Not Flesh Nor Feathers

by Cherie Priest

Page 43

 

  I wolfed both down, and wiggled my fingers towards the table for more. He dutifully provided some. I took down the next hot dog in under a minute, but spent more time with the soda. Hard to believe, surrounded by water, but I was getting dehydrated. We all were. That’s why the nice Red Cross people were urging us away from the sugary sodas and towards Gator-ade and water. Most of us ignored them. We’d had a shitty couple of days and we wanted our junk food, thank you very much.

  When I felt a tiny bit more human, I hauled myself out of the chair and went to look out the window. It was a big window, stretching from corner to corner of the skybox; and from it, I had a good view of everything below. An ambulance was parked in right field, or in the puddle that now comprised right field. Above, and very nearby, the air-chopping thunder of a helicopter droned low, then landed beside the pitcher’s mound.

  White-uniformed people spilled out of it. They were followed by some people in black uniforms and chunky vests, with guns.

  When the helicopter was empty, I lost interest.

  It was quieter there, in the skybox, than it had been at the Read House. Not so many people, I guessed. Everyone else had been passed up farther along the shelter chain. We were the stragglers. No kids, thank God. No one who was visibly incapacitated or disabled. Just a handful of people who were tired beyond endurance.

  I gathered very quickly that the trick was to lie low and stay out of the way. The trick was to hide there in the rich folks’ skybox and eat the trashy park food while the authorities sorted out the hard parts. No one wanted to be sent to the Read House or to the Choo-Choo—even though no one but me and Nick knew what those shelters were like. Everyone could guess. Nobody said anything, but we all were thinking about what happened in New Orleans when the hurricane hit. We were thinking about the stadium there, and what it looked like packed with people.

  So everyone played it low key.

  I did too. I didn’t have the strength to do anything else, so I went back to my overstuffed chair and closed my eyes.

  I could hear Nick talking, here and there, around the room—doing his Nick thing, asking questions and harvesting information. He was quiet and calm, his voice down in a firm but gentle whisper as he went from group to group. Roving reporter.

  I cracked my eyes to track him with idle curiosity.

  But I must have dozed off and on, because he’d cleaned up since we arrived. I thought about taking a trip to the loo myself, but couldn’t muster the energy, so I didn’t bother. I watched him, instead.

  He’d combed his hair down and it was drying into waves that sat against his head like they belonged that way. His clothes were drying out too, and lying funny on him, sticking to his chest and legs. Rationally I knew he was about ten years older than me, but it didn’t show.

  “What are you grinning about, princess?” He caught me looking.

  “Not a damn thing,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, and he was smiling back. He dropped whatever mini-conversation he’d started, and came back to squat beside me, putting his hands on the arm of my chair. “Have a nice nap?”

  “I don’t remember. If I did, it wasn’t long enough. What time is it?”

  “Too late for lunch, too early for supper. How you feeling?”

  “I’ve been better. But I could use another hot dog. ”

  He shook his head and jerked a thumb at the table. “No more hot stuff. Got chips and the like, though. Popcorn. Beer. ”

  “Ew. No beer. ”

  “Fine. More for the rest of us. ”

  “I’ll take a bag of chips, though. ” I began to unpeel myself from the chair and he objected, but I waved him down. “I’ve got to get up sometime. Now’s as good a time as any. ”

  When I rose I had creases and crinkles in all sorts of strange places from the way the vinyl chair had worked itself into my exposed skin. Nick pointed and laughed, and I kicked at him with the toe of my boot, but I didn’t mean anything by it.

  I squeezed a bag of Doritos and they opened with a poof of cheese. One at a time I snacked on them, both afraid to eat too quickly and afraid it’d be a while before I ate anything else. These days, I never knew when or what that next meal was going to be.

  My bedroom up on Signal Mountain might as well have been a thousand miles away. In the back of my mind, though, I thought I’d walk it for a chance at Lu’s kitchen. But you can’t walk on water without a degree in theology, so I tried to rally my brain cells together in a different direction. Fireworks. That was the brilliant plan that had gotten me this far.

  Leave the wading zombies to the men with guns. I’d take care of the tunneling ones.

  I took my chips back to my chair, back to Nick. I leaned back in his direction, offering one. He pushed his fist into the aluminum bag and helped himself.

