“Two days. Maybe three.”
“Only two days?”
Chuck nodded.
“And Ellarose can’t eat just anything,” added Susie, cradling her baby in her arms. “We’ve barely gotten her off formula.” She sighed and looked down. “Not that we had much choice.”
I was going to mention breast-feeding, but it felt too awkward. Anyway, the calories would just be coming from Susie, and she was thin to begin with.
Lauren had noticed things missing yesterday when we were out and she’d gone downstairs to help Pam with the burn victims. We were in Chuck and Susie’s place doing an inventory now, sitting on their couch in the middle of the main room. Luke was running around with Chuck’s night-vision goggles on, squeaking and pointing at us.
“Careful with those, Luke,” I said, taking them away.
He tried to grab them back, so I rummaged around in a bag next to the couch for something else. Picking up a cardboard tube, I gave it to him, and he stuck it in his mouth.
We had one of the cell phones turned on as a radio, using an app Damon had found. Yesterday Manhattan had been down to two official radio stations still transmitting, but today we’d discovered that dozens of local stations had popped up, “pirate” ham radio stations that were being operated by local citizens, each broadcasting over a radius of a few blocks.
“The entire country is in a shambles,” ranted the pirate radio announcer we were tuned into, JikeMike, in the background.
Chuck looked at me, bemused. “You know you just gave your son a flare, right?”
“Come on, Mike, be more careful!” exclaimed Lauren, reaching past me to grab the flare from Luke.
He shrieked, but then he saw Tony in the hallway and ran off after him. Lauren shook her head at me.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, still in shock. I hadn’t really accepted that this could drag on; a part of me was convinced that the power would come on at any moment and end the survival game we were playing. “We only have two days of food left?”
Chuck silenced the phone on the coffee table. “About two days if we keep sharing our food with everyone on our floor,” he said. “We got”—he looked at the ceiling, counting mentally—“thirty-eight people up here now, plus four on the ground floor in the infirmary. We can’t keep sharing what we have. People have been stealing from us. This isn’t going to be over in a day or two or three, no matter what they’re saying.”
The official government radio station was still broadcasting that the New York Power Authority would have power back up to Con Edison and Lower Manhattan in the next day, but nobody believed it anymore.
In the first real news we’d had of events outside of New York, we learned that a massive fire had razed South Boston, and Philly, Baltimore, and Hartford were nearly as decimated. New York was the only city without water, though, at least so far. No news about Washington, but some sketchy reports said that Europe was in a shambles as well, with the Internet still down.
Some kind of cyberattack on infrastructure had been confirmed as the root cause of the system failures, but nobody could say with any certainty where the attacks had come from. Command and control servers were located all over the world, most of them within the US itself, and they were being shut down one by one.
The US military was still jacked up on DEFCON 2, a condition that indicated a strong possibility of imminent attack, but attack from where and by whom was an open question. The military continued searching for the unknown entities that had breached US airspace just before the first string of major power failures. Pirate radio stations were buzzing with speculation that towns all over the Midwest had been invaded like a cyber–Red Dawn.
The news was interesting, but had become irrelevant to our immediate situation.
“Something isn’t right,” continued Chuck. “When Paul and those guys got in here that time, Paul said he stole keys from the front desk. But there were no keys missing—Tony went and checked. Somebody must have let them in.”
“So what are we going to do?” I asked.
“We need to start digging in for the long haul. No more trying to save the world.” Chuck held up his hand, fending off an objection from Susie. “We need to save ourselves.”
“We can’t just take everything for ourselves. We’d start a war in our own building.”
“I’m not suggesting that. I think we should divide up what we have and explain to people that they’re on their own from here on out. With that stuff we stashed outside, we should be okay.”
“Assuming we can find it,” I replied. It had seemed a clever idea at the time, but to hang our survival on it seemed incredibly risky.
“So let’s go out and see if we can recover it. But we cannot share it or tell anyone else.”
“This isn’t right,” said Susie, but with less conviction this time.
“This is going to get ugly,” said Chuck. “It’s already ugly, and so far we’ve been soft. We can’t afford that anymore.” He looked at me. “Get Damon to send out a message for a town hall meeting.”
“When?”
“End of the day, when the sun goes down.” Reaching down with one finger, he swiped the radio back on.
“—I think we’re not getting any news from Washington and Los Angeles because they’ve been wiped out by biological attack, a new form of that bird flu. I ain’t leaving New York, no goddamn way, and if anyone comes to my door, I got my shotgun—”
Damon had set up his control center at the end of our hallway, between the door to my place and Chuck and Susie’s. Two cell phones were attached to the back of a laptop via USB cables.
