by Ginger Booth
“In, in, in!” Ava begged.
Maz let her go to scamper up the stairs, while he got a grip on his best friend. “Did you cut your face on the window, Frostman?”
Ava tuned them out. At the top of the stairs Kat waited, the other top girl on the karate demo team. A couple months older than Frosty, she looked downright maternal to Ava at the moment. She barreled into Kat’s arms. “They jumped us. They raped us. Both. Penn Station.”
“Shit! Maz!” Kat cuddled Ava tight while she yelled to the lower landing. “Rape. Both.”
“DAMN YOU!” Frosty hollered. Now it took Maz and Jake both, everything they had, to keep him from bolting into the night. God knows where, since Frosty wasn’t thinking.
Ava rocked back and forth keening in Kat’s arms. The older girl drew her into Maz’s floor while the the three guys struggled up the stairs. They sounded like spear-hunters trying to wrestle an ornery rhinoceros, not far off the truth. No question, those three were brutal in a fight. And Frosty did not want to face anyone.
Kat took Ava’s face in both hands and looked into her eyes. “How bad are you hurt?”
“Nnn…”
“Right.” Kat drew her into a bedroom, and unwrapped her from her knife-sliced sodden rags. Panties and bra were covered in blood, so Kat forced her into the bathroom for a thorough sponge-bath. The water came from a gallon jug, not the faucet. All the time, she kept up a steady reassuring patter. “That’s not so bad, just a nick.” The rapist had threatened to cut off Ava’s nipple and settled for a gash. “We’ll get it nice and dry, a little antibiotic. And we’ll close it up with a couple butterfly band-aids. See, it’ll be fine.”
“I need to see Frosty!” Her voice keened, and she started rocking again.
“Like you need a hole in the head. You just calm down, and we’ll wash down below…”
Ava savagely thrust the soapy washcloth between her legs, then threw it at the wall. She wiped roughly with a white towel, turned it crimson, and tossed that also. After a brief struggle, Kat let her go, careening naked toward the guys’ voices.
They hadn’t gotten far yet, since it took both of them to hold Frosty down on Maz’s bed. Disconcerted by the naked bleeding girl shoving into his face, Jake ceded his spot. Ava wouldn’t have tried to dislodge Maz.
“Kat, bring the champagne!” he called. “And maybe clothes for Ava!”
Ava ignored them. She held Frosty’s face between her hands the way Kat did to her. “Sh-sh-sh… Get me a sewing kit. Yeah, Frosty? I need to sew up your beautiful face.” The knife cut missed the eye by only a quarter inch, in skin still mottled a little yellow and purple by the disease. Ava kept rocking, but Frosty stilled, staring into her eyes. Tears brimmed over and rolled down his cheeks with the rain and the blood.
“Maybe one of us should handle the sewing,” Maz suggested.
But his breath stank of wine or something stronger. The other two as well. Just like the gang at Penn Station, drunk on New Year’s Eve. “I’m doing it,” Ava insisted.
She’d done this once, on a teddy bear. She was eight, maybe. She sliced her knee open on some glass sliding into third base in Minnesota. It took forever to stitch up, all those tiny stitches. Her dad the nurse showed her how to do it on a stuffed animal later, let her practice. You needed lots of knots for a tight place like the knee or the face, where muscles kept tugging, or it would scar.
“Ava, you need to calm down first,” Kat urged. She managed to pull the younger girl away long enough to dress in her own too-large clothes.
But Ava wouldn’t even wait for socks before taking her place with Frosty again. “You want to do it now, right, honey? Don’t wait.”
Frosty squeezed his eyes shut, then nodded.
“Frostman, it can wait,” Maz urged.
“No. We go back tonight.” It was the first clear and rational statement he’d made since the rapists left them lying in a puddle on the sidewalk. “To the dojo. Storm protects us.”
Well, he sounded rational to Ava, anyway. She scrubbed her hands with soap. Then she got busy roasting a needle in a candle flame. The thread she bathed in hydrogen peroxide, then blotted with sterile gauze before threading the needle. She cleaned the wound with soap and water, then dabbed on a triple antibiotic with lidocaine, all the anesthetic Maz’s first aid kit could provide.
“Hold his head.”
