by James Phelan
I opened a door to a building marked as a cafeteria.
“Anyone here?”
No answer. Empty. No sign of life.
I started to feel uneasy. What if there were no group of survivors here, no Felicity to be found nearby, just Rachel? I couldn’t help but feel a little stab of disappointment at the thought of having to make do with this unresponsive, cautious girl. But I had to give her a chance. Give us both a chance.
I approached another door at the rear of the arsenal building. It was ajar.
“Hello?” I called inside as I pushed it open. Rachel was in the shadows, alone, at the far end of a hallway at the bottom of some stairs. “Hi. Can I please—”
“I don’t have anything.” Her voice was squeaky, shaky.
“There’s that shovel,” I said.
She looked at the makeshift weapon in her hands, then back to me.
I said, “I’m not the enemy.”
“Are you sick?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
She looked around to the side of the building, and then back at me.
“Did you just jump the fence?”
“Yeah.”
She almost looked impressed, but didn’t say anything more. I recognized she was more than just scared or cautious; she was alone here. Just her and the animals.
I needed a way of breaking the ice, to get her to trust that I meant her no harm.
“Hey, you wouldn’t be missing a polar bear, would you?”
She came forward, two, three steps, considering me more now. I could see up close that she was probably only a year or two older than me—there was a young, pretty face under all that grime and exhaustion.
“You saw a polar bear? Where? When?” Her head tilted to the side, her eyes watched me, closely.
“A few nights ago. Near the library, 42nd and Fifth?”
“Oh . . .” she said, seeming disappointed by that, either the timing or the place. “Was he—Did he look okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound upbeat. “He was sniffing around in the snow. More interested in finding food than in me. Seemed happy enough.”
“He was alone?”
“Yeah, I just saw one,” I said. “He mooched around then ambled off.”
The memory made me smile. Maybe if I told Rachel more about that unexpected encounter, she would realize I was on her side—on the side of the animals too.
“I was spooked at the noises he was making,” I continued, “but then when I saw him—I felt safe having him around. Like he and I were in this together. I threw him some fruit but he wasn’t interested. He seemed to prefer being on his own.”
I remembered thinking that the polar bear might sniff out the Chasers for us, warn us if they were coming. It might even keep them away. But it seemed wrong to say that, to think of using him as a line of defense. I didn’t think Rachel would see polar bears like that.
She smiled faintly, more with her eyes than her mouth.
“How many were there?” I asked.
“Two,” she said.
“Well, I’m sure they’re both doing fine. So, where’s the rest of the zoo staff?” I asked, not wanting to let on that I’d so quickly recognized her solo status.
“You’re looking at it,” she said, moving out towards the zoo grounds. I put my backpack down by the back door and followed her at a distance of a few paces. I watched her do her chores. She delivered a bucket of food to the penguins—tiny blurs of black and white that seemed oblivious to everything—then stopped and threw a toy back into the sea lions’ enclosure.
“What happened to the others?”
“I wish I knew.” She struggled to heave a sack of grains and wouldn’t let me help her.
“You seem young to be—”
“I’m older than you.”
“Okay. I didn’t mean . . .” I hadn’t meant to offend her. If anything, I’d meant it as a compliment. But maybe she was already tired of being the responsible one, dependable.
“I’m here on an internship, in my second year of vet school, from Boston. And I’m the only one who stayed here after the attack or whatever. That enough of a catch-up for you?”
I nodded. “Like I said, I’m Jesse. It’s good to meet you.”
She didn’t shake my offered hand, didn’t put the shovel down. “What’s your accent?” she asked.
“I’m Australian.”
She shrugged, as if she wasn’t really interested. Silence as she worked, broken by a sudden banging at the front doors. Hard, rough, rattling.
“Who is it?” she asked. “Friends of yours?”
“I have no friends,” I said, reality hitting me when I said this out loud. No point denying that anymore.
“Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
“Everyone I know in this city is dead.” That enough of a catch-up for her?
I followed her to the back doors, out of sight from those at the front of the building. “It’s the Chasers.”
“The what?” She looked across the doorway at me.
“The who. The infected.”
“They don’t bang on doors.”
“These ones do more than that,” I said. “These ones hunt.”
That seemed to register. She shook her head, as if in denial, and bent down, moving slowly on her hands and knees into the doorway between us. I followed. The rattling had stopped. We crouched in the shadows, peered around a corner of the stairs to the doors at the end of the hall. Two Chasers were there, standing at the entrance, clearly looking for me. I’d led them here.
“I’ve put you in danger.”
“Probably,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen these ones up close before.”
“I have,” I said. “I’ve seen them right up close. For keeps.”
“They’re . . .”
“They’re . . . ”
“Scary?”
“Intriguing.” Rachel seemed genuinely fascinated by the Chasers. As if they were some new species of animal. “They don’t seem that dangerous. They can’t climb the fences, for one thing.”
“Don’t give them the chance to prove otherwise.”
