The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious (26 page)

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?”

Maria 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.”

“You want something?” Jorge asks once we sit in the living room.

“We’ve got water. Thanks.” Guillermo pulls a crinkled plastic bottle from his jacket pocket and takes a sip. “I can’t wait to tell my moms you’re alive. Until we saw you on the roof, we thought there was no one else, except for those other groups.”

“What groups?” Jorge asks.

“There’s one, they’ve been going around smashing houses,” Guillermo says. We tell him about the kids we saw our first night. “That sounds like them. Everyone needs food. Can’t blame them for that, you know? Then there’s a group over in Chinatown. They’re all right. We made a deal with them that they get everything Eighth Avenue and up, we’re from Seventh down. There were a few more—gone now—Lexers got them.”

“Lexers?” Jorge asks.

“That’s what they called the zombies at the National Guard tents. They set up in the park the second day, inside the pool fence. It’s for the LX in Bornavirus LX. Lexers.” He shrugs. “We got tired of saying zombies.”

I’m tired of saying zombies.
Zombie this
and
zombie that
all the time gets old. I’m not sure Lexers is any better, but I’m willing to give it a try.

“Is the National Guard still there?” Jorge asks.

“Nah, most of them pulled out, we think for Safe Zones. Took a bunch of people with them. The guys that stayed inside the fence were dead. Lexers got in there.” Guillermo pauses, head dipped in a moment of silence, then looks up with glinting eyes. “But we got their guns. You should see what they had. You need one?”

“We have Maria’s.”

Guillermo raises his eyebrows Maria’s way. She leans back on the couch with an enigmatic curve of her lips, and I try not to laugh. He whistles when we tell him about the escape from the hospital. “It looks like you’re doing good.”

“Yeah, we have food and water for a while,” Jorge says. “Just built an outhouse.”

“No shit?” Guillermo asks.

“Yes shit,” I say. “In the outhouse.”

He laughs, smacking his thigh. “You need anything, you come by the Key Food. My guys are on the roof twenty-four seven. They’ll take you to the houses we’re at. Maybe we should dig an outhouse. Can I see?”

We give him a tour and explain the logistics of the outhouse while Guillermo examines it with shrewd eyes. I offer to loan him the book, which he accepts with thanks. We tell him about our plan to travel the neighborhood using yards and rooftops, and he nods. “That’s what we do when we can. We should make a route between our places. For real. Let’s do it.” He claps his hands like it’s all settled. “I’ve got big plans. We’re gonna be a Safe Zone once we get walls up.”

“It’ll take us a few days to get to you,” Jorge says. “We haven’t cleared out those blocks yet, and we’re going to check out a couple stores on the avenue first.”

“Careful in those stores,” Guillermo says. “Some of them are full of Lexers, and most of them don’t have shit. Okay, we’ve got to get back.” He raises his chin at the outhouse hole. “I’m going to build me one of those. If I don’t see you by the end of the week, I’ll come looking.”

“Don’t worry, we’re coming,” Maria says. “Say hi to your mom.”

Once they’ve left via the opposite side of the yards, with instructions on how to get back in using the key hidden in the front, I ask Maria, “What’d he say about Penny?”

“He saw her at our apartment, with Cassie, but it was before I spoke to them. He said the traffic wasn’t bad until the next day. If there was a roadblock, they would’ve come back here.” She’s been tapping her finger on her lips, but now she smiles in response to mine. “Guillermo’s a good kid.”

“A
mensch
,” I say.

“What’s that again?”

“Yiddish for a stand-up guy.”

“That’s Guillermo.”

I no longer feel like we’ve been shipwrecked on a deserted island in an ocean of zombies. Of course, Guillermo and company are an island, too, and the waters are rough, but we aren’t alone.

God, I sound like Grace.

Chapter 37

The poop bucket wasn’t spectacular by any means, but the outhouse takes some getting used to. I prefer locking, soundproof doors, so sitting in a bottomless tent listening to branches wave above was disconcerting. Now there are walls, a roof, and a locking door from inside a house, but even more disconcerting is the dark hole in which you can imagine almost anything lurking if you have a mind to. But it works, and it doesn’t smell as bad as I expected. To keep it that way, we sprinkle dead leaves into the hole and burn the toilet paper in a metal can every day—not my favorite job.

