Sylvie giggles and perches on the desk chair. I’d forgotten there was a chair under Cassie’s ever-present clothes. I’d forgotten that the world holds pretty girls whom I can make giggle, even when they don’t seem the type.
“I’m going to tell her you said that,” she says.
I raise a finger to my lips. “Please don’t. I talk a good game, but I’m no match for her.”
“No one is. The decision is yours, but I’m warning you that you get up at your own risk.” She moves for the door, then stops and tucks her hair behind her ear. “I’m really sorry I pointed a gun at you and told you to get out of your own house. I didn’t know who you wer—”
“You already apologized.”
“I did? Oh, you heard that?”
“Yep. You sure can talk, not that you’d know it now.”
I smile at the color in her cheeks. Rachel said I was the worst, and the best—although I might’ve inferred she meant the latter—when it came to bugging the shit out of someone until I put them at ease. It comes in handy when someone freezes on a climb or in a tight spot. I can’t help it; I don’t like tension.
“Is there a plan?” I ask, although I’m sure they would have told me if there was. Maybe it’s because I got used to the sound of her voice, or I like talking with her, or I’m enjoying having people around me after many days spent alone, but I don’t want her to leave.
“What kind of plan?”
“I don’t know. A what-to-do-next plan?”
“Like a mission? Of course. We’ve named it Operation Zombie Storm,” she says, deadpan. Soup spills off the spoon when I laugh. She hands me my napkin, dark eyes alight.
“Well, you have the most important part down. It’s all in the name. Does Zombie Storm involve leaving the city or anything like that?”
Sylvie’s gaze shifts toward the windows. “Leave for where? I don’t know where we would go. They’re everywhere.”
“There’s Fort Wadsworth.”
“That trip involves a very long tightrope walk over water. I’m not doing that to go to Staten Island, of all places.”
“But then you could get to Jersey. I’m sure you’re dying to go to Jersey.” She laughs and shakes her head. “It wasn’t that bad. I crawled across. Are you afraid of heights?”
“I’m definitely scared of giant broken bridges, so I’m stuck here for now. It’s better than plummeting to my death.”
“How about a garden? Do you guys have a watch set up?”
“We don’t have any seeds. Maria says there’s a seed store in Bay Ridge. We’ve heard people, but no one knows we’re here except for Guillermo, so we don’t keep watch or anything.” Her shoulders lift. “Grace and I will be gone soon, anyway.”
She runs her fingertips along the dresser top, then moves a jewelry box to a corner as if that’s where it belongs. She probably knows where things go better than Cassie does. I get the sense she’s comfortable in this room when I’m not here.
“How soon?” I ask.
“Whenever Grace says.”
I know she doesn’t have a mother, but she might have a father or siblings to find. A boyfriend. Friends. I would ask, but I don’t think she wants me to. “You can stay here as long as you want. I’ll be going upstate soon to see if they made it.”
“It looks like a nice place.”
“It is. Once I make sure it’s safe, I’ll be back for Maria and anyone else who wants to come. My friend Paul and his family, if I can find them. You’re welcome to join us.”
“I’m sure it’ll involve a bridge, so no thanks,” she says, joking, but her eyes are distant. “I have to go wash dishes. Maria’s heating water so you can wash up. We’ll let you know when it’s ready.”
I’ve lost her somewhere. Either she’s a tough nut to crack or I’ve lost my touch. “Thanks. Hey, I’m sorry that you had to—” I wave a hand at the bed because I’m not sure how to complete that sentence in a non-repulsive way. “Thank you for…”
My voice fails as I flash back to the loneliness that plagued me on my way here. The surety I would die. The hope someone would be with me at the end. I haven’t felt that lonely since my parents died, and never before that. Sylvie was funny but tender, and no amount of inscrutability can make me forget the kindness in her eyes when she took my hand and promised not to let go.
My eyes sting. Rachel’s death and Cassie’s absence and the whole fucking world being in the shitter have come to rest on my shoulders. I’m going to cry. First I crap myself and now I’m going to cry. Great.
