“Try not to move.” The man on the mattress groaned and looked up at me. His face was badly burned. “We’re going to get help.”
He closed his eyes, grimacing.
We’d turned the lobby of our building into a makeshift infirmary by dragging some mattresses down from the empty apartments and laying them on the floor. Pam was running the show with a doctor and some EMTs from neighboring buildings. The acrid stench of smoke and fire mixed with the smells of body odor and untreated wounds. We’d brought a kerosene heater down into the lobby, but we were running low on fuel so we’d started burning diesel in it. It didn’t burn clean, which added the stink of soot and petroleum to the air.
We wedged the back door open to ventilate the area, and at least it had warmed up outside. It was above freezing for the first time in a week, and the snow had stopped. The sun was shining for the first time in days.
The fires outside were still burning, and I thanked God that our building wasn’t attached to the neighboring ones.
A steady wind had blown all night, urging the flames from building to building. It wasn’t just this one fire either. New York Public Radio announced that two other fires had started in Manhattan during the New Year festivities—fires and candles didn’t play well with alcohol. The authorities were now warning people not to start fires indoors and to be careful with candles and heaters.
Too little, too late, and besides, what are people supposed to do if they’re cold and in the dark?
A torrent of people had run out of the burning buildings the night before. Many were suffering from smoke inhalation, and some were horribly injured, but most were unhurt. All of them, though, were terrified to be outside in the cold and dark, clutching whatever belongings they could carry, wondering where they would go.
A convoy of military Humvees had appeared from the blackness, crunching through the snow along Twenty-Third from the West Side Highway. There wasn’t anything they could do about the fires. There was no water, no fire department, and no emergency services. They radioed in what information they could, loaded up the wounded, and within a half-hour were gone, replaced by a second convoy about an hour later.
A third convoy failed to appear.
By that time, a ragtag collection of local firefighters, doctors, nurses, and off-duty police officers had started trying to create order out of chaos. Not knowing what else to do, we began taking some of the wounded back to our building while trying to convince the residents of nearby buildings to do the same.
The newly homeless had made tearful pleas to be let into their neighbors’ apartments. A few had found people willing to take them in, and we’d agreed to take two couples, but the requests became overwhelming. Standing back, we’d watched people begin their lonely walk up toward Javits and Penn, despondent, terrified, and many with children among them. A steady stream of new refugees had disappeared into the darkness and snow, begging bystanders for shelter, many with only their phones to use as flashlights to hold back the night.
A noise at the rear entrance snapped my attention back to the present. Damon appeared through the door with a young kid from one of the adjoining buildings. He waved at Pam and me to come over. He was holding what looked to be a huge bong.
“I went around and asked for painkillers and antibiotics,” said Damon in a hushed voice to Pam. “Most of what I could come up with was Advil and aspirin.” He held out his hand to reveal a few bottles. “Even this was difficult to get people to give up, but I have another idea.”
“And that is?” asked Pam.
Damon hesitated. “We get them to smoke weed. It’s a great painkiller.” He motioned to the kid beside him, who must have been about sixteen. The kid smiled awkwardly and produced a huge bag of marijuana.
“These people are suffering from smoke inhalation, even burnt lungs,” hissed Pam, wide-eyed and motioning around at twenty beds we had littered on the floor, “and you want me to get them to smoke?”
Damon’s face fell.
“Wait!” said the kid. “We could make, like, brownies, or, no … tea! We could make some tea. Add a little alcohol to help dissolve the THC. That’d work.”
Pam’s face softened. “That’s actually a great idea.”
Someone on a bed cried out in pain.
“Can you get it done right away?” asked Pam.
The kid nodded, and Damon told him to go up to the sixth floor and ask Chuck for whatever he needed.
At that moment Damon’s cell phone pinged. It had been pinging all day and night from people joining the mesh network he’d started.
