The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious

by Sarah Lyons Fleming

  Jorge toasts me with his can. “I’m a gentleman.”

  I toast him back. “It’s nice to know chivalry isn’t dead. Even if everything else is.”

  “I bet Ana’s clothes would fit you,” Maria says. “She’s the same shoe size. You should go into her room and take what you want.”

  “That’s okay. I have clothes.” I don’t know how to say that it feels weird to go on a personal shopping spree in there. Like ransacking a dead child’s room in front of her parents. Even if Ana is alive, for the moment it’s all Maria has of her.

  Maria gives me her pursed lips, eyebrows up expression. “I’m telling you to do it. Do you want shoes that fit or not?”

  “You’re really bossy sometimes.”

  “Get used to it.”

  Usually, the more authoritative someone becomes, the more stubborn I get, but I don’t mind Maria bossing me around. Grace would chalk it up to some sort of absent mother complex: AMC, maybe.

  Ana’s bed is a mess of clothes. Everything else—her dresser, her television stand, her comfy chair—is fairly tidy, so I assume it’s from when she left the city. Maria picks up a tank top made of golden-brown lacy stuff. “She probably tried to bring this with her. God only knows what she packed. Look around while I get my things.”

  I open drawers and take two pairs of expensive jeans. Her sweaters are so soft that I check the labels: cashmere. I find a leather coat in the back of her closet. It’s a dark brown that’s almost black, fitted and soft as butter, but it should stand up to teeth.

  I can’t carry much, so I change my dirty jeans for a new pair and put the other in my bag. I throw in a sweater and, at the last second, take the tank top. It’s barely a wisp of fabric, pretty with its thin straps and straight neckline. Completely impractical, but pretty.

  I sort through her many, many shoes. Heeled boots, flats, and sandals of all types. They’re my size, although they’re as impractical for running as the lacy tank top is for everything except a date on a summer night. Plus, I’m not a ballet flats or stiletto kind of girl. Ana and I may be alike in temperament, but we’re not soul sisters when it comes to wardrobe. I grab a pair of sandals to wear in the yard and don a pair of cute, trendy sneakers that fit perfectly. They’re clean, unlike my old ones, and it’s a shame I’ll probably destroy them.

  Maria walks in. “You found some stuff?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Ana worked as a clothes buyer.” She speaks in the past tense, but it isn’t Ana that’s past tense; it’s the old world and jobs in the fashion industry. “She was planning to move out in a few months, but before that she spent every cent on clothes. She got a lot for free, too.”

  “How about Penny?” I ask.

  “She’s my good girl. Too good. She teaches preschool. After my husband died, Penny tried to take care of everyone.”

  “I didn’t know,” I say. “I’m sorry about your husband.”

  “It was a long time ago. Almost twenty years,” Maria says, along with a nod that acknowledges my sympathy. I wonder if she’s dated since then. I can’t imagine she wasn’t fighting off suitors—Maria is eye-catching now, and no doubt she was gorgeous back in the day. “Ana pretended it didn’t affect her. It did, but she’s tough.” She picks up a dangly pair of earrings from the dresser and watches them sparkle in the sunlight. “She just has to get out of her own way.”

  I’ve heard the expression countless times—from my brief forays into Al-Anon to Grace—but it’s only now that I hear it, as Grace would say. I’m my own worst enemy. It’s great to recognize the problem. How to stop doing it is the biggie.

  Maria sets the earrings down. “Listen, I was thinking we could split our food into four parts. That way you have some that’s yours.”

  The crazy part of me wants to agree, to have something be mine alone. But, if I do, I’d be separating my food, and thereby myself, from them. Maria is willing to give me a quarter of the food to quell my insanity. The gesture says I belong, or that’s what I hope it says. My taking it would say I don’t want to belong, and that would be a lie.

  My throat is tight, but I push out, “I’m sorry for…everything. I don’t want to split it.”

  “You sure? We can.”

  I shake my head. “I just want cookies sometimes.”

  Maria laughs softly. “Me too, sweetie. So help us plan what to eat, and we’ll fit cookies in there. I didn’t think you were interested.” She probably calls half the world sweetie, but that doesn’t stop my pleasure at the word. She nudges my arm. “Let’s see what else we have.”

