by Ginger Booth
She didn’t have time for that. She plonked it back on the counter and focused on the relative merits of cornflakes and those cheap bricks of ramen. Ramen won, the only member of the pasta-and-rice food family she might manage to cook. Canned potatoes and tomatoes failed the liquids test. The cornflakes swapped back, lighter than a hefty can.
By the time Maz returned, she was already stuffing his old backpacks. He brought another two of those enormous protein mix jars Sensei sold, one mostly empty, and two gross of those oral rehydration salts. Drugstores practically threw the shiny packets at customers that final week before the outbreak. And Maz had money to burn.
“Wow, you’re good,” he allowed grudgingly. “Oh, the whiskey.” He ducked into another room to decant his mother’s bar.
“Practice,” Ava muttered. Protein, she decided. And the cornflakes shot back into the reject ranks. Then she swapped them back and shoved them into Frosty’s bag with finality. She didn’t want to waste time decanting the partial protein jar into a smaller container. Besides, she could almost taste the cornflakes. She chomped another bite of that incredible apple. “Eat one,” she urged Maz when he returned.
He labeled the bottles with a permanent marker, Rum, Tequila, Whiskey. “You’ll leave all that?”
“We need to win a fight more than we need more salvage.” Ava shoved the last of the ORS packets into the lighter bag. “Done. Maz… Is he OK?”
Maz appraised her coolly. “I should ask you. Am I making a mistake? Leaving here for what you’ve got at the dojo?”
Ava dropped her eyes under his challenge. “I believe in him.”
“You don’t have much choice,” Maz noted.
Her face warmed, and her eyes flared back to his. “I love him too, you know!”
He nodded and slung Frosty’s bigger bag over his shoulder. “I underestimated you. My mistake. Let’s go.”
In another two minutes, the five friends erupted out into the wild rainy night. They cut east toward 6th Avenue. It could hardly be worse than 7th.
Finally alone in their tiny apartment, Ava drew Frosty’s head to her good breast, his stitched cheek and her cut breast turned away.
Cry, Cade. Give me permission to cry, too. But she didn’t breathe a word.
They’d arrived safely at the dojo around 2:30 am – Maz’s watch worked. A bleary-eyed Germy reported no trouble while they were gone. Frosty had to wake Hotwire with a toe, after cautiously sliding his AK47 out from under his hand. Their eldest member spewed mortified apologies for falling asleep on duty. He offered an unconvincing welcome to Frosty’s three new best buddies before he fled upstairs to bed.
From there, Maz assured Frosty they could handle the rest of the night, with Germy to vouch for them to the others. Frosty and Ava needed sleep. The couple trudged upstairs, dumped their food salvage in the kitchen, and got as far as stripping their wet clothes. Then Frosty sank to a seat at the edge of the bed and simply stopped.
Ava reached to pull their down comforter around him, then slipped in to kneel beside him, still cradling his head. The rain slapped at their windows in velvety darkness, no lights showing at this hour, nor a peep throughout the building, as though they were the last people on Earth. Good. The millions of other people were their biggest problem. Especially – A whimper escaped her despite her best efforts to be strong.
“I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry.”
“Same. Don’t talk.” His voice broke at last into heaving sobs.
And they both cried to compensate for all the times they hadn’t cried since they left Washington Square Apartments to bring an old man to the piles, to await the cleansing fire. But they didn’t talk. There was nothing to say. The rape sucked beyond words. Their situation was untenable. Predators like the guys who jumped them at Penn Station were legion.
They recruited three more friends to help. Ones they could trust with their lives, and that mattered. But millions of desperate people would soon rise from their sickbeds to fight over scraps until none remained. And those she could understand and forgive, the ones who were merely hungry enough to kill for food. But the rapists unleashed their demon selves to attack with no remorse, no regret, no shame, no human decency. Like Ebola itself, like the corpse piles, they horrified her to the gagging point, that she had to withstand hordes of monsters like that.
Their chances sucked. They would endure until they couldn’t anymore. What other option did they have? To flee through these lawless streets was no temptation at all.
