CyberStorm Part 25

"Each person gets one of these rations," said Chuck, pointing again to the pile on the table, "and then you're responsible for how slowly or quickly you decide to eat. After that, you need to make trips outside to find what you can."

Shaking his head, Richard made for the table and collected a pile of the packages.

Chuck watched him. "What are you doing?"

"We're ten people." Richard pointed back toward the Chinese family and refugees at his end of the hallway. "We're going to share what we have together."

In a huff, he retreated to his place, and his group of people went with him.

Rory reached down to grab four packs of rations while looking at Chuck. They had taken in a couple from downstairs.

"I guess we know who our friends are now."

"I'm sorry," I said, "but we need to draw the line somewhere."

Rory looked toward Vince, but turned without saying anything and went back to his place, taking Pam and the other couple with him.

The nine other people that remained were the young family Vince had brought with him, and six people from the apartments downstairs. They just mumbled their thanks and took the packages.

Chuck, Vince, and I went inside Chuck's place to sit on his couch while Tony went back downstairs. The girls started to make some dinner.

"That went well," I said after a pause.

"I want to barricade our end of the hallway," said Chuck. "I don't want anyone except us coming over here anymore."

"Do you think that's a good idea?" asked Vince.

My phone pinged an incoming message, and I reached into my pocket to take it out.

"We had to release Paul and Stan," read a message from Sergeant Williams. "We warned them not to come near you, but be on the lookout. There was nothing else I could do."

"Yes," I replied to Vince, reading the message again before handing Chuck the phone to read it. "I think a barricade would be a good idea."

Vince looked at me while Chuck read the message, the muscles in his jaw clenching.

"And we need more guns."

Day 12 January 3.

WE WERE CROWDED around the coffee table in Chuck's apartment, looking at Vince's laptop screen. Lauren was sitting beside me with Luke wedged between her knees. He was playing with a spatula. Ellarose had been crying in Susie's lap, but she suddenly went quiet and a tiny fart squeaked out. She began screaming again.

"I think that one's yours to clean up," said Susie to Chuck, handing over Ellarose. "I'll try and find some clean clothes and water."

Chuck nodded, carefully taking Ellarose. He sniffed her backside but shrugged when he couldn't smell anything. While the first few days of being out of diapers had been manageable, by wrapping the babies in toweling and pinning them up, the attempts to recycle the cloth diapers had become difficult.

Ellarose quieted down as Chuck rocked with her, humming a lullaby, with a radio announcer speaking in a steady monotone in the background: "If you are going out for emergency relief today in the Midtown area, the Red Cross is advising to avoid Penn and Madison and head for some of the smaller relief stations."

We had a diaper bucket in one of the latrine apartments downstairs filled with bleach, but drying them meant hanging them near the kerosene heater. This wasn't popular with everyone else.

"Using signal strength from the fixed-point cell phones I set up," explained Vince, "I can triangulate the position of anyone on the mesh network in our neighborhood."

"Have you found them?" I asked.

Vince wagged his head. "More or less, a.s.suming they're connected, which I would a.s.sume."

He pointed at seven pulsing dots on the map overlay he'd been working on all night.

"The mesh addresses are sort of like phone numbers, and when people create them they usually attach their names. It's an open network, so anybody with a little technical skill can see everyone else right now. These mesh addresses I'm tracking, they all use names like 'Paul' and 'Stan' and have all recently been in our neighborhood."

"Won't they be suspicious that we might be able to track them if they connect?"

Vince shrugged. "I doubt they made the connection that it was us that started the mesh network. People are just sharing it now-it's going viral by itself. Anyway, people tend to not think about that sort of thing."

"And they don't seem like the sharpest sticks in the shed," added Chuck. "Can you create some sort of alert if any of them come closer than a block near us?"

Vince looked toward the ceiling. "I could do that, send a text to everyone."

"Not everyone," said Chuck. "Just our gang. I don't trust anyone else."

"So you really think someone on our floor is in with Paul and his gang?" asked Lauren. "I can't imagine anyone-"

"Someone let him in the first time," replied Chuck. "There were no missing keys to that back door, right, Tony?"

Tony nodded.

"And how did they know that we'd all be in Richard's place at that party? By luck? I don't think so."

"Who do you think it is?"

"I don't know," said Chuck, shaking his head. "Those couples from downstairs, I don't know them, and Rory-"

"Rory?" Lauren exclaimed. "Are you serious?"

"He's friends with Stan, and he's into all that Anonymous stuff, hacking, criminals-"

"They're hardly criminals," I said.