We’ve set buckets under every downspout, although the weather has been beautiful and dry. Once we have rainwater, we’re going to take cold baths, but I don’t care about temperature as long as it’s enough water to dump over my head. Right now we get a quart to clean up with every few days. It’s enough to lather up a washcloth, wash your stinkiest parts, and rinse away the soap.

The only useful store we could access from the back was the pharmacy—the cell phone store is as far from useful as one can get. We found feminine hygiene supplies and some medicine Maria deemed useful. Predictably, the strong stuff was gone and my dream of a full night of valium-induced sleep was dashed. Worse still, the candy display was bare.

At night, we eat our allotted sugar wafers while Jorge teaches us to play dominoes, which usually ends in friendly name-calling before we head to bed. Maria and Jorge beat the pants off me and Grace at first, but we won last night.

Guillermo’s presence has given us something to work toward. We use our days to clear the houses en route to Key Food. We open doors—either by force or Grace’s unexpected skill with a credit card on certain locks—and houses are vacated of zombies and tallied for supplies. We’ve found another few weeks of food and the water heaters are plentiful.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s fun, but it’s worthwhile. My job had no worth besides a paycheck, and for all the hours I worked, I was less than proud of what I accomplished. I sold out when I took a job I knew I’d hate, to sell products for companies I loathed. And I continued to sell out in small, yet significant-to-me ways: when I pretended that any of it was worth a shit, when I wore pantyhose, when I used the word
dialogue
as a verb. Actually, I never used dialogue as a verb. That line in the sand is so deeply drawn even the highest tide can’t wash it away, but I didn’t snicker when someone else did, which is bad enough.

Today we’ll reach Guillermo’s, and I can’t help but be proud we’ve made it this far. There are fewer Lexers close to the park, although more bodies lie in the streets and the houses that didn’t burn are emptied of food. This part of the neighborhood took a beating. Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to be surrounded by zombies—it appears to have kept people out, even though it’s only a half mile away.

We stand on the roof of the house kitty-corner to Sunset Park—the park for which the neighborhood is named. It’s a steep hill of green that runs three blocks across and two avenues up, surrounded by a tall stone wall. A chain-link fence forms another ring of protection inside the stone. The only open points of entry into the park were stairs, and they’ve been closed off with additional fencing. Sunset Park, one of the highest points in Brooklyn, looks like it’s also one of the safest, as long as the zombies were cleared out. I have no doubt they were.

Key Food is a one-story building on the corner across the avenue from the park. Relocated cars form a barrier around the store and at the crosswalks. The spaces between and beneath are filled in with a jumble of metal and concrete to keep out walking or crawling infected. Two figures sit on the roof of the supermarket in lawn chairs, one of whom gets to his feet and points a big gun our way.

“We came to see Guillermo,” Maria calls. “He told us to come. My name’s Maria.”

The guard nods and speaks to the other guy, who hasn’t left his chair. The lazy guy rises and ambles down a ladder, then heads up the side street to the houses that face the park. He can afford to go slow, since the cars enclose the entire intersection, but I don’t think Guillermo would approve of the lackadaisical attitude.

Three minutes later, Guillermo jogs down from the houses. We leave the roof and cross the street in our usual way—each person assigned a direction to watch, weapons at the ready. Jorge kills the one Lexer in our way with a quick strike, and we scramble over the barrier to the asphalt beside Guillermo. I know we’re safe within the cars, but I still have an urge to run for the nearest house.

“You guys are tight,” Guillermo says, and dips his chin in approval. He introduces us to the two men on the roof, both in their forties. “They’re welcome anytime. You got that?” The men nod and head back to their posts.

Guillermo jumps onto the wall of the park and encourages us up, then points out the next two intersections. They also have car barricades and one is half-filled with a wall of brick.

“We’ll do the other one next, then every intersection around the park. We’ve got to demo some houses for more bricks. Have to work out more mortar, too. If we could get to Home Depot or Lowes we’d be set, but it’s crazy down there. It’ll be a fortress when we’re done.” He looks into the distance, wind ruffling his dark hair. “Until the food runs out, but we’re working on that. My mom had us run down to the live markets a couple weeks ago. We got some goats and chickens.”

“Real live goats and chickens?” I ask. I’ve passed those live markets in the past but haven’t given them a thought. The animals would’ve been dead by the time we left the hospital, but we should’ve thought of it, at least. I picture myself trying to control a crazed goat or flapping chicken and acknowledge they’re probably better off with Guillermo.