That sounded ominous, and I stopped wiping the pot I was drying. After piling my plate with food at dinner, I’d totally lost my appetite and hadn’t been able to eat most of it. Lauren had been quiet, avoiding my eyes, and while she could have just been worrying about her family…
“What do you want to talk about?” I asked, shrugging, trying to sound casual. My scalp began tingling.
She took a deep breath. “Let’s finish cleaning up first.”
I stared at her, holding the pot in one hand and washcloth in the other, but she returned her attention to the sink, scrubbing industriously. Shaking my head, I began stacking the last few pots and pans, put the last glasses into the dishwasher, and then threw the dishcloth onto the counter. Wiping my hands on my jeans to dry them, I picked up the remote.
Lauren sighed loudly again.
Immediately, CNN sprang to life. “This is only the fourth time the armed forces have been called to DEFCON 3.”
“What in the world?”
I sat down on our couch. Lauren put down the pot she was scrubbing. Images of an aircraft carrier filled the giant screen on our wall. It was one of ours this time.
“The only other times our military have been at DEFCON 3 were the Cuban Missile Crisis in ’62, when we were at the brink of nuclear war with Russia—”
“What’s happening?” asked Lauren.
“—the Yom Kippur War of ’73 when Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel, nearly triggering another nuclear war—”
“I don’t know,” I replied, shaking my head. Lauren came to sit next to me.
“—and of course, on 9/11, when we were attacked by unknown forces that turned out to be al-Qaeda.”
I started to get up from the couch to go over to Chuck’s place, to see if he knew anything more, but Lauren reached out and stopped me. Without questioning her, I sat down and returned my attention to the TV.
“The only information we are getting is that CENTCOM, one of the US military’s internal command and control communication networks, has been compromised—”
“Mike, could we turn this off for a minute?”
I sat and stared at the TV, trying to understand what was going on. Multiple secret networks had been taken over, from the NSA to forward-deployed military units. They didn’t know the extent of the infection, or the purpose. Our military were readying for some kind of attack.
“Please, Mike,” repeated Lauren after another minute.
I turned to her, shaking my head.
“Are you serious? You want to have a talk now? The world is about to explode and you want to talk?”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Then let the world burn, but I need to talk to you right now. I need to tell you something.”
My heart raced. I knew what she was going to say, and I didn’t want to hear it. Containing myself, I stared at her.
“Can’t it wait?” I said, clenching my jaw and shaking my head.
“No.”
Tears were streaming down her face.
“I—” she stammered, “I, um—”
“We have just received an emergency alert from the DHS. Oh my God…”
Lauren and I turned toward the TV. The CNN anchor was at a loss for words.
“…the DHS is reporting multiple unknown and unidentified aerial targets over the continental United States, and is asking the public for any information—”
And then everything went dark.
The background hum of the machines went silent, and I found myself staring into blackness where the CNN anchor had been a split second before. All I could hear was the banging of my own heart and the rush of blood in my eardrums.
Breathlessly, I waited, half expecting the brilliant flash of a thermonuclear explosion to burn through my retinas. But the only thing I heard was the quiet howl of the wind outside while my eyes adjusted to the dim light from the candles still burning on the kitchen counter.
Seconds ticked by.
“Let’s get Luke and go next door, okay?” I said shakily. “Find out what’s going on.”
Lauren grabbed onto my arm.
“Please,” she begged, “I need to get this out.”
“What?” I demanded, my anger and fear boiling over. “You need to come clean right now?”
“Yes—”
“I don’t want to hear this,” I spat back. “I don’t want to hear about how you’re sleeping with Richard, how you’re sorry, how you never meant to hurt anyone.”
She burst into tears.
“You pick this moment,” I yelled, “this goddamn moment—”
“Don’t be such an asshole, Mike,” she sobbed. “Please stop being so angry.”
“I’m an asshole? You’re sleeping with someone, and I’m an asshole? I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.”
“Please...”
I glared at her, and she stared back at me defiantly.
“WHAT?” I shouted, throwing my hands into the air. Luke began crying loudly in the background.
In the wavering candlelight she put one trembling hand to her mouth and quietly answered me.
“I’m pregnant.”
Day 3 – Christmas Day – December 25
9:35 a.m.
“YOU DIDN’T ASK if it was yours, did you?”
I stopped digging and exhaled slowly.
“You did, didn’t you?” laughed Chuck. “You are an asshole.”
My head sagged, and I rubbed my face with one snow-encrusted glove.
“And I mean that in the best possible way, my friend.”
“Thanks,” I sighed, shaking my head, and began digging again.
Chuck leaned through the doorway. “Don’t beat yourself up too much. She’ll forgive you. It’s Christmas.”
I grunted and threw myself into digging out the last few shovelfuls. Pam had wrapped Chuck’s injury, so he had a club for one hand, making him useless for digging. Just my luck.
“You gotta stop imagining things,” added Chuck, “stop seeing things that aren’t there. That girl adores you.”