“So what do we do?” she demanded.
“We hope they leave.” It was all I could think to say.
8
We made our way along the hall, keeping to the shadows and watching as the Chasers joined another pair at the foot of the stairs leading up to Fifth Avenue. One turned and looked back, but we may as well have been invisible from where we were hiding. Another two figures I guessed to be the ones who had peeled off from the group a few minutes earlier appeared at the top of the stairs at street level. They must have called or signaled down to their comrades, for the four of them climbed the stairs fast and disappeared down Fifth Avenue.
“What brought you here?” Rachel asked as we wandered back into the zoo grounds from the rear of the arsenal building.
“Being chased by those guys,” I replied.
“Sure, but chased from where?”
“Near the Plaza Hotel, after I’d gone searching through another section of the park.”
“What were you searching for in the park?”
“A girl.”
She looked at me, smiled, and shook her head like I was nuts. I followed her to the locked door of a storeroom. Inside was dim, lit by snow-covered skylights, but she navigated with ease and passed me a couple of buckets of feed, which I could hardly lift. I followed her out.
“So you went out there in the park, with these—Chasers, you call them?—around, to look for a girl.”
“Yep. A girl from a video.”
“You don’t even know her?”
“Nope.”
“And you didn’t find her?”
“Nope.”
“Well, Jesse, at least I know now that you’re a little crazy and reckless.”
“I don’t regret it, though,” I said. “At least I found you.”
&n
bsp; As the afternoon grew darker and I continued to follow her around, Rachel remained wary, always keeping a safe distance, as if she might have to make a run for it at any moment. I found I liked just being around her, being around someone nonthreatening, residing in the comfort of our community of two. I hoped that she’d learn to share in that.
“You sure I can’t do anything more to help?” I couldn’t think of how to reassure her other than by proving myself by doing chores.
“This is my job, I have to do this. These animals—I’m all they have.”
I got that. But couldn’t I do something beyond lugging a few buckets? I kept a lookout, figuring maybe she would like me hanging around for that.
She checked on the penguins and the puffins and the sea lions who watched us closely. I saw she looked sad, worn out, beat. She finally stopped to rest and asked for my help in carting some water.
“I mean,” Rachel said, out of breath, sinking onto a bench, “if you’re just going to keep following me around . . .”
I used two large buckets, making trip after trip between the tap and the huge enclosed building that housed the tropical birds. After about ten minutes, Rachel joined me, lugging one bucket at a time.
On one trip I saw a sign for the polar bear enclosure. I wondered about sharing that vision I’d had of a new earth—a future where some kind of garden would secretly be growing up through the ruined ice rink, ready for the polar bear’s return. He’d be king again, maybe start a family. But would that seem crazy to Rachel, who was coping with the day-to-day business of keeping the animals in her care alive? What did her idea of the future hold?
We were taking the water to the Tropic Zone, where inside it was warmer, a kind of big greenhouse island in a sea of snow. Hydrodynamic-something-or-other heating . . . My dad would know; he’d designed it into our house back home. It was some kind of system where heat was brought up from the ground in fluid-filled tubes and fed into the concrete slab floor to radiate the earth’s natural heat. That, along with all the glazing that trapped what little sunlight there was, would be what warmed this place.
“Passive solar,” she said, following my gaze up to the roof. It had an aluminum foil-type section in the middle with massive skylights; big angled windows that caught every ray of daylight. “There are solar panels on the roof too. They power the heating pumps. We wouldn’t have been able to survive this long without them.”
I liked that she referred to her family—her and the animals—as “we.” Whatever was coming in the days ahead, there was a future right here.
“What are you smiling at?” she asked me as we stopped and caught our breath.
“Nothing,” I said. My grin wasn’t disappearing and neither was her look. “It’s just nice to be useful.”
Rachel nodded and went back to the colorful birds. One was an orange so vivid, I could not imagine it appearing in nature. It let her pet him while it stood there, pecking at the food.
“What is he?”
“A scarlet ibis,” she said. He waddled along a branch and preened himself some more, oblivious to how the world had changed outside his enclosure.
“So, you’ve been studying veterinary science or something?” I asked.
“Yeah. I come from a family of doctors, but that wasn’t for me.”
“You like animals more than people?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Animals are easier than people and a lot more reliable. And as much as I’ve cared for these guys here for the past two weeks, they’ve saved me too.” She nodded, and another small crack appeared in her standoffish demeanor.
It made sense, summed her up; explained how she could go on caring for this menagerie. Rachel’s fondness for the birds was mutual. And like her, they were keeping themselves busy, picking and preening, never still.
I followed her around some more, helped her repair a fence at the back of the zoo, carted more water until my arms felt like they’d fall off, then watched as she launched a bucket of meat into the snow leopard enclosure. We stayed there, leaning against the fence, watching them eat. It was getting dark, and the wind had picked up.
“Chocolate and Zoe,” she said, detached, as the cats crunched on bones. “They were my primary job—I was one of their keepers.”
