City of Savages

by Lee Kelly

  * * *

  Sam punctures a window with three quick jabs of the steel rod, and we hoist one another up and take turns crawling through the opening and inside to a dark, musty lobby. Then Sam and Ryder pick up a large bureau and move it in front of the broken window, a makeshift door to a makeshift home. Dripping wet, we cross the checkerboard-tile expanse of the lobby, past a wide desk with empty chairs, and then under a red-letter sign that reads YMCA. We climb two flights of stairs and emerge on the third floor.

  “The yoga studios should have candles.” Mom slowly combs the wide layout, checking the signage of each glass door that borders the open floor, as Phee and I flank her on both sides.

  The main space looks like a graveyard of headless, strange dinosaur skeletons, arranged in row after row. Some tall and hunched, like pictures I’ve seen of T. rexes in books; some small and tight, as if they once ran fast and close to the ground. “What are all these things?”

  “Workout equipment. StairMasters, ellipticals, bikes.” Mom points to a glass door. “Bingo.”

  We lead her into the small room, with a wood-paneled floor and lush red velvet curtains painted in dust. Sam lights a long row of white candles in the center of the room, while Trevor starts digging through the open cupboards on the far wall. He pulls out some black foam mats and tattered blankets. “I think I could sleep for a year,” he says, before splaying out on the ground.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Sam mutters, as he curls into a ball on the floor next to Trevor. “Those Park twats are on the hunt for us. We move at nightfall.”

  “Says the guy in the fetal position.” Phee moves to plunk down as well, but Mom and I grab hold of her arms.

  “Not yet,” Mom tells her. “We need to get you bandaged up.”

  “You ladies need any help with anything?” Ryder’s voice echoes against the wood. And I feel an unexpected, jealous surge—does he want to help because of Phee?

  “Actually, Ryder,” Mom says, “we should take advantage of this rain. I’m sure there’re buckets and old water jugs in the storage closets we passed. Can you guys take care of it? Sky, come with me.”

  Ryder nods. “Sam and I are on it.”

  Sam starts muttering obscenities in the corner, but he gets up.

  “Aren’t you forgetting someone?” Trevor moves from corpse state to standing in about two seconds. “I’ve gotta do my part too.”

  I watch Ryder stifle a smile. “Of course, man. We were counting on it.”

  * * *

  My sister’s practically falling asleep as we clean her wound with the treated gauze Mom dug out of an old first aid kit. But after our collective nightmare, I don’t know how Phee could even think about sleeping. Every time I close my eyes, I see split-open faces, an army of warlords on our heels, or worse, hungry tunnel feeders.

  I watch Mom rummage through the kit attached to the wall. She pulls out a cardboard box with a sorry-looking man clutching his head on the front of it.

  “Mom,” I say.

  “Mmm.” She opens the box and unravels a long flesh-colored dressing.

  “In the subways,” I say softly, “you said you saw the feeders in the tunnels before, personally. I don’t understand.”

  She doesn’t look at me as she pulls apart the bandage, but I take it as good a sign as any to continue.

  “I always thought the feeders were lost people, traitors who stayed underground after the city’s official surrender—holdouts who never came up to the surface again.”

  “That’s right.” But she doesn’t give me anything more.

  “So . . .” I struggle with how to phrase my next question. “So, what were you doing down in the tunnels after Manhattan surrendered?”

  She keeps her mouth in a tight, thin line as she wraps the gauze around Phee’s middle, then gives me the same to wrap around her other side.

  “Not too tight,” Phee grunts, eyes closed.

  I let my hands wind round and round, helping Mom, playing nurse, but I don’t take my eyes off my mother. She must feel it, my desperation for her to just let me in, to tell me what she keeps hidden. Secrets are spilling out of this city, emerging from the shadows, rising from the ground—and I’m tempting hers, begging hers to join them.

  “I was lying to the Englishmen.” She doesn’t look at me.

