The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious (51 page)

“What is it?” Grace asks.

“A cat.”

“Really? Let me see.” I scoot over so she can join me, and it runs out of sight. Grace gets to her feet. “I guess it doesn’t want to say hi.”

I try to see where it went without success. The thought of that cat wet and lonely and hungry gives me a hollow feeling in my stomach. I hate to see stray animals—stray anything, really. “Do you have any food?” I ask Grace.

“Just some nuts.”

I hear a zipper and then Eric kneels beside me, tearing something in his hand. “Beef jerky.”

He takes the time to make sure the jerky is shredded small enough for a cat and places it just inside our yard, close enough to entice but far enough that it will have to come through to eat it. If it returns, I’ll feed it part of my food every day. That way no one can object to its presence.

“Thanks.” I stand and start to move away.

“Don’t unfriend me.” Eric kneels in the mud, his bottom lip in his teeth and his plea in his eyes. I’m bewildered at the idea of him—this normal, funny, kind-hearted human who appeared out of nowhere and, for some mysterious reason, thinks the crazy person is worth knowing.

“Who
are
you?” I ask.

“I’m Eric Forrest,” he says, hand extended. “Who’s going to be your friend whether you like it or not.”

I yank him to his feet.

***

The gentle rain turns to a downpour when we’re blocks from home. The zombies who are dressed, especially the ones still in coats, are weighed down by sopping clothes and shoes, and we’re using the opportunity to visit stores away from our safe passage of houses. The rain and thunder mean not only that Lexers can’t hear us as long as we stay out of sight, but also that anyone with guns might decide to stay inside.

It also means we’re soaked. Even running between houses was enough to drench me. I should’ve put shampoo in my hair before we embarked and let nature do the job of rinsing. We have a list of the supermarkets, restaurants and stores on the avenue. According to Guillermo, the stores without zombies are bare. The stores with zombies may have something inside, but they also have zombies. However, we’ll starve without more food, and now we have enough people to do unwise operations like fight off a store full of zombies.

We stay low on our way up to the avenue. Whether it’s the rain or not, the streets are pretty clear. Paul asks, “Where are we going?”

Jorge points to the next block down, past a group of dozens of Lexers, where a pizza place’s boarded-up windows suggest someone is either living or undead inside. My mouth waters. Just one slice of Brooklyn pizza, that’s all I ask. To go back in time and buy one more slice. To have the pizza guy throw it in the oven, making it so crunchy and hot that you almost can’t taste the first bite off the triangle and the crust cracks when you fold it.

“…good?” Grace elbows me. She blinks to keep the rain out of her eyes; it slants to find us even under the corner store’s side awning.

“What?”

“Paul’s going to distract them.”

I wipe my forehead. Water drives into my face with each push of wind. I wanted rain. Be careful what you wish for. “How?”

“Not sure.”

I shrug. I don’t want him to get eaten, but better him than me. Paul nods once, pounds Eric’s back and heads straight for a shiny Hummer parked at the curb a block down. He rocks it with two hands and the alarm sounds. A month ago, no one in the city cared about a car alarm except to bitch at its owner for it blaring in the first place. But it’s not too loud mixed with the din of the rain, which would defeat the purpose—we want to call the nearby zombies away, but we don’t need to invite new ones.

Paul waves us back. We press ourselves against the wall while the corpses on the pizza block trudge past. Another car alarm peals, this one farther off. I’m hiding behind garbage cans watching dead bodies walk up the street. Zombies, sneaking around the streets, possibly starving to death, New York a wasteland—a single one of those things is unbelievable. Altogether, they’re fucking insane.

“What?” Eric whispers from my other side. His hair is plastered to his head. Rain drips from his chin and drops perch on the end of his eyelashes.

“Didn’t say anything,” I whisper.

He wipes his face with his equally wet sleeve. “You said
fucking insane
.”

Before I can answer, Jorge says, “Okay, go.”

We follow him around the corner. Aside from the large group that now follows Paul, only one straggler lurks on this block. Jorge waits for it to close the last two feet and then brings his cleaver into its head. Our visibility is down to a couple of blocks due to the rain, but those blocks are vacant.

