by Ginger Booth
Panic met him at the kitchen door holding up a cracker and cheese with lettuce. He opened his mouth obediently and she popped it in. Damn, that was good, super salty, but the lettuce helped with that. The green really did taste fresh. Wow.
“Love you, too.” She tiptoed to land a peck on his nose. “Weird time to say it the first time, though. Gosh, aren’t we romantic, huh?”
She made him laugh.
“Get a room,” Germy complained. “We’re not going to move in here, are we?”
“No, it’s haunted,” Frosty replied instantly. “Can we carry all this in one trip?”
They each took one piece of luggage, and helped carry Sensei. Frosty and Panic had experience with this corpse-down-stairs problem the day before. A box flattened into a sled proved the winning system, with the heavy shoulders and head pointing downward and Frosty steering from that end, the gun duffel over his back. They tucked their salvage away in the dojo quickly, then resumed sliding the blanket-draped Sensei outside. Frosty wished there was some way to restore dignity to the body, but it continued to leak fluids. Their sled had nearly decomposed by now under the wet and wear.
A voice rang out from above. “What are you going to do with it?”
Frosty gestured Panic and Germy to back up against the building. He stepped backward to the curb to look up to the balconies. And sure enough, another rifle was pointed at him. This guy was younger, maybe in his twenties. Ebola had ravaged him, too, though at least his aim seemed less wobbly. Frosty raised his hands partway again to pacify the guy. “I don’t know. He was my karate teacher at this dojo. Burn the body?”
“My wife and –” The guy’s voice caught. “I have more bodies up here. Help me bring them down. Then I could hotwire a car. Bring the bodies to the avenue. Too narrow here for a bonfire. The buildings might catch.”
Frosty nodded slowly. “Deal. Be right up.”
Germy dubbed Water Tiger number 4 as Hotwire. The guy wasn’t entirely with it. Frosty did most of the work to carry down his wife, while Hotwire clutched their dead toddler and baby, swaddled in a Christmas drop-cloth. While they were up on the second floor, where he lived, Hotwire pointed out to Panic which door was the building superintendent’s. She soon claimed keys to every apartment, and a goodly set of handyman tools.
Between them, they checked for occupancy on every apartment on the second and third floors – no one lived on the ground floor. They rousted out several people to help with corpse removal for their joint health and happiness. Hotwire sat on the hood of a car and explained to limber Panic how to hotwire a car. After others caught the idea, more corpses were dragged down, from their building and neighboring ones, without having to recruit door-to-door.
They decided to stack the bodies across 23rd at 7th Avenue, to discourage visitors. The consensus was the nastiest-looking looters came from that way. As the sun drew low toward an early winter sunset, and the corpse collection efforts slowed, a middle-aged black couple from the second floor took off with the car. No one cared, cars not being in short supply. But at that point they called it a day.
Panic and Germy made quick work stripping the newly-empty apartments of any food worth taking while Frosty and the adults worked corpse removal in a spirit of holiday cooperation.
Frosty tried to talk Hotwire into joining them for dinner. But the man shook his head and trudged up the stairs to 2F alone.
It was a start.
With his choice of several floors worth of Christmas presents to choose from, Germy settled for Frosty carrying out the bodies of his parents and little sister. The boy wasn’t willing to face the place alone again.
Frosty could relate to that. “Best thing I ever did, when I left my apartment yesterday to find Panic.” They traded a tired smile of understanding.
Germy nodded emphatically, and passed the oddly fresh salad. They feasted lying on one of the stadium blankets on the dojo floor, then called it a night.
4
December 29, E-day plus 21.
Ava paused to tuck some stray hair behind an ear and watch her laundry snap in the hard wind on the tidy little balcony. She’d holed up alone in one of the one-room efficiency apartments on the third floor to wash their underwear, then pants, then kept going to clean some fresh sheets.