  “Mom—”

  “Not lying, really. Just bluffing. I knew the stories. I knew some people who had tried to escape the Park years ago, who’d gone into the tunnels and came back with the fear of God in them. I knew the feeders were real. And I didn’t want to risk our safety for a shortcut.” She pats Phee’s side gently and then pulls down her sweatshirt to cover the dressing. “There.”

  Mom’s smiling, but it’s hollow. And I don’t know how I know, but I do. She’s lying, or bluffing, to me. She’s keeping something, something dark and terrible, from me.

  “Mom, please—”

  “Stay with your sister a minute, okay?” she says as she walks to the windows.

  And that’s it. My own window to the past is closed before I find a way to prop it open. “Sometimes you have to lie to survive, Sky,” Mom adds behind her. “I hope you’ll understand why I did what I did. One day.”

  And then she joins Sam, Ryder, and Trevor as they arrange buckets on the fire escape to capture the rain.

  * * *

  I toss and turn for hours, even though I know I need to rest. Even though my muscles are aching, quaking, pleading with my mind to just stop working for a moment so they can truly relax. But I can’t. My conversation with Mom has me so anxious to figure out the missing pieces of her story that I’m tempted to pull out her journal and start reading it right here in the yoga room.

  A collective wheeze whispers through the room. The candles have been blown out, and the only light that remains is a small sliver that sneaks through the velvet curtains. Phee’s snoring softly next to me, and I wonder if I should wake her up again, or if that’s too cruel, especially considering all that we’ve been through. Any normal person would be sleeping. So I grab my backpack, tiptoe over the field of bodies, and slip out the glass door.

  Filled water buckets now line the entryway to the yoga room. I pull a small canteen out of my backpack and tip over one of the buckets to fill it. I take long, luxurious gulps as I navigate through the dinosaur field, or “workout” room, then settle against a far window and pull out the journal.

  I look at the Charlotte’s Web cover for a long time. I feel guilty moving forward without Phee, even though I can’t wait to jump in.

  I settle on reading until there’s something I know we should share together. I crack open the pages, and the morning light pours across Mom’s words.

  I hear creaks, noises underground, and I think he and Robert are around the corner, coming for us. Sometimes I even trick myself into thinking Tom’s cologne is wafting through the subways.

  Other days I know Tom must be dead.

  But I won’t let myself feel it. Otherwise I know it would be the final straw, and I’ll crumble. And Sky needs me.

  April 25—The pains returned again, but this time with a vengeance. Dry heaves and aches and pains and a headache that knocked me sideways. And I knew it, I knew it so deeply and tragically that I started wailing.

  “I’m pregnant,” I told Mary.

  Pregnant. Phee.

  Phee and I always knew she was born during the war, but not . . . in the tunnels. Not when bombs were being dropped above and people were living in the dark, cold shadows of the city, on rats and borrowed time. I close my eyes and picture Mom, without Dad, with Mary, with one baby and another on the way. And even though I know the ending to this story—that Mom survived, is sleeping and snoring in the next room—I’m still terrified of what happened in between.

  I know I should stop reading, should tuck the journal back into my bag and
wait for my sister. Phee should read this. This is her story too.

  But the past has me under its spell, keeps my eyes transfixed and my hands wrapped protectively around the journal. And I don’t resist.

  I can’t resist.

  I didn’t want to tell her, but in the dark Mary and I have come to share everything, and it’s scary how much I need her.

  I couldn’t breathe after I said it. Me, with two. Her, with none. Mary. Strong, wonderful, beautiful Mary. For a moment, I wondered if her husband ever knew her like I’d come to know her. If Jim ever saw what I have seen.

  “What do we do?” I whispered. “I need him, Mary. I need to find Tom.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long time, just stroked my hair, hugged me and Sky towards her, and rubbed my belly tenderly.

  Finally she answered me, her voice as faint as rain on the surface, “We’ll figure out a way.”

  May 5—I’m lying down after a night of celebration, if you want to call it that. The tunnels for the first time feel festive, hopeful, though the day started out in a panic.

