by Ginger Booth
Frosty scowled at him, and took a sip of Panic’s earthy chamomile tea. Not a taste sensation, but breathing steam into winter-dry sinuses felt wonderful, and warmed his stomach and fingers.
Kat surprised him by going next. “I think white-only is smart. Gang should be family, not like a classroom. Same language, culture, clothes. It’s all about identity. If we can’t identify with black trash, then we should stick to white trash. Sorry, Maz. That’s my opinion. But unlike the rest of you, this is my second gang, not my first.”
Maz pursed his lips at her. Frosty wondered if the two of them would ever get past it. They dated sophomore year, and really clicked. But when Kat started flirting with the gang and drugs, Maz’s rich grandfather put his foot down and demanded Maz break off with her. Unsure, the 15-year-old Maz bowed to his wishes, and regretted it ever since. And now here they were, both in a gang.
“My turn?” Jake asked. “I think we should be more selective. OK, Frosty, I concede on the little kids. You want to protect them, fine. But accepting every teenager who turns up, that’s not smart. We should choose people we can depend on.”
Frosty had to respond. “The problem with that, is they’re all useless at first. They’ve been sick, starving, scared, alone. They’ve never stood on their own feet before. They don’t have friends yet with us. That takes time.”
“Point. We could accept them provisionally. Everyone gets a trial period. Weeks, whatever. Until they prove they’re worth something.”
Maz asked, “And race is part of that? Ethnicity?”
“Compatibility,” Jake argued. “Sorry, Maz, I agree with Frosty. Except I’d be even more selective. Though it’s hard to say. I mean, Kat and Panic make all the girls useful, and the kids. The sick ones can’t work, and they get better or they don’t. Johnny, I thought he was a waste of space. But then Frosty found the perfect role for him. God knows I don’t want the latrines.”
Disgusted, Maz poured the coffee for the three of them. “It is morally bankrupt to decide based on race. And Frosty, you think so too.”
Kat pounced to add a huge spoonful of creamer and three packets of sugar to her mug. Jake drank it black. Frosty’s hot cocoa returned to him more than half full. Now that everyone else had their treats, he settled to enjoy the rest instead of filching from his girlfriend.
“Baby, what’s your take?”
She cuddled her tea close, and near broke his heart. “They reminded me of the rapists. I lost my cool. I’m not proud of that. But I don’t want them in my home.”
As the warm sugar spread to his bloodstream, Frosty realized he just couldn’t do it, could not accept blacks into the gang. He needed the comfort of family. He wouldn’t justify it. It was simply the best he could do right now. “I’m with the girls. It’s about family. Maybe I’m broken right now, Maz, like Panic said before. But my gut reaction was, I won’t risk my life for them. There’s no room for ‘them.’ Only ‘us.’”
He paused to savor a final gulp of cocoa. “And we want a bad-ass pose for outsiders. Our street cred. We’re at a disadvantage. People see a gang of blacks in hoodies, or tattooed Hispanics in hair nets, they’re already scared. Middle class white kids, eh. We should look more intimidating.”
Maz grumbled, “White supremacists look pathetic, Frost.”
“I’m starting to vibrate.” He laughed, and pushed Panic off his knee. “Break-dancing!”
Frosty threw open the office door and sailed into the dojo, members scattering as he launched into a tumbling routine. His friends lagged him, but joined soon enough, laughing and frolicking and slamming bags in his awesome playroom.
“Break-dancing is black, Frost,” Maz reminded him. But Frosty laughingly just swirled on past. The sun set early, and foolishness yielded to the daily fighting lessons, and Maz told Panic never to feed him sugar without protein. Spoilsport.
Of course, when the sugar crash came, Frosty dropped blotto to the mats. Endorphins fled like the heat death of the universe. His mind morosely turned to his wrecked face in the mirror, and morons who thought it was cool to sing about fucking someone up the ass. Too bad he didn’t spring a new white-only policy while he was high as a kite. Now…maybe he should wait. Play it by ear. Maz’s good opinion mattered.
