The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious (18 page)

I set my gun on the wicker table and pull out my knife. They look to be my age. The kind of my age that pays a mortgage and chases kids around, rather than pays tuition and chases adrenaline. The minivan in their driveway has decals stuck to the back window. Five figures, varying in height: Mom, Dad, two kids and a cat, from what I can see. Dad wears a Hawaiian shirt and looks like he’d be good at the grill. Mom has knotted blond hair and a gold heart necklace swings from her neck.

I’m above and they’re below, with a convenient railing in the middle. I move close and plunge my knife into an eye of her upturned face. Her husband steps over her fallen body without a glance. In life, he’d protect her. In death, he doesn’t notice. Maybe he’s the one who bit the chunk out of her shoulder. Another ram of my knife and he falls on her, arms out, as if protecting her now.

I enter through the window. It’s neat as a pin, like the outside, and filled with photos of children and grandchildren. There’s a grinning kid everywhere I turn. I find the car keys and hit pay dirt in the well-maintained car in the garage: a New Jersey road atlas, along with several other maps. I stick New York City in my pocket and tuck the large atlas under my arm. I’m good on water, but I open the fridge—spoiled milk and juice, as well as a single can of beer. I take it and leave by the front door.

I can’t see the couple I killed, but I can smell them. I ponder whether they ate their kids and the cat as I head for the Jeep. The kids could be in the house, either finally dead or zombies. If the latter, I’d think they’d be outside with their parents. But there’s always the possibility they managed to lock out their parents and are in there now—alive, human, and terrified of what their parents became.

I toss the maps into the Jeep, drop the beer in the cup holder and stand by the open door. It can’t hurt to check. The last thing I need is two kids and a cat, but I have to know or the possibility of two little kids dying of starvation will haunt me. Rachel would shake her head at Steadfast Eric. Or she’d take it as proof I
am
still human. Maybe, after that last thing she said, she’d urge me on.

Rachel loved kids. She already heard her biological clock ticking at the ripe old age of twenty-seven. I never disagreed with her prediction that we’d have three of our own, but I said I wasn’t ready and couldn’t say when I would be. She said I needed to grow up and be responsible enough to tie my life to someone else’s. Only after we broke up did I realize it wasn’t tying my life to a kid that had given me pause, it was tying my life to Rachel, though I hadn’t known it at the time.

I step past the minivan. The backyard gate is ajar, and I move through the vacant yard to the open patio door. Dried blood is smeared on the kitchen counters, the table, the walls. Pink sneakers mottled with brown peek out from under the table in the adjoining dining room. They ate enough of her that she didn’t turn, which, in a terrible way, is a blessing.

Tiny footsteps and a barely audible grunt give me an idea of what I’ll see before it arrives, but I hope I’m wrong until a little boy comes into view. Five or six, maybe, with sandy blond hair and a bloodstained mouth. He reminds me so much of Leo that I return to the patio, slide the door shut behind me and walk away. He hits the glass with a bang. I should open it and kill him, but I don’t want to. I stop after another few steps. If he gets out, he might eat someone else’s daughter or son. I’ll be out of here in one minute, so the noise won’t matter, and I really don’t want to use my knife this time. Rachel’s .22 will be enough.

I open the door. It’s finished before he’s out. As I drive away, I tell myself I’m lucky: I could never get two kids across destroyed bridges. I’d have to feed them and protect them. I’d have to tie my life to theirs, and that could prove impossible when sustaining my own life is a major pain in the ass. There are so many reasons it’s better this way. But I’m still disappointed.

Chapter 27

Sylvie

The foyer of Maria’s safe house is littered with random items—a backpack, an empty plastic bin, and discarded clothing. It isn’t a pigsty of epic proportions, but someone left in a hurry. A door on the right leads to a bedroom. The two windows let in enough light to see dark wood furniture, framed prints and close to four thousand pieces of paper tacked to a corkboard. A desk in the corner is covered with more papers, and I assume the hump of clothes that sits before it has a chair somewhere underneath. Whoever lived here was not anal retentive.

The turquoise hutch by the front door holds a stack of unopened mail. Coats hang on a row of hooks beside a radiator. Most brownstones were built as one-family homes, and the foyer narrows to a hallway where the old staircase has been walled-in for privacy between tenants, although an access door is set into the end. If it’s the same as most garden apartments I’ve seen, the basement door will be on the other end of the enclosed stairs, where the hall opens to the remainder of the apartment.