  Early in the morning, somewhere between First Avenue and the crossover to Brooklyn on the L line, we woke to the pitter-patter of their footsteps on the tracks. Three people, maybe four. Was it other survivors? We listened.

  Then we heard the harsh, strident sounds of foreign tongues. The smacking of boots.

  Soldiers.

  Mrs. Warbler, one of the cursed vacationers from Kansas, just started rocking and mumbling, “This is our end.”

  “We’re never going to make it,” Bronwyn sobbed into her hands.

  I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her in, as Sky swatted Bronwyn’s matted blond hair from my lap. Bronwyn’s somehow become my charge in this dark underworld, where the lines between stranger and family, right and wrong, have been erased. She doesn’t have anyone else.

  But Mary has no time for the girl. She snapped at Bronwyn to keep quiet. There were still a lot of us, she said. And we knew these tunnels. “We might not all make it out of this alive,” Mary added, “but we sacrifice for the greater good.”

  We quickly dispersed and perched ourselves like long rows of gargoyles on the platform above the tracks. The front row of our crew was armed with knives, flashlights, Sky’s stroller, and a few other Bugaboos and UPPAbaby Vistas from other moms who’ve joined our doomed crew. Mary wouldn’t let me anywhere near the front line.

  As the soldiers approached, our crowd blinded them with the last of our light, then converged on them like a swarm of hungry roaches. Jumping them, beating them senseless. One, two shots went off. We lost another survivor and then another from the shots.

  But the soldiers were dead, and there was cause for celebration.

  We now have uniforms, and guns.

  A young orphan, Lory, and her little toddler shadow, Cass, immediately started playing with the guns—the hand-me-down toys of this lost next generation. But Mary yanked the weapons away from them. Then she dislodged the bullets, put them into her pocket, and addressed the crowd.

  “Like everything,” Mary said, “we ration.”

  I don’t understand how she’s doing it, how she’s managing to lead us and stay so calm, so strong. But I’m proud of her.

  June 5—New York has settled into summer, and the heat has invited itself into the tunnels, pushed its way down here to make us all that much more uncomfortable. Sweat is a constant, above my lip, on my forehead and back, paints me with my own clothing, until by night I’m mummified.

  But I barely have to lift a finger. Mary always makes sure Sky and I are fed first, holds my hand through the pain, sleeps by my side in case Sky and I start crying in the night. We’ve become a ragtag family, a patchwork quilt of the scraps of who we were before. And though I’m grateful for Mary, beyond belief, it’s not enough. My need to see Tom, to know he’s okay, has begun to plague me like a fever.

  “Where is he? Where could he and Robert be?”

  “We’ve been over this a hundred times, Sarah.” Mary shook her head under the soft candlelight, and odd shadows were thrown against the dank tunnel walls. “You said they were working at the studio. But Chelsea’s a wreck—the Piers have been blown to pieces.”

  I didn’t let myself process that. “Tom and Robert could’ve been on the subways, like us—trapped on the 1 or 2 lines.”

  “You know we’ve been over there, and nothing. If they’re alive, they’ve moved on by now. We can’t chase ghosts, Sarah. Look at this group, the number of people. Every one of them has someone missing. There’re far, far too many ghosts to chase.” She dropped her voice to a low whisper, so that those sleeping nearby couldn’t hear us. “Right now, you and I, we’re in a good position. We’re in charge. But it’s so fragile, can’t you see that? We need to think of the group. I don’t want to give anyone reason to question my priorities.”

  She used “me” and “we” interchangeably, and for some reason, it unexpectedly warmed me.

  “Just promise me, when we can, we’ll look for them again,” I whispered.

  “Of course.”

  July 4—Independence Day. But the sounds above weren’t fireworks. They were air raids. Land raids. Bombs.

  We’ve been trapped under here for four months. I can’t believe there are still so many of us left, over a hundred wandering the tunnels as a unit. Scavenging the surface, hunting rats, sharing water, and swapping food and supplies. Mary has kept us alive.

