Cholera? That sounded bad, but... "What can I do about it? I"ll be out in a few minutes."
"Uh-huh, but the real problem is that Richard is downstairs with a gun and refusing to let any of the twenty-odd people who"ve come back from Penn into the building. I think he"s going to shoot someone."
Lauren shot upright in the tub. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
G.o.d hates me.
"Okay," I replied in shaky voice, "I"ll be right out." Getting out of the tub, I said to Lauren, "We"ll finish this later?"
She nodded but reached over to turn Barry off and got up out of the tub with me.
"I"m coming with you."
For just a moment I allowed myself the pleasure of watching her naked, wet body climb out of the tub.
"Don"t forget to put a mask on."
Day 17 January 8.
"HOW ARE YOU feeling?"
"Groggy," replied Chuck, "but good. You still think we need criminals in society?"
I laughed. "Not so much maybe, no."
After three days of slipping in and out of consciousness, Chuck had come back to the land of the living. He was up and talkative, playing with Ellarose and Luke.
We purposely left him out of the loop while he was recovering, and I hoped whatever was making him "weak and achy" wasn"t the same thing that the rest of the people in our building were coming down with.
"So what did I miss?"
Susie was sitting behind him on the bed, holding Ellarose and gently rubbing Chuck"s back as he sat up. Lauren was sitting beside her, and Luke, of course, was running around the room.
"The usual-plague, pestilence, an armed standoff, and the decay of Western civilization, but nothing I can"t handle."
Last night had been a surreal juxtaposition, jumping from a dreamscape of steam and candles and Barry White, and into a nightmare straight from a zombie apocalypse-a darkened lobby lit by headlamps, screaming and cursing, guns being waved around while a ragged, dirty gang of humans pressed against a gla.s.s wall, banging, begging to get inside.
Thankfully, when I"d let them in, no brains had been eaten.
But Richard had had a good point.
If cholera had broken out at Penn Station, and they"d been there, then letting them back into the building was risking infection for all of us. On the other hand, forcing them to stay outside was tantamount to a death sentence given the subzero temperatures.
In the end, I"d convinced Richard that we could quarantine them on the first floor for two days, well past the incubation period for cholera. I"d looked it up on the phone app on infectious diseases Chuck had given me.
We"d gone back to using the face masks and rubber gloves, and brought down a kerosene heater and sequestered them in one of the larger first-floor offices off the main lobby. When I"d gone down to check on them this morning, everyone there was sick and aching, and so was everyone in the hallway. The symptoms weren"t anything like cholera, though; they seemed more like a cold-or the flu.
I explained the situation to Chuck, and he started shaking his head.
"Have you been ventilating properly? You"ve been mixing diesel with the kerosene to make it last longer, right?"
"I had to close the windows yesterday because of the cold," I admitted, immediately realizing what I"d done. How could I have been so stupid? The hunger made it difficult to think coherently.
Chuck took a deep breath.
"Carbon monoxide poisoning has symptoms a lot like the flu. We"re not sick in here because we"re using the electric heaters, but everywhere else is using the gas heaters?"
I stood up and opened the door to the bedroom and yelled out, "Vince!"
Even feeling ill, he was still manning his computer control station, monitoring the hundreds of images an hour that were arriving from all over the city and routing emergency messages to Sergeant Williams.
Vince"s head appeared through the main door to Chuck"s place. I"d made it clear he wasn"t allowed in here, so he tentatively peered around the door frame, his eyes puffy and red.
"The sickness, it"s probably carbon monoxide poisoning," I explained. "Open some windows and text everyone downstairs, and tell Tony."
Vince brought one hand up to rub his eyes and nodded, and without saying a word he closed the door. He was tired.
"They"ll be better by tomorrow. No lasting damage," said Chuck. "But keeping the ones who were near Penn Station quarantined was a good idea."
I nodded, feeling stupid.
Chuck rubbed the back of his neck while he swung his feet off the bed. "My G.o.d, cholera."
Susie rubbed his back as he leaned forward.
"Are you sure you"re feeling well enough, baby?"