Chuck looked at me, shaking his head.

"Well, who do you think?"

"What about Richard?"

Now Lauren really got upset.

"What is wrong with you, Mike? Are you still jealous?"

"He's the one that organized having us all together in his place," I replied defensively.

"And generously fed everyone, if I remember."

Chuck put up one hand, carefully holding Ellarose with the other. "Hey! We're just speculating. All I'm saying is that something isn't right, and we need to keep this tracking tool secret." He looked at Vince. "So can we track anyone, even people in our building?"

Lauren shook her head. "This is the same stupid behavior that got the world into this mess to begin with."

She stood, picking up Luke, and walked to the door, opening it and going out into the hallway. Chuck scratched his head, waiting for the door to close behind Lauren, and then looked at Vince again.

Vince returned his gaze. "As long as they're in our neighborhood and on the network, yes, we can track them."

Ellarose's face turned bright red, and she began a new round of screaming. Chuck lifted her up and sniffed her again.

"What's wrong?" he whispered to her, and then he turned to us. "Do you guys mind?"

He wanted to check her diaper.

"Course not," Vince and I muttered.

Chuck laid Ellarose on the coffee table beside the laptop. As he unpinned and pulled back the cloth diaper, I expected a brown streak of poo, but instead saw an angry, bright-red rash. It looked painful and infected, and Ellarose screamed.

Vince and I stood speechless while Chuck stared at the floor before looking at his infant daughter again.

"Can you guys give me a few minutes? We need to talk about this some more, but I need to..."

His voiced faltered.

"No problem," said Vince quickly, picking up his laptop.

Nasty diaper rashes in these unsanitary conditions were dangerous. Susie couldn't produce much milk under the stress, and little Ellarose's stomach was having an impossible time adjusting to the random food we scrounged. She was losing a lot of weight, but there wasn't much we could do. I could handle facing almost any pain or discomfort myself, but the children- I looked toward the closed door.

"I'd better go talk to Lauren."

And I wanted to see Luke.

Day 13 January 4.

"PUT THIS OVER your nose and mouth," I offered, handing Chuck a bandana.

I already had one around my face, and it wasn't for the cold.

It stank outside.

The temperature had climbed into the high forties, and under bright, blue skies and sunshine the melting snow had turned the tracks down the middle of the streets into slushy, brown rivers. We'd given up on the skis for this foraging trip, opting instead for thick rubber boots. The smell was nearly as bad as the latrines on our fifth floor.

"Lauren did have a point yesterday," I continued as I watched Chuck tie up the cloth. He looked like a criminal with the bandana and sungla.s.ses on, hiding his face.

I'd gotten an earful from Lauren the night before about setting up our own private spy agency. While we obviously needed to keep track of Paul and Stan, she was adamant that we not use it to spy on other people without their knowing. Try as I might, I couldn't help feeling suspicious about her motives, wondering if she was trying to hide something from me.

She'd made me promise to bring the point up with Chuck.

"It's wrong to spy on our neighbors," I continued halfheartedly. "It's exactly what we were talking about."

"Don't you want to know where Paul and Stan are?"

We trudged a few more steps through the granular snow at the side of the slushy main path, sinking calf deep on each step. Every now and then my foot would sink especially deep and I'd have to carefully pull it out, usually ending with a wedge of dirty snow packed into my boot.

My feet were soaking wet.

"Of course, but it's not the same as spying on our neighbors."

"How's it different if we know one of them is working with the bad guys?"

"Because you don't know," I replied. "You're seeing conspiracies, exchanging someone else's freedom to feed your paranoia."

"Paranoia, huh? Look who's talking. You're still thinking Lauren is doing something behind your back."

Sighing, I said nothing.

We walked quietly for a block.

The warm weather brought a lot of people outside, some wandering aimlessly, but most searching, scavenging. Through the broken windows of shops, we could see people picking through the empty shelves, searching for anything left behind. People were making an effort to pile trash bags together, and hills of them were growing at the intersections, glued together by windblown snow and debris.

I noticed that cables were strung from buried cars into the first-floor windows of a few apartments down the street. This was another one of Vince's ideas-to turn on cars and use them as electrical generators. The idea had spread quickly on the meshnet.

"You know, we need criminals," I said.

"We need criminals?"

"Society needs criminals. Without them, we'd be finished."

Chuck laughed. "Now this I have to hear."

"Any game theory simulation of society is more robust if you include a criminal element."

"Simulation, huh?"

"The criminals force society to improve. They weed out the weak, making us strengthen our inst.i.tutions and networks."