Grace is silent but for a few deep breaths. “I don’t know. I want to go right away, but maybe Maria’s right—we should wait a little while. We almost died like twenty times today. There’s no point if we die before we get there.”
“I’m ready when you are. I don’t want to eat Maria’s food any longer than necessary.”
“Is that why you’re acting so weird? Maria’s nice.”
“I know, but I think nice may be directly related to the quantity of food left. In a week or two, she’ll be slitting our throats in our sleep.”
Grace makes an exasperated noise. “No, she really won’t. I’m going to sleep. Love you, crazy person.”
“Love you, sane person.”
She laughs and rolls to her side. I swear she’s snoring in seconds. Jerk.
***
I wake at a noise from the street. Grace and I leap out of bed and smash into each other on our way to the window. Jorge enters a minute later, flashlight pointed to the floor, with Maria just behind. “Where are they?”
“We don’t know,” Grace whispers. “Not right out front.”
The sound of hard wheels on concrete nears. Jorge turns off the flashlight and pushes aside a curtain. The moon highlights his silhouette, but he’s invisible to the street. We rush beside him at a shout from outside. No matter how dark the city seemed, light always seeped in from somewhere—streetlights, houses, cars. Now, the moon and starlight are just enough to glint off the steel of a shopping cart and pick out four figures around it. The cart rolls halfway up the curb across the street, a flashlight flicks on, and the people disappear into the dark.
Glass shatters. There’s no one to stop them breaking into houses to look for supplies. I can’t blame them, but they’re loud. The last time we checked, the zombies from Fourth Avenue were down the street, and they’re probably on their way up right now.
I would warn them, but for all we know they’re murderers. If that’s the case, I doubt they’ll say sorry and go on their merry way empty-handed. We watch as they return, things clatter into the cart, and then the figures recede again. I hear the moans and slow footsteps before the zombies come into sight. The easiest to see wear light clothing, and there are plenty more who don’t.
The cart jumps from the curb. A flashlight beam wobbles in the dark. “We gotta go!” a boy yells, voice still high enough to be mid-teens or younger. “Lucien!”
The cart rolls up the street with his dark shape bent over the handle. He calls for his friends but he doesn’t stop, and I don’t blame him for that, either. The zombies reach the spot where he stood half a minute before. Bodies move and sway, but the details are lost in the night.
A flash of light and the crack of a bullet make us jump. More shots follow. What looks to be a male in dark clothing breaks through the crowd. He turns for a moment, reluctance in his backward steps, and then runs after the cart. Screams filter through the pack, rough screams, followed by high-pitched, agonized shrieks, followed by silence. It’s better not to have to see someone torn apart, but hearing is almost as ghastly.
I push my damp hair behind my ear and pull my sweaty shirt from my back. They should’ve stayed in that house. It was stupid to run. We stand by the window a while longer. Some zombies have followed the cart. The wet, chewing noises must be the others eating. Eventually, it tapers off into sounds we can barely hear.
Maria turns to us with eyes that shine in the gloom. “I have a gun at my apartment.”
“Maria Diaz has a gun?” Jorge asks.
“Believe me, I don’t use it. Pat gave it to me a long time ago.”
I don’t know the first thing to do with a gun except accidentally pull the trigger and shoot off my own face, but those kids had guns. If someone with a gun gets in here, and we don’t have one, the fight would be over before it began.
Jorge keeps his gaze out the window. Finally, he lets the curtain fall and says, “We need that gun.”
Chapter 30
I stare at the dark ceiling until it turns gray. Sleeping is hard enough under normal circumstances. Inevitably, I wake somewhere between two and three in the morning to wait for the call from my mother that came without rhyme or reason—sometimes every night for a week and sometimes not for weeks—and fall back to sleep around five. It doesn’t matter if I’ve turned off my phone, or, apparently, if my mother is dead; I still wake. Adding a million zombies and some looters into the mix makes even five in the morning pass with me blinking into the dark.