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, unconvinced.
It was still snowing, not as hard as yesterday, but still snowing—the whitest of white Christmases that had ever graced New York. Everything outside was covered, and the cars parked down Twenty-Fourth Street were marked by only the barest of lumps in the thick carpet of snow. This silent and blanketed New York was surreal and eerie.
Right after the blackout, we hadn’t seen the glow of mushroom clouds on the horizon, so we assumed the worst hadn’t happened. Chuck, Tony, and I had gone outside and battled our way over two blocks to the Chelsea Piers, straining to see into the snowy blackness above the Hudson. I’d expected to see or hear something, a fighter aircraft battling an unseen foe, but no. After a tense couple of hours, nothing had happened except that the snow had gotten deeper.
The moment the power had gone out, Chuck had fired up his generator. The fiber-optic line from Verizon, that the building had its TV and internet plugged into, should have worked even in a blackout—assuming you could power up your own TV and cable box. When we’d tried CNN, the image and sound had been scrambled for a few hours, and then it went totally blank. It was the same on all channels.
The radio stations were still broadcasting, however, and they were filled with conflicting stories. Some said that the unidentified aerial targets were enemy drones that had invaded US airspace; others said they were missiles and that whole cities had been destroyed.
Around midnight, the president had broadcast a short message saying that there’d been some kind of cyberattack. Its full extent was still being assessed, he said, and they still had no information about the unidentified aerial targets, except that they didn’t have any reports of US cities being physically attacked. He said nothing about drones. Power had been restored to many areas by then; at least that was what the announcement said. We were still without power, however.
“You sure we need to do this?” I asked. “The power came
back on yesterday after just a few hours. It’ll probably be back on by this afternoon.”
Chuck had the idea of siphoning gas out of cars on the street. We wouldn’t take it all out of any one car, he reasoned, and they wouldn’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future anyway. We needed more fuel for the generator. Gasoline wasn’t something he’d been allowed to store indoors, and we figured the gas stations would be closed.
“Better safe than sorry, what my granddad always said,” replied Chuck.
While inside this plan had sounded clever, outside it was a different story.
Just opening the back door was an adventure, with all the snow piled against it. I was barely able to squeeze out, and I’d spent twenty minutes digging the snow away from the outside of the door enough to open it properly.
“Come on then, let’s go,” I told Chuck as I scraped away the last of it. Opening the door, he scrambled into the snow outside, and we began waddling through the waist-deep drifts to the nearest car. On the inside of all my layers of clothing I was sweating, prickly, and uncomfortable, while my hands and face and feet were numb from cold.
“Remind me to add snowshoes to my shopping list for the next disaster,” laughed Chuck.
After brushing away two feet of snow from the top of the first car, we found it had a locked gas cap, so we moved to the next one. With that one we had more luck. After ten minutes of digging out a trench, we positioned the empty gas canister as low as we could and inserted a length of rubber tubing into the gas tank.
“I remember buying this medical tubing and wondering what on Earth I’d ever use it for,” mused Chuck, kneeling in the snow. “Now I know.”
I held the end of the tube up to him. “I did all the digging. I believe the sucking is your job.”
I’d never siphoned anything in my life.
“Great.”
He leaned down and put his lips around the tube and began sucking. With each few inhalations he’d stop to cough out the fumes, holding his thumb over the end of the tube as he did. Finally, he hit pay dirt.
“Merry Christmas!” I teased as he doubled over, coughing and retching out a mouthful of gasoline.
Carefully, he leaned down and inserted the end of the tube into the canister, releasing his thumb as he did. The satisfying sound of running liquid echoed out from the container. It was working.
“You’re pretty good at this sucking stuff.”
I was impressed.
Wiping spittle from the side of his mouth with his club hand, he smiled at me. “By the way, congrats on getting pregnant.”
Sitting there in the snow, I had a sudden flashback of being a child, of the days my brothers and I would go out back of our small house in Pittsburgh to build snow forts after a storm. I was the youngest, and I remembered my mother coming out on the back stoop all the time to check on us. She was really checking on me, making sure I wasn’t buried under the snow by my roughhousing brothers.
I had my own family to protect now. Perhaps I could tramp off into the wilderness with a backpack, survive, and figure out whatever came my way, but with children everything became dramatically different.
Taking a deep breath, I looked up into the falling snow.
“Seriously, congratulations. I know it’s what you wanted.” Chuck leaned over and put a hand on my shoulder.
I looked down into the four-gallon canister wedged into the snow. It was about a third full.
“But not what she wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
How much do I want to share? But there was no sense in bottling it up.
“She was going to get an abortion.”
Chuck’s hand dropped from my shoulder. Snowflakes settled gently around us. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment and anger.
“I don’t know. That’s what she told me. She was waiting till after the holidays.”
“How pregnant is she?”
“Maybe ten weeks. She knew when we had the Thanksgiving party, when her family was here and her dad offered that position with the firm in Boston.”
Chuck pursed his lips, not saying anything.
