THE RAVAGES OF the end of the world had managed not to leave much mark inside the apartment, and nearly a year of solid tenancy had normalized the building’s interior. Apart from some water damage, the crème walls and polished concrete stairs were clean. A salvaged antique sideboard rested at the foot of the stairs with an empty fish bowl and a few old newspapers folded on top. There was a message board, but only a few handwritten notes.
There were three apartments each on the upper two floors, but Swarovsky stopped at the second landing.
“This is me,” she said. “The vacant apartment is the one above mine.”
“Vacant?”
The doctor tilted her head at him, something of a challenge in it.
“It’s yours for the taking.”
“I don’t have a weapon.”
“If you need a weapon in the City, you’re not going to last.”
Swarovsky extracted keys and quickly let herself in.
“There’ll be some kind of energy bar in your care packages,” she said. “You need a solid night’s sleep to acclimatize. Keep your appointment in the morning and someone will explain the ration book.”
She gave a flippant wave to Tom’s children and then a tight smile to him before vanishing inside.
“Are you serious?”
The barely-voiced comment hung in the dusty air, Tom working to maintain his composure with his children looking to him as Swarovsky’s door closed. Dry tears had left clean lines on Luke’s dirty face, and Lila’s expression was tight in her battle against tiredness.
“I thought she was nice,” Lucas said like maybe he didn’t think that anymore.
“Dad, does that mean we don’t have anywhere to live?”
“She said she was on the Housing Committee,” Lucas said.
“Dad,” Lilianna said. “Did that sonofabitch back there really try to . . . buy me?”
Lila channeled her mother’s rage. Tom nodded, too overwhelmed to say much more. He looked to Lucas for the M14, but of course now that was gone. His hand felt for the phantom knife likewise no longer on his belt. Then his face grew grim and he shook his head, working up the necessary outrage for the moment.
“OK, you two stay here.”
“Dad, what are you gonna do?” Lila asked.
“Couldn’t we just stay where they told us to go?” Luke said.
Tom only shook his head again and started stamping up the stairs. His son and daughter hung back, able to watch him most of the way around in his ascent to the landing over their heads. The door was near-identical to the good doctor’s. A bona fide vase filled with dried flowers sat on a small lectern next to it.
And he knocked on the door.
*
THREE MEN ANSWERED after nearly a minute.
The one working the handle was shirtless, a dirty frying pan like a weapon in one hand. There wasn’t much to be seen in the clear hall beyond, not that visibility was much anyway with the man’s two friends packed in close. One held a paperback novel, the other a baseball bat.
“Yeah?”
“You’re in my apartment.”
“The people who lived here are dead,” the blonde guy with the frying pan said. “We had to clean the blood up ourselves.”
“It’s much appreciated,” Tom said. “You’re in my place.”
He forced a steady breath, easing into the conflict like a too-hot bath, but just as ready for it with a head of steam behind him. The frying-pan guy scratched his overlong hair and studied Tom, at the same time nervously trying to read his friends’ movements by peripheral vision.
“Who says?” he asked slowly.
“Well, I’m telling you,” Tom said. “This apartment was cleared for me by the Housing Committee.”
“There’s a Housing Committee?”
“I know, right?”
“Lot of fucking good they are,” the guy with the bat said like he was the token black guy of this particular sit-com.
“We found this place,” the third man said with an accent, motioning with his paperback. “We’re keeping it.”
“My children are downstairs,” Tom said. “We’re tired. We’re waiting to move in.”
“Fuck your children,” the scraggly Scottish man said. “You too.”
This was normally a moment requiring violence. Tom valiantly kept himself in check, his adrenalin for real now, and something about his mood was clear enough to the other men that Tom didn’t much care that there were three of them. For a man his age, he had an imposing build and now an even worse mood. The guy with the frying pan broke first.
“Fuck,” he snapped. “This is bullshit. We need somewhere to live.”