It took me years to learn to give in. Rather than lie in bed and crave sleep, I read or write or surf the internet or watch TV until my brain powers down for those last hours before the alarm. And all of those time-killers are now impossible in my non-electric world.
When I can see the shapes of furniture, I rise and peek out the window. The same lines of parked cars. Zombies are still clustered in the street and on the opposite sidewalk. Fewer than the night before, I think, but the thirty that are there guarantee I won’t step foot outside. No way, no how.
The floorboards creak on my way to the bathroom, where I pee in the bucket and use as little water as possible to brush my teeth. On second thought, I swallow the minty foam. Water is water. I eye the bookcases in the living room. A book sounds like heaven after so many hours with unpleasant thoughts.
I tiptoe toward the closest bookcase on the right, past where Maria sleeps on the sofa bed and Jorge on the office floor, and continue on my mission when no one stirs. I give Cassie a nod of approval at the assortment of titles and pass over horror—we’re living in a horror novel. I’m about to ease out some easy to handle women’s fiction when the shelf below catches my eye.
The books have names such as Edible Plants, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, and Survival Training. It’s the wacky prepper bookshelf, but it’s also the shelf that offers me a way to contribute something. I pull out four books and head to the kitchen, where the espresso machine taunts me from the counter. I give it the finger, sit at the table and open the first book.
Maria shuffles into the kitchen a couple of hours later. I look up from my pad of notes. Her eyes are barely open, the right side of her hair has gone horizontal, and she has a hand to her forehead. She does not look the tiniest bit like a morning person.
“What are you doing in here so early?” she asks. I hold up a book. She nods but then raises the hand that doesn’t clasp her forehead. “Wait, I still don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I was reading about sanitation.”
“Okay.” She drops into a chair, eyes closed. “Why?”
Disappointment floods in. I’ve been studying this shit, no pun intended, for hours, and thought she’d be impressed, especially since Maria is the one who brought up sanitation. This is why I don’t try to make people like me: I become that kid who seeks approval and is crushed when she doesn’t get it.
“Because we don’t have a bathroom?” I answer in a clipped tone.
“True.” Maria opens her eyes and pats my hand. “Sorry. One thing you need to know is that I don’t speak until after coffee. You need to know this so I don’t kill you.”
“Or so I don’t kill you.”
She rises from the table with a laugh. “That, too.”
“Does this mean we get coffee?” I ask. I’ve restricted myself to water and not much of it.
“Listen mama, if we don’t get coffee, every one of us is going to die because I’m going to kill us all.” Maria raises a finger. “At least for today. Maybe I can deal without it tomorrow but, today, I’m going to have me my fucking cup of coffee.”
She pulls a bag of ground espresso from the kitchen cabinets, stares at the espresso machine as if it’s a spaceship that just touched down, then rustles around in a cabinet above the fridge before she victoriously pulls out a French press. “Cassie doesn’t like coffee. Just that fancy shit. But I knew she’d come through. It’s probably Peter’s.”
“Who’s Peter?”
“Her boyfriend. He’s an assh
ole, but he likes coffee.”
“Well, he can’t be that bad, then.” She mutters another oath, and I grin. “You curse a lot in the morning. So, how are we going to heat the fucking water?”
“On the fucking stove,” she says. “And God help anyone who tries to stop me.”
***
I’ve dumped powdered milk and several spoons of sugar in my mug. If this is the last cup of coffee I’m ever going to drink, it’s going to be good.
“You want some coffee with your sugar?” Jorge asks. He sits at the kitchen table hunched over his cup. If I have to be holed up with people, I’m glad it’s with a bunch of caffeine addicts.
I point at him. “You’re not much better, Mister. I saw you dip that spoon into the sugar bowl a few times. But I’ll admit it’s possible I have a slight sugar problem.”
“Sylvie doesn’t eat real food,” Grace says. She’s drinking hers black, since there’s no soy milk, raw milk, or minimally processed sugar.
“There’s milk in here,” I say. “That’s real food.”
“It’s powdered. And cow’s milk is for baby cows.”
