But Touré would still be standing here.
“Touré?” Robbie shouted. “It’s me, Robbie.”
Nothing.
“All right, I’m coming down.”
There was a doorstop—a barrel of cooking oil—on the inside of the entrance. Robbie moved it to the roof to hold the door open. Then he used the sunlight to help guide his way down what was an unpleasant-looking metal ladder.
The ladder deposited him into one of the storerooms in the back of the market. He could barely see, but recognized the space because he’d been in it before, looking for any evidence of non-Noot products. Today, the place smelled more like body odor than he remembered, which meant either someone else had been in there or he just hadn’t noticed it before.
“Hello?” he said.
Still nothing.
In the only light he had, he bent down and pulled a torch from his (thankfully) waterproof bag and got it lit. The room flared into view and for a second . . .
No, that can’t be right, he thought.
For just a moment, he thought he saw a figure in the corner of the storeroom, right near the exit to the sales floor. He was taken back to when he thought he saw someone staring at him from the parking garage off Mass Ave. But no, this was just his mind playing tricks.
“Just me,” he said. His voice echoed back, as if affirming this conclusion.
He exited to the main part of the store and started going aisle by aisle, just to confirm that he was indeed alone in the place.
“I guess you’re just my imagination,” he said. Like the door earlier, his imagination didn’t talk back.
He made it to the front, shoved five Noot bricks into his bag, and went back out the way he’d come in.
3
Robbie returned with the five Noot bars late in the afternoon, having taken even longer to return to the dorm than it took him to reach the store. The snow was becoming softer as the day progressed, which increased the number of soft patches, each one more exhausting than the last.
A couple of times, he considered just staying there in the snow. He had food, and he had water, and the snow covering provided some insulation, if not a kind of warmth. He didn’t do it, both because that was a preposterous idea and because Carol and Bethany were relying on him.
He didn’t like being the guy everyone turned to for help, but until there was someone else around for himto turn to, this was how it had to be.
When he finally did make it back to the front of the dorm, he discovered a new problem: The snow was melting a lot faster than was okay under the current circumstances. On the one hand, fast-melting snow was excellent news—the kind they’d been waiting for since the storm ended. On the other hand, when he stood under the window he’d left through in the morning, he was two feet further from the bottom of the sill than expected. And he still wasn’t close enough to the ground to use the front door.
He chucked snowballs at the window for a while, shouting sparingly—not interested in attracting the attention of any wolf in snowshoes . . . or a hawk maybe—until Bethany showed up.
“Oh, hey, I have a rope,” she said, disappearing inside. She returned a minute later with thick twine that barely met the definition of rope. It was sturdy enough to lift the food to the window—which was how they used it first—but barely capable of supporting Robbie.
“Where’d you find this?” he asked.
“It was holding together some furniture in the basement,” she said. “It’ll work. I put some knots in it for you.”
There were a number of things Robbie hated having to do when he was in grade school, and that he was also objectively terrible at; in those cases, he either didn’t make any effort to accomplish them and thus failed, or he did make an effort to do them and still failed. He used to argue with the teachers, counselors, gym instructors, his parents, or whoever, that surely learning how to do this thinghe was unable to do wouldn’t be important later in life.
Years later, his life depended on an intermediate rope-climbing exercise.
It didn’t end up being all that bad. There was a wall to help him along the way, so rather than go knot to knot in a free climb, he scaled it as he might a mountainside. The one setback came when it turned out the furniture Bethany tied the other end to wasn’t heavy enough to support his weight. He fell, but only five feet, and into soft snow.
Back inside, exhausted, he felt like he’d actually done some heroic hunter-gatherer stuff.
Behold, I have slain five Noot beasts, he thought.
He got out of the heavy wet clothes and into some dry ones, then plopped himself down in front of the fire with a blanket, looking forward to an evening without any additional physical labors.
Then the women told him they wanted to move.
“You want to what?” he asked.
“As soon as possible,” Carol said.
“Why?” he asked. “And also, no, don’t be ridiculous; it’s impossible to get anywhere out there. But more importantly: why?”
Then he got the story of the man in the room on the sixth floor.
He turned to Bethany first.
“Did you search the building?” he asked.
“What? No, dude, are you insane?”
“We agreed to not be alone,” Carol said. “If he confronts one of us he will confront both of us.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. God, I wish Touré were here. Okay, I’ll go floor to floor while you two stay put. We never did a full search of the place anyway, right?”
“Hey, maybe it’s a ghost,” Bethany said, uttering the most not-helpful thing he’d heard in his entire life.
“Please don’t say that,” he said. “That would make this so much worse.”
4
A debate ensued regarding the exact definition of a full and comprehensive search.
It was eventually decided—on a vote Robbie lost—that the very best way to do this was to open every locked door. But while they did have someone accomplished at getting through locked doors, Bethany needed to stay with Carol, and taking all three of them along on this search would just elongate the whole endeavor.