Ava dozed off long before the midwinter dawn, clasping Frosty’s hands between them. Exhausted by her tears, she twitched and muttered through the nightmares her subconscious mind regurgitated for her to withstand again and again, battered from within and without.
7
January 1, E-day plus 24.
Frosty and Ava waded into the throng clogging the dojo. They both wore their fighting gi, black culottes with black belt, wrap-over jackets emblazoned with the sumptuously embroidered demo team version of the Water Tiger emblem. Worn red wraps twined their hands to safeguard their knuckles.
“Make space!” Frosty hollered. “This is a dojo. Time to use it!”
Ava hastened to shoo the younger kids against the walls, away from five standing bags at the far end of the room. She caught Kat’s eye, and she and Jake scurried to herd the older teens out of the way.
Frosty didn’t wait for a clear path. Dodging the milling crowd, he backed up and took a running hand-flip. Springing up, he laid the first standing dummy flat with a straight kick. He spun to the next dummy and landed back-fist, cross, and uppercut. He laid it down, and the following bag too, with a double spinning side kick. His next luckless victim was a rubbery man-shaped model. He stayed with that one to work off his fury with his fists for a good minute, mostly in triple combo strikes, before laying him flat with an uppercut fist to the sternum. The final bag he dismissed with a simple roundhouse kick, then started hammering a hanging speed bag. Ava trusted that one would fly off its hook real soon now.
She took a cartwheel herself, followed by three standing kicks at the air on each side, narrowly missing onlookers. They prudently pressed against the windows. Then she struggled to pull up a standing bag for herself to whale on. But the damned things were weighted with water for stability. She braced on its base to lever it up with her entire body weight, but she was too light. She forgot the ‘demo’ aspect of this task in her frustration. She just straddled the damned thing and laid in with her fists to beat the crap out of it where it lay.
Maz stuck an arm in to deflect a cross-punch and catch her attention. She hopped back onto the base to pull back while he pushed from the other side to get it up and rocking. Ava got started on a flurry of kicks just before Frosty’s hanging bag flew past her. Maz blocked her again, and turned her around to watch her boyfriend.
“Do I have your attention?” he demanded of the room. “Do I have your fucking attention? The answer is, YES, SENSEI!”
“Yes, sensei!” the throng muttered guardedly.
“Pathetic!” With a back kick, Frosty casually laid down the one bag Ava and Maz had struggled back to standing.
He began stalking along the huddled gang members to date, ranging in age from 25 for Hotwire down to a four-year-old. “My point is that this is a fighting dojo. We fight. We band together for mutual defense. Now I’ve heard you in here. You whine about your parents. How sick you got. How hungry you are. How scared.
“That ends now! Nobody whines in my dojo! You come here, you learn to fight. Rule one: no whining. Rule two: everyone fights. You don’t fight, you don’t work, you don’t eat. Keep it up and you’re out. Am I understood?”
Few answered, so Jake wheeled out to face his side, the older window-cling contingent. “YES, SENSEI!” he screamed at them. Kat likewise harangued the far end of the room.
The last thing Ava wanted to do was listen to a lecture. Her fists itched to murder a standing bag. She yanked out of Maz’s restraining grasp on he
r arm. She barely restrained herself from the automatic follow-on of backhanding him to the face. But she grudgingly took her proper place, to glare at her young ones on the back wall, across from the windows.
“Last night,” Frosty resumed, “Panic and I walked past Penn Station. We went to fetch my friends down here to join us.” He took a moment to introduce the new trio again. Unlike the three herders, Maz levered another bag up off the floor. He stood behind his best friend.
Frosty walked to the biggest new guys in the audience. “We got jumped, a dozen to two. They brutalized us.” He caught the older kids in the eye. “You know what brutalized means. Now, I’m sure I could win against most of you. Panic is amazing for her size. But two isn’t enough. That’s why we came here, to the dojo. To gather a gang, allies. But last night we had nobody. And we lost.
“Never again. Do you hear me? NEVER AGAIN!”
“Yes, Sensei!”