“And soy milk is a travesty of food products. How is it even milk? How can you milk a bean? Do they have little boobs?”
Grace holds an invisible soybean in the air and pretends to milk it with two fingers. “Right underneath. They’re invisible to the naked eye.”
Maria snorts. Jorge examines us over his mug, brown eyes twinkling. “You ladies are whack jobs.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I say.
“You should.” He gestures at the book-laden table. “What’s going on here?”
“I was reading while you all got your beauty sleep. I think we need to dig an outhouse. It says to dig it far away so you don’t contaminate everything.” It suddenly seems presumptuous that I’ve suggested it at all. “That is, if you guys even want an outhouse. It’s just an idea.”
“It’s a good idea,” Jorge says, and crosses to the window. “I thought I might end up in a lot of places, but I never thought I’d need an outhouse. I can knock some fences down, make a bigger yard. I’d put it on that end, since the street slopes.”
I’m gratified at the animation in his voice. Helping out doesn’t mean I can’t cut and run at any time, although I don’t want to cut and run yet; it’s been a pleasant breakfast so far, even if it is expired peanut butter, jam and crackers. They’re nice and they’re caffeine addicts.
“Won’t people know we’re here if we pull down the fences?” Grace asks.
“They’ll know we’re here if they see an outhouse,” Jorge says, which is a good point. “If we dump it on the street, they’ll see it. We could store it in one of the basements for a while, but that will attract bugs and animals. Let’s see what’s out there and then decide.”
We agree the first step of any course of action is to check for neighbors, whether alive or dead. Jorge says he’ll make noise in the yard while we watch windows. “I get shot at, you run,” he says with a laugh, hammer in hand.
We follow him out and watch in our assigned directions. I’ve heard that if you want to see movement over a wide area, you should keep your eyes unfocused. I try it, feeling vaguely ninja-like, but after Jorge begins to hammer on the shed there’s no need for spy techniques. It’s obvious who’s home, and they’re no longer human. We note the windows that don’t remain empty, of which there are more than a few but not as many as expected.
We go inside before we excite them into window-breaking and start on the next step—a visit to the roof and a mattress from upstairs. Like I thought, the door in the foyer hides the staircase to the second floor of the brownstone. It also hides every item Cassie decided she couldn’t part with—which could very well be everything that ever crossed her path. Once we’ve tripped over assorted boxes and bags, we step through the doorway and into the parlor floor.
The floor-to-ceiling windows brighten the room the way the ones below can’t, and they give a much better view of what’s on the street—still zombies, and a lot of them. The furniture is old but nice. A mantel sits on one wall, but the fireplace area has been sealed by drywall, with a few logs artfully stacked in the remaining space. It’s a good thing we don’t need heat in the spring. After this comes the sweltering New York City summer, and maybe by winter we won’t have to worry about zombies at all.
I stop with my hand on a side table. Even if every last zombie rots away, it’s not as if I’ll be happily ensconced in my own apartment this winter, paying ConEd for my electricity and luxuriating in my radiator heat. I try to envision what it will look like, but I genuinely can’t. I don’t know how to stay warm in the winter, how to grow food, how to raise animals. I don’t know how to do those things in the country, for fuck’s sake, much less in New York City, where there is no farmland, no livestock, and no abundance of trees to cut for firewood—not that I have a fireplace in which to burn it.
I’ve been scared up until now, but it’s been a moment-to-moment kind of terror: Leaving the hospital, getting past zombies, how to get to Grace’s family. I’ve thought about food and water in the day-to-day and even week-to-week sense, but any food will run out eventually. There will be no truck deliveries. No factories, no supermarkets. The life that stretches out before me is full of things I haven’t the slightest idea how to do. And, if I don’t figure them out, I’m a dead woman. Icy tendrils of panic start at the back of my neck, curling down and around until they reach my chest and spread to my limbs.
Maria pauses at the staircase to the next floor. “Sylvie, you coming?”
Grace moves to my side. “Syls? You all right?”