I look over the framed photographs on the walls as we follow Maria down the hallway—a dated one of a brown-haired boy and girl, a family standing in front of a log cabin, school pictures of the same two kids through the years until they wear high school caps and gowns.

Sure enough, we pass the basement door at the far end of the hall. The bathroom is straight ahead and the living room to our right. Colorful throw pillows decorate the couch and chairs, and a striped area rug covers the wood floor. Two bookcases hold so many books they’ve been crammed in at crazy angles. The TV sits in a wood entertainment center whose shelves display various
tchotchkes
—a candlestick shaped like a gnarled tree, old glass bottles and tins, and another picture of that same family. Despite only one window in the corner, it’s bright and cozy and comfortable.

Pocket doors to the right of the living room lead to a small room inhabited by a desk, an easel and racks of paint tubes and brushes. An artist lives here. I’ve surmised by now that the friend of Maria’s daughter is female. And not doing too badly in the money department. You can’t afford to live alone in an apartment like this, even in the Sunset Park neighborhood, unless you have money to blow on rent. Especially not with the backyard I can see through the window.

“Penny? Ana?” Maria calls softly, although it’s obviously empty. She moves across the living room and into the kitchen at the rear.

Two windows over the sink look out on a small backyard with a shed in the corner, all accessed by a paned glass door on the right wall. A backpack sits in a kitchen chair. A folded sheet of paper is on the table, the word
Mama
written across the front. Maria wipes her hands on a paper towel and brings the note to the door.

Her shoulders quiver as she reads, then she refolds the paper and lets out a sob. Grace moves to touch Maria’s shoulder. “It’s from your daughters? Did they leave?”

“She said the streets were okay,” Maria whispers. “They got a van and were leaving right away.” She lifts a hand to her mouth, then appears to think better of it when she sees the filth on every finger. “I think they got out.”

“I’m so glad,” Grace says with a soft smile.

Maria’s expression shifts from relief to grief and back again. She’s overjoyed her daughters may be safe, but I think there must be a part of her that wishes she could hold them. Her knees buckle and she buries her face in Grace’s brown-speckled hair.

This is always the part where I take off. Ostensibly to give the person privacy, but really because the more broken-down someone is, the more awkward I become, until I’m cracking jokes and invariably insulting someone. I inch into the living room, past where Jorge stands watching with damp eyes. A black, gooey string of something dangles from his collar. My fingers are coated in the dried contents of that zombie’s abdomen, and my scrubs are streaked with blood and brown chunks. I carefully pull the shirt over my head. My long-sleeved shirt beneath is damp with sweat and possibly zombie fluid, but it doesn’t have actual pieces of entrails clinging to it.

I stink. We all stink. I walk to the bathroom and turn the tap. It’s dry, and my relief that we’re here turns to fear. I return to the kitchen, where Maria and Grace stand with their arms around each other’s waists, catharsis complete.

“How will we get water?” I ask Maria. I don’t mean it to sound accusatory and attempt to soften it with, “I tried the bathroom but the water is off.”

“There should be water in the basement, but I know there’s a barrel out back from when they had a garden.”

“Let’s clean this off before we touch anything.” Jorge inspects his hands and then uses a crusty finger to point to the yard. “You think anyone’s out there?”

It isn’t a revelation, but seeing Kearney in action has brought home the fact that zombies aren’t the only thing to fear. When
cops
are feeding innocent people to zombies, who do you call? Especially when there are no phones. And no cops.

A basement hatch is set into the concrete outside the kitchen door. Two steps lead up to where the yard widens into a concrete patio with outdoor furniture and, beyond that, a grassy area and the blue shed. A wooden fence encloses the yard, and the trees in neighboring yards promise more privacy once their leaves open. It’s impossible to see anything but the windowed backs of the three-story brownstones across the yards.

“We have to go out there sooner or later,” Maria says.

“All right, let me go first,” Jorge says. He opens the glass door and the screen door behind it, cranes his neck around, and then steps outside with a shrug. After a peek under the lid of the barrel beside the basement hatch, he turns with a round-cheeked grin.