“We’re in a dojo, people! Jake knows military tactics. The other four of us, we’ve taught karate and self-defense for years. Now I won’t promise you’ll be any good at fighting. But every one of you has to try your damnedest. You’ve got to defend yourself and others. Everyone fights! Kat, Maz, Panic, Jake! Sort them.”
The other three hustled to right the dummies. But Ava’s eyes fell to her four-year-old charge. Germy chose Pebbles for her gang handle, though the child insisted her name was Katrina half the time.
“OK, who knows how to fall?” Ava began. “Germy, get back here! Assistant instructor!” Of course he’d abandoned the shrimps to go prove his skills with the best of them. He was that good. When he bounded back to her, she tripped him to fall into a roll on the mats. “We’re going to teach everyone to fall. This is your first test of self-defense. Let’s go!”
Ava longed to punch out a tree. But she’d been assistant instructor to Sensei for half a year teaching the middle-schoolers. This lesson was her first in that role. She remembered it well. Most of these kids weren’t natural karate material, though.
Pebbles showed off a somersault. And that was fine by Ava.
Frosty made the rounds, to evaluate and offer suggestions to the other four. She pointed out four of her fourteen, in addition to Germy, suited for advanced work. He told her to set them to coaching the others for today. Evaluate their character. Then she could start building up their physical strength and stamina.
After 45 minutes, Frosty called the proceedings to a halt. “That’s the end of class for today. Everybody does this part together.” He led them in cool-down stretches, then dismissed them out of his dojo.
“Long way to go,” Maz quipped, as the last exited the building.
“They want to live,” Frosty countered. “They’ll get better. Status. Jake, did you check out the block?”
“Waited for you.”
“Never wait for me. Panic, how long can we eat? Days? A week?”
She scowled. As though she spent her time bookkeeping? “We add people and food every day. Can’t tell.”
Frosty nodded. “Kat, help her figure out how to track our food stocks. We need some way to decide who gets how much, and when we’re running out. I have this concept. That you’re in charge of kids and girls, and Panic works with you. Maybe you two could play with that idea and tell me how it works. Panic? How do you feel about that?”
“Kat just waltzes in and she’s in charge of everything I used to do? She’s my boss?”
Kat touched her arm. “He said we talk and figure it out. If you’re doing all he just said? You got too much. We need to split the load. Panic, so far, like two thirds of the gang works for you. Doing all the chores that keep us alive.”
“Plus maybe defenses,” Frosty suggested.
“Oh.” Now Ava felt like an idiot. “Sorry.”
Frosty shrugged. “You’ve done miracles, baby. But now you need to turn those little couch potatoes into fighters, too. I can’t tell you two how to split the work. But Kat’s an adult, legally anyway. She can help.”
Lines hardened around Kat’s mouth. “And I’m the one with street gang experience. Not much, but.”
Maz stretched his arms overhead and cracked his neck. “What do you have in mind for Hotwire, Snowman?”
Frosty met his friend’s eye. “He’s broken, Maz. Maybe he’ll come back to life, maybe not. Leave him be.”
“You’re not worried he’ll challenge you?”
“If he’s better than me, he can have it. Same for you. Or Jake. I’m not worried.”
Maz smirked. “Way to cut me down. So Jake’s warlord. And me?”
Frosty grasped Maz’s right elbow to shake forearms. “My best friend. Always. We’ll see.”
“I checked out the apartments while you slept in. I like the two bedroom next to yours. Keep an eye on you.”
“I’d sleep better,” Frosty agreed. “Thanks.”
Ava sighed in relief. She’d sleep better too, even if Maz vied for her boyfriend’s affections. Having a friend next door to defend them lifted a huge weight off her shoulders.
Maz looked to Kat. “Want my second bedroom?”
“Nope. I like the studio on the other side of you, like Panic’s.” Apparently Kat had accompanied Maz on the apartment-hunting. “Jake, there’s a one-bedroom on Frosty’s other side. Or share with Maz.”
Maz pursed his lips at his classmate. “Wasn’t offering.”
“Do we have a problem, gentlemen?” Frosty inquired. “Get over it.”