Before dismissal, he announced to the gang that he was considering the new guideline. But he assured the few non-whites they were grandfathered, already family. And that was the bottom line – family. Put that way, the message was well received, with cheers. Even Maz looked mollified. Good enough.
This dojo was getting too small for group meetings. Always something else to do. That hot cocoa sure was nice, though. And to think, he mostly started dating Panic because she was easy. Conveniently located in the same apartment complex, she fit into his packed school-and-dojo schedule. But she was smart and tough and he’d be dead without her. Best choice I ever made!
13
January 18, E-day plus 41,
Frosty’s 18th birthday.
Perched on his throne – the folding banquet table in the dojo – Frosty watched appreciatively as Panic sashayed toward him with his morning mystery cup. She was in a happy-body mood. As was he. They’d managed to make love this morning for the first time since the rape.
Some yutz teased her for looking so satisfied this morning. She turned all saucy and slapped her butt. A chorus of catcalls fell on her. “Nice tail!” “We should call her Tail Panic!”
She reached the clearing in front of him and gave them a deep bow, presenting her butt to him alone. Those gorgeous rock-hard glutes were how such a tiny person managed to kick like a mule. He appreciated their curves fully.
“Tail Panic! I like it! New nickname!” she called out.
“I don’t like it,” he muttered. “The name. The tail is quite nice. The name lacks dignity.”
She jutted a hip and parked a fist on it. “You call yourself Frosty the Snowman, and talk to me about dignity?”
He laughed silently. “Whatcha got for my birthday breakfast?”
“Vegetable soup, with garlic croutons.” She presented an enormous mug.
“Ooh, you know what I like, baby. Lots of carrots!” He gave her a kiss, and applied himself to his luxurious treat. Amazing how good salty canned soup tasted these days. He would have turned his nose up at this…how long ago? The onlookers didn’t bother him – they got their own breakfast, and he was running late. Oh! Forgot! He leaned in to whisper in her ear. “I’m whatever age they think I am. OK?”
Panic nodded emphatically. She sure turned out smarter than he expected, for a girl from some crappy Public School Umpty-Two in Chinatown. Frosty approved. Her deep mug of hot veggie soup for breakfast was heaven, a perfect birthday present.
The last members trickled in for morning briefing while he enjoyed it to the hilt. Not the full gang anymore – they were up to 150 kids now, and only the group leaders attended in his dojo. They’d collect their people later. He let them start on reports.
Brawnda now had water collection facilities rigged for the dozen buildings they’d pacified, the middle third of the block. One proved to have a rare swimming pool out back. Apparently the pool shock chemicals would vastly expand and simplify their drinking water bleaching program. Opinions varied on the wisdom of drinking the pool water, heavy with winterizing chemicals, but she hoped to provide a laundry facility.
Frosty pointed to Jake to do the honors for today’s gleaning plan. As they already knew, the game had gone sour. For a couple weeks, Maz and Kat were able to duplicate Frosty and Panic’s friendly neighbor routine. Jake was a washout at making friends and influencing neighbors, but more and more, floors were hostile from the get-go, and soon he and Hotwire led a team to crash in and pacify if Frosty and Maz found too few friendlies. Yesterday neither neighborly team found a single floor to handle kindly. And there was little food left to recover from the dead. The living had wised up and stolen it already. Today’s plan was two teams storming floors by force.
Kat wa
s brief. She gave vital statistics. And today they’d stage a group spaghetti feed from gang stores to celebrate Frosty’s birthday.
Panic raised her hand to be recognized. “Everyone needs to lay off the toilet kids. C’mon, they’re just doing their job. They help you wash your hands. I also want to try surveillance with some of my kids.”
Frosty pressed his lips at her, and she stepped back to cede the floor. He’d already said no to reconnaissance missions with kids under 12. “I want to emphasize what Panic said about the toilet kids. Hygiene matters. If you fail to wash your hands, if you hassle Johnny or the toilet kids, these are serious infractions. Piss me off enough times by peeing outside the designated urinals, or being mean to children, I will exile you! Remind your teams that I’m serious about this. Johnny? You don’t look so good, buddy.”