Eric clears out the broken glass of the pizza place’s doorframe and slams his shoulder into the wood behind. It shifts. Jorge gets a go, and the corner dislodges, then Eric goes again. I can just make out the distant bodies clustered around the Hummer through the mist the rain throws up. Either Paul keeps setting off the alarms, or the zombies do, or they’re those car alarms that never stop and tempt you to hunt down and strangle the owner.

The wood crashes to the floor and reveals a pitch black interior. Grace flicks on her flashlight. Rotted faces peer back, already moving toward the light of the street, and we withdraw to allow them room on the sidewalk. Rain moistens the dried blood once they’re out. It runs in streams over their faces and down their clothes. Rehydrated gore smells just as bad the second time around.

I back away from a man who has 200 pounds on me. His shirt is gone, his hanging stomach a mass of ropy gray-black innards. I’d hand him off to someone bigger, but Jorge and Eric are busy, and he’s coming for me with the flesh of his outstretched arms jiggling. If I run, he’ll go for Grace, who has her back to me while she fights another. I slant my chisel under his chin and his dead weight falls forward, arms locked on my waist.

It’s either allow myself to go down with him or go down anyway, only with two snapped legs. I drop with my bottom half under his weighty torso and extricate myself quickly, but the damage is done. My jeans are covered with rotten liquid and entrails, all of which the rain ensures will run down my legs and into Ana’s cute sneakers once I’m on my feet.

Something moves at eye level. A girl, maybe four. One side of her face is normal zombie and the other is skull with a staring round eyeball. Whatever made her faceless had to be brutal, but it didn’t remove the sequined pink headband with an offset bow. It perches over the skeletal side and makes her a contender for Worst Thing I’ve Seen So Far.

I twist her Disney princess shirt in one hand and bring the chisel into the side of her head. The eye is a better target, but I can’t bring myself to puncture that orb of yellow jelly. She was someone’s kid, like Manny. Like Leo. The thought of this happening to Leo is so awful—instant cold sweat awful—that I feel a little sympathy for Paul. Not much, but a little.

The other residents of the pizza place are finished off. I slowly lower the girl to the sidewalk and get to my feet. Grace moves beside me, her gaze on the bow. “That is…”

“I know.” I drag her into the store and away from the scrawny, sprawled limbs of the little girl.

Our flashlight beams cross over the empty counter. Bodies lie between red plastic booths. The door to the storage room is on the back wall, but I don’t have high hopes now that I’ve seen the number of people who took refuge in here.

Eric and I guard the front door while Grace and Jorge check. Grace comes rushing back. “There’s a ton of food. Oil and canned tomatoes and flour. Come look!”

I leave Eric at the door. Large cans of tomatoes are stacked on the shelves along with metal cans of olive oil. Jorge opens a cabinet to reveal more large bags of pizza flour than we can possibly carry. All the ready to eat foodstuffs—mozzarella cheese and meats and drinks—are eaten or rotted away.

“How do we get it all home?” I ask.

This is more than we anticipated, and more than our bags and two folding metal carts can hold. We thought if we found a lot, we’d take what we could carry and return for the rest. But now that I’ve seen all this glorious food, I can’t bring myself to leave a shred of it here. Not a grain of flour, or whatever you call flour. A sifting? A powder? It doesn’t matter—it’s coming with us. I’ll stay to guard it if I have to. It might be gone if we don’t.

Jorge cradles a can of tomatoes in one arm and runs his other hand along the cans and bags while he sizes them up. Based on his caress, I’d say he’s as reluctant to leave as I am. “The streets are clear enough to roll it home, if we can get more of these carts.”

“How about a discount store? I’ll see if there’s one nearby.” I run to the front and stick my head into the rain. There, on the next block, is a store that’s bound to have them.

“What’re you looking for?” Eric asks.

“We need more carts to bring it all back. They should have them in there.”

“I’ll come.” Eric watches in the direction Paul traveled. There’s no sign of his friend, although an alarm still sounds in the distance. It’s a good trick, one we can use until car batteries die. When they do, we can use something else that makes noise—a boombox, maybe. It could be a viable plan for when we return to Brooklyn Heights.

Grace slides the wood into place, and Eric and I step into the rain. He yanks me down between two parked cars so unexpectedly my back slams into a bumper. I swallow my yelp of pain.

“Sorry. Six coming,” Eric whispers, and points to the street side of the car. “Get ready to move.”