Surprising how few people these days used bleach. Her grandfather and nurse parents swore by the stuff. After any illness, when they got well, they washed the whole family’s bedding with bleach. More important, just two drops of bleach would purify a liter of water. The scented versions they shouldn’t drink, so she could afford to waste this lemon-scented variety on cleaning.
She’d found a survival manual in Germy’s apartment to double-check the dose. She made sure the scavenger teams understood the priority. They had nearly twenty Water Tigers by now, a dozen younger ones on the salvage operation. For Ava, today was a guilty pleasure, sneaking away from the kids and lavishing so much of her precious chlorine on clean sheets.
The third floor still offered tap water. She didn’t expect that to last much longer. Once the deep Arctic cold arrived with January, too many pipes would freeze. According to the neighbors, the fourth floor water slowed to a trickle and died last week.
“There you are!” Frosty rapped on the apartment door and entered. He paused at the counter blocking off the open kitchen nook and peered down at the sink full of suds. “Can I dive in? Damn, this room smells clean.”
She brandished a wooden spoon of warning. “Too much bleach. You can use the bathroom vanity. How disgusting are you today?”
“I quit yesterday,” he shared. “No more corpses. The adults are welcome to argue with themselves. I just opened the windows for the top floors. Winter is dry. Maybe the bodies will mummify. But at least the stench will air out. If the neighbors want to get off their asses, they can cart the dead themselves.”
He hung his outerwear on a hook and walked into the bathroom to wash. “I like this place.”
Good! Ava exulted. She claimed a spot by the bathroom door, watching as he splashed his face in the icy water. The tub held her rinse water, the fresh bleach and detergent wafting throughout. “I was thinking we should pick a place. For our own. There’s a nice two-bedroom next door.”
Frosty glanced up at her in the mirror, eyes wide, then a slow crooked smile blossomed. His bruises were fading. Good food, hard work, and lots of people helped restore the athlete’s strength. She’d found him some Vitamin A&D ointment for his chapped cracked lips, and was pleased by their progress back to smooth and pink. She almost liked him better marked by Ebola. Normally her guy was too conspicuously good-looking compared to her.
Not that there was anything wrong with her looks. She had wide-set hazel eyes, high Slavic cheekbones and wide thin-lipped mouth, light ash-brown hair. But her figure was petite and wiry to the point that people mistook her for a middle schooler.
“Huh.” Frosty straightened to towel his face and hair dry, rucking the longer bleach-blond hair on top into spikes the way he used to mousse it. He’d pulled off his sweater to wash, and didn’t pull it on again right away. Instead he turned to her, propped against the vanity, arms and ankles crossed. He was thinner, of course. But he was co-captain of the dojo’s competitive team, and sculpted his body every day before he got ill. Ava’s eyes couldn’t help noting damp spots on the white T-shirt clinging in front. “What’s wrong with this one?”
“Hm? Oh, the apartment! Well, it’s small.”
“Maybe I like small.” He grinned in challenge.
Her face burned with the blush. “Small is awesome, of course.”
He reached to grasp her shoulders and kiss her on the forehead. Then he shifted her out of his way so he could exit the dim bathroom. He made a show of assessing the compact living room area. A cute overstuffed love seat and arm chair, upholstered in dove grey leather, nestled around a miniature coffee table. He checked the view of West 23rd through the windows. Ava had pulled back the drapes for light while she worked. Betw
een the balcony and the ‘living room,’ the south wall was mostly glass. They were barely high enough that the sun cleared the buildings across the broad four-lane street to fill the apartment with light. He checked for drafts, and nodded judicious approval.
He paused at the beautiful oriental screen dividing off the bed area. The whole place was maybe 25x20 feet, a single room plus the bath. He glanced to her for clues – how revolting was the bed?
“The mattress is clean,” Ava supplied. “The bedding I tossed for the pyres. But they had a great mattress protector. I washed it.” She pointed to the merry flapping and snapping on the balcony.
Intrigued, Frosty dared slip behind the screens.
