City of Savages (8 page)

9    PHEE

So I’m not sure when Sky decided to turn all daredevil on me, but I’m not going to pretend I like it. Breaking out of our room during lockdown feels stupid, half-baked. What if we get caught? What happens then? Of course I want to read that journal as much as she does, but there’re other ways.

I don’t tell her any of this, though. I’m not going to stay behind—it just doesn’t make any sense. That’s not the way we work. In fact, if anything, she’s usually the one trailing me.

We creep into the hall, and I reach for one of the firecups attached to the walls, but Sky grabs my hand and shakes her head. She keeps up with the secret sister sign language, points to both of us and then down the hall. Then she starts signing way too quick, and I can’t catch anything else.
Enough of this
. I throw up my hands. Then I raise my index finger.
Hold up a second
.

I duck back into the room for one of our torches. At least one of us is going to be prepared. I pause for a second and think about my gun, which I haven’t really carried since Mom gave it to me. Talk about being prepared.

No, stupid idea, Phee. It’s not necessary.

But a part of me, one I’m not so proud of, begs and pleads to grab it.
You’re the one who’s supposed to be badass
, my little instigator taunts me
. Not Sky
.

I honestly can’t spare a minute for this
Who am I really?
crisis. Since I don’t have the time to debate, I just listen, and dig the gun out from under our mattress. I stick it in the right pocket of my sweats and put the bullets in the left.

There
. Things feel right again. I head out the door.

“No, leave the torch. We’ll feel our way up the internal stairs,” Sky whispers when I get back. “We need to stay in the shadows. Follow me.”

I ignore this idea and keep the unlighted torch, and follow her down the hall of the Carlyle.

It must be almost midnight. I’m so jumpy I’m starting to see and hear things, whorelords climbing out of the shadows, whispers in the walls. Then I’m sure I hear two guards talking quietly at the opposite end of the hallway. I grab Sky’s hand and we flatten ourselves against the wallpaper, like we can push ourselves through it. We watch the pair of whorelords cross our hall and head towards the lower-numbered rooms. After they disappear, we scramble to the stairway door, open it, and duck behind it. I open it again to light my torch with a nearby firecup, then rejoin Sky on the other side.

“This way, we can see where we’re going,” I say.

“Yeah, and they can see us.” Sky shakes her head. “I told you to leave it and just follow me. We could have made a fire on the roof.”

“With what? You’ll thank me later.”

She just shakes her head again and begins climbing on all fours up the few flights of stairs. “Stay down,” she cuts at me. “There’re lords roaming every floor. They see that flame, we’re finished.”

“Well, we trip on the stairs and we’re finished.”

“Phee,” she huffs. “No one insisted you come along.”

Really. Would Sky have actually gone without me? So I just say, “Get real.”

We continue to climb in silence, then finally reach the rooftop door. It’s bolted and locked with about four monster chains, but the chains are loose, so we manage to push the door open enough to wiggle through. Sky goes first, and then I pass her the torch and slide through behind her, into the open air of the roof deck.

We run across the empty lounge, from couch to beat-up couch, towards a long rectangular shape in the far corner of the space. It’s bordered with rusted stools on one side, and we crawl into its belly. Half-empty bottles and broken glass are everywhere. I read the labels:
JIM BEAM
.
JACK DANIELS
.
JOSE CUERVO
. A bunch of other guys.

Sky nudges the glass away with her foot, and we settle down against the shelves. I hold the torch as she whips the journal out from the elastic of her shimmery stretch pants. Sky’s pajamas put all my outfits to shame.

“We finish this tonight,” Sky says as she cracks open the journal. I lean the grip of the torch against my knee and the journal comes alive, firelight breathing into the old words. And for the first time since she woke me up, we’re on the same page.

“Without a doubt.”

We pick up with Mom and her sister-in-law, Mary, walking through the tunnels.