Tom didn’t want to hear their sob story. He could smell smoke from within.
“You burning something in there?”
“Tryin’ to cook,” said the guy with the book. The Death of Grass.
They all looked so damned pitiful – too much like survivors rather than predators. Tom released a tight, begrudging sigh, completely irritated at himself for the bad idea overtaking him.
“Listen,” he said abruptly, voice like double-crossing himself. “Are there two bedrooms?”
“Yeah.”
“OK, you guys move your gear into one of them,” Tom said. “For tonight. We’ll take the other and figure the rest out in the morning.”
And he gave a briefly wistful, not entirely unmalicious thought for the enigmatic woman in the apartment below.
“I know a woman on the Housing Committee who’ll find you somewhere legit.”
*
THE THREE MEN were Laurance and Dkembe, with the nervous third wheel of their group a dirty-looking, pasty-faced thirty-something Scotsman they only called Shirts. Posturing aside, the young men looked desperate, and more abashed than aggrieved as they let Tom and his children see what they’d done to the place.
All the deceased elderly couple’s things were emptied across the floor and in the kitchen and the best of it pilfered. There was no electricity for the oven or anywhere to have a fire, so the trio commissioned the metal sink, and now the apartment was filled with acrid smoke Tom moved instantly to douse – only to find turning on the water produced the merest trickle.
“That’s our food in there,” the Scotsman hissed and pushed in as much as he dared, burning his fingertips to retrieve chunks of half-cooked meat of questionable origin.
Tom turned the tap off again and waved at the air and caught Laurance checking out his daughter as Lilianna removed her jacket to reveal the sports sleeve she’d taken to wearing on her upper right arm.
“It’s hot in here,” she said.
“Open a window.”
Tom’s kids froze, unsure about the permissions. Tom growled and nodded his head at Dkembe, the black guy paused near the selfsame window in the living room holding his own hands and looking every inch a young man abandoned to the world. Dkembe took a moment to get Tom’s meaning and then jumped to comply, and Tom caught a look of Lucas grinning, and his father shot him a wink, not really a hundred per cent about the undertones except the other young men seemed almost as lost as the Vanicek family themselves.
*
TOM UNPACKED THEIR relief supplies on the kitchen table, sharing out the energy bars and offering one to split among their unwitting flatmates. There was bottled water, too. Tom tried to ignore how quickly his daughter offered one to Laurance, or that the younger man was in no rush to put on a shirt. Night had fallen completely by this point and a misleading cool breeze filtered the smoker’s lungs of the room. There wasn’t much to the apartment except the kitchen leading onto the living space with the back bedroom and bathroom out there. Motley furniture complicated the carpeted lounge, the apartment light and airy once upon a time. But the anxious heaviness of the three other men and the disorientation of the past few hours conspired to leave Tom averse to conversation.
“We only just got out of the shit,” Tom said to them by way of explanation. “If you could clear that back room, I’d appreciate
it. We’re not ready for socializing.”
“I’m ready for socializing,” Lila said.
“Yeah, dad.”
Tom looked at his children askance, not expecting the bushwhacking, and the short fuse nearly already lit found at least Laurance and Dkembe ready to join them.
“We don’t know each other,” Tom said more harshly than he wished.
“That could change,” Laurance said.
“We appreciate you not kickin’ up a fuss about us being here,” Dkembe said. “We don’t mean any trouble.”
There was a pause. Their Scottish friend Shirts seemed to weigh his options.
“I’ve got hooch?”
“Hooch?” Lucas asked and screwed up his face.
“They mean booze,” Lila said. “Alcohol.”
“I’m not much of a drinker,” Tom said.
“Jesus, dad.”
“It’s actually not bad stuff,” Dkembe said. “There’s a heap of guys here tryin’ to make it as brewers.”
“Everyone’s got to have a trade,” Laurance said.
“And you three, what do you do?”
The trio exchanged glances, the Scotsman’s expression ruinous.