She hesitated a moment. Should she play hard to get? That was pointless – he already had her. She had no guile, no tricks. He was her first boyfriend and he knew it. He’d been dancing around the topic playfully since Thanksgiving, almost but never quite crossing the line into when and where and how she might lose her virginity. He’d hinted her sixteenth birthday, a few days before Christmas, was a precondition.
But essentially if he said the word, she was game. He knew that. She trailed him to the opening beyond the screen.
He sat on the bed for a bounce test. He lay back and instantly bolted up again, laughing. “Damn, that’s cold!”
She smiled shyly. “I thought we could pick an apartment. Then I’d fix it up and move that bed in.”
“Baby, I can’t count how many disgusting mattresses I’ve thrown into the street. I don’t want to move a bed. This apartment smells great. The third floor is perfect. I like the sun.” He reached a hand out to pull her onto his knees.
“Don’t you think the head Water Tiger needs a grand place to impress the peons?”
“Peons aren’t invited. This is for us.”
“OK.” She smiled shyly. She did like this little place. The oriental screen suited a karate couple. “I’ll clean it up, and then maybe –”
“We can’t sleep up here. We don’t have anyone to guard the dojo and the stockpiles. Nobody we can trust except Germy. That’s too much to ask of him.”
“Oh. You’re right.” She sighed and started to rise. “How do we figure out who to trust?”
He grabbed her butt two-handed and tugged her back down. “New Haven, I decided. Over Christmas break. Get a bed and breakfast, show you around town. Great Italian food in New Haven.” He touched her chin with a fingertip and drew her in for a kiss.
“I like that,” she agreed happily as the kiss broke off. “The room would be warm. A big raging fire in the fireplace. I don’t know how I’d talk my parents into it.”
Frosty emitted a wrong answer buzzer. “No parents.”
This was getting weird. The one thing the Tigers all shared was bereavement. Yet instead of comforting her, her boyfriend forbid the subject. “We’re grieving, Frosty. Maybe we should talk about it.”
“Baby, your seduction technique needs work. Trust me on this. The last thing a guy wants to hear right now is parents.”
“Right now?” She stiffened. She didn’t mean now.
“Not now. OK.” He smiled lazily, laughing at her, and leaned away on his hands.
“Well…”
“Not night. Not now. And this bed is cold as ice. Sheets and blankets would be good. And a better wash. But we could make out now. Mind if I grab my sweater first?” With all her trips onto the balcony with the laundry, the apartment was maybe 35 degrees despite the sun’s best efforts to heat it. He burrowed his hands between her thighs to warm them. One thing led to another.
In the end, Ava decided now was delightful after all. Frosty was right. Why invent chores and prerequisites? It wasn’t as though they’d change their minds. They’d been together nearly four months, to the end of the world and beyond.
December 31, E-day plus 23.
Ava staggered under a gust and turned away from a sheet of rain. Frosty laughed and hugged her close under his arm, and she faced the onslaught again. She tugged the forehead bill of her rain poncho forward, and ducked her face against the gale whipping down 7th Avenue.
She’d finally gotten rain barrels set up at the dojo, made of well scrubbed trash cans. They merrily overflowed tonight.
Of course Frosty picked a storm to go walking again. But Ava was walking on air these days. Frosty could do no wrong. She also agreed with him. They needed stronger allies than the random teenagers who happened to survive on that one block of West 23rd. But their karate team never showed. The couple hoped that meant they still rendezvoused, but chose the other possibility. The group held most of their parties at Maz’s house. Frosty’s best friend, Gary Mazurkiewicz, was rich. His mom owned a whole brownstone on West 34th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. Maz enjoyed an entire floor for his personal man cave.
More to the point, the others on the karate team lived uptown from Maz, and crosstown in Rafe’s case, east of Central Park. Only Ava and Frosty lived south of the dojo. With the streets dangerous as hell, it made sense that they’d stop at Gary’s first. And Frosty had to check on him. That’s how he was made, and part of what Ava loved about him.
When the warm rainstorm blew in, Hotwire agreed to watch the dojo for them. And they hit the road.