After showing Sergeant Williams how to install the software, we’d asked him to get as many people as he could to start using it. The more people that were connected, the farther messages could travel. Damon had also gone out to neighboring buildings with memory chips and explained the procedure. Judging by all the incoming messages, Damon and Sergeant Williams had been busy. The meshnet had gone viral. Already hundreds of people had joined, with dozens more every hour. People were finding ways to charge their cell phones, whether with generators or solar cells or by digging out and starting cars. Someone posted a general broadcast message to everyone connected, explaining how to pull out a car battery and hot-wire it to charge phones.
“Could you broadcast a message asking people in our area for some more pot?” I asked Damon. He nodded and pulled out his phone.
“We can pick it up on the way back,” I added.
We were going back up to Penn with the worst of the wounded. Two people in our lobby were in need of critical care, beyond what we could provide. Tony was rigging up backpacks with harnesses attached to makeshift sleds we could pull through the snow, and I walked over to the basement stairs to see how he was doing.
As I arrived, he was just coming up, pulling his cargo behind him. Luke had been “helping” him, really just running around and arranging piles of empty water containers, but he loved being near Tony. Tony had him under one arm as he came up the stairs.
“Emergency lights have given out,” he said when he saw me. He put Luke down and Pam came over to take him upstairs. “We better start saving the charge on the headlamps. Batteries are scarce.”
I reached down to help him haul the sleds up. We slid them into the lobby.
“You’re the best skier,” said Tony, picking up the harnessbackpack he’d rigged together and demonstrating how to use it. “I think you and I should do the hauling and bring Damon along for backup.”
Damon shrugged. “I’ll try, man, but surfing is more my thing than skiing.”
How does a kid from Louisiana, who goes to school in Boston, end up a surfer?
I sighed. When I put my jeans on this morning, I had to do up my belt one notch tighter than usual. On the bright side, it looked like I was losing some of that weight Lauren had been bugging me about. On the other hand, I was hungry—starving, in fact.
Starving. With a sinking feeling I realized I might get firsthand experience of what that really felt like.
Tony, Damon, and I put on our outerwear while some of the EMTs dragged the sleds over to the two badly burned people we were taking up to Penn. Despite muffled cries and whimpers from the injured, they began bundling them up against the cold and doing their best to secure them in the sleds.
Opening the back door, we scampered to the top of the snow piled outside. The sky was a flat gray, and the air felt warm. It was amazing how quickly the body adjusted to the cold. Just two weeks ago I would have been complaining about this temperature, shivering, but now, with it hovering a few degrees above freezing, it felt almost tropical.
Standing on the snow pile, our feet were even with the heads of the people inside the lobby. One person propped the door open, while the rest pushed the sleds carrying the patients up the steep incline of snow. It was awkward work, and each jolt of the sleds earned a cry of pain from their occupants.
Soon we had our skis on and were heading down the middle of Twenty-Fourth in single file, with Damon bringing up the rear on foot, hopping through the snow as best he could. The two-lane ski and foot trails had become well worn, with openings cut into the snowbanks lining the streets, so our pace was quick.
Rounding the corner of Ninth, we stopped to look down the street. The building on the corner of Ninth and Twenty-Third was now a burnt-out husk, but the fire still raged in buildings farther down the avenue and around the corner on Twenty-Second. Thick black smoke smudged the gray sky.
As we continued along Twenty-Fourth, the foot traffic became heavier, with people going in all directions, dragging and carrying what they could.
The trash I’d first noticed two days ago was now heaped along the edges of the street, and with the warmer weather each breath of wind brought the reek of human excrement seeping up through the melting snow. At the larger heaps near the intersections, rats competed with gangs of human scavengers, combing through the garbage, searching for food.
As if in a trance, I slid through this landscape of urban decay, watching people’s faces, inspecting their bags, fascinated by what they’d decided to carry: a chair here, a bag of books there. Someone in the distance was carrying a golden birdcage.