  There’ve been dissensions, of course. Small fights and brawls. Two or three people, usually the younger ones, who think they have a better answer, who curse Mary and disappear into the tunnels to fend for themselves. Or the ones who work her from the inside, the fragile ones like Bronwyn, who fear everything, who question everyone, who still wait for someone to save us.

  But in general, we’ve become a well-oiled machine that hums along steadily in the dark. I try to be a cog, do my part, not ask questions. Though sometimes the old me bubbles to the surface, and I cry and I scream and I’m so angry I can’t see.

  “Lie down,” Mary often says. “You need to think about that baby.”

  I can’t believe I’m bringing another person into this world.

  August 4 (or 5)—I’ve started to lose count of the days. The heat arrested all of us, and we lay around on the tracks just trying to breathe, a thick swamp of survivors.

  Mary and I were next to each other, with Sky between us, sharing a jug of water.

  Mary had her hand on my belly and was stroking it, carefully, cautiously. And I knew I shouldn’t have asked, but I did.

  “Are you ever going to try again?” I whispered. “I mean if, when, we ever get out of here.”

  “No.”

  Mary was quiet for a long time. Then she told me that after her third miscarriage, Jim told her that she must be doing something wrong. “That on some level,” she said softly, “I must not want it badly enough.”

  Her breathing was heavy, loaded.

  “Mary.”

  “Jim was drunk. But I knew he meant it,” she said. “He never loved me. Not in the way I needed, anyway. I know that now.”

  I rarely saw her soft underbelly anymore, and it scared me. She’d become our fearless leader, our resourceful commander in the dark.

  She grabbed my hand. “Being down here with you, it’s awakened something inside me. Like my whole life I was supposed to be someone else.”

  I thought about what she said. It wasn’t news. I knew, for a long time, how unhappy Mary was.

  “Do you ever think things happen for a reason?” she whispered again. “That we’re given second chances?”

  Her words were full and promising, almost visible against the dark. They floated towards me like those soft dandelions on my parents’ farm in Iowa. The ones we’d blow on to make wishes.

  I couldn’t see Mary’
s face, but somehow I could sense her tears, could tell that she was inches from me, with Sky and my stomach pressed between us.

  Then I felt the softest of pressure against my lips, and I sighed. It felt wrong and yet so wonderfully right. The tunnels faded away, as did the thick moat of bodies lying around me. And the only thing that ran through my mind was, I knew this was coming. And I wanted it. I couldn’t do this without her.

  Tom, please, if you’re out there . . . If it’s possible—forgive me.

  I can’t believe what I’ve just read. My face, my hands, my whole body is on fire, yet I force myself back over the flames and reread the last passage:

  . . . against my lips . . . I sighed . . . I wanted it.

  Mom cheated on Dad. With his sister, no less—Mom cheated on Dad.

  I knew this book would contain secrets, things that might change how I see my mom, her world, her place in it—but not this. A twisted knot of anger lodges itself right in my throat, and no matter how I try to sugarcoat what I’ve discovered, I can’t swallow it. How could Mom have done this?

  And how can I ever see her the same way again?

  I want to talk to her. I want her to explain this away and show me how this was possible. No, how it was right. These pages couldn’t have captured everything. There has to be an explanation.

  But I know I can’t go to her, not now, not when I’m in the trenches of her past. Not when I’m peering in judgment over its casualties.

  Besides, at this point, I’m covered in lies and deceit myself.

  I take a deep breath and do the only thing I can do.

  I keep reading.

  September—There’s no use pretending I know what day it is. It feels like September, in my belly, in my bones. That’s what we’re all whispering. That we survived the heat wave of August and lost only a handful. That we’ve got a few cool autumn months ahead. That we’re fortunate.

  And in a small, bizarre, unfettered way, I do feel fortunate. Mary and I have become something. Something undefinable. Something we shouldn’t be, of course I know that. Am I falling in love with her? Is this love? Is this need? I’m not sure. When you inch through life as we’re inching, you’re desperate for something deep and grand. You cling to feelings like this, nurture and feed them, let them pull you up and out of yourself.