Vince had hatched the plan of how we could trap them, and it had been the tipping point in deciding to stay today rather than just making for the truck, to try to get it down and escape. We didn"t have enough time to prepare for the trip, not knowing when Paul and his gang might be coming, so we"d decided to stay and fight.
Once we made the decision, we started telling everyone in the hallway, and the quarantine on the first floor, that we were having a birthday party for Luke. It was a private party, we"d said, only our gang was invited, and we"d be off watch and not available.
If it had seemed odd, n.o.body had said anything, with only a few grudging stares from people thinking that we were going to have a feast and we weren"t inviting them.
Telling everyone that we were having a private party had been Chuck"s idea. I was sure it would come to nothing, but just before five p.m., right when we"d said that Luke"s party was supposed to start, the gang of dots had coalesced on Vince"s meshnet location map.
They began to move this way.
Noisily, Chuck had gone around to tell everyone that we were going into his apartment and that we didn"t want to be disturbed for a few hours. We didn"t tell anyone else what we were up to, or even that Paul was coming, but it seemed somebody on our floor was talking with him.
"They"re going to leave at least one man at the entrance when they come in," said Tony.
He was the only one among us with combat training, so he was leading the mission.
"We"ll get Irena and Aleksandr to handle that one, and then the four of us wait until the rest of them are up on this floor, and we come up behind them."
"You guys stay to the back, right?" added Tony, looking at Chuck and me.
We had children and wives, he insisted, so he and Vince would bring up the front. Vince hadn"t objected, but he was very quiet the whole time we were planning this.
We were already dressed for outdoors, and Tony made straight for the open window and began to climb out onto the rooftop.
"What if they split up?" I asked.
Vince disappeared for a second to put his laptop back at its station in the hallway. He quickly returned, opening up his smartphone and handing me the AR gla.s.ses.
"That"s where you come in. You"re used to using these to spot those buried packages-now the packages are the bad guys."
I put on the AR gla.s.ses and looked out the window where he was pointing. Out in the darkness, six small red dots were moving along Ninth Avenue toward us. The building across from us obscured Ninth, so the dots were superimposed where Paul and his gang were, as if I could see through the building.
"Dots on a screen are good, but with these you"ll be able to see through walls, see where they are."
"What if one of them doesn"t have a smartphone on the mesh?"
Vince considered this for a moment. "We"ll do a visual check from the roof."
I pulled myself out onto the roof, landing nearly waist deep in snow, and then helped Vince out. We"d already tramped down a path toward the fire escape and the rooftop entry where Lauren and Susie had taken the kids. It was dark out, but not yet night, and it was clear. We hid on the rooftop in the snow and looked down Twenty-Fourth, waiting for them to appear.
As soon as they did, I gave the thumbs-up. Each of the augmented-reality dots overlaid exactly with one of the men who rounded the corner.
We watched them walk up our street, and the tension mounted. For the first time in days I forgot I was hungry. The group of men arrived at our back entrance, not a hundred feet away from where we were, and I could see their faces. Paul produced something from his pocket, keys, and then leaned down to open the back lock.
"I pulled Manuel off duty," whispered Tony. "There isn"t anyone guarding the stairwell."
As soon as the men entered the building, we got up from our hiding spots in the snow and began to hurry down the fire escape. My breathing was heavy, my heart pounding. Barely looking down at my feet, I watched the red dots through the wall of our building.
"One of them had a shotgun," said Tony quietly. "Can you still see them? Where are they?"
"Still in the lobby."
Our plan was to cross over from this fire escape onto ours at the third floor. The dots began to move.
"No, wait, they"re starting up now."
As Tony had predicted, one of the dots remained behind to guard the entrance. We"d reached the third level by then, and while the rest of the guys climbed over to our building"s fire escape, I stopped to text the location of the guard to Aleksandr and Irena, who were hidden on the second floor.
"Did they stop at quarantine on first?"
I shook my head. As I stared straight at the wall in front of me, the red dots grew in size, seeming to crawl straight up the wall to stop right in front of us. The entire brick wall glowed red.
"They"re right in front of us." I whispered.
Everyone held their breath.
The pulsing, red wall in front of me shifted, and then began moving upwards, separating again into individual red spots above my head.
"They didn"t stop anywhere else. Looks like they know exactly where they"re going."
Chuck and Tony nodded, and on my signal we began following them up, shadowing their movement up the fire escape stairwell. The fifth floor was as high as we could go outside, so we waited.
"Describe what you see," whispered Tony.
"It looks like they"re outside the sixth-floor door, waiting."
"They"re going to do this fast," said Tony, "probably send one or two of them towards Richard"s place, with the rest to Chuck"s. As soon as they open that door you need to tell us, and we"ll enter through here."
The wind whistled while we waited.
Chuck nervously swept away a little snow that had acc.u.mulated since we"d last cleaned this spot a few hours ago. I stared up at the wall, watching the red dots, and then finally they moved, bursting through the door and dispersing into the hallway on the other side.
"Now!"
Chuck pulled open the door. Tony went in first, followed by Vince, with Chuck and me pulling up the rear.
"One of them went over to Rory and Richard"s end," I said as we climbed the stairs to the sixth-floor landing. "The rest look like they"re waiting outside Chuck"s."