  “This is what we need to do,” I began, as if beginning to say it would help me to construct it. “We need to find out where they keep the fireworks, but we need to do it without calling too much attention to it. I mean, we can’t just corner a cop and say, ‘Hey man, how about them fireworks?’ So instead—”

  “Instead, we could just ask around about where they store the supplies, because one of the Red Cross people is asking if there are more napkins, towels, and the like. I mean, you could try that if you wanted to, but it might look weird because I’ve already been doing it. ”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Well, I am a genius you know. ”

  “I did not know that. ”

  “Well, now you do. But here’s what I’ve gathered, in case you’re interested: there’s a basement level or two beneath this place, which shouldn’t surprise you at all. That’s where they keep everything from jockstraps to ketchup packets. ”

  “To fireworks? And if they’re in the basement, would they still be dry?”

  “Hang on,” he said insistently. “The basement in this place is still well above the river; we’re on top of a hill, remember? And after asking about fifteen people, most of whom told me the same things all over again, I got one nice guy to warn me about the locked, sealed storage down beneath the food service areas. That’s where they keep the dangerous crap, like, I don’t know, fireworks and shit by the sounds of things. ”

  I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say.

  He was grinning ear to stubbly ear, and only when I saw him up close like that did I realize it must’ve been several days since he’d shaved last. And up close, and after a week like the one we’d had, I had to admit that up close—yes, I could see the extra ten years on him.

  In that same split second, my logic centers deactivated due to fatigue, I grabbed him by his shirt collar and kissed him.

  18

  How Should I Put This?

  He kissed me back, and one of the other refugees made a halfhearted cat call. It embarrassed me but not enough to let go of him right away. When I did, I pushed him back as quickly as I’d pulled him forward, and then I said, “That is the most competent, reasonable, useful thing and best damn lie anyone’s done for me in ages. ”

  Nick looked surprised, but from which part of the last thirty seconds I couldn’t tell. “Is that all it takes to get your attention?” he asked. “A minimal display of competency?”

  “It’s harder to come by than you might expect. And that wasn’t just competent, it was thoughtful. A veritable double play, my dear fellow. Help me up and we’ll call it a triple. ”

  He did, lifting me out of the chair again by my wrists.

  I felt better, if not good. I felt ready to walk again, and maybe even take a few stairs if I was feeling bold. I was gradually shedding that shaky, low-sugar fragility that made me all weepy and needy, or so I liked to think.

  One of the guys standing by the window tried to chide us. “I don’t think we’re supposed to leave the skybox areas,” he whined.

  “Bathroom,” I told him.

/>   “There’s one up here. ”

  “I don’t like that one. ” And once we got outside, I pulled away from Nick and said, “I really do need a bathroom. Let me take a quick spit bath. Hang on. Plumbing. ”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you later. ”

  Downstairs and down the hall there was a stadium-sized unit with a long row of stall doors, all of them empty. The sinks were big and battered for such a new stadium, but they were more or less clean, so I more or less stripped and rinsed out my clothes again, except for my jeans. My jeans were almost dry and there was no way in hell I was going to douse them again until I really had to.

  At the risk of achieving a nuclear ‘fro, I held my head under the faucet and rubbed pink bathroom soap into my scalp, because it smelled better than I did.

  I wrung out what I could and wrapped my head in nasty brown paper towels to squeeze out some of the rest. I wadded them up and threw them away under the counter.

  I slapped the round metal knob of the hand dryer, flipped the nozzle up, and draped my wet shirt across it. And while the heat took the edge off the dampness, I washed my face a couple of times.

  Nick kicked the door. “Hurry up in there. Are we going to kill some zombies today, or are you going to take a spa break?”

  “Shut up. I’m coming. ”

  On the floor beside the trash can there was a hair elastic that could’ve belonged to anybody on earth before it wound up on the bathroom tiles. I didn’t give a damn. I picked it up and twisted it around my fingers, then pulled my hair up into a high, raggedy ponytail. The scarf I’d been using was too disgusting to wear anymore. Somebody else’s discarded hair twisty was actually a step up.

  I yanked my shirt back over my head. It felt clean and hot instead of cool and dirty. I pushed the door open with my foot and said to Nick, “Let’s go do this thing. ”

  “You sound positively human again. ”

  “I’m feeling positively human again. Not superhuman, but human. I think I can walk unassisted. Where are we going?”

  “Down,” he said, taking the lead. “I’ve been told we’ll need a manager’s key to get down to the storage levels from the elevators, but there’s a service stairway back behind the food places on the first floor that’ll get us in without one. ”