“I wish we could offer more,” said Sergeant Williams.
I shook my head. “This is great, thank you so much.” I cupped the bowl of soup in my hands, luxuriating in its heat. My fingers tingled painfully as the blood returned, but my feet were still numb. On the way inside, I’d checked my face in the bathroom. It was sore and red, but there was no frostbite, or at least nothing resembling what I thought frostbite would look like.
Moving down the cafeteria line, I picked up a hard bun and a pat of butter. There wasn’t much left except for some crackers and a few bags of chips.
The second floor of the office tower adjoining Penn Station and Madison Square Garden had been converted into an NYPD barracks, and it was packed. After I’d struggled through a few more trips back and forth, Sergeant Williams had stopped me, seeing that I was about to collapse, and offered to bring me up to their mess. Nobody had batted an eye when I entered wearing my frilly red coat. They were too exhausted.
Scanning the crowd, I couldn’t see anyone I knew. Chuck had stayed in our apartment. He wasn’t much use with his broken hand. Richard had disappeared when we’d announced our intention to come and help. Tony, Damon, and I had walked over to the hospital, but I’d lost track of the others in the confusion.
Everyone had been wearing masks during the hospital evacuation, but in the cafeteria nobody was. Either they knew something the general population didn’t, or they’d given up.
Sergeant Williams motioned to an open spot at the tables, and we wound our way through the crowd to sit down. Wedging myself between some NYPD officers, I put down my steaming bowl of soup to shake hands all around. Sergeant Williams sat across from me, pulling off his hat and scarf and tossing them atop the heap of outdoor clothing littering the table. I added mine to the pile. It smelled like a locker room.
“It’s a goddamn mess out there,” complained one of the officers, leaning down into his soup.
“What happened?” asked another.
“The Chinese is what happened,” the first man growled back. “I hope they’ve friggin’ leveled Beijing.”
“Enough of that,” said Sergeant Williams. “There’s enough bad already going on out there without us adding to it. We don’t know what happened yet, and I don’t want to hear any more talk like that.”
“Don’t know what happened?” said the officer. “It’s like we’re fighting a goddamn war in our own city.”
Sergeant Williams scowled at the officer. “For every person causing mischief, there’s five more like Michael here”—he nodded at me—“who are risking their lives to help out.”
The officer shook his head. “Mischief? I’ll give you goddamn mischief. You can all go to hell. I’ve friggin’ had it.” He shot up, grabbing his bowl of soup, and stormed off to another corner of the mess hall. The officers around him looked away, but one by one they all got up and left as well.
“You’ll have to forgive Officer Romales,” said Sergeant Williams. “We lost some people today in a shoot-out on Fifth. Some idiots decided to start looting the fancy shops there, a whole mob.”
Leaning down, I undid the laces on my boots and loosened them, curling my toes. They were burning with an intense ache.
“Take the boots off,” suggested Sergeant Williams. “Warm in here, but the boots are insulated. If you keep your feet in ’em, you’ll be keeping ’em cold.” He sighed and looked around. “Bodies and blood everywhere after that firefight on Fifth, and nowhere to put ’em, no way to get there with paddy wagons or ambulances, so we had to leave them to freeze right on the street. A hell of a thing.”
Kicking my boots off, I brought one foot up onto the opposite knee and began kneading my toes. “Sorry to hear that.” I wasn’t sure what was appropriate to say, and perhaps nothing was. I switched feet to work on the other toes.
“City morgues are full up anyway, and the hospitals are fast becoming meat lockers.”
A searing pain shot through the foot I was massaging. I winced. “What happened at Presbyterian?”
Sergeant Williams shook his head. “A gasket blew on the generator fuel pump when they were switching it from one tank to another. Eighty big hospitals in the city, plus hundreds of clinics, are all gonna come crashing down soon. We’re near three days without power—even without equipment failure, none of them have reserves to last past five days on generator, and there’s little refueling in sight.” He dunked his bread into the soup. “Worst is the water. Department of Environmental Protection shut down tunnels two and three out at Hillview Reservoir when a system malfunction said sewage had spilled over, but when they found it was just a glitch, they couldn’t open the tunnels again. Pure genius. Control systems are screwed, or some such nonsense.”
“Can’t they do something?”
“Ninety percent of city water flows in from there. They’re going to have to blow the tunnel controls, but even then, with no flowing water for a few days at these temperatures, the smaller pipes are probably frozen up already. Not long till people start hacking into the ice on the East River to drink that polluted slop. Eight million people on this island are going to die of thirst before they freeze to death.”
I stopped eating my soup and put both feet back on the ground, despite the pain it sent shooting up my legs. “So where’s the cavalry?”
“FEMA?” he laughed, but then stopped himself. “They’re doing their damnedest, but there’s no contingency for rescuing sixty million people. Networks are all down, and they can’t even find their people or equipment. Boston is as bad as us, add a frozen storm surge when that nor’easter hit, and more of the same story in Hartford, Philly, Baltimore.”
“Didn’t the president order the military in?”
He sighed. “Even Washington is up this creek, son. We haven’t heard anything from there for the last day, like they’ve dropped into a black hole. Starting with the bird flu scare, the entire country’s been thrown into chaos. At least from what we hear, and that’s damned little.”
“Have you even seen the military?”
“They showed up, but they have their knickers in a twist over the unidentified targets, thinking we’re in some kind of new drone war and cranked up on DEFCON 2 to protect a country that’s disintegrating behind the fences. Idiots are getting set to launch a war on the other side of the world while we starve and freeze over here. And still nobody has any idea what the hell happened.”
“But somebody’s done something.”
“Yeah, somebody has done something.”
I looked around the crowded room. “I’ve got my family here. Should we get out, get to an evacuation center?”
“Evacuate to where? It’s a frozen wasteland out there, and even if you had somewhere to go, how would you get there?” He took a deep breath and reached out to hold one of my hands. It was an intimate gesture I wasn’t expecting. “Do you have somewhere safe? Somewhere warm?”
I nodded.
“Stay there then, get clean water, and keep your head down. We’ll sort this out. Con Edison says they’ll have power in a few days, and after that the rest will sort itself out.” He let go of my hand, leaning back to rub his eyes. “One more thing.”
I put my spoon down and waited.
“There’s another storm coming, nearly as bad as the first.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
I stared at him.
In barely a whisper he added, “God help us all.”