It was snowing again.
I had gone up on the roof in the morning with Tony to play with Luke and shovel new snow into a barrel for drinking water. Snowflakes swirled down soundlessly from the sky, smothering a city it seemed the outside world had cut off like a cancerous tumor.
Yet here we were.
After the president’s message, we’d lain together in the hallway for the rest of the day, listening to the ham-radio-sphere explode. First came shock and denial, but after reports of the military checkpoints turning people back, this shifted to anger and bargaining. A good chunk of the best lawyers in America were trapped on Manhattan, and threats of lawsuits about violations of human rights and the Constitution flooded the meshnet and airwaves.
But what made for the most colorful listening were the conspiracy rants. If there was anything Americans were good at, it was conspiracy theories. The alien invasion theorists were my favorite—“This has nothing to do with the Chinese or Iranians or anyone else on Earth; the government is hiding an alien invasion, pure and simple”—but even they failed to lighten the mood.
Chuck declared he was going to storm the bridges, gun in hand, and would be damned if anyone would stop him. The futility of our situation began to dawn on us just as the first news of fighting and casualties on the George Washington Bridge came over the meshnet. By nightfall, the mood of New York had shifted from anger to depression and hopelessness. Where people had been resigned to waiting it out, when it was announced that they couldn’t leave, that they were penned in like animals, suddenly everyone needed to leave. Pictures of people falling through the ice on the East River appeared on Damon’s laptop, images of small boats getting stuck in the ice, of people drowning like rats.
The subway tunnels were useless. Without power, most of the tunnels in Lower Manhattan, and up past Chelsea, had flooded after a few days. With the cold temperatures, most of that was now frozen as well. Some people must have been attempting to hide down there, but we didn’t hear anything about it, and we didn’t go exploring to find out.
Morning had brought a listless agitation to the hallway. I’d slept out there, with Lauren and Luke curled up with me and Damon. Feeling abandoned by the outside world had made us all want to stay together.
We didn’t even talk about our plans for retrieving the truck. It was useless.
Chuck sat dumbly, staring at the walls, while Damon was glued catatonically to the screen of his laptop. It was nearing midday, and I was fiddling with the station app on my smartphone, cycling through the ham radio operators.
“I don’t believe a word of what the president said. I think there’s something else going on they’re not telling us about. That was just a broadcast for New York, to keep us in line, to explain why they’re keeping us in—”
I switched the station.
“—bring those assholes down to the East Village and show them what’s going on. How can they leave us here? Why is nobody helping—”
I switched again.
“—believe it? If the rest of America is all right, do you think that the president would be hiding? We can cure cancer, for God’s sake, why are they so afraid of some ancient—”
“Can you switch it to public radio?” asked Damon, sitting up. “Quick.”
I changed stations and adjusted the volume. Rory turned up the volume on the main radio. Pam had been up all night, administering what care she could for our infections, upset stomachs, and colds, and was asleep beside Rory, but she stirred only slightly at the increased noise level.
“—the Iranian Ashiyane hacking group is now claiming responsibility for the Scramble virus that brought down logistics systems, with the Ashiyane group saying they initiated—”
“See, I told you it was the Arabs,” said Tony, sitting up.
“They’re not Arabs,” said Rory.
“—retribution for the United States’ attack on Iran with the Stuxnet and Flame cyberattacks of the years before—”
Susie perked up next to Chuck. Ellarose and Luke were asleep together in a small improvised crib in front of her.
“So it wasn’t the Chinese?”
“—the initial attack was targeted at US government networks. It quickly spread to secondary systems—”
“Iranians are Persians, not Arabs,” repeated Rory. “They pretty much invented science and mathematics. And the Ashiyane group they’re talking about isn’t the Iranian government.”
“—NATO is still considering a motion of collective defense, while the US government is on the brink of taking unilateral action—”
“You seem to know a lot about these guys,” said Chuck to Rory.
Rory shrugged. “I cover it for the Times. It’s my job. The IRGC has a very sophisticated cyber unit.”
“—while global Internet traffic is at a crawl, Europe has begun to bounce back and land-based mobile radio has been restored in most of the East Coast—”
“The IRG what?”
Rory turned down the volume on the radio. “Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It’s like a mix of the Communist Party, the KGB, and the mafia. Imagine if Halliburton and the Gestapo got married—the IRGC would be their love child.”
“Are they that good? Could they have done all this?” I asked.
Maybe it was some sort of ploy. A Middle Eastern group claiming responsibility for something beyond their scope, making noise, diverting us from where we should be focusing.
Rory laughed. “Commander Rafal, who runs the cyber division, is world-class. The thing you need to understand is that the US has no technical edge when it comes to cyber. Our military thinking is based on the idea of overwhelming technical and numerical superiority, but in the cyberworld, all that goes away.”
“But we invented the Internet, didn’t we?”
“Sure we did, but now it’s global. You can spend ten billion dollars on a new piece of fancy military equipment, but all it takes is one bright kid with a laptop to disable it.”
“So you’re saying they could be the ones?”
“The Iranians changed the rules of the game by attacking civilian targets using cyberweapons—the Shamoon attack that wiped out fifty thousand computers at Saudi Aramco—so this wouldn’t be out of line with their operations, especially as retaliation for the US cyberattacks.”
“So you think this is justified?” said an incredulous Chuck.
“Of course not. I’m just saying it could make sense. But what you don’t realize is how important it is that someone admitted to something. Maybe they can start to unravel this mess.”
“So this is cyberwar,” I said. “Dirty, smelly, diseased, quarantined …”
Rory nodded without saying anything. He looked incredibly thin and frail. He hadn’t eaten much in weeks, insanely trying to maintain his vegan diet. I had a hard time imagining that he was the one who’d been talking to Paul, that he had some ulterior motive.
“Could you turn the radio back up?” demanded Richard from the other end of the corridor. “It’s nice to hear your opinions, but I want to find out what’s going on.”
Rory adjusted the radio, and I wandered toward the middle of the hallway. Vicky had gone off with one of her kids, and the other, a boy no more than four years old, was sitting alone on the couch, playing with Luke’s fire truck. I hadn’t had a chance to speak with him yet.
“How are you doing?” I asked him.
He looked up at me defiantly. “Mom said not to speak to strangers.”
“But we’ve been—” I started to say, then shook my head, smiling, and stretched my hand out. “I’m Mike.”
The little guy examined my hand, considering it. The skin on his face was peeling, and his clothes looked two sizes too big, like he was a waif from the street. Dark bruises spread under his eyes from lack of sleep. He shook my hand. “I’m Ricky. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too,” I laughed.
In the background, the radio droned. “The US military is now considering the possibility of taking action on three fronts, something it was designed to do but never tested—”
“My dad is a marine. He’s out fighting,” Ricky said matter-of-factly. “I’m going to be a marine one day.”
“Is that right?”
He nodded and started playing with the fire truck again. The door to the stairwell opened, and his mother appeared, holding his sister in her arms. “Is everything okay?” she asked, seeing me hovering over Ricky.
“Everything is fine, Vicky. We’re just having a chat.”
She smiled. “As long as he’s being a good boy.”
“He’s a strong boy,” I said, ruffling Ricky’s hair. “Just like his dad.”
The smile on Vicky’s face disappeared. “I hope not.”
I said something wrong. We looked at each other in an awkward silence.
Just then I received a text from Sergeant Williams asking how we were doing. I said good-bye to Vicky and retreated to our end of the hallway, texting him back to ask if he had any ideas about how we could get off the island.