He’s coiled and crouched, knife in his hand on the bumper ahead of us. When he leans past me to check their progress, the soft skin of his neck, cool with rain but warm underneath, rests on my lips. I feel a single beat of his pulse before he pulls back and motions to the road.

I scuttle behind him to the opposite side of the car. Footsteps grow close then fade away. We run on the diagonal to the next block and step through the broken glass of the discount store’s window. The contents of shelves and bins have been tossed around and the candy aisle is a memory, as is any scrap of food. The party aisle is untouched. Understandably, no one’s been throwing parties.

Something crashes at the end of an aisle, and we freeze on our way to the far side of the store. Feet shuffle. A fuchsia and white marbled rubber ball rolls out of a center aisle, bumps off a hair dryer box and continues toward the door, making cheerful little bounces on its way. It’s almost as creepy as that little girl.

“Maybe it wants to play?” I whisper.

Eric shushes me. It’s coming anyway; we might as well speed up the process. The front of the store is a gloomy gray and the rear borders on charcoal, but it sounds like only one set of feet.

“Oh, just come out already,” I say in my normal voice.

“Geez,” Eric says with a shake of his head, but he’s resorted to his normal voice, too. “Don’t you know to be quiet?”

“So it can sneak up on us? If you’re going to have to deal with them, you might as well call them out. I do have some experience with this, you know.”

He huffs. Footsteps drag. A dark shape grows lighter with each successive step until a tiny, hunched old lady comes into view, probably moving as fast as she did in life. Eric steps in front of me and plants his knife in her forehead as if it takes no effort. Foreheads take a lot of effort.

“Through the skull,” I say. “That’s pretty impressive.”

“I do have some experience with this, you know,” Eric says in a high voice that’s supposed to mimic mine. I trip him on our way to the baggage aisle.

We grab the metal carts. I don’t want to waste any more time, but since the health and beauty products are up for grabs, I shove a few boxes of tampons in my bag. Eric looks away.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those guys who grow faint at the sight of pads and tampons,” I say.

“I’ve bought many a tampon in my time, I’ll have you know.”

“Many a tampon? Like, how many? A thousand? A million?”

He blatantly ignores me. We head for the pizzeria with carts still in their packaging. Eric gives a human-like knock on the plywood, and it slides over to reveal Paul. He thumps Eric’s shoulder as we enter. “We’ve got a few minutes ‘til the alarms stop.”

The food fills the carts and a couple of backpacks. There have to be forty large cans of tomatoes, hundreds of pounds of flour and a whole lot of olive oil. I don’t know the calorie count, but I’m guessing it’s pretty high. I give my assigned cart a tentative push. The cans of tomatoes, garbage bag wrapped flour bags, and oil are heavy, but I’d push a ton of food home singlehandedly if I could find it. And it’s better than carrying a hundred pounds on my back, which is what I’d have to do otherwise.

The rain has lessened. We move at a steady pace for the first few blocks, although the grinding of wheels on sidewalk is louder than I’d like. Another few blocks and we run into our first zombies. I grab my chisel, but Jorge strides forward with his cleaver while Eric and Paul make quick work of the other two. Even with the rain, their blood is thick, a viscous black. Aged zombies.

Two blocks from home, my cart wobbles for a couple feet before a front wheel splits and it tilts forward to rest on its metal axle. Grace stops beside me, brow furrowed and wet hair stuck to her face. “Just leave it.”

“No way. We can’t leave all this food. Let’s at least bring it to a house.”

Eric pushes his cart toward Paul. “Can you get two? I’ll help carry it, you go ahead.”

Paul arranges the two behind his back to pull instead of push. “Maybe we should leave it.”

“I am not leaving this cart.” I tilt it and roll another fifteen feet on its rear wheels before one of them goes with a solid crack. I want to scream, but I mutter, “Stupid made in China piece of shit.”

“All right, all right, just wait,” Eric says.

He wraps a hand around one of the uppermost bars and lifts the front into the air while I raise the handle. We move slowly, as two people attempting to move in sync with an unwieldy cart are wont to do. The lower end swings into my shin and then the handle takes a turn on my rib cage with every step. I’m dripping with warm sweat, cold rain and an unreasonable amount of rage directed toward a red metal cart and my now-defunct country’s trade agreements. After the tenth jab in my gut, I want to drop the stupid thing.