I manage a weak smile. “This is the part where I start screaming, ‘We’re all gonna die!’ ”
“Even your freak-outs are lame. Can’t you just have a good cry and be done with it?”
My fingers begin to regain feeling. I can do this. I have to read every book on that bookshelf downstairs. We have to comb the area for as much food and water as we can find, like those kids last night. And we should do it before they do. In my hours of sleeplessness, I decided they had to be kids. They sounded young, and only teenagers would do something as idiotic as leaving a kid out front with a cart.
But some of them aren’t kids any more. I don’t want anyone else to die, especially idiotic teenagers, for whom I have a soft spot, having been a teen of the idiotic variety myself. Unless they want me dead, in which case we’ll have to kill them first.
“We need better weapons,” I say.
“How did we go from freak-out to weapons?” Grace asks.
“Freak-out’s over. Now we need weapons. Jorge’s right. We should get that gun.”
I still don’t plan to shoot the gun, but I could scare someone with it. I’d shoot someone if I had to. I spot a poker among the fireplace tools. Heavy metal, poky end. Thin enough for an eye socket, maybe.
“Let’s see what’s outside first,” Maria says.
I nod, but I still grab the poker and set it by the stairs on my way.
Chapter 31
There are two ways onto the roof—a ladder on the fire escape out back and a ladder in an upstairs bedroom closet that leads to a hatch. We choose the closet, much to my relief—if I fall off inside, I’ll survive the seven-foot drop. Jorge pushes up the hatch, showering us with paint chips and dust, then disappears into the square of daylight.
I reach the tar paper roof after Grace and Maria and immediately start to cough. The smell isn’t bad in the house or the yard, but up high the aromas of burnt plastic and electrical fire mingle with decay. Roofs stretch to the other end of Brooklyn, many still intact. The clouds are tinged a yellow-brown from the smoke or ash or dust that Manhattan drifts into the breeze.
The little I can see of the distant Manhattan skyline is missing chunks. The stone supports of the Brooklyn Bridge appear to support something, although the hanging debris suggests it isn’t roadway. The Statue of Liberty plugs along just fine—a green monument t
o the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Maria hacks beside me. No one here is breathing free at the moment, whether from dust, the smell, or the tension that hangs in the air with them. We walk from roof to roof and climb three feet onto the higher roof of the store on Fifth Avenue. I trail the others to where it slants up at the front edge, with no barrier to keep us from tumbling off, and give silent thanks when Jorge and Maria creep on hands and knees to avoid detection. I won’t have to go into a whole spiel about heights and why I’m incapable of walking upright within ten feet of the edge.
I lie on my belly beside Grace. No one is cruising down Fifth Avenue anytime soon, but you could almost weave a car through. The block contains the usual assortment of stores for this stretch of avenue—pizza, cell phones, discount clothes and shoes, pharmacy, shoes, fast food, shoes. I’d love a new pair of shoes, preferably boots. My sneakers are crusted and waiting to be washed at an indeterminate time in the future and, and although I borrowed a pair of Cassie’s, they’re too large.
The sidewalk glitters with broken glass from the store windows. Food is probably not as plentiful as shoes. Houses may be a better source, although I assume most people would’ve left only when their food dwindled to nothing or they had to search for water.
The clothing of fully dead bodies flutters in the breeze. Zombies lurk, but not as many as on the lower avenues—three on the corner, two window shopping for cell phones, and two loners. Maybe most wandered down to Fourth Avenue during the chaos. We heard the honking from the hospital roof, so they would’ve heard it, too. New Yorkers like to voice their frustration with their horns, and I can only imagine the frustration of that particular traffic jam.
“People on a roof over there,” Jorge says quietly. “In the south.”
I scan the roofs moving only my eyes. I’m definitely going to end up dead—I don’t know which way is south in my own city. I look to where everyone else’s heads have turned. Far off, maybe five blocks down, people stand on a roof.
“Should we wave?” Jorge asks.
The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious Page 16