“And now you’re everyone’s keeper.”
Rachel nodded, the concept not lost on her; I think she liked that I got it. She looked at the big cats and they sometimes looked back at her. “They’re why I’m still here,” she said, quietly. Then she started to cry. “Long as it’s just me here . . . they’re why I can never leave.”
9
I understood Rachel’s feeling of responsibility for the animals, but it played no part in my plans to escape this city. Would I be wasting my time trying to get her to change her mind and to leave with me? I needed to find Felicity. She seemed so full of hope on the video, so determined to escape the dangers we were in. Maybe she could change Rachel’s mind.
By evening, there was still some distance between Rachel and me, but I noticed she’d slowed and was showing none of the urgency and drive I’d seen in her earlier. We went inside and I shut the glass doors behind me. It was still cold, but thankfully the wind was shut out. Rachel locked the doors, bolts at the top and bottom.
“You’d better stay here tonight,” she said as I followed her upstairs. “Bathroom’s there,” she said, pointing down the hallway. “Do you mind using a bucket—to flush, wash, whatever?”
“It’s okay, I’m used to it,” I said.
Rachel led me into an office, the timber floor of the historic building creaking underfoot. There was a big old couch, which she’d obviously been using as a bed, a couple of windows with the curtains drawn, and an open fireplace. I looked at her little makeshift bed, the food, the small stack of clothing, the bottles of drink—all of it enough for one to survive for a short while and not much more. I took off my coat and wet shoes.
“I’ll get the fire going,” she said.
There was an old fireplace behind where the desk had recently been, a huge old leather-topped timber construction that was now pushed against a wall, leaving telltale dents of its former position in the ornamental carpet. The coals in the hearth glowed dull through black ash and charcoal. Rachel stoked them back to life with a poker, put on a fresh split log from the big steel bucket of firewood and coal briquettes that stood nearby. She waited a bit for the wood to spark, blew to coax them to ignite, then rose and lit an oil lamp on the desk, the type with a wick and a glass bell and little dial for adjusting brightness. Her face was friendly in that light.
“Sorry, Jesse,” she said, pointing at an assortment of tubs, jars, packets, and cans on the desk. “I don’t have much food to offer you—not much variety, nothing exciting. Just what I could keep from the cafeteria.”
“I’ve got some food,” I said, producing everything I had in my bag. “Soup?”
“Sure,” she said, taking a pot and can opener from the desk. I set up my wind-up flashlight against a wall in the corner, so that it shone up to the ceiling like an up-light. I emptied two cans of chicken and vegetable soup into the pot and set it in the corner of the fireplace, nestled onto a bed of glowing coals. Rachel took off her polar-fleece sweatshirt, revealing just a T-shirt. Her arms were much skinnier than mine.
She looked at me, ran the back of her gloved hand across her sweaty forehead.
“So, you were here on vacation?” she asked.
“It was a UN leadership thing.”
“The UN? As in the United Nations?”
“Yeah.”
“No wonder there’s problems . . .”
“What?”
“I mean, you seem a bit young for the UN.”
I laughed. “Camp,” I replied. “It was a senior school camp.”
I told her about how I was on the subway when the attack on the city happened. How I’d gone to 30 Rock to see what I could of the city from the viewing platforms.
Everything I’d seen. I told
her about Dave, Anna, and Mini. All I’d been through with them “by my side.”
“That’s . . . a special story.”
“Yeah,” I nodded in agreement.
She was being friendly, but I realized that special didn’t really explain how I felt. I was sad to realize that, despite everything I’d done to hang on to them, I had been losing my friends gradually from the start.
Was I to blame for deceiving myself? Nobody had forced me to spend twelve days in total denial of the facts. All that time I’d been torn between wanting to leave and wanting to hide and wait until whatever had happened was over, and everything went back to normal. What could I have achieved if I’d accepted the truth the moment I woke up in the smashed train carriage? I wouldn’t be here with Rachel, that was for sure. And I wouldn’t have found the video of Felicity. There was a sacrifice to be made, however I looked at it.
I told Rachel as much as I knew about Felicity; that she was out there, somewhere, as of yesterday afternoon.
“She’s lasted this long,” Rachel said. “She’s probably still okay, just had to shelter someplace else.”
“I hope so.”
“And it was this morning when you left hers?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s only a day. She’ll be all right.”
She put a pot of water to one side of the fire.
“So,” I asked, broaching a subject that I knew might well bring her some unwanted memories, “where were you when the attack on the city happened?”
“I was in the basement,” Rachel said, her eyes reflecting the red of the embers. “I heard the explosions; they went on for about half an hour. I wasn’t here in 2001, but I assumed it was terrorists again; that they’d come to finish the job, right?”
I shrugged, not knowing what to say. I’d come to my own conclusion that this was surely the work of some kind of nation-state rather than a group of crazy nut jobs, but I reminded myself that Rachel had not seen the scale of the destruction beyond the walls and fences of this zoo.
