The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious (47 page)

I’m struck with the idea that somehow he can see into my mind and wants to use my insecurities against me. But that’s Crazy Sylvie talking, and Sane Sylvie is on the scene today. “Well, we did just try. But we were coming back anyway.”

He grunts. “Eric told me about your mom. Sorry.”

It’s the last thing I expected to hear, and I wonder what else Eric told him. “Thanks, but we weren’t very close,” I say, and try for an expression that implies I don’t need sympathy although I appreciate the thought.

Paul nods, his blue eyes cool above his stubbly cheeks, and it’s clear I haven’t nailed this particular reaction. But he also looks like the quintessential Brooklyn brawler, and that type is happy only when getting into a fistfight at a bar. I try not to take any of the conversation personally after the few weeks he’s probably had.

“Your water’s done,” I say. He rises. I feel dwarfed, and not in a good way. “There are towels in the clo—”

“I know where towels are. I practically grew up here.”

He lifts the pot and walks past me to the house. And I thought
I
was brusque around new people.

Chapter 62

We sit in the yard to eat Second Meal. The food will go faster with seven of us, and I assume Second Meal is here to stay. The calorie obsession is creeping in again, not that it ever left completely. I point to the large cylinder of metal on which our dinner was cooked. It’s a stove of some sort, the product of Operation
Caffeine Strike
. “What is that exactly?”

“A rocket stove,” Eric says. He points to a metal tube that juts out of the cylinder near the bottom. “You put the fuel in there, on the fuel shelf. You can use twigs to cook an entire meal. The insulated combustion chamber and vertical chimney mean you lose almost none of the heat. It’s pretty much complete combustion.”

“So what you’re saying is that it’s magic?”

Eric leans back in his chair, eyes twinkling. “That would be the shorter explanation.”

“And how did you make this magical thing?”

“You know, I just rolled up my sleeves and did a bunch of manly stuff.”

I roll my eyes even as I appreciate the vision of him doing manly things with his sleeves hiked up.

“You cursed a lot,” Leo says. He sits with his knees bent and feet splayed out behind him in a position only a five-year-old could find comfortable.

“That I did. But you’re not supposed to mention that part.”

I smile at Leo. When he grins back, it becomes apparent why they call them the apples of your cheeks. There’s not a booger in sight. I’m not sure where his mom is, but Paul has shaved, accentuating eyes that carry enough luggage for a grand tour of Europe, so I think wherever she is can’t be good.

“We need to get to any food before someone else does,” Paul says. “Bay Ridge is getting cleaned out. Whoever’s doing that might move this way next. Maybe it’s that group supplying the monastery, and they’re storing it somewhere.”

There’s no reason I should be wary. After all, here we sit, a group of people surviving on stored food. But I still don’t like the sound of it, or the fact that Paul said he heard gunshots on a regular basis, or that one day we might be in a race for food or it’ll become so scarce that people are willing to kill for it. I think of Mrs. Hernandez—they already
are
willing to kill for it.

“There are other people around here, too,” I say. “One group seems young. We heard them outside our first night. Some of them got eaten, but we don’t know how many are still around.”

Paul frowns and then tilts his chin to where Leo sits, listening with rapt attention. I’m about to apologize when he stands and lifts Leo under one arm like a football, disapproval radiating my way. “Let’s go check out that bike Jorge found, buddy.”

I should’ve known not to discuss this stuff with kids around, although it didn’t seem any worse than what Paul has said so far. Another reason I’d be unfit as a mother—I’d read them Stephen King books at bedtime or something equally terrifying.

“Sorry,” I say to everyone else, since Paul has moved out of earshot, “I’m not used to having a kid here.”

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Eric says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Jorge sets down his bowl. “Eric, does Paul think that group in Bay Ridge is dangerous?”

“He doesn’t know. Maybe they’re not all bad if they’re supplying nuns with food. We could try to meet with them at some point, make a deal, like that deal Guillermo made with Chinatown. But they could be the ones from the other night and, if they are, I’m thinking they don’t want to make friends. We should have someone on watch all night.”