Maz pressed his lips into a line, glaring at her. The best friends weren’t quite matched. Pale Frosty had a slight build, 5’9” and 140 pounds. He usually bleached his darkening blond hair on top. He aimed for an elfin, whimsical look. The golden-tanned Maz stood a couple inches taller and broader. His dirty blond hair reached jaw length under a deep-set brow, which lowered at her right now. Oddly, their icy blue eyes were a near match.
“Do it,” Frosty whispered, his eyes opening to Ava’s. “Whatever she says.”
“Cade –”
Frosty’s face whipped toward Maz. “CADE IS DEAD!”
Their eyes locked in a battle of wills for a moment, then Maz nodded, then shook his head. “Alright.” He pulled Frosty around so his head reached the side of the bed, then straddled him gently, pinning his arms. Jake wedged a pillow under his head, and held it. “Remember I’m doing this because you asked me to. Are we clear on that – Frosty?”
“Just do it.”
Maz nodded to Ava. She scooted a chair in. She hadn’t bargained on her boyfriend’s face being upside down, which threw her for a moment. Then she psyched herself into it. This way was better because she saw the medical challenge, instead of her lover. “Close your eyes.”
He flinched at each stab at first, but gradually steeled himself. She stitched the lower end first, one knot at a time until she had eight of them. Then she worked ever closer up to the eyelid. The last stitch was half an inch from the eye itself.
Maz waited until her hand retreated for a moment, then caught it with his own. “That’s close enough. We can use a butterfly band-aid at the top. Yeah? You’re done, Panic. You did well.” Meanwhile he confiscated the needle out of her hand. “Kat, get her out of here, and put her together. I’ve got Frosty.”
Frosty didn’t make a sound, or open his eyes. Completely wrung out, Ava let Kat lead her away.
“Did you have sex with him first?” Kat inquired, pursuing her third attempt to get Ava cleaned. This time they sat downstairs in Ms. Whelan’s master bath. The place included a gracious interior staircase for family, as well as the grand stairs in the public hall, plus a modest back stairway for tenants to reach the top three floors.
When Ava nodded, Kat pressed, “Was it good? Sex with Cade? Then you’ll be alright. No, rinse the washcloth, but then soak yourself again.” Ava perched on the edge of the giant tub, Kat supervising her wash job from the throne. She tamed her blue-black curls demurely for schooldays at St. Bernadette’s. Off hours, like New Year’s Eve, she looped her hair with metallic mardi gras beads, and hanks of hair jutted out at odd angles. She laid the makeup on thick tonight, too, with broad strokes of cat’s eye lines, purple eyelids, and ruby red lips. Her black sleeves dropped from her shoulders to showcase a dragon tattoo climbing to her neck.
The older girl resumed her thesis. “Ebola was much harder on your body than what you just went through. Forced sex – your body is built to withstand that. Hundreds of thousands of years of women have endured rape. Just keep your head on straight. You hear me, Ava? You got to be real careful what you allow this to mean. Truth is, it doesn’t mean anything. What some asshole did, that has nothing to do with you. No worse than losing a karate match. You get past it.”
Ava flinched as Frosty screamed from the floor above. She tried to rise, and Kat slammed her back down tub-side.
“Don’t you test me again, girl-chick! I cut you a break so far. But you cross me one more time, I take you down! Hear me?”
“Yes, Kat.” Ava couldn’t help adding a grumble, “You can try.”
This was pure obnoxious defiance. They fought on the same
karate team. If the taller, older, more experienced Kat wanted her down, Ava couldn’t stop her. Frosty fought cool as ice. But a wild thing dwelt in Kat’s heart. When Ava pressed her hard enough in a fight, Kat’s inner creature leapt out eager to kill. She’d hate to fight Kat outside the decorum of competition rules.
“Good,” Kat crooned. “That’s the spirit. Where was I.”
“What are they doing to Frosty?”
Kat sniffed disdain at the question. Guess. “Oh, yeah. My point. Ava, you’re not alone. A quarter of all women in this country are raped eventually. There’s this head crap, oh, I’m soiled, I’m this, I’m that. Pure bullshit. You were completely clean an hour ago. The guys who did this? They never knew who you were, never cared. Gone forever. Good riddance.”
“A quarter of women?”