So, Robbie took the axe instead. He needed to have a weapon anyway, and most of the doors were made of wood, so it all worked nicely.
Using an axe to get through a wooden door hadn’t been a part of Robbie’s grade school curriculum either, but if it had been, he would have failed at it, too.
The first door he encountered—the third door on the second floor—took ten swings and a lot of punching. But by the tenth or eleventh door he’d gotten quite good at it.
He finished the search of the dorm rooms just before sunset. That left only a sublevel storage room, which they checked together with the help of a torch and Bethany’s lock-picking skills. It was a boiler room, and, like everywhere else, it had no one unexpected inside.
“Okay, the place is clear,” Robbie said, once they were back in the common room. He’d collapsed on a couch. He could hear his hands throbbing and could barely move his arms. “Can we stay now?”
“Oh, no, we can’t,” Carol said. “He could have avoided you; you were making so much noise.”
“Carol . . .”
“I’m willing to wait until the front door is clear, but after that, I would like to go, please. I no longer feel safe here.”
He sighed and sat up.
“I have to ask—” he began.
“No, Robert, you don’t.”
“I do. Someone has to. Is it possible you imagined this?”
Carol delivered the most withering stare a blind person was capable of. Robbie was too tired to care. He looked to Bethany.
“Tell me you aren’t thinking it too,” he said.
“Yeah, sure,” Bethany said, “but it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. Either there was someone here or there wasn’t. There’s no gray area.”
“No, dude, what matters is, she believes it. There’s only th
ree of us, right? That’s her reality or whatever, and we’re stuck in it with her.”
He sighed, sat back, and held on to the next thing he wanted to say. If there was ever an occasion to bring up the wolf, this was it. Except he was sure it wouldn’t go well.
The morning after their first night in the building, Carol insisted a wolf had gotten inside, but that she petted him and he went away. He’d never challenged this, but it sounded a lot like someone who missed her dog very much had a dream about him. Now she was interacting with people who weren’t there and making suggestions that could put their lives in danger, and he didn’t know what to do.
“What if adhering to her reality gets us killed?” he asked Bethany. “Isn’t this how we lost Touré? You said yourself he was trying to play the hero, when the truth is, he needed us to have his back. Now he’s gone and probably . . . I mean, it’s bad out there. If he was hurt . . .”
“I will not be compared to Touré, thank you,” Carol said. “I miss him too, but don’t do that. Someone was here, Robbie. He frightened me when he didn’t need to, and that makes this worse. I’m leaving as soon as I can, alone or otherwise. Excuse me.”
Carol, and then Bethany, got up. They left together.
Robbie sat alone, listening to the wind through the tiny crevices in the walls.
“Well . . . crap,” he said.
Nine
Win
1
Touré’s fever broke after almost a week, right around when Win ran out of snow to cool him down with. That was because of a thaw that started the day after the storm, when a blazing sun appeared and pretended that whole winter thing was a scheduling error.
The sunlight turned the city into a steam bath, despite which they didn’t see grass or pavement for five days, among rivers of water running for the sewers. Since it appeared half of those sewers were backed up, this resulted in a lot of standing water, but it was drinkable fresh water, so nobody much minded.
Certainly, none of the pigs did. They were the first to show up once the sun came back out. If anything, it seemed like there were more of them than before.
Instant population boom, Win thought. And I have to get us past them.
Elton walked up next to her, looked through the window, and snorted.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “They look hungry, don’t they?”
Elton huffed.
“Yes, you’re hungry too. But I don’t think this town’s safe for either of us. Let’s get you out of Boston. Then you can decide if you’re better off foraging than hanging with me.”
Elton looked at her.
“Cambridge?” She nodded toward Touré. “That’s what he thinks too.”
Touré groaned from the other side of the room. He was wrapped up in nearly all the blankets they had, like a baby in a receiving blanket. This was to try to combat the violent chills that had been wracking his body for the past day. Win didn’t understand how someone could have a 104-degree fever and complain about being cold, but she wasn’t a doctor.
The fever was down to 100 now. He wasn’t entirely lucid yet, unless he was always like this.
“Figured it out,” he said, ostensibly to her. There was no guarantee, because while she and Elton were the only ones there, Touré also held conversations with people who weren’t strictly real.
“What did you figure out?” she asked.
“We weren’t home,” he said. “That’s how come.”
“We weren’t home?”
“Right.”
“You aren’t making any sense,” she said.
She knelt down next to him and tried his forehead. Yes, much better.
“Probably not,” he said. “None of it makes any sense. You’re pretty.”
“Thanks. Don’t make me regret not leaving you in that snowdrift.”
“Oh, wow, that was real? Thought I imagined that.”
“That was real. Listen. I was thinking of taking you up on your suggestion.”
“I’ve made a lot of suggestions.”
