“He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Will he be okay?” Susie’s face was streaked with tears.
Chuck had been in and out of consciousness all day, and hardly aware of who we were when he did wake up. We’d laid him out on the bed in Chuck and Susie’s bedroom after carrying him back to the building.
“I think so,” replied Pam, feeling his pulse. “He has a strong, regular heartbeat, which is good. He needs sleep and lots of liquids …” She hesitated.
“What?” I asked.
“And he needs to eat as much as possible.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“Thanks, Pam, we’ll make sure he does,” I finally replied.
Leaving Susie with Chuck, I walked Pam out of the apartment and past the barricade at our end of the hall.
The hallway had been empty all day. For the past three days, since we’d made it clear how dire the food situation was, everyone had been leaving in the morning to wait in line for food and water at one of the relief stations. The Red Cross was distributing one food pack per person per day, about a day’s supply of calories, and after three days the other people on our floor—the hallway group, the ones with Rory, and the ones with Richard—had built up their supplies, surviving on starvation-level rations, where we’d nearly run out.
How quickly the tables had turned.
Susie was cooking up a rice mash for dinner, using almost the last of our food, and nobody on the rest of the floor was in a sharing mood after Chuck had made it clear we weren’t going to share with them.
We’d pinned our hopes on recovering the food we’d stashed outside, but we’d lost what we’d collected in the scuffle yesterday. Between taking care of the kids, nursing Chuck, Damon running the meshnet, and Tony handling security, nobody in our group had the five or six hours it took to get through the food lines or search for another one of our stashes.
The thing nobody had ever told me about hunger was just how much it hurt. I was making sure that Lauren and Luke got most of what I was allotted, and sometimes the hunger was just an ache, but often it was an intense pain that burned in my gut, making it impossible to concentrate. The worst was at night. My lack of food was translating into a lack of sleep.
Sighing, I slumped down on a chair next to Damon. He was almost surgically attached to the laptop he was using as the meshnet control center. It seemed all he needed to survive was a constant stream of coffee, but that was almost gone too.
“So people just whipped out their phones and started taking pictures?” he asked.
“It probably saved our lives,” I replied, shaking my head. “You saved our lives.”
When Chuck was hit on the head, I’d thrown my food into the crowd and jumped onto all fours to try to help him, grabbing one of his legs as the attackers pulled off his backpack. Fumbling in Chuck’s pockets, I’d tried to get the gun out, but it had fallen into the snow. The guy who had hit Chuck with the two-by-four had wound up to whack me as well, and I’d cowered in the snow, holding my hands up to protect myself.
Just then, someone had yelled out “Stop!” and held up her phone to take a picture. The man had towered above me, holding the club over his head, hesitating, and then someone else had taken a picture with her phone too. Under the public scrutiny, the attacker had retreated, dropping the two-by-four and scrambling to grab some of the food.
Fishing around in the snow, I’d found the gun buried under Chuck, stashed it in my pocket, and sent out a text message saying we needed help. Tony and Damon had arrived within minutes. By that time, the crowd had dispersed, and we’d carried Chuck back to the apartment like a sack of potatoes while he bled from his head wound.
“Social media as a lifesaving tool—wouldn’t be the first time. By the way, I have pictures of the guy who attacked you and Chuck.”
“Really?”
The meshnet was amazing, but up to that point it had been slow and patchily connected.
“Some hackers in the East Village figured out a way to upload the mesh software wirelessly, and it’s gone viral now. Tens of thousands of people already.”
The day before there hadn’t been any uploads of our incident. I got up and studied the screen.
“Recognize him?”
The images were grainy but recognizable.
A large man in a red-and-black-checked jacket and wool hat menacing a pathetic-looking figure cringing in the snow. My head was turned away in the image, one hand held high to try to deflect the coming blow, but the other man’s face was in full view.
Damon zoomed in.
“That’s us.” I hadn’t gotten a good look at the time. Where had I seen him before? “Hey! That’s one of the guys from the garage downstairs.”
I remembered seeing him lounging next to Chuck’s pallet when we were unloading it. He’d been standing there when Rory was talking to Stan.
“You sure?”
I looked again, more carefully. That’s definitely the guy I saw that day. “Absolutely.”
Damon shook his head. “The bastards are hunting us down. I’ll run a network map and see if I can filter this guy out, see if any of those nodes run into Stan’s or Paul’s.”
“Is Rory back yet from the food lines?”
Damon typed away for a few seconds before answering. “Not yet, why?”
“No reason.” I didn’t want to fuel any more gossip.
Giving me a funny look, Damon shrugged and continued working.
“Can you add an alert text if any of those guys comes within a hundred yards of any of us?”
“Will be tricky to get in real time, with all the delays, but yes, more or less.”
I shivered and scratched a sudden itch.
A cold draft was blowing through the hallway, even with the kerosene heater turned all the way up. The temperature had dropped again. I hadn’t been outside, but with all the melting yesterday, the sharp drop below freezing had turned the streets into a skating rink, like a frozen obstacle course.
“So what else is going on?”
“I’ve hooked up with those hackers in the East Village, and they’ve already coded up a kind of mesh Twitter and set up other base stations like mine. People are creating neighborhood watches, barter exchanges, charging stations, crime reporting—communication is the key to civilization.”
“Hackers, huh?”
Damon shook his head, still tapping on his keyboard, and then stopped to scratch his head and look at me. “I’m using the term ‘hacker’ in its original meaning of tinkering with code, of creating, not abusing. Hackers have gotten a bad rap. They didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Those Anonymous guys admitted to attacking the logistics companies, and that was half of this mess.”
Damon scratched his head again. “They didn’t do this.”
He seems awfully sure of himself. Shaking my head, I let it go. “It’s freezing in here,” I complained, itching again and shivering as another cold blast of air hit me.
“The window down the end of the hall is still open from when it was warm yesterday,” answered Damon, coding away on his machine. “Why don’t you close it?”
Nodding, I got up. I wondered just how deep Damon’s involvement with Anonymous was.