Part 33 (1/2)

”Everything is fine, Mrs. Strong. We're just having a chat.”

She smiled. ”As long as he's being a good boy.”

”He's a Strong boy,” I joked, ruffling Ricky's hair. ”Just like his dad.”

The smile on Mrs. Strong's face disappeared. ”I hope not.”

I said something wrong. We stood and looked at each other in an awkward silence.

Just then I received a text from Sergeant Williams asking how we were doing. I nodded good-bye to Mrs. Strong and retreated to our end of the hallway, texting him back, asking him if he had any ideas on how we could get off the island.

Day 22 January 13.

PULLING MY GOGGLES up, I stopped and blinked, looking out into the night with my own unaided eyes. The night was pitch black and soundless, and my mind suddenly felt disconnected. Alone, staring into the void, I became an infinitesimal dot of existence floating by itself in the universe. At first the feeling was terrifying, my mind reeling, but it quickly became comforting.

Maybe this is what death is like? Alone, peaceful, floating, floating, no fear- But then I thought of Luke, of Lauren, and my mind snapped back. I clipped the night-vision goggles back into place, and ghostly green flakes of snow appeared falling gently around me.

My hunger pangs had been intense that morning, almost driving me to the point of going outside during the day to hunt for the buried food. Chuck had held me back, talked to me, calmed me down. It wasn't for me, I'd argued with him, it was for Luke, for Lauren, for Ellarose, for any reason that would allow me, like an addict, to get my fix.

I laughed.

I'm addicted to food.

The falling snowflakes were hypnotic. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath.

What is real? What is reality anyway?

I felt like I was hallucinating, my mind never quite able to take a firm track before skidding off.

Get a grip, Mike. Luke is counting on you. Lauren is counting on you. The baby is counting on you.

Opening my eyes, I willed myself into the here and now and tapped the phone in my pocket to bring up the augmented-reality display. A field of red dots spread out into the distance, and, taking another deep breath, I began carefully putting one foot in front of the other, continuing on my way across Twenty-Fourth, pus.h.i.+ng myself toward a cl.u.s.ter of dots on Sixth Avenue.

In my initial enthusiasm at digging up the bags of food, I hadn't thought to mark off which locations I'd already visited. We'd tagged forty-six locations in total, and so far I'd tried fourteen of them on four trips.

At four locations I hadn't been able to find anything. It might have been that people saw me dropping the bags at those spots, or that they'd become exposed, or even that I'd already visited them. My brain wasn't clear anymore.

In any event, I guessed that a quarter of the locations would be empty. With fourteen spots already visited, that meant about twenty locations should still yield something to eat. I was finding three or four bags per location, and with an average of about two thousand calories per bag, each location represented nearly a day's worth of food for our group on starvation rations.

The numbers spun through my head.

Lauren needs two thousand calories, and the kids needed nearly as much.

But I need to eat more.

I'd been light-headed all day, feverish. I wasn't going to be protecting anyone if I starved myself to death. Starvation rations weren't going to be enough, not in this cold. I was allowing myself only a few hundred calories a day of food, but I'd read that Arctic explorers used up to six thousand calories a day in the cold.

It was cold, and I felt like the wind could blow me over like a leaf. Looking up, I squinted, trying to make out the street sign as I pa.s.sed it.

Eighth Avenue.

The sign behind it mocked me-Burger King.

Imagine a nice, juicy burger, all the toppings, mayonnaise and ketchup. It was all I could do to restrain myself from going through the open door and digging through the snow drifted halfway up to the ceiling inside. Maybe somebody missed a burger in here? Maybe I could start up a propane grill?

Pulling my mind away from burgers, I continued walking. In the s...o...b..nks on Sixth Avenue, we'd buried food at eight locations. It was a veritable gold mine, and that's where I was heading to hunt. My mind cycled through the numbers again. If I could recover it all, from all twenty locations, we'd have twelve days until we'd be like them.

Like them.

Like the other people on our floor.

It'd been five days since the relief stations had closed, pinching off the only reliable new stream of new calories for the other groups on our floor. It was my guess that it had been nearly as many days since they'd had anything substantial to eat.

Mostly they just slept.

In the morning, I'd gone to check on the young mother and her kids, pulling away the layers of blankets from the couch in the middle of the hall. The kids had stared at me dully in the dim light, their lips horribly cracked and swollen, red and infected.

Dehydration was worse than starvation.

Vince and I had spent most of the day collecting as much snow as we could, dragging it up with the pulleys. Chuck had tried to help, but he hadn't really recovered from the blow to his head, and his broken hand was swelling up again. Susie went around offering water to everyone, sneaking out sc.r.a.ps of our food, doing what she could.

The hallway smelled of human excrement.

As brutal as conditions had become, I would still see small acts of kindness. I watched Vince bring over his own blanket, that he'd spent a day cleaning, and give it to the mother and her kids. He shared some food with them as well. During the whole day, though, I hadn't seen the door to Richard's apartment open even once. We'd knocked to make sure they were all right, but he'd told us to go away.

Arriving at Seventh Avenue, I looked up and down the street, but visibility was limited to about twenty feet in the falling snow. When I tapped the phone's screen, the heads-up display on my AR gla.s.ses switched to a top-down view of where I was.

I might as well head up Seventh and then circle down Sixth from Twenty-Third.

Carefully making my way to the intersection of the footpaths at the middle of the streets, my mind filled with images of the dead bodies we'd stacked in the apartment on the second floor.

During the day, ham radio stations had rebroadcast the audio portion of a CNN news report, one that had apparently been broadcast on television networks in the outside world. It described the situation in New York as difficult but stable, that supplies were being delivered, that the outbreaks of disease were being contained.

Nothing could have been further from our reality. The immense disconnect fueled speculation that the government was hiding something.

How can they not see what's happening in here?

I didn't care anymore.

My life had been reduced to caring for Lauren and Luke, and after that, for Susie and Ellarose and Chuck. Our situation was bringing my life into sharp relief, making me shrug off any artificialities, cleaning away all of the unimportant things I'd thought of as essential before.

A strong feeling of deja vu gripped me when I sat in the hallway, but not from anything I'd experienced before. I felt like I was reliving the stories Irena had shared with me, of the siege of Leningrad seventy years before.

This cyberwar felt like it had nothing to do with the future, but was a part of the past, as if we were burrowing backwards, like a diseased worm, back into the essence of humankind's unending ability to inflict suffering upon one another.