The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious (21 page)

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 to 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.

“I don’t know,” Maria says.

We stay down. I wish we were invisible. Zombies stumble your way while trying to eat you, which isn’t something I relish, but they don’t concoct plans and stratagems. God, I sincerely hope they don’t concoct plans and stratagems. People can be astoundingly wily. I didn’t think Kearney was a standup guy, but I also didn’t think he’d feed his partner to the zombies.

It takes ten minutes for the people to leave, and then we crawl back the way we came. Grace and I drop to the houses’ roofs. Maria curses from above. “There’re more people. They saw me.”

We scramble up. Figures stand in what I now know is north-ish. They’re indistinct but near enough to see their arms wave as though thrilled to have spotted us. Jorge waves back.

“Why are we smiling?” I ask Grace out of the corner of my mouth.

“Because we’ve been up here for fifteen minutes and we’ve already seen two groups of people.” She purses her lips. “That means people are alive, Sylvie. It’s a good thing.”

That’s partly true. It means her parents and Logan might be alive. I’m worried about everyone else. I want to believe people are mostly good, most of the time, but I’ve met too many who aren’t to have it be a given.

They wave a minute longer, but without any other means of communication that’s all we can do. The figures point and mime things in a game of Rooftop Charades. We can’t discern their meaning.

“Are there any binoculars in the basement?” Maria asks.

“Didn’t see any,” Jorge replies. “It looks like they have a pair. If we find some, we can write notes to each other.”

We wave one last time and head for our hatch.

Chapter 32

In the afternoon, light floods through the open hatch at the back of the basement and illuminates the shelves. I’m sure it seemed outlandish to all who knew about it, but the stored food was a stroke of genius as far as I’m concerned. The freeze-dried food is the best part—instant meals, almost like takeout. Maria says they stored most of the items that require thorough cooking at their cabin.

“Where exactly did they go?” I ask Maria. “Cassie and your daughters, Ana and…”

“Penny,” Maria finishes, looking up from her clipboard. “Upstate New York. It’s a log cabin with, I don’t know, a year’s worth of food. There’s a picture of it in the hall.”

“I saw it. It looks nice.”

“It is. When we can get out of the city, you girls could come there with me.”

I concentrate on a can of black beans, wondering if she means it and if I’d go. “That makes thirty cans of black beans.”

I imagine skipping around in the woods, although there might not be much skipping going on with zombies. I like the woods just fine, but I’m a city person. Grace’s family took me camping a couple of times and I had fun building a fire and sleeping in a tent, but it’s been a long time since then. I’m not some underprivileged kid who’s never left the city—I saved all that work money in college and used it to backpack in Europe with Grace one summer, but those were all cities, too.

“Twenty-seven cans of pintos,” I say, and kneel to start on the pasta bin.

“I can’t figure you out, Sylvie,” Maria says.

I raise my shoulders. “I can’t figure me out, either.”

“One minute you’re starting fights and the next you want to get a dialysis machine for a kid you just met.”

I can’t talk about Manny or his mother without crying. I elect to give her an honest, if brief, answer. “I don’t like for things to be unfair.”

Maria nods as if it’s enough, which makes me like her more than I already do. She’s tough, but not at the expense of being gentle and compassionate. I want to be like her when I grow up.

I tally up more food and almost hit the ceiling at a car alarm from the street. Most likely a zombie has bumped into a car, but something is moving out there, and that something could be alive. “Maybe we should bring some of the food upstairs,” I say. “Make it look like we have it all up there and hide the rest in case we’re robbed.”

“You always think the worst,” Grace says as she counts jam jars. “You’re so cynical.”

“I’m a cynical optimist,” I argue. “I think that maybe people aren’t bad, but I’m fully prepared they will be. That way I’m not disappointed.”

Maria raises her eyebrows at Grace, who responds with a
don’t look at me
shake of her head.

“I have to use the bucket,” Maria says. She sets down the clipboard and stops at the top of the hatch stairs. “Being prepared to be disappointed is fine, but not if it means you don’t trust anyone.”

She nods at her own wisdom and makes her exit. Grace eyes me. “What?” I groan.

“What she said.”

“Okay, I’ll embrace the zombie-ridden world.”

Grace pulls on two clumps of hair to tighten her ponytail and then straightens her shirt. Her therapist face materializes—lips in an almost-smile, eyes squinted but concerned. “I’m serious. You have ACE and probably PTSD.”

I write down the number of pasta boxes. “That does sound serious. Do I also have XYZ?”

“You’re such an ass. I’m trying to talk to you and you’re doing your usual avoidance tactics.”