Jorge nods. “We should make this block look abandoned. Crack windows and doors like someone broke in and cleared it out. The other side, too.” He points at the houses whose backyards are now ours. “I thought it before, but after Guillermo came by all I could think was how obvious it is they’ve got supplies. If I was gonna hit anybody, it’d be them, but if they know we’re here…”

“It’s a great idea. We should’ve done that before now.”

“Jorge is full of good ideas,” I say, “but he likes to keep them to himself and drop them in at random moments like little bombs of good sense.”

Jorge opens his hands. “Still waters run deep,
mami
.”

“That’s what I hear,
papi chulo
.”

Jorge’s booming laugh fills the yard. I’ve been waiting for him to call me
mami
again, hoping he’d be amused by the response. Maria shakes her head but laughs along with everyone except Paul, who has returned and put his feet up on the table, completely at ease with his bowl of rice and beans in a way that makes me envy his level of security.

“We’ll start the watch shifts tonight,” Eric says.

“How are we going to see anything?” Maria asks. “The block is huge and it’s pitch black.”

“We’ll listen. It’s better than nothing.”

“I can do early morning,” I say. “Since I’m up anyway. And I have a book that says—hold on.” I run into the house and return with my latest survival book.

“
When All Hell Breaks Loose
,” Jorge reads when I hold it up. “I think it has.”

“What’s that on the cover?” Maria asks.

“Just a piece of paper,” I say.

“There’s a picture of a roach on the cover, so she taped a piece of paper over it,” Grace says, altogether too pleased to alert everyone to my insanity.

“Really?” Maria asks, and bursts into laughter at my nod.

“I couldn’t touch it.”

“It’s a
picture
,” Maria says.

“Doesn’t matter.” I tried it uncovered for a day, but it made me have to smash imaginary bugs on my legs, so it had to go. If it was my book, I’d cut it out. “But this is a good one—it even has a section on how to wipe your butt with your bare hand.”

“Now
that’s
a survival book,” Eric says.

“Gross,” Grace says. “I am not wiping my butt with my bare hand. No matter what, there has to be something else nearby that’s better than that.”

“But it’s eco-friendly,” I say, to which she flips me the bird. I open the book to the chapter on self-defense. “It even gives defensive moves.”

I show the page to Grace, who pretends to do the illustrated open-handed strike on me. It’s basically a face mash with an open palm and, assumedly, a bit more force. “Now imagine if I’d used my hand to wipe,” she says.

“Poop strike!” I say. We crack up, as does Leo, which serves to demonstrate our level of maturity. I clear my throat. “It talks about having a signal so the other people in your group know something is wrong without giving it away to others, and maybe a safe room or an exit strategy, and—” I stop yapping. “Well, you get the idea, but you never know when someone will try to
mulct
our supplies.”

Eric levels his finger at me. “You.
You
.” I bat my eyelashes and he shakes his head good-naturedly. “But it’s true, they might.”

“Anyway,” Paul says, “how are we on food?”

“We need more,” Maria says. “We have maybe a couple months if we ration it. We already aren’t eating enough, and plants will take a while to grow.”

“So we should go out looking. Eric and I can start tomorrow.”

“We’ll come?” Grace asks me. I nod.

“That’s all right.” Paul gives a small laugh. “You should stay here and…”

He trails off when Grace straightens, hands gripping the arms of her chair. “And what? Bake you cupcakes?”

I glance at Leo to see if he’s noticed his dad is about to be taken down a notch, but he’s happily throwing dirt in the air with explosive noises. He’s going to be a mess later, but that’s not my problem, thankfully. Maybe Paul expects us to babysit his kid for him while we bake those cupcakes.

“We’ve been going out all the time,” Grace says in a voice that’s both soft and deadly. “And we can show you the best route because
we
made it
. We went farther yesterday than anyone else here except Eric.” Her eyes are steely. “Do you think we should stay because we’re women? If so, I’ll tell you right now that is not happening.”

The yard is silent except for Leo’s small explosions. Jorge coughs into his hand. Finally, Paul raises his hands in a placating fashion, though he looks more annoyed than apologetic. “Okay, sorry.”

Grace nods, limp blond ponytail flopping like a cheerleader and completely out of context with her demeanor. She gets up from her chair. “I’m going to the roof. Maybe I’ll even keep watch. Although I
am
a woman, so I might get confused and go shopping.”