Water. Maybe fifty glorious gallons, based on the size of the barrel. I don’t care who’s out there, we have water. Life-giving water. Maybe a week’s worth, two weeks’ worth. I have no idea how much water we need to live, but it has to rain soon. It always does in the spring. I leave Maria rummaging in a cabinet and meet Jorge outside.

“It’s not the cleanest water I’ve ever seen,” Jorge says, “but it’s water.”

“I don’t care if it’s swamp water,” I say, and he laughs.

Maria and Grace come out bearing bowls, hand soap and dish towels. We each get a bowl of water to clean up. I lather the lavender-scented soap and wash my face and hands, soap up the grossest parts of my hair and then rinse everything off over the yard drain. I might happily sacrifice someone to the zombies for a hot shower, but a clean face and hands feels wonderful.

I do my best to wash the brown gunk out of Grace’s hair. She towel dries it and sniffs the ends. “It’s better. Thanks.”

That black string still hangs from Jorge’s collar below the freshly-scrubbed skin of his neck. “You’ve got a…thing on you there,” I say.

He looks down with a grimace, then plucks it off with two fingertips and drops it in the outside drain. Using water to wash has made me thirstier. I’ve acquired a bad case of cotton mouth, and with it comes the realization that I have to ask for water, that my continued existence is dependent on the generosity of others. “Do you think we can drink that? I’m a little thirsty.”

“We should boil it first, right?” Jorge asks.

“Probably,” Maria says. “Let’s see if there’s something in the fridge.”

In the kitchen, she sets bottles of warm root beer and brewed iced tea on the table, then grabs the backpack on the chair. “They left some of my things. I’m going to change. Be right back.”

I drink half my iced tea in one gulp. Jorge and Grace do the same and then we stand awkwardly in a strange kitchen, nursing the rest of our beverages. The refrigerator is covered in magnets and photos and notes under notes, much like the corkboard in the bedroom.

“The clothes in the bedroom will fit you two,” Maria says to me and Grace upon her return in a clean outfit, and then she shifts her focus to Jorge’s attire. “There might be some men’s clothes in the basement. We should wash yours out.”

“Let’s see what there is first,” Jorge says. “I don’t want to waste any of the water.”

Maria finds a small flashlight in a drawer and leads us to the basement door.

“So, whose house is this?” Jorge asks.

“Penny’s best friend, Cassie.” Maria turns to me and Grace at the top of the stairs. “There’s enough light to see in Cassie’s bedroom. Why don’t you change first?”

Cassie’s bed is unmade and, inside the large closet built out from the wall, clothes hang with no apparent rhyme or reason. Shelves hold jeans and sweaters that are folded but still manage to look untidy and precariously balanced. I stare at the clothes, unable to motivate myself to look through.

After she’s taken a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt for herself, Grace hands me a pair and drops a black shirt on top. “Look, your favorite color.”

She finds a pair of underwear and a bra in the dresser, then peels off her old clothes. Grace is petite, so she cuffs the too-long jeans at the bottom, buckles a belt to keep them up and sits on the bed with a sigh while I stand clutching a strange girl’s clothes.

“Syls, you all right?”

“Yeah,” I whisper.

But I’m not. It’s possible I’ll never see my stuff again, never have anything that’s truly mine. I like having things that are mine. Things that aren’t suddenly lost to an eviction notice ignored too long. Things that aren’t stolen and sold by my mother for easy cash. Things that aren’t left behind because I have to move in with my best friend’s family in order to finish high school.

I’ve spent years amassing things that are mine and mine alone. Years not depending on anyone. And now I have to ask for food, for water, for clothes. There’s no end to the amount of stuff I’ll need to survive. I’m happy to be alive, but no matter how I tell myself to be grateful, I think I’d rather be dead than be at someone’s mercy ever again.

I inspect the underwear drawer. Pretty but comfortable, with a few racier things thrown in. The bra is close enough to fit. I put on my new outfit. It’s almost like wearing my own clothes, but it still feels as if I’m disappearing one article of clothing at a time.

Chapter 28

Grace and I descend the stairs to a basement that’s nowhere near as creepy as I expected. Two camping lanterns illuminate smooth, dry concrete walls. Ziploc bags cover a ping pong table. Plastic storage bins were opened, gone through, and left with their lids off in front of additional bins stacked against one wall. It’s reminiscent of the bedroom.