“They’re how I connect to our meshnet,” he explained. “I’ve gone out into neighboring buildings, and we have people nearby maintaining cell phones active on the network at fixed locations.” He pointed to a pad of paper with scribbled notes and diagrams. “Usually on the third floor of buildings on the corners of blocks, and every hundred yards or so. Sort of like our own cell towers. Those give us at least some fixed points in the network nearby, but the rest is completely dynamic.”
I’d asked him to explain what he was doing, but it’d been a long time since my engineering classes.
“It’s not a ‘hub and spoke’ network like you’re used to, but point-to-point, and uses reactive instead of proactive routing.”
It was beyond me. “How do people know how to use it?”
“It works as a transparent proxy at the bottom of the network stack,” he explained, laughing as he saw my face. “It’s totally transparent to the user. They just use their cell phone like normal, except they need to add a new mesh address for people in their contact list.”
“How many people connected so far?”
“Hard to say exactly, but more than a thousand already.”
Damon had created a “mesh 911” text address, routing it into the cell phones of Sergeant Williams’ group. It was getting dozens of calls an hour.
“And people are sending you pictures?”
We were asking everyone on the meshnet to send images of people who were hurt or dead, and of crimes being committed, along with notes, details, anything they could think of. It was all being stored on the hard drive of Damon’s laptop.
“Yeah,” he replied, “dozens already. I’m excited it’s working, but the pictures …” He hung his head.
“Maybe you should stop looking at them.”
He sighed. “It’s hard not to.”
I put a hand on his shoulder.
Damon had been busy. He’d also created a mesh repository where people could share useful tips, survival techniques for cold weather, and cell phone apps like an emergency radio, flashlight, compass and map for NYC, burn treatments, and first aid. The first emergency survival tip was posted by Damon himself—how to distill marijuana into a liquid painkiller.
“You’re doing a lot of good, Damon, saving lives. There’s nothing more you can do.”
“Maybe we could have avoided all this if we’d been able to see the future.”
“We can’t see the future, Damon.”
He met my eyes, deadly serious. “One day, I’m going to change that.”
I paused, not sure what to say, then decided to simply bring us back to the present. “Can you send a text out to everyone who’s staying on our floor, ask them to be here for a meeting at sunset?”
“About what?”
I took a deep breath and looked down the hallway. Tony was playing with Luke, some kind of hide-and-seek game. “Just tell them to come. We need to talk.”
“None of us thought it was going to last this long,” explained Chuck. “We’ll keep sharing the electricity and heating and tools, but you’re going to have to take more responsibility for yourselves.”
“And that means?” asked Rory.
I counted thirty-three people, all crammed together in the hallway. Despite our best efforts, it was getting dirty. There were stains on the piles of blankets and sheets covering the furniture. Nobody had showered in a week or more, and most of them hadn’t changed clothes in the same length of time. The dank smell of sweat permeated the air. The latrine area on the fifth floor had become a mess already, and the reek seemed to come through the walls and floors. The carpet was soaked from our hauling up snow for melting in the small elevator hallway, and this dampness had seeped into the furniture and cushions. Mold was creeping along the baseboards.
“What we’re trying to say is that you’re going to have to start finding your own food,” I said, inspecting the dirt caked under my fingernails. “We can’t just keep sharing what we have.”
What Chuck had was more accurate, and everyone understood the line that was being drawn in the sand. Those that Chuck and Susie were going to share with, and those they weren’t.
“So every man for himself? Is that what you’re saying?” asked Richard.
He’d taken in several fire refugees and was still housing the Chinese family. I’d started to develop a grudging respect for him.
“No, we still need to share duties for guarding the apartment, for water and cleaning, but for food we’re going to need to begin rationing what we have here.” I pointed to the food we’d piled on the coffee table. “We’ve divided up what we could share. Add this to what you have. You’re going to need to start going to the emergency food lines.”
Earlier this afternoon, Chuck and I had slipped out and used my treasure hunt app to try to recover some of the food supplies we’d hidden. It had worked. We’d dug up three bags on the first try.
“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 to the Chinese family and refugees at his end of the hallway. “We’re going to share what we have.” He retreated to his place in a huff, and his group went with him.
Rory grabbed four packs of rations, looking at Chuck as he did. He and Pam 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 at Damon, but turned silently and went back to his apartment, taking Pam and the other couple with him.
The nine people who remained were the young family Damon had brought with him and six people from the apartments downstairs. They just mumbled their thanks and took the packages.
Chuck, Damon, and I went inside Chuck’s place to make dinner while Tony went back downstairs. “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 Damon.
My phone pinged an incoming message, and I took it out of my pocket. 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 Damon, reading the message again before handing Chuck the phone. “I think a barricade would be a good idea.”
Damon stared at me while Chuck read the message, a tendon in his neck flexing.
“And we need more guns,” said Chuck from between clenched teeth.