The snow began again as the day slipped toward darkness.
Evacuating Beth Israel Hospital and Veterans over to Bellevue was a much more orderly affair than the scene at Presbyterian the previous evening. It was an organized closure, or as organized as it could be under the conditions. Emergency resources and fuel were being concentrated in just a few of the largest medical centers. The hospitals knew when the generator was going to lose power and were making the transfer ahead of time. Only the critically ill were transferred to Bellevue, with the rest going to evacuation centers.
Chuck and I skied over, using the gear the thieves had left in the lockers. We weren’t the first ones to get the idea. A network of cross-country ski tracks had appeared on the streets. New Yorkers were adapting fast, and we saw all kinds of improvised snow gear on our crosstown trek, and even people on bicycles going down Sixth.
Cars were buried, but a few adventurous souls had dug theirs out and ventured onto the street, for the most part only to get stuck again.
After the requests on the radio, hundreds of people had turned up at Beth Israel to help the NYPD and emergency services, turning First Avenue into a buzzing hive of activity. Where New York had felt almost deserted before, today’s mission had inspired a sense of camaraderie and togetherness. The city wasn’t beaten yet.
I’d checked in on the Borodins before leaving. It was as if nothing had happened. Irena and Aleksandr were sitting in their usual spots—Aleksandr asleep on the couch with Gorby next to him, Irena knitting another pair of socks. Irena had even offered me some sausages she’d cooked for breakfast, which of course I’d accepted along with a piping-hot cup of tea.
The Borodins didn’t want to come and hang out with the rest of us. Irena explained that they would just keep to themselves, that they’d done this before.
At the hospital evacuation, I ran into Sergeant Williams again. He honked and waved to me from a police cruiser as I was going one way up First and he was going down the other way.
“Time to get going back?” asked Chuck as the first fat snowflakes began to fall.
We’d managed seven runs back and forth, and I was exhausted. “Definitely.”
They were still plowing First Avenue, and we walked down it to the corner of Stuyvesant Town. Its towers hung in the sky above us. The bronze plaque at the entrance listed a hundred residential buildings in this one complex, fifty thousand people within its red brick walls.
I was intensely thirsty. The Red Cross had arrived to hand out blankets and supplies, but they were short on water. We got one bottle each, but even with the water we’d packed ourselves, it wasn’t enough. It had warmed up to about fifteen degrees during the day—still cold, but warm enough that I was soaked in sweat, and I was cooling off fast as the sun started to set.
Picking up our skis from the security checkpoint inside the lobby of the VA Hospital, halfway between Beth Israel and Bellevue, we strapped them on and headed back to the west side. We had a trip of nearly two miles across Twenty-Third. The snowfall was getting heavier. For the millionth time, I resisted the urge to check my cell phone for e-mail.
The evacuation had been a rumor mill, and I’d been on the receiving end of a dozen different theories about what was going on.
“So what did you hear?” asked Chuck
“Air Force One is down, and the Russians and Chinese have teamed up to invade,” I said. With a dusting of fresh snow, the ski tracks along the middle of the street were quick, and Chuck was setting a fast pace in front of me. “People want to know why nobody has heard any more from Washington, why no military.”
“About the same as what I heard, but my favorite is aliens,” yelled Chuck over his shoulder. “I got stuck with a gang from the Village who’re about to start wearing tinfoil hats to stop them from reading our minds.”
“About as effective as anything so far.”
“Mostly people are wondering where in the hell emergency relief is. And frightened of the next storm.”
We skied silently for a few seconds, looking up into the thickening snowfall.
“It’s scaring the heck out of me, too,” I said.
Ahead, Twenty-Third looked like a frozen canyon. A double set of ski tracks, flanked by foot trails, disappeared into the distance straight down the center of the road. From the middle of the street, the snow angled up toward the edges, covering the parked cars and blowing into snowbanks against the buildings, sometimes covering first-floor awnings and scaffolding. Channels were dug into the snow at irregular intervals at doorways and entrances, burrows of the human animals struggling to survive this onslaught.
Passing the corner of Second Avenue, we heard the sound of breaking glass, and a mob of people materialized from the gloom. A few of them had broken through the window of a food market, and the rest were waiting while the leaders cleaned away the glass at the edges of the window.