"A little woozy, but not bad."
"That was a close call," I said. "That guy that attacked us was no random accident. It was one of Paul"s guys."
Chuck sat back down from standing halfway.
"What?"
"We have a picture of the attack-"
"You stopped to take a picture?"
It was easy to forget that, after being out of it for a few days, Chuck had only seen the start of the meshnet. Vince estimated that over a hundred thousand people were now connected.
"No, not me. Someone watching took a picture. It"s what people do now, how we"re helping keep things under control."
Chuck stopped and stared at me for a second, absorbing what I was saying.
"Maybe you"d better back up and explain what"s going on."
"How about some hot tea?" suggested Lauren. "And we can leave you guys to catch up?"
"That"d be great."
Susie nodded and picked up Ellarose from the bed.
While the girls took the kids and left to get some tea and breakfast, I started explaining to Chuck how neighborhood watches were evolving on the meshnet, the emergency service tools, and how we were keeping a record of everything that happened out there on centralized laptops like Vince"s.
"So you managed to go and get more of that food?"
Food was a topic never far from anyone"s mind.
With the emergency centers quarantined, the trickle of new food had come to a halt. We"d even emptied all the ketchup and mustard bottles scrounged from the apartments, all of which had been opened and plundered for whatever we could find.
Hunger had a way of focusing the mind on every crumb of sustenance, and you couldn"t help going and looking to see if something had been overlooked, or some corner forgotten.
"We have about three days of food left at starvation rations," I explained. We"d become experts at rationing out calories. "I went out at night, with darkness for safety, using the night-vision goggles and augmented-reality gla.s.ses to get around."
"You did what? I leave you guys alone for a few days-"
I smiled. "And something else."
"Eggs and bacon?"
I shook my head, still smiling. "I wish."
"So?"
"The kid figured a way to get your truck down."
"Time to get out of here, huh?"
I nodded.
"So what"s the idea?"
I started to explain Vince"s plan, but before I could finish there was a loud commotion in the main hallway.
"Mike! Chuck!" yelled Vince.
Getting up, I opened the bedroom door, and Vince"s head appeared again through the main doorway.
"They"re all dead."
"Who"s dead?" I asked, horrified, imagining a flash cholera outbreak that had wiped out everyone in quarantine. "The first floor?"
Vince"s head sagged.
"The second floor. I just went to check on them, and they"re all dead." He stared at me. "They had a kerosene heater, cranked all the way up with all the windows shut."
I"d been down and visited them just the day before, and they"d been heating their place with an electric generator outside their window, just like us.
"Where"d they get the kerosene heater?"
"I don"t know, but we have a bigger problem."
A bigger problem than nine dead people?
The look in Vince"s eyes made my stomach knot painfully.
"Paul"s on the move."
Day 18 January 9.
"THEY"RE COMING."
My stomach growled.
In a crazy part of my mind I hoped they were bringing food.
If we have to fight, at least there should be a food prize at the end of it. A random, illogical thought-like realizing you could shift the wheel and slam into oncoming traffic when you were driving. I usually had no idea why thoughts like this came to mind. They just did.
This time I knew why.
It was crowding out the thought that I was being hunted, that my family was being hunted.
Hunger crept into every thought. I was steadily eating less and less, making a show to Lauren of pretending to eat, but stashing away my crumbs and bits and pieces.
When Luke and I would play in the hallway, I"d produce my hidden treats for him to squeals of excitement. Anything was worth seeing a smile on his little face.
"Are you paying attention?" asked Chuck. "It looks like there are six of them."
I nodded, watching a collection of dots begin to move across Vince"s laptop screen, and then popped a gla.s.s bead from a decorative bowl on the kitchen counter into my mouth and began sucking on it.
A cold wind blew in from the open window in Chuck"s bedroom.
The girls and children had already gone out through there onto the neighboring rooftop, and Vince was just helping Irena and Aleksandr out. From there we could go down the back fire escape and reenter our building at a lower level through exterior doors we"d left ajar.
We were going to trap Paul and his gang. The hunters were becoming the hunted.