But before we reached Grand Central, we felt a rip, a jolt so powerful it seemed like the world’s carpet was being pulled out from under us. I leaned against the raised subway platform and pulled Sky close to me. She started wailing, like she was being tortured in the dark.

“We need to get out of here,” a woman dressed far too nicely for the subway on a Saturday implored, once the earth had stopped trembling. “Now.”

I could feel a new undercurrent to our group, a collective, breathless panic. We all started scrambling, throwing elbows and grunts as we moved towards freedom. The teenager from our train, Bronwyn, started sobbing behind me, moaning that she wasn’t ready to die.

Mary dropped her voice an octave, even as the murmurs and the cries began to bubble and rise around us. “Whatever happens,” she said to me, “we stick together, okay?”

Her voice was shaking, and it scared the shit out of me.

“Mary—”

“Just promise me,” she said.

I told her of course.

The crowd began clambering its way up the stairs to the terminal. The lighters were extinguished by the rush, and then we were blind, a thicket of hands pawing our way through the dark. We jumped one by one over the turnstiles into the station. But there was no sunlight to greet us. Instead we combed through a thick, dusty fog. We heard brittle rounds of machine guns, the barking of foreign tongues. Wails.

We were lost, lab rats in a maze of fog, and I wanted to scream, just sit down and scream, I was so panicked. But instead I clutched Sky and prayed. For her, for her dad. Where was Tom? Was he safe? Were he and Robert at the studio, or were they somewhere underground?

I felt a hand on my waist, and Mary was at my side. “Everyone back to the subways,” she told us. “Now!”

Mary herded us back down the stairs, to the hungry, empty belly of the city. We descended the stairs carefully, and by that point, Sky was
shrieking. Hungry, tired, sitting in her own filth.
I promised her I would get her home. But maybe I was full of shit. Maybe the world was falling apart.

“Wait a minute.” Sky yanks the book from me and then leans over it so close, it’s like she’s trying to hear it whisper. “Wails . . . foreign tongues. Machine guns.” She looks at me, her eyes wide and spooky under the torchlight. “Do you realize what this is?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

She starts flipping Mom’s journal pages so fast, the ink starts to blur together. “This isn’t . . . some slice-of-life journal about Mom before the attacks.” Sky’s words are practically tripping over one another, they’re so excited to come out. “This
is
the story of the attacks. It’s happening right here, in these pages. Maybe all the secrets, all the missing links . . . about Mom . . . and
Dad
 . . . even me and you, they could be in here. Phee, this could explain everything.”

I peer over the journal and think about all we don’t know. All the times Sky would ask about Mom’s life Before, or even After, and Mom’s face would just cloud over.

I don’t want to tell Sky that it feels like spying, like we’ve broken Mom open and are just dumping all her secrets out.

’Cause right now, I’m having trouble breathing.

Right now, the idea of figuring out what happened to Mom, to our family, is so huge and heavy, it almost knocks me over.

“Everything we don’t know about our family could be in there?”

“More than just our family, Phee.” Sky shakes her head. “Everything we don’t know about this
city
. About Manhattan.”

March 8—We lived through another day. We camped out in the dark just shy of where the 7 train pulled into Times Square. In the process, we freed the passengers of two other subways.

No one knew what was going on at the surface. No cell phones, no computers, no television. Those who had gadgets with power left bounced and roamed for service like stumbling drunks.

“We need to send a team of scouts to the surface.” Mary finally broke the silence.

We’d been debating for hours about what was happening up there, arguing, hundreds of voices reaching a fever pitch until Lauren, the well-dressed woman, finally pointed out that regardless of what was going on, we were in hiding and should be quiet.

“Mary, are you insane? We don’t know who—or what—is up there,” Bronwyn said from the corner. The alpha teen’s mask of confidence from the subway car had faded, right along with her makeup. And now I saw only a pale, lonely girl drowning in a sea of strangers—somebody’s daughter lost in the dark. “The police’ll find us, they have to,” Bronwyn said, and shivered. “Someone will save us.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Mary said. “We can’t just sit here forever. We need to save ourselves.”