Apart from the smashed front window of the Apple Store in Chelsea, I hadn’t seen any looting, but people had to be running out of food and water. While some had taken advantage of the situation, most New Yorkers had been holding on. With no help in sight, though, it had taken four days for scared and hungry to trump the law. There was an inevitability to it under the circumstances, and seeing it happen uncorked horrors crowding the back of my mind—Irena’s stories of Leningrad, when roving gangs had started attacking and eating people, and the police had been forced to start an anti-cannibalism unit to combat it.
Stopping outside, we watched from a distance.
Far from being a mad dash of pushing and shoving, this was an orderly, almost apologetic looting. Two men stopped to help an elderly lady step over the smashed glass of the window. Seeing us looking at them, one of them shrugged at us. “Waddaya gonna do?” he yelled through the falling snow. “I gotta feed my family. I’ll come back and leave some money when this is done.”
Chuck looked at me. “What do you think?”
“What? Should we try to stop them?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Do you want to grab something?”
I looked into the swirling white distance, toward home and my family. “Yeah, we should grab everything we can.”
We unclipped our skis, strapping our gear to his backpack and joining the line of people waiting to get into the shop. Chuck fished out our headlamps, and we climbed in through the window. Picking up plastic shopping bags, we made our way to the back where it was darker and there were fewer people.
“Anything high-calorie, but try not to take junk food,” instructed Chuck.
Even with the headlamps, it was confusing, and I grabbed what I could. I wanted to get out of there. Within minutes we were stepping back out through the front window, loaded down with as much as we could carry. My fingers were already aching from holding the bags.
“This is not going to be fun,” I complained. The wind had picked up, driving the snow into our faces. Maybe we took too much. “I’m not sure I can carry this much all the way across town.”
“No sense in trying to ski with all this,” replied Chuck. “We’ll just have to walk, and maybe drop a bag or two if it gets to be too much.”
That gave me an idea. I put down the bags and fished through my layers of clothing to retrieve my phone, pulling off one mitt with my teeth. I opened up a geocaching treasure hunt app we’d used last summer on a field trip with Luke’s preschool. Blowing on my fingers to warm them, I tapped a few icons.
“We just need to walk straight down Twenty-Third,” said Chuck, frowning. “I can show you how to work the compass later, but we’d better get moving—”
Shaking my head, I looked up at him. “Drop your bags here and go back inside to get more. I’ve got an idea. You said GPS is still working, right?”
He nodded. “What’s the idea?”
“Just trust me, and get back inside before the place is emptied.”
He shrugged, dropped his bags, and headed back to the store.
I put away my phone and picked up his bags and mine. Backtracking to Second, away from the people at the shop, I trudged awkwardly into the knee-deep snow, hauling the bags with me. I stopped in front of a cell phone store that still had a visible sign, kicked a big hole in the snow, and then carefully looked around to make sure nobody was watching. Once I was sure, I deposited a few bags in the hole and buried them, then took a picture of the storefront using the treasure hunt app. I repeated this procedure a few times, in a few different locations, until I’d hidden all the bags.
Chuck was waiting for me, new bags in hand, when I returned. “Ready to explain?”
I grabbed the bags from him. “We bury them in the snow and tag their locations with this treasure hunt app I have. As long as we can add a local image to the GPS data, it should be accurate to within a few feet. We can dig them up later.”
He laughed. “Cyber-squirrels, huh?”
“Something like that.”
The wind gusted, nearly blowing us over.
“We’d better hurry.”
By the time we made two more trips into the food market, it was stripped clean, and as we continued on our way home, we came across shops being looted everywhere. This new snowstorm was striking a deep fear into people, awakening their survival instinct. The law had been broken, but not order. Rules were designed to maintain a community, and in this moment, the community needed to break the rules to survive. It was self-administering its own emergency services.
We stopped everywhere we saw looting, grabbing anything useful or edible and burying it outside as we continued on our way.
The darkness and snow would have been terrifying if not for the map software Chuck had loaded onto our phones. It provided a comforting connection, a small glowing screen we could open up from time to time to see the small dot of where we were and, more importantly, where home was.
Close to ten at night, we arrived at our back door. I was exhausted and numb with cold. Tony and Damon were waiting for us, keeping the doorway clear of snow. Upstairs, Lauren was still awake, and worried of course, but I collapsed into bed without a word and passed out.