“Luke was an accident, a happy accident, but still an accident. Lauren’s father was expecting her to be the first female senator for Massachusetts or something. She was under massive pressure, and I guess I wasn’t listening.”
“And having another baby now—”
“She wasn’t going to tell anyone. She was going to Boston in the New Year.”
“You agreed to go to Boston?”
“She was going to go by herself, get a separation if I wouldn’t.”
Chuck looked away from me as a tear ran down my face. It froze halfway.
“Sorry, man.”
I straightened up and shook my head. “Anyway, all that’s over, at least for now.”
The container was almost full.
“She’s going to be thirty next month,” said Chuck. “It can stir up a lot of confusion in people, about what’s important.”
“She obviously decided what was important,” I said angrily, pulling the tube out of the container. Gasoline sprayed up onto me and soaked my glove. I swore and began screwing the cap onto the container to seal it. It jammed, and I swore again.
Chuck leaned over and put his gloved hand on mine, stopping me.
“Take it easy, Mike. Take it easy on yourself, and more important, take it easy on her. She didn’t do anything. She just thought about doing something. I bet there are a lot of things you’ve thought of doing that people wouldn’t be too impressed with.”
“But to think about doing something like that—”
“She’s confused, and she didn’t do anything. She needs you now. Luke needs you now.”
He picked up the container with his good hand and stood up, sinking back into the snow and falling sideways. Looking at me, he added, “I need you now.”
Shaking my head, I took the container from him. We started shuffling back toward our building.
“Why do you think CNN didn’t come back on last night?” asked Chuck.
“Local carrier networks are probably jammed,” I speculated. “Or generators ran out of power.”
“Or CNN was bombed,” joked Chuck. “Not that I would be entirely against that.”
“Big data centers usually keep a hundred hours of fuel for backup generators. Isn’t that what Rory said?”
“I think he said the New York Times had that much.” He looked around at the deep snow on the streets. “Won’t be any refuelling for a while.”
Reaching the door of our building, we saw that snow had already drifted up against the door. We better come and clear this regularly if we want to get out. Tony was still at his post at the other end of the main-floor hallway. He waved to us.
Reassuringly, we heard the rumble of a big plow coming down Ninth Avenue and saw it sweep by in the distance between the buildings. It was nearly the only evidence that the city was still operating on some level.
When the power had gone out, the local radio stations were still operating, but this morning many of them were static. The radio stations still transmitting were now filled with wild speculation about what had happened, but they were just as much in the dark as we were.
The only consistent information between all of them was that this second blackout had affected not just New England, but the entire United States, and a hundred million people or more were without power. The best the radio announcers could do was report on local conditions. We had no idea what was happening in the world, or if it even existed anymore.
It was as if New York had been disconnected from the rest of the planet and was floating alone, soundlessly, in a snowy gray cloud.
8:45 p.m.
THE FACES BEFORE me glowed in dazzling bright green, and then the green spotlight swept down the hallway, flashing off doorframes.
“Cool, huh?”
“Very cool,” I replied, taking off the night-vision goggles. “Lights please?”
&
nbsp; With a click the lights we’d jury-rigged in the hallway, connected to Chuck’s generator, turned back on.
“I can’t believe you have ten thousand dollars’ worth of night-vision goggles and infrared flashlights.” I looked around at the military paraphernalia stacked around Chuck. “And you don’t have a shortwave radio.”
“I’ve got one, but it’s in Virginia at the hideaway.”
Same place he should be, he didn’t add.
“Thanks again for staying,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, thanks for staying,” said Ryan, one of our neighbors from further down the hallway. He raised a steaming cup of buttered rum.
His partner, Rex, raised his glass as well.
“A toast to our well-prepared friend, Chuck!”
“Hear, hear!” came a halfhearted cheer from the rest of the people crowded in the hallway, nearly twenty people packed together on chairs and couches pulled out from their apartments.
We all raised our cups to drink.
Susie decided on hosting a hot rum toddy party for Christmas, and all of our neighbors were bundled and cuddled up together, holding steaming-hot cups of alcohol in their hands.
The building was retaining heat but cooling quickly.
We’d switched to using electric heaters in Chuck’s apartment. The kerosene heater was more powerful but produced carbon monoxide, and Susie was worried about the kids. For this gathering we’d pulled the kerosene heater out and placed it in the center of the hallway. People were warming themselves around it as if it were a campfire.
The hallway had become our communal living room, a place to gather together and chat. We’d wired up a radio that played news in the background, mostly just listing off emergency shelter locations around the city and saying that the power would be back on soon and to stay indoors. Most of the roads and highways were impassable, in any case.
Everyone was sitting in more or less the same positions as where their apartments were located along the hallway. The Chinese couple from down the hall near Richard had finally come out and were bunched up together on one couch together with their parents, who’d come for a visit before everything fell apart. It was a bad time to have chosen to visit America for the first time, and none of them spoke English very well.
CyberStorm final Mar 13 2013 Page 9