Everything about Sylvie unstiffens, from her lips to her ramrod straight legs. Her fingers come within a few inches of my arm before she pulls them back, and I have to restrain myself from taking her hand; it worked to stop this feeling once before.
“I’m glad I was here,” she says softly. “I’ll check on the water. I’m sure you want to get cleaned up.” I nod—I don’t trust myself to open my mouth without bawling. She stops at the door with an earnest expression. “I’m no tonsorial artist or anything, but even I can see you could use a shampoo.”
It’s so unexpected that my laugh explodes from somewhere deep and scatters all that heaviness to the winds. Sylvie winks and heads into the hall, saying, “Sylvie, one. Eric, none.”
Chapter 50
I’m bursting with energy when I wake. My cold shower at Wadsworth wasn’t that long ago, but yesterday’s pot of hot water was sorely needed. I would like to never again reflect upon the last few days, a desire reinforced by what I rinsed off. It’s early yet, so I tiptoe down the hall and past the sofa bed to the kitchen. Sylvie leans back in a chair, one foot on the edge of the table. A book is on her knee and she taps a pen to her mouth while she reads.
“Morning,” I say.
Her leg drops. “Hi.”
“Carry on. Just wondering what the usual morning is like around here.”
“You’re looking at it. They wake up around eight, sometimes later.”
“Slackers.”
She smiles, glances at the table and then scrambles to shove her scattered papers into a pile. “Sorry, I made a mess.”
“No problem. Leave it.” I give her my friendliest smile. One minute she’s sociable and the next aloof, but I’ve made it my mission to get her talking. “I heard something about coffee yesterday. Please tell me it’s true.”
“It’s true. We heat the water on the stove and make it in the French press. We tried the solar oven, but it doesn’t make good coffee.” She chews her lip. “Or maybe it does, but we can’t wait that long. We have to put dinner in for the rest of the day or else we’d brew it the night before. So we keep using propane even though we shouldn’t. Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
She brings the papers to her chest and lifts her shoulders. I drop into a chair and look around the kitchen. It’s tiny, but it holds a lot of memories: cramped but fun family dinners, where a friend was always welcome to squeeze in at the table and happy chaos reigned, good food, my mom and dad talking at the kitchen table late into the night in quiet voices.
They made each other laugh. You could see their connection in the way they looked at each other, as if they knew what the other person was about and loved them because of and, sometimes, in spite of it. They each had their faults, but they understood and complemented each other. Rachel and I were friends, but not in that way. I feel bad thinking it now that she’s gone, but it’s not an ill thought—just a fact. I hope she had it with Nathan, even if it was for a short time.
Sylvie edges toward the doorway. “Where are you off to?” I ask.
“I was going to go read in the…somewhere.”
“I don’t remember there being a somewhere in the apartment. Is it upstairs?”
She gives a little laugh. “I don’t want to be in the way.”
“In the way of my sitting in a chair? I’m going to think you’re avoiding me. Sit.”
She places her pile on the table and lowers herself into a chair, hands o
n her knees. “So, how do we make the coffee?” I ask. I could figure it out, since I have half a brain, but if I take over she’ll probably head for the hills.
“Outside, on the stove.”
“Let’s do it.”
Sylvie brings a pot of water outside and I fire up the stove. Now that we have a task, she seems less tense. While I was sick, she told me about Guillermo’s aspiring Safe Zone and I’ve seen what they’ve done to the yard, which is pretty impressive. I know Sylvie had a hand in it.
“Maria says you’ve read all the survival books in the house.”
“Not all, but a lot. I like to read.”
“So do I,” I say. “So does my sister.”
“I can tell. She has a lot of books.”
“She has a lot of everything. She’s not the neatest of people, but she’s great.”
“I can tell that, too.” The corner of her mouth edges up, as if she and Cassie have a secret. “Shouldn’t you be in bed? I can finish this and bring you a cup. I don’t mind.”