“No,” Johnny agreed, with a self-effacing smile. He looked pasty white, with sunken eyes, his frame more hollow than ever. He’d suffered diarrhea for days. “Guess I should have washed my hands! Joking. I wash my hands more than anybody. My apartment ate an under-cooked rat. Bad idea. We’re all sick. Cook your rats really well, folks. But our new hospital is open! Slept there myself last night. Thanks to Panic for watching out for the toilet kids for me. They don’t like being teased.”
Frosty backed him up. “Absolutely. No teasing or being mean to kids. Thanks, Johnny. Hope you’re back with us soon.” Dehydrated and weak from starvation, the beanpole latrine czar headed back to bed. “Angel?”
Their head nurse nodded. “We can help, as much as anyone can. We moved Panic’s diarrhea pharmacy over there. Anybody sick has to move to building 4. No visitors. But your friends can drop off stuff at the door. ”
“How many Ebola cases?” Frosty inquired.
“Eleven now,” Angel replied. “Still no repeats. If you had it already, you’re immune. If you’ve been exposed lots, and never got sick, you’re immune.”
“Good. That’s it? Cool! Happy my birthday –”
“Wait! How old are you?” Hotwire called out.
“How old do you think I am?”
“I bet you’re 21 today, legal to drink at last!”
Frosty laughed. He revved his fist with his signature speed-bag, then thrust straight upward. “Let’s go, White Tigers!” He reached to collect his soup mug, but Pebbles already made off with it to lick.
Instead Panic brought him a ridiculous snowy white knee-length wool coat, with deep slits up the backside like a buttoned-on beaver tail. To go with it, she supplied bunny-tail fluffy earmuffs and his current favorite neon hot pink and lime green fringed scarf. He laughed out loud.
“You’re going to have a great birthday!” she asserted.
Don’t tempt fate, baby. He crossed himself superstitiously, a bad habit he picked up surrounded by Catholics – his Jewish mom would have felt hurt. Then he shrugged into the silly coat and gave her a quick kiss. “I’ve already had a great birthday. Now we work.”
The middle-aged woman showed the whites of her eyes, sunken into bruised sockets, peering out from a door cracked only the width of her chain. “No, I wouldn’t do that! I never threw sewage out the window!”
“Ma’am,” Frosty countered, “everyone has done it. And you did it. And I gave you a warning. Do you remember what I said would happen if you did it again?”
He pretended this was a rhetorical question. He didn’t recall the conversation, or her. Just another vaguely brown starving grownup, on a 10th floor this time, which sucked.
“It wasn’t you! I don’t… He was…” Her eyes lost focus and she swayed a little.
Cool, neither of them remembered. And she was a goner, dead woman standing. He glanced to Panic’s small group and shook his head slightly. Don’t believe everything you hear. “I said you need to relocate to the first floor. There you have convenient access to the latrines. Time to go. Five minutes to pack one bag. Unchain the door.”
She shut the door, threw the deadbolt, and scurried away. It didn’t pay to give her time to find a butcher knife. Frosty immediately took three steps backward and kicked the door in. By habit, he signaled the others to wait. He strode in himself after her footsteps, into some kind of windowless junk room.
Ah, another gun-owner! He grabbed her by the shoulder and thrust her out of there, raised his left hand on guard, and acquired her pistol with his right. On this, he merely checked the safety, then slipped it into a pocket, to clank with the ones he’d acquired on the 4th and 6th floors. Capacious pockets. Panic chose well on this silly coat. He enjoyed the feel of the tail swish, too. “Is there a bag in here I can get for you, ma’am? Light luggage or something?”
She tried to edge in and he shoved her into the wall.
“It’s…the purple…” She pointed shakily.
Frosty flicked his lighter and spotted a quilted bag-lady monstrosity in purple. He plucked it up and handed it to her. “I recommend food, ma’am. And wear full winter clothing, of course.” He caught Ava’s eye, and pointed to the junk room, making a finger-pistol. She’d dispatch a kid to search for ammo. “It’s very cold outside. Food in the kitchen?” He took a courteous grasp on her elbow to steer her thataway. She cringed away from his touch. He could hardly blame her.