“The one about the subway.”
He furrowed his brow.
“I don’t remember this,” he said.
“I think we have a window. The snow’s melted, it’s warm, and we need to get out of the city before the real winter cold hits.”
“Subways,” he said. “I remember. You want to take the train out of town. But we can just ride the horsey out.”
“The streets are overrun with pigs.”
“Cops run this town, man.”
“Touré.”
“I’m here,” he said. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
2
He didn’t like the plan. Elton also didn’t like the plan, so Win had to sit down with both parties, laying out the facts as she understood them, until they both reluctantly agreed.
First, though, they had to clean Touré up. For starters, he needed new pants: The wounded leg portion of his old pair was torn open from when Win had bandaged him, which by itself made them essentially useless. Worse—and what necessitated a completely new set of clothes—was that he’d soiled himself.
Against his protests—she was not going to go to Newbury Street to pick up something cool—he dressed in sweats obtained in the gym’s terribly convenient branded products shop. He also self-performed a sponge bath in the ice-cold water of the men’s locker room, in between outfits.
Win had a bath too, and a change of clothes, and would now be riding into battle in yoga pants and shorts. It wasn’t remotely practical for winter, but the clothing was comfortable, the weather was warm enough for it, and there’d be opportunities to change in Cambridge if they made it there.
Touré hopped out of the locker room an hour later looking like a living representative of the species for the first time since he and Win had met.
“I could use a shave,” he said. “My whole face itches.”
“Later. How do you feel?”
“I’m here. When’s my first lesson?”
“There’s only one,” she said. “Don’t squirm too much when I tie you down.”
“Aw, not again.”
“You’ll be upright this time.”
Win walked Elton outside first, then took Touré down the stairs and helped him into the saddle.
Elton protested.
“We talked about this,” she said to the horse.
He griped, but didn’t run off or try to buck Touré loose, which were two other entirely possible outcomes with historical precedent.
“I think he actually likes you,” she said as she tied Touré’s legs to the saddle.
“I’m likable,” he said. “Ask anyone. Hey, watch the wound.”
“I know. How’s that feel?”
“It sucks. Only seven on the suck scale, though. It was a ten before.”
“Good enough,” she said. “What I meant was, the first time I got on his back, he ran for something like two hours straight to try to shake me off. You he’s fine with.”
“Then I’m very glad he likes me. You’re not gonna tie my arms down again, are you?”
“No. Hold the rope, there and there.”
“Got it. Two hours straight ahead gets us out of Boston.”
“You’ll never make it that far.”
She slipped the quiver onto her back, and with the bow in her right hand, she took Elton’s lead with her left.
“Which way?” she asked.
“Are you asking me, or Elton?” Touré asked.
“You.”
“We want the red line, so, that way.”
He pointed. Not far away, a subway station entrance erupted from the ground, with a Downtown Crossing sign that was half red and half orange.
“Easy enough,” she said. “It goes the right way?”
“It goes four ways, but one of them is the right way.”
There were a ton of pigs in front of them. It remained the case that they didn’t know what to make of Elton, so at least initially, they were mor
e interested in getting out of the way than in squaring up to attack.
“It’s like the boars of Pamplona, man,” Touré said.
“I was thinking more Hitchcock,” she said.
“The Birds! You’re right. The ending. You’re right. Yeah.”
“Keep your voice down.”
The station was practically next to the gym entrance, in terms of actual, measurable distance. Measured by boar headcount, it was a lot farther.
But they made it. At least as far as the top of the stairs.
So it was all going great, except that Elton took one look at the subway station entrance, whinnied, and refused to go down.
“Come on,” she said. “I know, it looks bad, but we don’t have any other options. We had this conversation.”
“Maybe he didn’t know it was an underground train,” Touré said. “They could just have an el where he comes from. Are you from Chicago, Elton?”
“You aren’t helping,” she said.
Behind them, a phalanx of boars had formed, led by perhaps the largest one of them she’d ever seen. It looked big enough to take on a wolf, maybe big enough it would think it had a chance with a horse.
“Touré,” she said as she let go of the lead and nocked an arrow. “I’m going to need you to encourage Elton to go down.”
“Why?” he asked, trying to turn in the saddle.
“No, don’t turn around. Elton might turn with you. Just get him down.”
“How do I do that?”
“Hit him in the sides with your heels.”
The lead boar’s attention shifted to her. It was simply massive, snorting like a bull about to charge, as if they actually were at Pamplona and this was going to be a stampede.
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said to the boar. “Look at me. Show me those big eyes.”
“It’s not working,” Touré said. “He just complains louder.”
“Elton, buddy,” Win said, “you have to trust me here.”
She could hear them inching closer. The goddamn pigs were flanking them.
Win took a step closer to Elton. “Touré, can you reach the quiver?”
The Apocalypse Seven Page 20