Mike waved his arms back and forth. “You’ve gone crazy. We’re not going Mad Max here. There’s got to be another solution to this.” Mike stormed back to his office, robots scurrying out of his way.
Later that morning, the three found themselves bored. They were tired of being in the apartment, but too weirded out to go outside. James thumbed his phone, trying to work the TV yet again, and gave up with a sigh. “Well, what are we going to do?”
Vito smiled. “Before there were computers…”
“Before there were computer games…” James bellowed in a mock-deep voice.
“There was Dungeons & Dragons!” all three finished in unison, mimicking the popular commercial. Leon got up to get the books, paper, and dice for playing.
“Do you think this game really existed before computers?” Vito asked when Leon had come back into the room.
“It’s what wikipedia said,” Leon answered. “I looked it up.”
“And is it really what all role playing games are based on?” Vito asked.
“That’s what the article said,” Leon answered, passing around papers and dice.
“Do you think our parents played it?” Vito went on.
“What is this, twenty questions?” James answered. “Play the damn game.”
“I don’t have my character sheets,” Vito complained.
“Let’s just make some up,” Leon said.
Hours later, dragons vanquished, and gold coins safely sequestered in a dwarven bank, the three sat back on the couch. The topic turned to college admissions.
“Where did you apply?” James asked.
“Everywhere,” Leon answered, grinding a cigarette out. “Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Hopkins, MIT, Purdue. But unless one of them gets back to me with a full scholarship, then what? Admission does me no good. I need a frakking scholarship.” Leon lit another cigarette.
“What about you, Vito?” James asked, getting up to look out the window.
“MIT, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, U.T. Austin, Purdue. Some overlap with Leon.” Vito smiled at Leon. “You?”
James didn’t answer. “Come look at this,” he called in a quiet voice a moment later.
Leon’s father was notorious for introducing the apartment as “a poor man’s home with a rich man’s view.” Leon and Vito joined James at the sixth story picture window. Leon’s building stood at the edge of a large apartment complex, overlooking a neighborhood of two story single family homes. Beyond the neighborhood, about a mile away, stood another large apartment complex composed of four buildings.
Smoke and flames billowed massively out of the second building from the left end. The two buildings on either side had smaller amounts of smoke pouring out of them, as though they had just started to burn.
“Why aren’t there any fire trucks?” Vito asked.
“Because they can’t move,” James said. “I saw one on the way to school this morning. It had just stopped in the middle of the road, like the cars. When I passed by, I saw the firefighters getting ready to haul fire extinguishers and axes by hand to wherever the fire was.”
Leon stared motionless at the fire. “Pamela lives there,” he said, barely audible. He and Pamela had dated for a few months last year.
“What?” James said. “Oh, yeah, Pamela.”
They were all quiet for a minute.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Vito said cheerfully. “She was at school with us before. She probably didn’t walk all the way back home. She’s probably with some friends near here.”
“Her mom is in a wheelchair,” Leon said in a small voice.
“Oh,” Vito said quietly.
Leon turned suddenly and vomited into a potted plant by the window.
“This is my fault,” he said after a minute. “All my fault.” He rested his forehead against the window and watched the fire burn.
They spent forty minutes watching the fire spread in silence. “Look, we can’t stay here,” James said finally. “The most likely case is that all of Brooklyn is going to burn.”
“Shouldn’t the buildings have some kind of fire suppression?” Vito asked. “You know, sprinklers, or some kind of passive fire-blocks. Isn’t that standard?”
James grunted. “Come on, these buildings were all built in the 1960s and earlier. Even if a building had an advanced fire system, how’s it going to hold out when it’s surrounded by buildings on fire?”
Leon weakly lifted his head to look out the window at the spreading fire. The neighborhoods around the apartment complex were aflame. James was right.
“And even if, by some miracle, it doesn’t all burn, we’re still in a city without any operating machinery. By tomorrow people are going to be panicking over food, if they haven’t already. No stores are open. They’ll probably all be ransacked by morning.”
Leon thought he was going to pass out. He slumped back down.
“We’ve got to get out of the city,” James implored.
“And go where?” Leon asked, without lifting his head from where it rested on the coffee table.
“We’ve got to get into the country. Anywhere out of the city. Cities are death traps in any emergency situation. In Moscow during World War II, people starved during the winter and ate each other.”
“Bullshit,” Leon weakly called.
“How? Are we going to walk? We’re in the middle of fucking New York.” Vito said. “We gonna ride bicycles?”
“No. We don’t need to. Look up there.” James pointed into the sky.
Leon got up and walked over to the window. Vito stood beside them, and high above they saw the distinctive brown color of a UPS package drone. UPS had switched to the autonomous flying vehicles a few years earlier. Solar-powered and unmanned, they cost little to operate, and although slow compared to a jet, they were unaffected by traffic. They could get a package from New York to LA in forty-eight hours.
“How can they be flying?” Leon mused, as much to himself as to anyone else.
“They must have hardened systems,” Vito said. “Something resistant to the virus.”
“Resistant to the virus, but able to be hacked by teenagers?” Leon replied.
Vito shrugged. Leon hesitated, then nodded, understanding Vito’s simple gesture to mean that complex systems couldn’t be explained easily.
“We can joyride on the drones,” James said. “We can get out of the city — to someplace safe. Let’s pack some clothes and food and hitch a ride.”
“Wait a minute, that’s crazy,” Vito said. “We can’t just leave. What about our parents? What if school starts up tomorrow? What if we get caught? What…”
“Look,” James interrupted, “our parents are all at work. They’re probably stuck in Manhattan, holed up in their offices or something. They aren’t getting home until the cars and buses start to run. We can joyride out of the city. If everything starts to work again, we come back and they won’t even know we were gone. If everything doesn’t work, well, then they would want us to take care of ourselves. Right, Leon?”
Leon nodded his head weakly. “It makes sense. But I need to do something. I started this virus. I can’t just not do anything. This is all my fault.”
“We can argue about that later. But we’ll be dead if we stay here, and then you won’t be able to do anything. I think they have Internet access in the country, so you can do whatever you want to do from there just as well as you can from here.”
“Yeah,” Leon answered. “I guess you’re right. Let’s get clothes, food, water. What else?”
“We need matches,” Vito started, ticking off his fingers. “tents, sleeping bags, cooking gear, flashlights, water purification filters, water bottles, rope, duct tape, spare batteries, and knives. It would be good if we could bring a gun so we could shoot fresh meat.”
“Ok, Mr. Boy Scout, Leon doesn’t have any of that shit,” James said. He looked at Leon. “Do you?”