start to unravel this mess."
"So this is cyberwar," I said quietly. "Dirty, smelly, diseased, quarantined..."
Rory nodded without saying anything. He looked incredibly thin and frail. He"d barely eaten in weeks, insanely trying to keep up his vegan diet. I had a hard time imagining that it was him that was talking to Paul, that he had some ulterior motive in this.
"Could you turn the radio back up?" demanded Richard at the other end of the hallway. "It"s nice to hear your opinions, but I want to find out what"s going on."
Rory reached back up to the radio next to the coffeemaker, and I wandered toward the middle of the hallway. The young mother was gone with one of the kids, and the little boy, not more than four years old, was sitting alone on the couch in the middle, playing with Luke"s fire truck. I hadn"t had a chance to speak with him yet.
"How are you doing?" I asked the boy softly.
He looked up at me defiantly. "Mom said not to speak to strangers."
"But we"ve been-" I started to say but then shook my head, smiling, and reached my hand out. "I"m Mike."
The little guy looked at my hand, considering it. The skin on his face was peeling, and his clothes looked two sizes too big, like he was a waif from the street. Dark bruises spread under his eyes from lack of sleep. He reached out and shook my hand.
"I"m Ricky. Nice to meet you."
"Nice to meet you too," I laughed.
In the background the radio played. "The US military is now considering the possibility of taking action on three fronts, something it was designed to do but never tested-"
"My dad is a marine, he"s out fighting," he said matter-of-factly. "I"m going to be a marine one day."
"Is that right?"
He nodded and started playing with the fire truck again. The door to the stairwell opened, and his mother appeared, holding his sister in her arms.
"Is everything okay?" she asked, seeing me hovering over Ricky.