When I pictured Eric’s best friend, I imagined a laid-back guy who smelled faintly of weed. The kind of guy I wouldn’t be surprised to come upon playing hacky sack in the yard, or a guy who said things like
dude
and
awesome
and had a carabiner hanging from his belt loop that he referred to as a
biner
. Likeable and funny and even a tiny bit exasperating in the same tree-hugging manner as Grace.

I watch Grace stalk into the house, and then I turn to Paul. So far, I’m not impressed. He couldn’t be more unlike Eric if he tried. “She’s a little pissed. You should stay out of her way.” Paul’s eye twitches. I give him a saccharine smile before I follow her in.

Eric’s bag is now in the bedroom that holds the closet ladder, and I hope he doesn’t mind that I will forever be using his room to access the roof. I find Grace facing the general direction of her home, wiping at her cheeks, and I sit without a word.

“What a dick,” she says. “You know what the worst part is?”

“That there are forty people left in the world and he’s one of them?”

Grace snorts. “Well, yeah. But no. It’s that I can’t contact them. I don’t know what’s happened. If there were a way to know, then I’d be o—No, I wouldn’t be
okay
, but at least I’d know how to feel.”

“I never know how to feel, so I can’t help you there.”

“You feel good, though, don’t you?”

“What?”

She glances at me quickly, lips twisted in a quarter smile, before she returns her gaze to the view. “You like it here.”

I shrug. I don’t want Grace to feel worse. I wish with all my heart we had her family with us, but I am happy to be back.

“Syls, you’re allowed to like it. It’s okay.”

“Everyone’s nice,” I say, and think of Paul. “Well, maybe not everyone, but I like everybody else. How about that?” I prod her with my elbow. “I like
people
.”

“You know what’s happening? You’re having corrective emotional experiences. That’s where—”

I groan. “No, we are not having a Psychoanalyze Sylvie session on the roof. We’re making fun of Paul and possibly shopping, not discussing correctional emotions or whatever.”

Grace laughs. “Okay.” She mutters under her breath, “But you are having them.”

I yank her ponytail.

Chapter 63

We start off the next day smashing windows. The streets are full of zombies—not a good day to go out looking for food unless we want to
be
food. We open a few front doors to give the appearance the houses have been broken into and cleaned out, but wedge pieces of wood beneath, both to delay people and any zombies who might make it up the stoops. I’m more worried about people than zombies.

Eric knocks a window with a bat to create a starburst pattern, then pushes out the glass in the hole with gusto. “This is every ten-year-old kid’s dream.”

“Ten-year-old
boy’s
dream, you mean,” I say.

“I take offense to that,” he says, but his grin says otherwise.

“My brother once broke a car windshield with a baseball by accident,” Grace says. “So what did he do? He kept throwing the ball against the window until it shattered completely. When they asked him why, he said he’d already broken it, so he wanted to see how many throws it would take to obliterate it.” She looks pointedly at Eric. “He was ten.”

“I’ll never win against you two. Paul, help me out here.”

Paul starts to speak, but Grace cuts him off with, “Time for the next house.”

Grace hasn’t warmed to Paul since yesterday, and he’s keeping his distance from her, but she still manages to knock him with her shoulder as she passes. Paul stands utterly still for a moment before he follows, head down. Eric turns to me with an
oh shit
expression.

“Don’t piss off Grace,” I say. “She’ll One Love you ‘til she’s blue in the face, but once you’re on her shit list, she’s got no love for you.”

“I’ll be on my best behavior.”

“You will if you know what’s good for you,” I say, and give him one of Grace’s shoulder swipes on our way to the next house.

It would be nice to sweep up the litter and pull the dead bodies off the sidewalks because there’s plenty of stink from flesh that oozes and opens and leaks, but a well-kept street means a lived-in street. Once it looks post-apocalyptic enough and I’ve regained my appetite, I dream about my non-existent lunch. Grace must feel the same, since she asks, “Remember when we used to eat that meal in the middle of the day?”

“Barely.”

“I guess I’ll plant something that will be lunch eventually. Only three months to go.” She pumps a fist and leaves to help Maria and Leo plant seeds in tiny pots.