Breathing heavily, we a.s.sembled behind the hallway entrance door. Everyone had their guns out except me, and I fumbled in my pocket to find it.
"The second they look like they"re going into Chuck"s place, you call it," said Tony. "Vince will go to the guy at Rory and Richard"s end while the three of us go and surprise the four inside Chuck"s. Everyone good?"
I nodded along with everyone else but kept my eyes on the red dots waiting to my right. The dots were large and merged into each other. Is that three or four people over there? But then they burst into Chuck"s, yelling. I didn"t need to say anything. Tony opened the door silently, and we slid into the hallway.
I held back, watching, scared, but then forced myself out. By the time I got to Chuck"s door there was already a lot of screaming, but no gunshots.
"You a.s.sholes looking for us?" yelled Chuck. "Drop the guns."
Three men stood with their hands up, staring stupidly back at us. Pulling off the AR gla.s.ses, I held my gun up and pointed it at them, and one by one they dropped their weapons. Tony rushed past me, going back to check on Vince.
"All clear!" yelled Tony after a few seconds.
"Do you have Paul?" yelled Chuck.
"No!"
None of the men in front of us was Paul.
Maybe he was in the staircase?
"Where"s the sixth guy?" asked Vince, running up behind me.
He motioned toward the AR gla.s.ses in my hands. It took me a second to understand what he meant, but then I quickly put them back on.
Three red dots hovered in front of me as I looked at the three guys in our room, and swiveling around I could see the dot of the guy they"d captured in the hallway coming toward us. Looking down to my left I could see another dot coming up toward us, which must have been Irena and Aleksandr bringing up the one they"d captured downstairs.
That"s five. Where"s the sixth?
"I only count five," I said after double-checking.
"G.o.dd.a.m.n it!" yelled Chuck. "Tie them up. He"s here somewhere."
We herded the four men we"d captured into my apartment, pushing them into my small bedroom and tying them up. By that point Aleksandr and Irena had arrived, pushing ahead of them the man they"d ambushed in the stairwell.
"Where"s Paul?" demanded Chuck to one of the men, and I recognized him as the one that had hit Chuck in the video.
He knew we recognized him.
"He stayed out in the hallway," responded the man, clearly afraid. "Don"t kill me, please."
"What, in the stairwell?"
The man nodded.
"Why?"
"He said he was going to hang back, make sure n.o.body came behind."
Chuck cursed, rubbing the back of his neck with his .38.
"Why did you come? Are you some kind of gang?"
The man shrugged. "He said you had a lot of stuff, food, equipment-"
"Yet he didn"t join you?"
"The laptop, he said it had pictures of all of us on it," added the man quietly, "doing stuff, you know, to people-"
"s.h.i.t," said Vince quietly.
He ducked his head around the corner into the hallway. His body sagged.
"Somebody took the laptop."
"So that"s what you were after?"
He nodded.
"So what do we do with these guys?" I asked. "We don"t need five more mouths to feed."
"Feed them?" laughed Chuck. "We"ll keep them here, but we"re not going to feed them. If this thing lasts more than a few weeks then we"ll have to let them go, I guess. But until then, we keep them here."
With the immediate danger over, I texted Lauren and Susie to come back to the window of Chuck"s apartment. Tony and Chuck pushed past Vince, off to search the building for Paul, but I knew they wouldn"t find him. I had a feeling he"d be staying off the meshnet as well.
"So what are we going to do with them?" I called out after Chuck.
"You leave that to me, Mi-kay-hal," answered Irena softly. Vince and I turned to look at her and Aleksandr. "We have some experience with gulag."
"Nice to finally be on other side," added Aleksandr with a smile.
Day 19 January 10.
I MOVED THE gla.s.s bead around in my mouth.
Who said that sucking on pebbles made you feel less hungry?
I spat it out.
The snow had come again, and this time I was thankful. Chuck and I were walking down to have a look at his truck, to see if Vince"s idea would work. It was early morning as we made our way down Ninth Avenue, and a pristine carpet of white covered all the hurt and mess the city had become.
We hardly spoke, both of us lost in our thoughts to the rhythmic crunch and squeak of the new snow under each footstep.
A tweet on the meshnet the night before said that Americans threw away nearly half the food they brought home-normally this would have struck me as wasteful, but now it was unimaginable. Trudging through the snow, I was thinking about all the food I used to throw out after sitting in our fridge for a few days, daydreaming about what I would do with it.
Lauren knew I was giving her the bigger portions when we ate, but she didn"t say anything.
I felt embarra.s.sed at the meager meals, feeling like I wasn"t providing for my family, but Lauren always smiled and kissed me before we ate as if they were the most amazing feasts. A single Doritos chip had become a great prize, and like a chipmunk I was squirreling away what I could save for her.
I had a few pounds to spare, I reasoned, so why not? But hunger was something new to me, and unconsciously I would find myself eating something I was supposed to be saving, my stomach sabotaging my willpower when I wasn"t looking.
"Look at that," said Chuck quietly as we reached the corner of Fourteenth.
He pointed at what used to be the Gansevoort hotel. We hadn"t ventured toward downtown in two weeks, ever since the day after Christmas when we"d last come to look at his truck.