I sit down with a sigh. She must miss her patients. “Okay, what’s ACE?”

“Adverse Childhood Experiences. It can lead to social and emotional impairment, social problems and high-risk activities. And early death.”

I stroke my chin in a professorial manner. “I won’t argue with most of those, but I think the playing field for early death has been leveled.”

“Sometimes I really hate you.”

“All right, fine. Psychoanalyze me for the nine-billionth time. Mother issues, father issues, everything issues.”

“You never learned to trust anyone.”

I cross my arms. “That is not true. I trust you.”

“It’s been almost fifteen years. I would hope so. Who else do you trust?” I shrug. She’s pretty much it. “People have to prove themselves to you over and over, and still you don’t trust them. Take Matt, for example.”

I let my head fall back; Grace is bringing out the big guns. “Could we not bring up Matt?”

“Why? He was a good guy. But no matter what he did, you didn’t trust him. You lived with him, for God’s sake, and when he moved out he said he felt like he barely knew you.”

“When did he say that?”

“When he called me. Crying.”

I stare at the shelves, hoping the light isn’t bright enough for her to see the color that rushes from my toes to my face. I might’ve been a little harsh when I told him to deal or get out, but he chose the latter, thereby losing any trust I had in him. And once he was gone and I didn’t miss him, I knew we’d both made the right decision. Still, it wasn’t my finest moment in a life brimming with moments that could stand a do-over.

“You test people,” Grace continues. “You push them away to see if they’ll come back, and, even if they do, you push until they don’t. You pretend not to have feelings. Getting you to say anything but a joke or angry words is impossible.”

Even when I want to let them out, words cling in my throat like barnacles. And, after I’m invariably disappointed, I’m glad I haven’t given my true feelings away. But maybe it’s because I
haven’t
said them that I’m invariably disappointed. I’m sure I’ve caused my share of disappointment to the people who’ve waited for words instead of my signature wordless stare.

I attempt to swallow. That I create my own problems isn’t a bombshell—Grace has said it for years—but I always thought there’d be time to get my act together. That one day I’d meet someone for whom it was worth scraping out those barnacles. And now I sit in a basement, measuring my life in boxes and cans on a clipboard. I’ve missed my chance to even reminisce about a once-normal life.

“I didn’t mean to make you cry,” Grace says gently.

“I’m not crying,” I say, even though it’s a ridiculous thing to say while obviously crying—and the crux of my problem, in a nutshell. I swipe at my cheek. “It’s just hard to swallow and my eyes sting.”

“That’s called crying, dumbass.” I laugh as she picks her way between bins to sit beside me. “There are so many good things about you. You’re honest to a fault—”

“The word
fault
kind of negates that as being a good quality,” I say.

“Shut up. In a good way. You’re loyal and funny and caring and smart. But you need to let other people see it. Let them in.”

“Grace, there are hardly any people left in the world.”

“So let in the ones who are.”

I exhale through my mouth since my nose is stuffy and swollen. Another reason not to cry. “I’ll do my best to scupper my defenses.”

“
What
your defenses?”

“Scupper: to defeat or put an end to.”

“This is that stupid calendar, isn’t it?”

“I get an extra point if I use it aloud.”

Grace sighs. “Just tell me you hear what I’m saying to you.
Really
hear it.”

“I hear it,” I say grudgingly, and smack her hand when she pats my head.

Chapter 33

I’m the first awake once again. I find a book called
Tom Brown’s Field Guide to City and Suburban Survival
and open to the section on water. I’m obsessed with water. It’s something I haven’t thought about much in my life. It comes out of a faucet, it falls from the sky on occasions when you’d rather it not, and it’s fun to swim in. That’s about it. But I’ve gone water-crazy. I want all the water in the world and I can’t have it. I’ve divided the water we have between us and, based on what another book has given as a minimum gallon a day benchmark, we have less than a month’s worth. And that doesn’t include washing up after major zombie altercations, which we have planned for later in the day—our neighboring houses need to be cleared of their occupants.

My new book tells me how much water I need and how important it is.
Thanks a lot, Tom, wasn’t aware of that one
. It discusses home water systems, which is interesting in a plumberly sort of way, but we’ve gotten nothing from any taps, whether upstairs or down. The next paragraph makes me jump up with a squawk, sleeping people be damned. I pace the kitchen. I can’t wait. They have to wake up now.

I decide to brew coffee to soften the blow. It uses water, but we
have
water—we just didn’t know it. I light the camping stove on the teak backyard table and hide under the umbrella while I switch between watching the lidded pot and rereading the paragraph to be sure I didn’t imagine it, then pour the boiled water into the French press and set it on the counter.