This place reeked. They all did. But he passed a closed-door room where the stench made even him gag, much of it as he’d smelled by now. She’d kept a corpse or two close. Bloody bedding lay heaped in a corner of the living room, and mostly-clean bedding on the couch. These rooms she passed without interest, hugging her ugly satchel and dragging her slippered feet. Frosty hoped she could walk down the stairs a few flights. Throwing her would ruin his coat.
She started to pluck out her paltry food reserves. A partial jug of maple syrup. Pink bismuth tablets. A half-stack of saltines. A few tubes of the damned bean soup mix, near impossible to cook. A can of sauerkraut. The smelly remains of a yap-yap dog, uncooked, littered the little table. She really wasn’t worth climbing ten flights of stairs, yet she managed to generate sewage to throw below. What a sorry nuisance.
“You collected snow?” he asked, to pass the time. “Let me pour this into a bottle for you.” A meager cup or two of water lingered at the bottom of a dishpan on the counter. Her hand reached toward a cabinet, then she snatched it back. Frosty opened the cabinet to find it housed her liquor supply. And a water bottle, which he filled. “Don’t want to leave the booze behind, ma’am. It has trade value.”
“It…does?”
“Better to pack food first,” he assured her. Panic passed the doorway and he glanced heavenward, to convey this was boring.
A sudden hammering of feet approached in the hallway. Frosty set aside his water project for Panic to finish, and poked his head out.
“Frosty!” A runner, maybe 13, burst into the apartment. “Jake needs you across the street. A ‘delegation.’ Grownup asshole committee.”
“Be right there. Catch your breath.” He leaned back into the kitchen and snagged the woman’s saltines to hand to the boy. “Water too.”
“Thanks!”
“You can’t –!” the woman objected querulously.
“He can,” Panic assured her. But Frosty was already running.
14
January 18, E-day plus 41.
The ‘grownup asshole committee’ proved easy to find. They accosted Jake’s team across the street, standing on the sidewalk of the building he was fleecing today. Frosty assumed the T-shirts drooping from their hands served as white flags at some point in the proceedings. The five men of the delegation were mixed browns, most still showing the slow-healing bruises of Ebola, but the leader healthy if haggard. Adults in their prime got the disease at its worst, and didn’t recover as quickly as Frosty had.
They were recovering now, he thought grimly. And growing frisky.
Jake stood ramrod straight, engaged in a staring contest with his counterpart, a couple kids backing him up. The rest must have gone back to work. “They demand to talk to you. Nacky, meet Fr
osty.”
Nacky grimaced at him before turning to the gang leader. “I am Nakhtmin. Representing the block association.”
“Really? How exciting! I wasn’t aware there was a block association. I’d love to join. You should have sent someone to say hi.” Frosty extended a gloved hand to shake.
“Don’t play with me, ‘Frosty the Snowman’! You’re a gang, and we won’t tolerate it!”
Ah, well, Frosty didn’t want to touch the turd anyway. He thrust his hand into his pocket, setting the pistols to clank. “I lead an alternate block association,” he corrected Nacky. “You live in this building?” He smiled up to admire the grimy stone ugliness.
Nacky waved further along toward 6th Avenue in dismissal. “Never mind where I live!”
“No,” Frosty agreed. “Say, Nacky, I haven’t noticed any water catchments on your end of the block. You hide them out back or something?”
“That’s none of your concern!”
“So was there a point to this little chat? Since you seem unwilling to…chat.” Jake and the guys snickered behind him. He pointed downward with his left hand to suggest they leave it to him how to aggravate Nacky.
“We will not tolerate you expanding any further up the block! You have been warned! You racist dogs! We hear about you. You chase out black children!” For someone named whatever it was, he spoke unusually clear English, with only a trace of…wherever Nachtmensch came from.
Frosty narrowed his eyes. “There were a few black teenagers. They accosted my girlfriend, joked about raping themselves a white girl. She had recently been sexually assaulted. By blacks. Me, too. We took offense. They’re gone. You can take that as racism if you like. But oddly, I see no white men on your committee. Were they all busy today?”