“They’re coming.”
My stomach growled. In a crazy part of my mind I hoped they were bringing food. If we have to fight, at least there should be a food prize at the end of it. A random, illogical thought—like realizing while driving that you could turn the wheel and slam into oncoming traffic. I usually couldn’t explain why ideas like that came to mind. This time I knew why. Hunger was crowding out the fact that I was being hunted, that my family was being hunted.
I was steadily eating less and less, making a show to Lauren of eating, but stashing away crumbs and bits and pieces. When Luke and I played together, I’d produce my hidden treats for him. Anything was worth seeing a smile on his little face.
“Are you paying attention?” asked Chuck. “It looks like there are six of them.”
I nodded, watching a collection of dots move across Damon’s laptop screen, and then popped a glass bead from a decorative bowl on the kitchen counter into my mouth and began sucking on it.
A cold wind blew in from the open window in Chuck’s bedroom. Susie, Lauren and the children had already gone out through the window onto the neighboring rooftop to hide in an abandoned apartment in the next building, and Damon was helping Irena and Aleksandr out. From there we could go down the back fire escape and re-enter our building at a lower level through exterior doors we’d left ajar.
We were going to trap Paul and his gang. The hunters were becoming the hunted.
Damon had hatched the plan, and it had been the tipping point in our decision to stay today rather than making for the truck. We wanted to try to get it down and escape, but since we didn’t know when Paul and his gang might be coming, we’d decided to stay and fight.
Once we made the decision, we told everyone on the sixth floor, and the quarantined group on the first floor, that we were having a birthday party for Luke. It was a private party, we’d said, only our gang was invited, and we’d be off watch and not available.
If it had seemed odd, nobody had said anything, and we’d received only a few grudging stares from people who thought we were going to have a feast and weren’t inviting them.
The party ruse had been Chuck’s idea. I was sure it would come to nothing, but just before 5 p.m., right when we’d said that Luke’s party was supposed to start, the gang of dots had coalesced on Damon’s meshnet location map. It seemed somebody on our floor was talking with the people hunting us.
The dots began to move this way.
“They’re going to leave at least one man at the entrance when they come in,” said Tony. He was the only one among us with combat training, so he was leading the mission. “We’ll get Irena and Aleksandr to handle that one. The four of us wait until the rest are up on this floor, then we come up behind them.” He looked at Chuck and me. “You guys stay to the back, right?”
We had children and wives, he’d insisted, so he and Damon would bring up the front. Damon hadn’t objected, but he was quiet the whole time we were planning this.
We were already dressed for outdoors, and Tony and Chuck made straight for the open window and climbed out onto the rooftop.
“What if they split up?” I asked.
Damon disappeared to put his laptop back at its station, then quickly returned, opening up his smartphone and handing me the AR glasses. “That’s where you come in. You’re used to using these to spot those buried packages—now the packages are the bad guys.”
I put on the AR glasses and looked out the window. Out in the darkness, six small red dots were moving along Ninth Avenue toward us. The building across from us obscured Ninth, so the dots were superimposed to indicate where Paul and his gang were, as if I could see through the building.
“Dots on a screen are good, but with these you’ll be able to see through walls.”
“What if they don’t all have smartphones on the mesh?”
Damon considered this. “We’ll do a visual check from the roof.”
I pulled myself out onto the rooftop, landing waist deep in snow, and then helped Damon out. It was dark out, but not yet night, and it was clear. We hid on the rooftop in the snow and looked down Twenty-Fourth, waiting for the men to appear.
As soon as they did, I gave the thumbs-up. Each of the augmented-reality dots corresponded with the position of one of the men who rounded the corner.
Watching them walk up our street, I realized I wasn’t breathing, and I almost had to force myself to take a few quick, short inhales. For the first time in days I forgot I was hungry.
The group of men arrived at our building’s back entrance, not a hundred feet away from where we were. I could see their faces. Paul produced keys from his pocket and leaned down to the lock.
“I pulled everybody off duty,” whispered Tony. “There isn’t anyone guarding the stairwell.”
As soon as the men entered the building, we got up from our hiding spots and hurried down the fire escape. My breathing was heavy, my heart pounding. I could see the red dots through the wall of our building.
“One of them had a shotgun,” whispered Tony. “Can you still see them? Where are they?”
“Still in the lobby.”
Our plan was to cross over from this fire escape onto ours at the third floor. The dots began to move. “No, wait, they’re starting up now.”
As Tony had predicted, one of the dots remained behind at the entrance. We’d reached the third floor by then. While the rest of the guys climbed over to our building’s fire escape, I stopped to text the location of the guard to Aleksandr and Irena, who were hidden on the second floor.