“Dkembe and me are in Building Services,” Laurance said. “Shirts is just pissed because he got Public Utilities.”
“Toilets,” Shirts said.
“What about you, uh, Tom?”
“I’m reporting tomorrow,” Tom said. “Foraging, they said. I take it all three of you have work to go to in the morning?”
“Yep.”
“Good.”
“But for now,” Shirts said, “let’s have a drink.”
He moved back into the kitchen and started scouring the cupboards for more glasses.
*
THEY ONLY HAD two candles, though the bike shop turned into an outdoor meeting place at night, before the Curfew kicked in, throwing a burnt-orange luminescence against the open window, tasteful curtains timestamped with mildew occasionally billowing as Tom and the others sat, for his part uneasily as the three men gnawed on the half-cooked meat and Tom’s children sat watching them like a museum exhibit come to life.
The men were half-starved and Lila and Lucas were likewise hungry for contact with people – so much so, Tom wondered if their years in self-reliance forged its own kind of weakness, now they were among others. Added to that were the half-guarded glances between Lilianna and the twenty-eight or twenty-nine-year-old Laurance. Their names together alone would be a tongue twister. And they were conscious of Tom’s eagle’s stare, even if he did accept a wine glass with half a serving of tepid, pineapple-smelling liquor.
“Why can’t I have some?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, why not, dad?” Shirts joked. “He’s still got another pair of teeth to come in yet.”
“That’s not true, actually,” Tom said.
“I never had kids,” Shirts said. “What do I know?”
Tom grunted.
“Why’d they put you in charge of toilets?”
The Scotsman’s eyes flicked into the corner, finding only defunct electrical sockets.
“I was an engineer.”
“So why make it sanitation?” Tom asked. “They must need engineers everywhere.”
“Tell them what sort of engineer.”
Shirts wouldn’t say it, so Laurance said it for him. The Scotsman was an ex-traffic controller once based in a busy Pittsburgh transport company.
“It’s a legitimate title,” Shirts said. “Traffic engineer. We find solutions.”
“With plumbing,” Tom said.
It was now OK to laugh. The other men relaxed a notch and Tom took a hit from the fermented drink, glad it was so acrid and foul. The children and the two younger men talked nonsense for a little while and Tom tried to ratchet back his own resting adrenal rate to more civilized levels. He moved into a plush chair near the window and heard the laughter of a few Citizens in the street outside, not a single note of traffic to tarnish it except the baseline thrum of the Night Market in full swing a tantalizingly short distance away. Tom’s fingers curled into the arm of the chair, squeezing the fabric as hard as he could to quell the irrational fear and the much more understandable sense of dislocation surging within him.
It didn’t take long for Lucas to wilt, and to their credit, the other house guests quickly relocated Dkembe and Laurance’s gear from the back bedroom. Tom helped his tired son onto the room’s only bed, throwing one of the relief-effort blankets over him, acknowledging his son’s complaint about hunger without placating him.
“We’ve been hungry before,” Tom said. “You’ll get through it. I’ll sort out this ration business tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“This time tomorrow you won’t be hungry,” Tom told him. “Focus on that.”
He kissed the boy on his forehead, Lucas with the sort of tiredness worthy of surrender rather than staying up. He promptly rolled over and Tom eyed the bare carpeted floor where he’d be sleeping later, eyes rising to the sturdy lock affixed to the back of the bedroom door.
The thought of locking themselves in seemed worse than the risks.
In the living room, Lila and Laurance now sat next to each other on the carpet beside the Ikea coffee table. Tom waded past them and sat heavily back in the same chair as before and caught his daughter’s eye.
“I need to talk with these guys,” he said.
Lilianna’s smile vanished, but she was smart enough to know it was too soon to throw herself any further into social niceties. Tom’s blunt and unapologetic tone was also difficult to fight. She nodded and stood and did a pretty good job of faking her yawn, still managing to deliver it ironically as she gave Laurance a pretty smile and bowed towards her dad, moving around the room and waving vaguely at Dkembe on a footrest in front of a dead TV for some reason no one had ever removed.