“Yeah, I looked it up.”
Ava stared at her. “You too?”
Kat met her eye levelly, with an expression that more than once had preceded her flipping Ava hard onto the mats. “What’s it to you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Might be comforting to know you’re in the same boat.”
“It isn’t.” Kat leaned closer. “When you need to think that it happened to me? Think it all you like. When you need to think the other way? Go right ahead. Point is, if you know ten women, probably two or three have been raped. None of your business which ones. Got me?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“You’re lucky. Frosty won’t hold it against you.”
Ava countered, “He’ll never talk about it.”
Kat chuckled. “I bet.”
“Kat, he won’t talk about his parents dying. It’s all bottled up inside, and he’s…” Words failed her.
“Ava, Cade’s father isn’t dead,” Kat pointed out clinically. “He’s on the other side of the Hudson River. He lives in the fancy house Frosty had to leave, with his new family that he likes better than broken Frosty and his broken mom. And who broke them, we wonder? You leave that one for Maz to handle. Frosty talks to him.”
Broken? Ava wished she could ask Maz. She’d tried to warm to him. Her efforts were not reciprocated. Maz didn’t care to share his best buddy with a temporary girlfriend. The more temporary the better. And Frosty was oblivious. “But if I’m his girlfriend –”
“Trust me, let him tell you what he wants, when he wants. Don’t push. I’ve known Cade Snowdon for years, Ava. He’s a charming chameleon. There’s a lot he won’t tell you. Because he wants it out of his universe. If you try to rub his nose in it, like a puppy who messed the floor, he’ll escape you.”
Ava frowned, confused. “What happened?”
Kat shook her head. “When you need to know, he’ll tell you. OK, now you’re turning blue from the cold. Time to dry off and dress all clean and fresh and warm. Put this behind you, Ava. Promise.”
“Promise.” Ava had no idea how to keep that promise.
But then, she reflected, perhaps her boyfriend was a master of the art form.
6
January 1, E-day plus 24.
“Frosty, are you OK?” Released from Kat’s clutches, Ava sailed into him where he stood against the wall in Maz’s bedroom.
“Fine.” The word was dismissive, but his arms were not, as he cuddled her loosely.
“It’s an acronym.” Maz stood arms crossed and leaning one shoulder to the wall, an arm’s reach from Frosty. “Fucked up, Irrational, Neurotic, and Emotional. He’s FINE.”
“Enough, Maz.” Frosty squelched his best friend with a curled lip. “Can you walk home, baby?”
“Good to go,” Ava insisted. “We should move before the storm stops. You?”
“I’ll make it. Are you with us?” This challenge he aimed at his friends. “Ten minutes to pack.”
Maz studied his face searchingly, then checked Kat and Jake. “Any doubts?”
Kat shook her head. “I’m with you. And you’re with him, so. Your call.”
Jake narrowed his eyes. “Why the dojo instead of here?”
Ava recalled that Jake devoured military history like most kids played video games. Frosty hoped to get into Yale. Jake aimed for West Point. Kat hoped to scrounge the money for a year at cosmetology school. Maz’s strategy, on college as with all else, was passive resistance raised to an art form. This fall he delayed until spring rather than apply for early decision at Columbia, alma mater to his rich and overweening grandfather.
Ava’s own nebulous hopes for something like MIT seemed irrelevant as a 10th grade dropout. She never mentioned her ambition to the others, still misleading Frosty to assume she attended Public School Umpty-Three in Chinatown or something. She did attend public school. And Brooklyn Tech was downtown from the Village. But she omitted the part where her own excruciatingly competitive STEM school was more prestigious than their Catholic prep schools.
“Head start,” Frosty defended his dojo strategy to Jake. “Whole lot of work. Food stockpiled, corpses cleared. Here, you’re three blocks from the creatures at Penn Station. I’ve got forty so far, mostly kids. You?”
“Just us.”
“How many you think we need?”
Jake considered the question. “What are we defending? And how long?”
“Children. Food. Our lives. Our health.” Frosty hugged Ava tighter. “Did you ever get a look at the quarantine barricades outside the city?”
“Glimpses on the news,” Jake allowed. “Looks like the army fortified the interstates and rivers. Gun-boats. We’re not breaking out.”