  We empty her cabinets into bags. It isn’t a lot, but Jorge is ecstatic at the spices and jars of sofrito. We pull bags of crackers from their boxes to conserve on space. Maria explains the shriveled, sprouting potatoes will be good for planting.

  “I thought potatoes came from seeds,” I say.

  “I thought they came from the store,” Jorge says with a wink.

  Maria reaches into her backpack and pulls out a revolver. I’ve never held a gun. I’ve never even seen one up close, unless you count in a cop’s hand. “I have three boxes of ammunition. I know how to use it, but I haven’t in years.”

  She places it in Jorge’s outstretched palm. He opens what I think is called the chamber and nods when he finds it loaded. I can see that much from the corner to which I’ve retreated.

  “Sylvie, it’s not going to bite,” Jorge says.

  “No, it’s going to shoot. And even Maria won’t be able to save me.”

  “I don’t have a holster. You want to hold on to it?” Maria asks Jorge after an amused glance in my direction. He sticks it in the back of his jeans. People really do that, I guess.

  We check through the peephole of Maria’s front door before we leave. Once Jorge has killed the one zombie on the landing, three of the other five apartments on her floor are quiet when we knock. Jorge slams a beefy shoulder against one door, then kicks it low and hard. It bursts open, a chunk of door attached to the frame.

  “Cheap-ass doors,” Maria mutters.

  Jorge leans an elbow on the doorjamb. “Really, Mimi? Not, Ooh, Jorge, you’re so strong. Look at how you bust down doors.” He’s put on a falsetto voice for the last part. I crack up—Jorge’s flirty in a friendly way, but he doesn’t normally flirt with Maria.

  “Just get in the apartment, Jorge,” she says.

  He salutes before he heads in. I turn and catch a faint trace of her smile. “Mimi?” I ask.

  She glances heavenward and shoves me inside. We pass a vinyl-covered flowered sofa on our way into the kitchen, where we find a few boxes of Rice-A-Roni and some canned tuna. The next apartment has coffee and a package of vanilla sugar wafer cookies about which, I admit, I get a little over-excited.

  Maria lifts the flap on my bag and drops them in. “Tonight,” she says with a wink.

  The third apartment is thick with the scent of decay, and we gag through our inspection of the bare cupboards and empty fridge. There’s not so much as a condiment to be found. A blanket covers two bodies on the bed. Maybe they ate everything and then died, or maybe they offed themselves. They could’ve gone into Maria’s apartment and found food, but it’s possible they decided a few more days of life with zombies wasn’t worth it. I can sympathize in some respects, but no matter my struggle to coexist with other humans, I at least want to try.

  We leave the two occupied apartments alone. We can’t carry much anyway, and we can always return if we need to. Whatever’s in there might keep someone else from entering until we need to. Guard dogs.

  Every third floor door is destroyed. Two bodies lie in the center of the landing, one on top of the other. The uppermost one is twice the size of the one beneath and looks to have died while human—bloated and fly-covered and half of its head eaten. I stick my nose into my new coat. I could use a bath, but I don’t smell dead.

  The bottom body jolts. One black-rimmed eye peers out from under the top body’s shoulder. Its hand scratches on the li
noleum. Jorge brings his cleaver into its forehead and then moves for the two plastic bags by the exit door.

  “Food.” He lifts them to his shoulders and hands me a hunting knife that was hidden beneath. “Sylvie, you want this?”

  “Thanks.” They wait while I attach it. My knife from the hospital was nowhere near as good as this one, which snaps into a sheath that threads onto a belt. I still prefer my screwdriver, but since I sent one flying on the way here, it’s not a stretch to imagine I’ll send my spare flying at some point.

  The top floor has been plundered, and we appear to hold the spoils in the plastic bags Jorge carries. An old woman in a housedress lies half out her door, slippers still on her feet. I can’t tell how she died due to decomposition, but the bugs make it obvious she didn’t turn—bugs avoid zombies. It might’ve been the person downstairs, maybe with the knife I now own. I don’t feel bad for him if that’s what happened.