When I joined the others, Tony asked, “Did they stop at quarantine on first?” We were all worried about Vicky and her kids.
I shook my head. As I watched, the red dots grew in size, appearing to crawl straight up the brick wall in front of me until the entire wall glowed red. “They’re right in front of us.” I whispered.
Everyone held their breath.
The pulsing red mass in front of me shifted and then moved upwards, separating again into individual spots above my head.
“They’re not stopping at any of the other floors. Looks like they know exactly where they’re going.”
Chuck and Tony nodded, and on my signal we followed, shadowing their movement up the fire escape. The fifth floor was as high as we could go outside, so we waited there, outside the fire escape door that led directly into the stairwell, for the men to make their move.
“Tell us what you see,” whispered Tony.
“It looks like they’re outside the sixth-floor door, waiting.”
“They’re going to do this fast,” said Tony, “probably send one or two of them toward Richard’s place and the rest to Chuck’s. As soon as they open that door, you need to tell us, and we’ll go in.”
The wind whistled as we waited. Chuck swept away some snow that had accumulated since we’d last cleaned this spot a few hours ago. I stared up at the wall, watching the red dots. Finally they moved, advancing through the door and dispersing into the hallway on the other side.
“Now!”
Chuck pulled open the door. Tony went in first, followed by Damon, with Chuck and me pulling up the rear.
“One of them went over to Richard’s end,” I whispered as we climbed the stairs to the sixth-floor landing. “It looks like the rest are waiting outside Chuck’s.”
Breathing heavily, we assembled behind the sixth-floor door. Everyone had their guns out, and I fumbled in my pocket for mine.
“The second they go into Chuck’s place, you call it,” said Tony. “Damon will go to Richard’s end while the three of us surprise the four inside Chuck’s. Everyone good?”
I nodded along with everyone else but kept my eyes on the red dots to my right. They were large and merged into one another. Is that three or four people? Then I heard the attackers burst into Chuck’s, yelling. I didn’t need to say anything. Tony opened the door and slid into the hallway.
I held back, scared, but then forced myself out in time to hear Chuck yell, “You assholes looking for us? Drop the guns!”
I ran to Chuck’s door, pulling off the AR glasses and holding my gun straight in front of me. Three men stood with their hands up, staring stupidly back at us. I recognized one of them as Chuck’s attacker. One by one they dropped their weapons.
Tony rushed past me, going back to check on Damon. “All clear!” he yelled moments later.
“Do you have Paul?” yelled Chuck.
“No, but we’ve got Stan!”
Paul wasn’t among the men in front of us either. Did he slip past us down the stairs somehow?
“Where’s the sixth guy?” asked Damon, running up behind me. He gestured to the AR glasses in my hand.
I put them back on. Three red dots hovered in front of me as I looked at the three guys in our room, and swiveling around I could see Stan’s dot at the other end of the hallway. Looking down to my left, I could see another dot coming up toward us, which must have been Irena and Aleksandr bringing up the one they’d captured downstairs. That’s five. Where’s the sixth?
“I only count five,” I said after double-checking.
“Goddamn it!” yelled Chuck. “Tie them up. He’s here somewhere.”
We herded the four men we’d captured into my apartment, tying them up in our small bedroom. By that point Aleksandr and Irena had arrived, pushing ahead of them the man they’d ambushed downstairs.
“Where’s Paul?” demanded Chuck, glaring at the men clustered on the floor.
Stan and three others just scowled back, but the man who had attacked Chuck wasn’t so tough without a weapon in his hands. “He stayed out there,” he responded, cowering. He seemed to know we recognized him. “Don’t kill me, please.”
“A little late to be begging,” fumed Chuck. “Why did Paul hang back?”
“He said he was going to make sure nobody came up behind us. He hid in the doorway across the hall.”
Chuck cursed, rubbing the back of his neck with his .38. “Why did you come back here?” he asked Stan.
Stan shrugged. “Paul said you still had a lot of stuff—food, equipment …”
“And you risked coming here again for that?”
Stan looked at his feet. “And the laptop. He said it had pictures of all of us on it.” He looked up into Chuck’s eyes. “Doing stuff, you know, to people—”
Damon thumped the wall. “Shit!” He looked into the hallway and his body sagged. “He took the laptop.”
Tony and Chuck pushed past Damon, off to search the building for Paul, but I knew they wouldn’t find him. I had a feeling he’d be staying off the meshnet as well.
“So what are we going to do with these guys?” I called out after Chuck.
“You leave that to me, Mih-kah-yal,” answered Irena, poking Stan with the muzzle of her old rifle. “We have some experience with gulag.”
“Nice to finally be on other side,” added Aleksandr with a smile.