“No,” Frosty agreed. “They erected the borders before disease broke out. Part of the Calm Act. Enforced local self-sufficiency, no domino effects from starvation migration.”
“You think it’s permanent.” Jake shook his head. “That’s a death sentence for millions. But army morale wouldn’t permit it. How do you lead soldiers to pen up their own citizens to die?”
“Make us scary,” Frosty returned. “Ebola carriers. They’re not killing us. They’re defending everyone else from us. Even when Ebola runs its course, other diseases will run rampant.”
“You think our own government did this to us! Snowman, that’s insane!”
Frosty shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. But yes. I think this was planned.”
Jake shook his head emphatically. “You’d never get the army to go along with that!”
“They don’t have enough food to go around. Neither do we. But I want Panic to live anyway, and you three. So how do I do that? Until I have a better option. Show me a better option and I’ll take it.”
Maz cut in. “Jake, can we continue this at the dojo? It’s one a.m., and the storm is slacking off. That’s our cover. Let’s go.”
“Who leads?” Jake challenged.
Maz snorted. “He does. What have we accomplished? He can barely stand. Yet he walked here to bail us out. Back down, Jake. Go pack. Or stay here alone, I don’t care.”
Frosty tilted his head. “We all lead. Plenty of work to go around. Unless you want to referee spats between children? Manage food stores? Rig water purification? Clean and cook and care for the sick? You think you can manage all that better than Panic? While you defend us, and train fighters? I lead. West Point didn’t knock on your door, Jake. I did. You can be warlord. But only if you’re the best. If Maz or someone else is better, you step aside.”
“Hell.” But the military buff hustled to collect his stuff. Kat had already ducked out for hers.
“No liquids!” Frosty called after them. “Too heavy. Pack to fight along the way.”
“You never got sick,” Ava noted to Maz. She’d turned in Frosty’s arms to peek out during this debate. Jake and Kat’s faces showed light bruising like Ava’s, well along the road to recovery. Maz looked unchanged from when they’d gone ice skating at Rockefeller Center, the Sunday before Ebola broke out on Tuesday. He hadn’t even lost weight.
He had a go bag ready. Now he rummaged his room to decide on any last-minute additions. “No. I got an Ebola vaccine for a trip to Afr
ica. Back in middle school.”
“Maz never gets sick,” Frosty added. “I brought photos, Maz. Otherwise it would drive me nuts trying to remember what they looked like.”
Maz glanced at him thoughtfully, then decanted the framed pictures standing by his bedside. “Good thought. Jake brought the arsenal.” Despite these words, he tucked a pistol into the back of his jeans. He thoughtfully hefted the backpack like an arm curl, then added a cashmere sweater. “Done. You two up to carrying some food? I’ve got more rucksacks.”
“I’ll rest now. Panic, you can carry ten pounds. I’ll take twenty. She’ll pick, Maz.”
Ava selected her choice of backpacks, and a few water bottles as well, then followed Maz down to the main kitchen. They’d barricaded the interior stairway by sliding steel folding chairs through the railing spindles on alternating sides, and strung noisy cans in the way. Anyone who broke in below would move slow and make plenty of noise coming up. Maz kicked the impediments out of the way to either side.
In the kitchen, he threw open the relevant cabinets and showed her the pantry. She handed him the water bottles. “Anesthetic booze?”
“Whiskey coming up,” he agreed. “Three water bottles, a liter apiece, is seven pounds out of your thirty.”
Ava knew that, but let it slide. “Any oral rehydration salts? Frosty got a pile of them at a drugstore –”
“I bought a couple cartons. Upstairs. What else?”
“Protein powder, high-carb high-nutrient snacks, multivitamins, first aid, drugs.”
“You know what you’re doing. I’ll be right back.” With that he trotted back up to his floor.
Working quickly, Ava set candidate selections on the prep island, about three times as much as she had room for if she obeyed Frosty’s weight guidelines. But she wanted to scope out the options first. She allowed ten pounds for whatever Maz would fetch, then winnowed, transferring rejects to another counter. She agonized over a lovely bag of potatoes, and another of apples. But damn, they were heavy. And cooking was a problem. She settled on five apples and bit into a sixth, losing herself momentarily to its tart sweetness.