  “Mrs. Hernandez,” Maria says through gritted teeth. “What the fuck is wrong with people?”

  Jorge and I shake our heads. Maria marches to Mrs. Hernandez’s living room windows and stands there for a full minute. “They’re still out there,” she finally says, about the zombies on the street. Her voice is unsteady, but when she turns there’s no trace of it in her expression. “Help me move her?”

  We drag Mrs. Hernandez as far as the living room, leaving a trail of slime along the floor. Maria settles a pink and green crocheted afghan over the body and stares down. “She babysat Penny and Ana when they were young. Looked out for them when they were teenagers and I was at work. I don’t understand why someone…”

  Jorge fills the silence with, “I’m sorry, Mimi. Sometimes people…” The silence returns. There’s no good reason to kill an old woman for the trivial amount of food in the plastic bags.

  “Suck,” I say. “Sometimes people just really fucking suck.”

  It’s not much of a eulogy, but Maria dips her head and makes the sign of the cross like I’ve uttered the Lord’s Prayer. “You’re right, they do. Let’s go.”

  We take the stairs to the roof and make our way toward a house that has a ladder down to the fire escape. Not every house does. Some have fire escapes that end at the top floor windows, and some don’t have a fire escape at all—only a hatch locked from the inside. The bigger buildings, like Maria’s, have a small room that juts from the roof with a full-sized door. The tallest buildings have that and a water tower. Unfortunately, there isn’t one of those nearby, not that I could schlep a water tower back.

  Maria and Jorge travel down the ladder as though unconcerned they could die any second, then I step onto the ledge, turn backward, and clutch the rails. My bag and the two small duffel-type bags on my shoulders swing haphazardly. I imagine my fingers uncurling, the mad scrabble for a handhold as I fall down, down, down. Even if I hit the balcony ten feet below and don’t fall through the ladder hole and tumble to the lower balcony, I’d still be injured. When my feet reach the flat metal bars of the balcony, I let out my breath.

  We break into the house and leave through the front. It doesn’t take much energy to outwalk the few zombies who didn’t follow us to Maria’s, but being ever-vigilant saps what’s left of mine. By the second to last corner, my body has had enough and my shoulders ache from my load.

  Maria picks up speed to check the corner and then spins on her heel. Six zombies round the building, inches behind, and she flies back with a gasp. The closest has her backpack, and his mouth approaches her neck. Another holds her arm, and the dead teenage girl closing in means she doesn’t stand a chance. Even if Maria can wrestle free of her backpack, she won’t get far. I drop my bags and take off for the first, then slam my screwdriver into its eye. I whirl for the other, praying it hasn’t gotten her yet, but Jorge’s cleaver is already in its face. Maria shoots forward but stays on her feet.

  The teenager sinks her teeth into my shoulder, but my new coat does its job admirably. I push the screwdriver up and under her chin. It gets easier every time I do it, but the initial puncture of skin, followed by the slide into flesh and bone, is still repulsive. Between the three of us, the remaining zombies are dispatched in less than a minute, but the ones who were following have caught up. We retrieve our bags, then race along the avenue. Grace bangs from her perch with renewed vigor when we appear; she’s kept the ones on the block busy while we were gone.

  In the foyer, I lower my bags to the floor. My jeans stick to my legs with sweat. My hair is soaked. My latex gloves are torn, I note with a little disquiet, but I’m too exhausted to be all that alarmed.

  “Thank you,” Maria says between gulps of air.

  We nod. If you’d asked me a week ago, I might’ve thought I’d spend at least a second of deliberation on whether to help if it meant my life was on the line. But I didn’t deliberate—I barely had time to be scared, although now I shudder at how close Maria came to their teeth. And I know that unless it’s a lost cause, I’d never leave Maria or Jorge to the zombies.

  “Why didn’t you use the gun?” Maria asks Jorge.

  “I forgot about it.” Jorge’s hand goes to his back, and he gives a flabbergasted shake of his head. “What a dumbass.”

  Maria stares at him, chest heaving, and then gives over entirely to the laugh that bubbles up. It’s contagious, and, by the time Grace finds us, we’re in tears.

