We were crowded around the coffee table in Chuck’s apartment, looking at Damon’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 went quiet and a tiny fart squeaked out. She began screaming again.
“I think that one’s yours to clean up,” Susie said to Chuck, handing over Ellarose. “I’ll try to find some clean clothes and water.”
Chuck sniffed Ellarose’s backside but shrugged when he couldn’t smell anything. While we’d managed the first few diaper-less days by wrapping the babies in pinned-up toweling, our attempts to recycle the makeshift cloth diapers had become difficult.
Ellarose quieted down as Chuck rocked 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 you to avoid Penn and Madison and head for one 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.
“Using signal strength from the fixed-point cell phones I set up,” explained Damon, “I can triangulate the position of anyone on the meshnet in our neighborhood.”
“Have you found them?” I asked.
Damon wagged his head. “More or less, assuming they’re connected, which I would assume.” 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’ or ‘Stan’ and have recently been in our neighborhood.”
“Won’t they be suspicious that we might be able to track them if they connect?”
Damon shrugged. “I doubt they know it was us who started the meshnet. 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 comes closer than a block away?”
Damon looked up. “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,” replied Chuck. “There were no missing keys, right, Tony?”
Tony nodded.
“And how did they know we’d all be in Richard’s place at that party? Luck? I don’t think so.”
“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 shook his head. “Well, who do you think?”
“What about Richard?”
Lauren’s nostrils flared. “What is wrong with you, Mike? Are you still jealous?”
“He’s the one that brought us all together at his place,” I replied.
“And generously fed everyone, if I remember.”
Chuck put up one hand, 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 turned to Damon. “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 picked up Luke and left the apartment. Chuck scratched his head, waiting for the door to close behind Lauren, and then looked at Damon again.
Damon 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,” Damon and I muttered.
Chuck laid Ellarose on the coffee table beside the laptop. When he pulled back the diaper, I expected a brown streak, but instead saw an angry, bright red rash. It looked painful and infected, and Ellarose screamed. Chuck closed his eyes and then said, “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 Damon, picking up his laptop.
Diaper rashes in these unsanitary conditions were dangerous. Susie couldn’t produce much milk under the stress, and Ellarose’s stomach was having a tough 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 at the closed door. “I’d better go talk to Lauren.” And I wanted to see Luke.