Jake shuffled his feet. “I made suggestions earlier. Like, Frosty, we can’t afford to defend all these kids. And Hotwire is a risk.”
“Hotwire isn’t the one challenging me.” Frosty’s voice was silky cool, but his ice blue eyes flashed danger. “You are. Make my day.”
Jake backed up, hands raised in warding, fingers splayed in surrender. “No, Frosty. I will not spar with you. You’re hurt.”
“I would love to dance.” Frosty shoved his shoulders, sending Jake back another few steps.
“Dammit, no!” Jake threw himself backward onto the mats, rolling legs up, and tapped out with both hands.
“Disappointing,” Frosty noted. “I would so love to kick your ass right now.”
After a pregnant moment, Maz broke the stalemate. “I’ll fight you, Frosty. After the tour. Sun sets early in winter. Let’s go.”
“Maz, you can’t,” Ava begged. “His stitches.”
“Panic, you had Ebola. I didn’t.” This was clearly true. Maz stood healthy and strong like an Adonis amid a city of scarecrows. He hadn’t gone hungry a day, and doubtless pressed weights the whole time. “I could wipe the floor with any of you. If Frost needs to blow off some steam, I’m happy to oblige. But later. We’ll lose the light. C’mon.” He reached a hand down and nearly jerked Jake’s shoulder out of its socket.
Ava started to follow them outdoors in concern, but Kat yanked her back. “We’ve got an assignment. Remember?”
Ava eyed her unhappily. The older girl stood arms crossed, freshly limbered by her defense class with the older girls, a far cry from how Ava had attempted to train giggling children. Sensei’s most talented teen girls, the pair had sparred plenty of times. Ava rarely won.
Kat sighed. “I’m not challenging you, Panic. We don’t suffer testosterone. Where do we stand with food? And record-keeping. We probably need a membership roster or something, right? Or…”
Ava nodded. “We need that. Name, age, what they’re good for. To assign chores and rooms and stuff. We have thirty-eight, last I counted.”
“Adults, too?” Kat asked.
“Aside from Hotwire, we don’t call the grownups gang members. I’m kind of worried they’ll demand a share of the food. But we scrounged it. So I have food tucked all over the place.”
Kat nodded judiciously. “Hard to defend that way. Especially from our own people. Show me.”
8
January 1, E-day plus 24.
“Wow, you’ve already got a lot.” Ava was showing Kat around her second majo
r stash by now, in the branch bank across the hall from the dojo. The younger girl squirreled away the protein powders and diet shake mixes among the modular cubicle furniture, her prize stock.
“It goes fast for 38 people now.” Ava changed direction back to the teller’s counter and hopped over. “Back here I keep what I call the diarrhea supplies. Bleach, oral rehydration salts, jello mix, the pink stuff – pink bismuth? Sports drinks. Sugar. And potassium chloride – sometimes you find that. It’s for people who avoid salt for high blood pressure.”
Kat hauled herself stomach-down to peer over the counter, but couldn’t see underneath, so grudgingly spun around and clambered down as well. “Where’d you learn all this?”
“My parents are nurses. Were.”
“You lived with your grandfather, too, right?”
“Don’t, Kat. Frosty’s cardinal rule. We don’t talk about our parents. Drains too much energy.” Ava let Kat look her fill, then slipped over the counter again. “I found a couple survivalist manuals, too. And some of the elderly upstairs are useful. Oh, and Germy’s parents got into survivalist stuff at the end. Preparing just in case.”
“Germy?”
“Jeremy, you know him. Top competitor under 12.” Ava moved on. “And then there’s the canned stuff. That’s awesome, because it doesn’t need cooking. Cooking is hard. Lately I’ve stowed cans in the basement. And the stuff we carried from Maz’s house is still in my kitchen.”
Kat claimed a seat in a loan-officer desk nook by the shuttered windows. “Got a notebook?”
Ava ducked into a cubicle to rummage, and returned armed with a legal pad and a pen.
“Inventory,” Kat reminded her.
“I’m not sure there’s any point,” Ava replied. “Stuff comes in, stuff goes out.”
“Start there. What’s your system?”