“I’m healthy as a horse. I’ve spent half my life in that bed, and even Maria can’t make me get back in there.”
I lean against the table. The trees are almost full-leafed now. What made sense before—a tree in the corner of a yard—looks haphazard with the fences down. A shed here, a barbecue there, a random patio, a pile of junk against the back of one house.
“Where did you grow up?” I ask.
“All over Brooklyn. We moved around.” Sylvie motions at the house. “You lived here your whole life?”
“My parents moved here when I was a baby. The rent was cheap and the neighborhood was good. So they stayed and saved their money for the cabin. Where’d you go to school?”
“I went to too many schools to count, up until high school. I even went to Catholic school for part of junior high.”
“Paul went to Catholic school before high school and told me all about it, so I’m sorry,” I say, and she laughs. “Are you Catholic?”
“I’m a mutt,” she says. “Jewish, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“My dad is Italian. He insisted I be baptized. My mother was Jewish, so she said I was Jewish, probably to annoy my father. It’s not like she was religious. But my grandma was Jewish, and I celebrated the holidays with her before she died, so…” She shrugs, although there’s fondness in her voice. “I only remember the Hanukkah prayer.”
She does have a father. I wonder where he is. “How’d you end up in Catholic school?”
“My teacher in fifth grade made me apply for a scholarship. She thought it would straighten me out. It didn’t work.” She peeks under the pot lid, shakes her head that the water isn’t ready, and then watches the backs of houses.
“So, how was Catholic school?” I ask, once it’s clear she has no intention of elaborating on the subject.
She considers the question for a full minute. “It started out great,” she says, with sarcastic emphasis on the great. “On my first day, we had a religion test. I forgot there were Ten Commandments. I thought there were twelve. So I wrote down the ten I remembered and then, on the bottom, I explained I couldn’t remember the other two.”
“No, you didn’t,” I say, imagining the nuns’ reactions at the heathen in their midst.
“I did. I’d been to a lot of AA meetings with my mom, which didn’t straighten her out, either. But, you know, Twelve Steps, Ten Commandments—they got mashed together in my sixth grade brain. Sister Jean Marie almost plotzed.”
“Please tell me you also said plotz to Sister Jean Marie.”
“You don’t want to know the things I said to her. They weren’t very Christian.”
I laugh, not only because the story is entertaining, but because I’m standing in a yard having a normal conversation. The kind of conversation I would’ve had a month ago, where there’s no talk of killing or supplies or viruses. “What did you say?”
“You’ll think I’m evil.”
I nudge her arm. “C’mon. Tell me.”
She twists her lips. I wait her out, and she says, “Okay, think of every evil teacher nun you’ve ever seen in a movie, and that was Sister Jean Marie. The only difference was she wasn’t allowed to smack us with a ruler. I got straight A’s even though she hated me, which made her hate me more. But she couldn’t get rid of me. Not until I got into a fight with her in seventh grade and they kicked me out.”
I stare at her wordlessly. I think she might be insane. In a good way, possibly, but still crazy. “You punched a nun?” I finally ask.
“No, I didn’t punch a nun!” Sylvie screeches at a low volume. “She was a bully, so I told her off.”
“What’d you say?”
“You have to know the backstory,” she says. “Sister Jean Marie had a scapular—that’s a special religious necklace—and she loved to tell us how we were all going to Purgatory when we died, but she would go straight to Heaven because of this stupid necklace. She’d pull it from her blouse and wave it at us and gloat. It was like she wanted us to suffer in Purgatory.
“She picked on this kid, Kevin, all the time. He was one of those small, quiet kids. One day she was screaming at Kevin over nothing and her face was bright red and there was spit flying everywhere. He’d sunk down in his chair and I could just see his will to live ebbing away. She seemed like she was getting bigger, like she was sucking all the life out of him. Feeding on him, you know?”