Peering in through the smashed windowpanes of shops, I saw people huddled inside around oil barrels with fires, smoke pouring out of the windows, blackening the sides of buildings. Despite it all, it was quiet, just the soft shuffle of feet on snow and the hushed muttering of the displaced.
“Hold on a second!” Damon yelled.
Looking back over my left shoulder as I rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue to start the trek up to Penn, I saw Damon crouched at the side of the road next to a pile of garbage bags, using his phone to take a picture of someone sitting there.
What is he doing? This wasn’t the time to start fooling around. I slowed my pace, not wanting to leave him behind. In a few seconds he was back on the trail with us, jogging to catch up and then running ahead of us and darting off into the snow at the side of the street again. Poking through some bags and not finding what he was looking for, he ran back to walk beside me.
“That guy back there was dead,” he explained, out of breath. He fiddled with his phone, typing something, while he walked in step with me.
There are going to be a lot of dead people, and if they’re dead, there’s nothing we can do for them anymore. Unimpressed, I didn’t say anything.
“We should be making a record of what happened. That could be somebody’s loved one,” continued Damon, finishing typing and putting his phone away. “I created a mesh address, connected to my laptop back at our place, for people to send pictures to and add text and explanations of where and when and what. When all this is over, maybe we can help piece things together, bring some resolution.”
Taking a deep breath, I realized I had it wrong. There was something we could still do. We can give their loved ones some closure.
“That’s a great idea. Could you send me the address?”
“Already did.”
Something else caught his eye, and he ran off.
“Smart kid,” said Tony from behind me.
Up ahead, the crowd around Penn Station was much larger than two days before. The snow was black and tramped down, covered in litter and waste, and thousands of people thronged the entranceways. Soldiers in fatigues had replaced the NYPD officers manning the barricades, their weapons visible, with a sandbagged command post hiding heavier weaponry just behind.
As we approached, a low murmur grew into a roar of voices, sirens, and instructions shouted over megaphones. We stopped and studied the crowd.
“No way we’re getting in there,” said Tony. “Maybe we should try Port Authority or head up to Grand Central or Javits?”
“They’ll be just as bad.” I had an idea and pulled out my phone. “I’ll text Sergeant Williams. Maybe he can send someone out.”
While I sent my message, Damon and Tony detached our harnesses, checking on our passengers and explaining what we were doing. Within a few seconds of my hitting the Send button, before I’d even put the phone away, it pinged an incoming message.
“He’s sending someone to us,” I said. The meshnet was a lifesaver.
Tony adjusted the blankets on one of the sleds and whispered that someone was coming.
“Did you get any messages about—” I began to ask Damon, but I was cut off by a shriek in the crowd just ahead of us.
“Give me the bag, bitch!” yelled a large man, pulling a backpack away from a small Asian woman.
The man’s blond hair was clumped in dirty dreadlocks that swung around his head as he pulled and tugged. The woman clung to one strap of her bag, and he dragged her through the snow while pulling a handgun out of one pocket. The crowd dispersed around them.
“I’m warning you,” he growled, pulling at the bag with one hand and pointing the gun with the other.
The woman looked up at him, screaming something in Korean or Chinese, but she let go and fell into the snow. “That’s my bag,” she wept in English, her head bowed. “It’s all I have.”
“Goddamn bitch, I should shoot you right now.”
Beside me, Tony pulled out his .38, holding it hidden between us. Glancing at him, I shook my head and put a hand out, holding him back. With my other hand I brought my phone up, thumbing the camera on, and took a picture.
The man smirked at me. “You like that?”
I took another picture and clicked a few buttons. “No, I do not. I just took your picture and e-mailed it to the NYPD officer who’s on his way out here.”
His smile evaporated and was replaced by confusion. “There’s no phones working.”
“On that you’re wrong, and what you’re doing is wrong.”
His confusion turned to anger. I wasn’t much for confrontation, and had never been in a fight in my life, but right was right. “Just because we’re going through a bad time, it’s no excuse to start hurting people.”