  Chapter 36

  It takes another two days to clear the houses and dismantle the majority of fences down to Fourth Avenue. We’ve decided to build the outhouse. It’s necessary, unless we want to fill an entire house with bags of poop. The plan for a garden also influenced our decision—if someone sees a garden, they’ll know we’re here, but if we don’t garden we likely won’t have enough to eat. The probability of starvation outweighs the possibility of trouble.

  “Come have a look,” Jorge says the afternoon of the third day. At the low end of our new Westchester-sized backyard is a deep hole lined with fence boards to prevent collapse. “I dug it under a tree so it’s in the shade. I’ll build a platform out of that wood we found, attach the toilet seat, then we’ll set up a tent and be good to go until I make walls and a roof.” When we praise his skills, he raises his shoulders in an aw, shucks gesture.

  “I read you can burn the toilet paper so it doesn’t fill up as fast,” I say. We have a lot of toilet paper, which we use sparingly, but what we’ll use when it’s gone is a question I believe has no heartening answer. I’ve heard the old-time stories about corn cobs and Sears Roebuck catalogs, and I want them to remain old-time stories.

  “You can compost human waste somehow—did you see that in any of the books?” Grace asks me. “It’s called humanure. We could use it in the garden.”

  “Thankfully, I have not seen that. And you want me to eat those vegetables?”

  “It’s environmentally responsible. Better than flushing it all to a sewage treatment plant and then using fossil fuels to process it. This is kind of cool.”

  I circle my finger by my ear. “Who wouldn’t want to flush the poop away and never see it again? Grace, that’s who.”

  “It is much better for the environment,” Grace argues.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t, just that you’re crazy.”

  Grace sticks out her tongue. We head back, thinking of dinner, and freeze at a deep yell that carries into the yard from above. We crane our necks and spin around, but the surrounding roofs are unoccupied.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice calls. “On the roof across the street! We saw you the other day?”

  We wait for Jorge to grab the gun and then, after a quick discussion, we file out of the hatch five houses down from our brownstone. Two young guys move to the roof directly opposite. The big one has short dark hair, a trim beard, and is almost as broad as Jorge, but he’s made entirely of muscle. His gaze takes us all in, moves to the street and then rises again, calculating risk. He puts his elbows on the roof’s edge and then leans closer. “Holy shit, Maria?”

  Mari
a squints. “Guillermo?” she calls, and then, in a low voice, “I know his mother.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Same thing you are,” she calls. “Surviving.”

  “Fucking right! Sorry. I mean right.”

  Now that he’s a kid watching his mouth around his mother’s friend, the tension eases. Guillermo asks her a question in Spanish, and the conversation moves on in Spanish from there. Maria stiffens when Guillermo says Penny, and her fingernails leave white marks on the stone of the cornice as she throws out a question. Guillermo shakes his head and says a bit more, gesturing to the lower avenues.

  Finally, Maria translates, “There’s a group of people over by the park. They have the Key Food under guard. He says there are eighteen people.”

  “Do you trust him?” Jorge asks.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Have them come over.”

  All the yelling has attracted the zombies below, making it hard to hear. Jorge gestures that they come to our side, and Guillermo points to a clear spot down the block. “We’ll come across there. Can you open that house?”

  Five minutes later, they’re in our yard. Guillermo is early twenties, with a dark brow that looks perpetually furrowed in thought. But my brow is perpetually furrowed these days, so his might be the same. His facial hair is more of a well-developed and shaped five o’clock shadow than full beard. There’s not a stray hair anywhere, which makes his apocalyptic grooming abilities extraordinary. The best I can do is tuck my greasy hair behind my ears and slap on a layer of deodorant.

  His buddy—a kid with a baseball cap and sleepy looking eyes—glances my way and removes his hat, self-consciously smoothing his bangs until they lay flat on his forehead. He’s no more than twenty, if that, as his sparse goatee attests.

  “Hey,” he says, giving me a too-long stare that I think is supposed to be sultry.

  Guillermo cuffs the side of the kid’s head. “Carlos, get your helmet on and get back in the game. And take off your shoes before we go inside.”