Her voice is heated; she still feels sorry for Kevin, and I think she wouldn’t mind taking a swing at Sister Jean Marie. I grimace at the image, so lost in the story that it’s only now I realize Sylvie is talking without coercion.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up from my desk and yelled at her to stop. She screamed that I wasn’t Catholic and I was going to Hell. So I said that her scapular would burn just fine in Hell, because that’s where she was going, and I’d see her down there.” She cocks her head. “Oddly, that didn’t go over well. The next day they sent me back to public school.”
The whole thing is awful, but I can’t stop smiling at the image of a seventh grader telling off a bully nun. My mother, champion of the forgotten and downtrodden, would’ve loved Sylvie. From what I heard, Mom was a tough cookie in her younger years. By the time we came around, she’d mellowed out for the most part, but if she got riled up about something, you did not want to be on the opposing side.
“That’s not evil. She deserved it. But I can’t believe you told a nun she was going to Hell. That might be worse than punching her.”
Sylvie plops in a chair, spent from reliving Sister Jean Marie’s trespasses. “She was, if there is a Hell. Or at least Purgatory for a million years. So, how about you? Religion?”
“Agnostic humanist.”
“Is that a thing?”
“I don’t know, but I like it. The humanists haven’t come after me with pitchforks yet. I think I’m safe.” Steam escapes from under the pot’s lid, and I jump to turn off the stove. “We wasted some fuel. I won’t tell if you don’t.” Sylvie casts an anxious glance at the propane tank. “Don’t worry, I just came up with a plan. Soon we won’t need to use the fuel and you’ll still have hot coffee every morning.”
“What is this plan?” she asks.
“I’m calling it Operation Caffeine Strike.”
Sylvie laughs. “It’s all in the name.”
***
I know they’re gunshots and they’re close by. It’s dark in Cassie’s room, but I’m on my feet, pistol in hand, before I’m fully awake. A pounding comes from above and I step into the hall as the door to upstairs flies open. The light blinds me for a moment before I make out Sylvie holding a lantern and staring at my gun, pale as a ghost.
I lower it immediately. A few more shots come from outside, still close but farther now. I move forward to put my arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”
She nods, still stiff. “Where are they?”
“Not sure.”
Jorge, Maria and Grace come do
wn the hall and into the lantern light. We wait for the next volley, but nothing comes. It could be people against zombies, but it could be nothing as innocent as that. Sylvie’s breaths are tiny puffs of fear, and I think it’s more from my gun than what’s outside. I had it ready for whatever was coming, but I have the control not to shoot blindly at any movement.
“Guess they’re gone,” Jorge says in the silence.
“How close were they?” Grace asks. She crosses her arms and shivers.
“Maybe five blocks the second time,” Jorge says. “Not too close.”
“How can you tell?” Maria asks.
“You grow up in the projects in the ‘80s, you learn these things.”
Maria laughs. “Well, I’m not getting any more sleep tonight. I’ll make coffee.”
Grace and Jorge follow her down the hall. Sylvie steps out from under my arm, and I say, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“This is why I hate guns,” she says. “What if you’d shot me?”
“I wouldn’t have shot you.” Her face makes it clear she doesn’t believe me before she lowers the lantern to her side. “My finger was alongside the trigger. I didn’t know you were up there.”
“I go upstairs to wind the lantern. Just so you know not to shoot me next time.”
I look away. It’s stupid, but I’m insulted she doesn’t trust me. She steps on my foot playfully. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t shoot me.”
“Only pretty sure?”
“You never know.” She lifts the lantern and peers into my face with wide eyes. “There are at least a few people who wouldn’t mind taking a shot at me.”
I hold in my laugh at shuffling from the street. They must be moving toward the gunshots. The gate at the sidewalk rattles when a body brushes against it. Sylvie switches off the lantern. The chance that they’ll see through the entry gate, then at an angle into the window of the inside door and notice the dim light is slim, but I, for one, feel no need to test out that hypothesis.
“Want to look at our word?” Sylvie whispers. “Since the new day has dawned.” She turns on the lantern in the curtained room and lifts the page with the paperclip.
The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious Page 29