What a difference a week made! They both felt worlds better than the night they slipped and slogged their way to the dojo. Tonight’s battle against the dark and rain was downright fun. The streets less familiar, they kept their flashlight on.
“So do we drink champagne?” Frosty had to yell to make himself heard over the wind. The rain smelled oddly fishy. This marked a major improvement over the cloying stench of death overlain by oily funeral pyres and raw sewage. And any temperature above 40 was more than welcome. Granted, their rain ponchos failed to keep them dry.
“I bet they drank all the champagne!” Ava never drank more than a few sips from someone else’s wine glass. But with nothing better to do than hide, her older friends might get drunk.
“Never underestimate the wine cellar!”
“Maybe his mom survived!” It was possible. Ava went and tallied the corpses by age one day before they lit the pyre, hardly a scientific sampling. But maybe half the prime-age adults survived Ebola, between age 20 and 55. The 20-somethings seemed especially hard hit. More like one in four died from the younger and senior cohorts. And maybe one in ten never got sick.
“Mama Maz was out of town!” Her actual name was Ms. Whelan. But closer than brothers, Frosty and Maz used pet nicknames for their parents. “Far end of Long Island.”
Without warning, the attackers jumped them out of the dark hole of Penn Station at 32nd Street, a black gang. Two guys ripped Ava out of Frosty’s arms. Another six fought him to the ground.
Ava struggled and kicked wildly. Until one managed to get her in a head lock she couldn’t break out of. He held her face and another held a flashlight, to force her to watch as one sliced Frosty’s face open from eye to jaw. “You’ll fucking behave or we take his eye out!”
“We’ll rape both of you!” another yelled in her other ear.
Frosty met her eye bitterly and shook his head. Don’t fight it.
Sometimes all you could do was submit. And that sucked very badly indeed. They raped her. And they raped him. And they forced each to watch, over and over.
5
December 31, E-day plus 23.
“Let me in!” Ava screamed and hammered the door again. Frosty squatted next to her, one knee down and his forehead glued to the other.
He wasn’t talking. No surprise there.
In pure fury, Ava tried to back up to the top of the brownstone steps again and kick in the front door. She slipped backward, but Frosty shot up to grab her before she could topple down the stairs.
He jammed her soaking face against his to beg in her ear. “Stop! Just stop!”
She tried to shake her head but he held it too tightly against his cheek. A single sob escaped, but then she pushed him away. “No! We’re getting through this
door!” She watched her step this time and backed to the edge. But she had neither the runway to gather momentum nor the mass to launch at this expanse of solid oak.
Frosty jumped up and slammed his fist through the fan window. Then he did it again and again until every pane was shattered.
Through the sheeting rain, they didn’t hear the window open above them until a voice called down. “What the fuck? Get lost or I’ll shoot you!”
“Jake!” Ava screamed up. “Open this door! It’s Ava! And Frosty! Jake! Open up – up – up!” She started hammering her fists into the door again as though it was one of the dojo’s standing dummies, completely losing it. Her fist tried to go straight through into Maz when he opened the door.
Maz sidestepped, let her fist sail past him, then used the arm as leverage to get a good hold to immobilize her. “I already opened the door, little hell-cat. Won’t you please come in. Watch your step on the broken glass, asshole.” That last was to Frosty. The blood dripping from his glove was a dead giveaway which of his guests punched out the fan window. Someone behind him carried a lamp.
Frosty backed up, nearly tripping down the steps himself, blood still dripping from his slashed face as well. He waved a hand through the rain drops as though trying to swat away a swarm of midges, then stumbled down and away.
“Get him!” Ava shrieked and stomped a foot. “Don’t you let him go! Frosty, come back!”
Jake pelted out and snagged him, forcing him back up the half-story flight of steps. Normally Jake was no match for either of the blond co-captains in a fight, but Maz had his hands full. And Frosty wasn’t firing on all cylinders. He kept shaking his head that he didn’t want to go in, but instead of lashing out, he crumpled as though trying to roll into a fetal ball.