The man straightened up. He was a lot bigger than I’d thought. “You call this a bad time? Are you kidding me? This is the end of days, brother, and the Chinese—”
“What you’re doing isn’t going to help.”
“It’s going to help me,” he laughed.
“People will know what you did. You committed a crime, and I’ve recorded it.” I held my phone up. “This will be over one day, and you’ll have to answer.”
He laughed again. “With all this crap going on, you think someone will care that I stole a bag?”
“I do,” said Tony, still keeping his weapon concealed. A small crowd had gathered around us.
“Does anyone else here care about this bitch?” yelled the man, looking around at the crowd. Most people stared dumbly, but many nodded, agreeing with Tony.
“It’s not right,” yelled someone from the back.
“Give the lady her bag back,” said another person in the front.
The man shook his head. “Screw all of you.”
He walked away from us, and Tony started to raise his weapon, but the man threw the bag back at the woman after grabbing a few things from it.
“Let him go,” I said unsteadily, holding Tony back. I was shaking. “It’s not worth it.”
Tony grunted, not agreeing with me, but put his gun away just the same. The crowd began dispersing, with two people coming to help the woman up. Several people approached us.
“Is your phone really working?” asked a teenage girl.
“Sort of,” I replied, motioning toward Damon. “You’ll have to talk to him.”
Within a few minutes, a large crowd had gathered around Damon. Most of them still had their phones, but they were uncharged. He started by explaining ways they could charge them, and then began taking the memory chips out of some of their phones to copy the mesh software onto them.
“That was a good idea, taking that guy’s picture,” said Tony.
We watched Damon tutoring the crowd on meshnets. He was like a cyber version of Johnny Appleseed.
“With no police, people think they can get away with anything,” said Tony. “Taking pictures might make them think twice.”
“Maybe,” I sighed. “Better than nothing.”
“Much better than nothing, and better than shooting each other.”
In the mass of people near the Penn entrance barricade, I saw some commotion, and then Officer Ramirez’s face appeared, bobbing through the crowd toward us with two other NYPD officers in tow. As he approached us, he was shaking his head. “We can’t take any more.”
I motioned toward the sleds. “These people are from the fire last night. They’re going to die if they don’t get help.”
“A lot of goddamn people are dying,” muttered Ramirez, kneeling down beside one of the sleds and pulling back the blankets. Seeing the extent of the burns, he winced and closed his eyes, standing back up.
“Okay, guys, grab these sleds,” he said to the officers with him. Turning to me, he added, “We’ll take these two, but after this, no more. It’s as bad or worse inside there.” He pointed toward Madison Square Garden. “Understand?”
I nodded. That bad already?
“One more thing,” he said as he turned to leave. “That guy Paul you brought in? His brother died last night of his injuries, and we may have to let him go.”
“Let him go?” I remembered Sergeant Williams’ heads-up, but I still couldn’t believe it.
Ramirez shrugged. “They released all the medium-security prisoners today. We got nowhere to keep them all. We’re keeping everyone we bring in for a day or two, taking statements, but we need to let them go until all this is over.”
Rubbing my face, I looked skyward. My God, if Paul’s brother died, and they let him go … “When?”
“Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day,” said Ramirez, before disappearing into the crowd.
I watched him go, and a sinking feeling settled into my hungry stomach.
“You okay?”
It was Damon. The crowd around us was gone. He had finished giving his meshnet lessons.
“Not really.”
Tony had heard Ramirez too, and I could see him gripping the .38 in his pocket.
Damon watched us for a moment. “Just before that guy attacked the woman, you were asking me a question, if I had any messages from somewhere?”
I laughed. “Ah, yes.”
“What was it you wanted to know?”
“Did anyone e-mail you saying they had some weed for us?”
“Yep, I had two texts.”
“Good, because I could use a joint about now.”