Of course Mary looked to me for support, and even though I was exhausted, I mustered my
conviction and said, “Absolutely. Yes, we need to do something.” Then I clutched Sky tighter, dropped my
voice, and whispered to Bronwyn, “This
will
be okay.”

The crowd started murmuring in agreement, and soon we were making plans, selecting scouts to send into Times Square station. The cyclists from our subway car volunteered, and we gave them careful instructions, used our collective knowledge, and drew a map in someone’s notebook of the various hallways and passages of the subway stop. We started a collection and sent them along with money, a lighter, and hope.

“Be quick about it,” Mary warned them as they jumped the subway turnstiles. “We’re all down here, waiting for you.”

It was then that I finally saw that fire behind Mary’s eyes, the power that Tom often told me was there, ready to burn him to the ground. But I was grateful for it. I was starting to think that without
Mary, I would go insane down here. Might run until the blackness enveloped me, claimed me as its own.

The cyclists never returned.

March 20—It’s been weeks. Or maybe it’s been a lifetime. I can’t be sure. I’ve divided my mind into two—the anxious, fully conscious part of me has been put to sleep. There’s only my animal left, which roams this dark labyrinth. I breathe, eat, and care for Sky. I don’t think. I can’t think.

We’re just lost migrants at the city’s mercy, survivors scavenging for a second chance. We camp out at different subway stops, swapping tales from our past lives like trading cards. Lauren has shared stories about her overachieving fifth grader. Bronwyn’s told me about her “perfect” boyfriend, some arrogant freshman at NYU . . . then more quietly, as she played with Sky, about her little sisters back home.

A few of our doomed pack have volunteered to scout and loot on the surface. Many of them haven’t returned. Some have with food, clothing. Flashlights and candles. And of course, images.

“New York is under fire,” they said. “We’re at war. The streets are filled with corpses. There are soldiers on every corner. There’s nothing left.”

I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I stay in my dark cocoon, taking rations for Sky and me, keeping an eye on Bronwyn, clinging to Mary. I feel so sick these days.

April 1—Our numbers are dwindling. The brave ones are dying faster, one by one volunteering or being chosen for a near-certain suicide mission. Those who are left are young or old, scared or sick. We get by on looted goods from abandoned corner stores and restaurants. We ration. We want to give up. But Mary keeps us focused and moving. There’s really no one else to lead this pitiful crew.

Most days we spend wandering or cowering in corners, speculating. We’ve compiled a collective mental montage of the surface, from the few who have made it back with supplies. Our theories start out each morning as a slow simmer, building throughout the day into a boil, until by evening we’re whistling louder than a teakettle.

“It was China.”

“I met survivors from the N line on the surface. It’s definitely the Middle East.”

“I heard Brooklyn’s bombed out.”

“No, it’s Queens. And it started with Japan.”

“You idiots, it’s a land invasion. No one dropped a nuke.”

But no one knows for sure.

April 15—The pain has gotten unbearable. I feel like my insides are trying to crawl out of me, and recently it hurts to even walk. Where is Tom?

Some days I picture him hunting through the dark, looking for me. I hear creaks, noises underground, and I think he and Robert are around the corner, coming for us.

We hear a frustrated rattle of chains from the other side of the bar. An angry door trying to break from its hinges. I jump and nearly burn the journal. Sky’s eyes are wild under the firelight. She quickly tucks the journal back into her stretch pants, then motions for me to blow out the flame.

Our light disappears just as we hear a series of keys click into the door’s padlocks. The chains fall one by one, clang to the floor, and then a team of voices stampedes the roof.

“This is ridiculous. We should be at the zoo, or the castle.”

I close my eyes. I’ll never forget that voice. The one that taunted me before my 65th Street fight. The one that promised I wouldn’t walk away from it. Cass.

“Fieldworkers are like sheep. They know to stay in their pens,” Cass adds. “We don’t need to be at this shitty hotel missing all the action.”