“Close the door,” Tom said. “I don’t want to keep you up.”
*
“HEY MAN, YOU don’t have to warn me off your daughter,” Laurance said straight away.
“Good,” Tom said in a level tone with a tight smile. “I wasn’t going to. But I did want to mention how my kids and I just walked out of four years surviving by our wits every fucking day and I’m not to be messed with for any reason whatsoever . . . cool? I need to find my footing and my family do as well.”
The other men rocked out on that.
“Got it,” Shirts said.
“Yeah, man,” Dkembe said unevenly. “Er, you know, tell it how it is.”
“We haven’t been around other people for a while,” Tom said.
“Yeah, man.”
“No shit,” Laurance added.
The three of them tittered. Tom reclaimed his drink.
“Fill you up?” Shirts asked.
“No thanks,” Tom said. “I imagine that cost you something?”
“I got a tab,” the Scotsman said, pleased with himself.
“Credit?”
“This place is a bloody world of opportunities,” Shirts said and tipped back his drink. “That’s why I’m not getting stuck in Public-bloody-Utilities. They can get fucked.”
“You’re not going in tomorrow?” Laurance asked him.
“Nope.”
“What opportunities?” Tom asked.
“Well, I don’t know about you,” Shirts said in his slurrier-by-the-minute Glaswegian drawl. “I came to America chasing my dreams. Everywhere I’ve ever been in my life, it felt like some other bastard got there first and maxed out everything, you know? I lost money during the property boom, I was flat broke in the GFC, never had any luck with the stock market, wife took my credit cards and ran . . . but here, you can do what you like. You know, like Crowley said: ‘Do as thou wilt and let that be the whole of the law’.”
“Aleister Crowley?” Tom replied. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like our pals brewing this rotgut,” Shirts said and raised one of the dead couple’s elegant glasses like
making a toast. “There’s a market for almost anything here, and the bloody zombie virus leveled the competition. Now it’s every man for himself . . . And, you know, women.”
“You think it was a virus?” Tom asked.
“Why not?”
“You ever been bit?”
The younger men were quiet for a moment.
“No,” Dkembe said. “But I seen other people bit.”
“If it were a virus, it’d be transmissible,” Tom said. “That’d happen when you’re bit. Instead . . . we just go when we go.”
“Furies, they called them,” Laurance said. “At the checkpoint.”
“The TVs called it the Fury virus,” Tom said. “In the first days.”
“I called ‘em the Risen,” Dkembe said. “Before here, anyway.”
“Biters,” Tom said with a slight smile.
“Zombie assholes,” Shirts added.
They each relaxed a moment. Tom finished the drink. Dkembe started speaking, and before Tom really knew it was happening, the other men took turns to recount their journeys of survival. The trio had only known each other for three days, fallen into each other’s company in the name of survival. And they wore blue tags too, though it was from a previous load of arrivals.
Dkembe came from Baltimore and traveled south in the early days following a rumor about a controlled border, but ended up on the road for months as the stories trickled further away down south carried by other survivors – survivors who soon became competitors, after which he lived a year in the ruins of Atlanta, eventually falling in with a safe haven run by survivors working for mutual gain. Later, there was a spate of killings in a dispute over supplies and he moved on again, returning north three years later, first hearing the story about Columbus from a father and daughter trekking on the outskirts of Nashville.
Shirts’ apocalypse started in Pittsburgh like he’d said, the wily redhead managing to squirrel away in a shopping mall for almost a year until boredom drew him out into exploring the city – and then he was captured by a company of Marines who forced him into effectual slavery just to get enough to survive. The Scotsman eventually escaped – glossing over the details perhaps until required to do so by a court of law – and found a working farm outside the city and stayed there two years, married a fellow survivor, and watched her turn one night after a disturbance in their sleep.
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