Feral Recruit (Calm Act Book 5)

by Ginger Booth

  By spring, Soho Ville hoped to grow crops in the newly opened land, which more than doubled the green space of Washington Square. Bright sunlight would flood in to feed the crops, freed of the city canyons.

  “Get a move on!” LaTisha yelled at Ava. “Use hoses to spray down the dust. Clear it off the grass and trees.” LaTisha pointed an accusatory enameled fingernail at Ava. Proof positive that LaTisha never lifted a finger on their salvage work. Her ridiculously long fingernails, with their fake little glue-on jewels, had never unraveled and stripped wiring, never applied wrench to corroded copper pipe. LaTisha never donned the crew’s sturdy work gloves. “Move! Or I’ll dock your pay, little ho!”

  “Sure you don’t want us on the far side of that tape again, LaTisha?” Ava returned, pointing to the yellow warning tape. “Order me into the collapse radius again?”

  “I never said that!” LaTisha denied. She scurried away toward the truck full of hoses and watering cans and brooms, casting a nervous eye over her shoulder at Ava.

  Ava shot an old Slavic hex sign at her. One Deda taught her long ago, in another city and state. Maybe another country, certainly another lifetime. She drew Jelly with her to select cleaning implements.

  The buildings of NYU were gone. Not even rubble remained, really, as they disintegrated into mounds of dust. Not terribly tall mounds of dust, either. The buildings mostly formed tough shells around empty spaces, and fragile people long gone. When the wreckage settled, a lot of the mass would fill in the abandoned subways and foundation holes below.

  Ava didn’t even recall that once upon a time, she hoped to apply to New York University. That would have happened right about now, in fact. This was supposed to be November of her last year of high school. In that other lifetime.

  2

  Interesting fact: A key goal of Project Rebuild in the ‘Apple Core’ was to transform the built-up urban landscape into green space. The city wasn’t expected to become self-sufficient in food, but they’d have some local fresh vegetables, milk and eggs, for a little food security. The intent was to trade industrial goods and services for food from the rural districts. At this point, they supplied salvage.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ava complained to the cafeteria proctor. They were in the cafeteria of the old NYU student center, one of the NYU buildings they planned to keep, now used as the Soho Village community center. This frail and elderly woman checked each person’s credit balance before clearing them to claim a modest lunch. “We worked all morning. All of us on my crew.”

  “Not you crew,” the proctor returned primly. “LaTisha crew. LaTisha dock yous. All yous. Bad kids. Bad job.” She glared and wobbled her head, tsk-tsking. She didn’t doubt for a moment that Panic and her scrubby compatriots didn’t deserve to eat. She swatted a hand at Ava. “Go way!”

  Ava slammed her tray on the metal bars of the slide-along serving line, for the sound effects. She stuck her face two inches from the elderly Hindu woman’s. “I’m not going anywhere, you old parasite. We worked. We eat. All of us. Full pay!” She banged her tray again. The other kids took up the clanging percussion.

  “Police!” the proctor shrieked, shrinking backward. Actually it rhymed with Maurice, but Ava was used to it. The Apple was a cacophonous stew of dreadful accents and dire English. Luckily she learned English before her family moved here.

  The bored militia pair on duty came over to shut up the ruckus. Ava explained for the third time this week that her crew had been docked their wages unfairly, while their crew boss was eating over there, back turned on them. Ava demanded yet again that LaTisha’s wages be docked, and her crew get their full lunches. And for the third time this week, she got her way.

  Well, the kids got theirs anyway. Nobody docked LaTisha.

  “Can you believe this crap?” the public relations face of the pair asked his side-kick.

  His partner didn’t even bother to shrug. It was a rhetorical question. She kept her eyes trained on the kids and her gun at the ready.

  “They worked,” the talking cop told the proctor. “They eat. Capiche?”

  “Bad kids,” the proctor kept muttering, her head bobbing on a diagonal.

  Ava shoved into her face again. “Bad proctor!”

  Chatty Cop yanked her back by the shoulder. “Enough, Panic, you got your way. Again. Ladies, let’s not do this every day. Move along.”

  Ava stood back out of the way, still glaring at the proctor. She counted heads, to make sure everyone on her crew got past the tiny dragon lady, before she trailed them to claim her own lunch last. By the time she took a seat, the younger ones like Jelly had devoured every crumb. They went into comic contortions trying to lick their milk glasses clean.

  Ava bit into her cornbread and tuna salad sandwich, closing her eyes to savor it while she chewed. The sweet moist graininess of the cornbread. The fresh crunch of hydroponic lettuce. The slightly mustardy rich tang of mayonnaise. The stringy bits of tuna. The faintly fishy smell. Tiny sweet bits of pickle, kernel corn, and pepper. She swallowed slowly, and opened her eyes to take a small swallow of the fresh goat milk.

  Seven orphans, of the age-15-and-under variety, ringed her, watching her every move with huge hungry eyes. They hadn’t gotten enough to eat. They never did. Neither would she.

  She hated that about eating with the younger kids. She glanced over at the older teens. The couple. The loser trio. Two girls she hated, and the feeling was mutual. And five visitors, in from the gangs just for the day, for work and wages. None of them were from her old gang. Just as well.

  “Stop staring at me,” she told the younger kids. “Go wiggle outside. Recess. Twenty minutes.”

  They exploded out of their seats to comply. And she finished her sandwich alone, in peace. Her tongue was longer than theirs. She got every last drop of milk without having to turn the glass upside-down and look like a fool.

  Well, that was ten minutes of lunch break accounted for, and 500 calories of her 1600 calorie day. The emptiness of these accomplishments seemed to yawn beneath her for a moment.

  “These seats taken?” One of the demolition experts grabbed a chair at her table.

  “No! Join me!” Her eyes lit up. She smiled. She un-hunched and waved an arm of welcome around the table. Ten strong adult men and women, not kids and not elderly, sat down to join her. They weren’t desperately hungry, doing whatever scrap work was offered in exchange for a tiny meal. These were real people who truly loved their jobs.

  Best lunch ever!

  And the demolition crew got to see what few people in Soho Ville ever saw. Because when Ava Panic chose to stop being hostile, she was a beautiful, vivacious, and intelligent young woman. Waves of long soft ash brown hair. A broad forehead with wide-set eyes and brows. High Slavic cheekbones and wide mouth, with clear olive complexion. At first glance, people dismissed her as younger, because she was so petite. That usually ended the moment she opened her mouth. Ava was used to command, if only commanding other kids. She spoke with self-confidence and flawless English.

  Her elders at the table hugely enjoyed their little one-girl fan club. They answered her questions. They explained the delay before imploding the library with little diagrams sketched on a tablet. Basically the southeastern-most section of buildings was independent, not aiding to pull down other buildings. So detonating them separately reduced the shock wave, and thus the wear and tear on the rest of the neighborhood.

  “So do you live in Manhattan?” Ava asked.

  “On weekdays we live near the current demolition site,” Oska replied, one of the two women on the team. Although much burlier, she looked Slavic like Ava, maybe in her thirties. “We’ve got a house near Delancey for a couple months now, in Resco Margolis’ town. But most of us live in Brooklyn Prospect, Resco MacLaren’s town. Except Juan Carlos there, he lives in Inwood. Far end of Manhattan. And Madonna’s got family on Staten Island, in Lacey’s enclave.”

  Ava grinned. That was a lot of name-dropping, the biggest names of Pro
ject Rebuild. Colonel Emmett MacLaren led Project Reunion to reintegrate the city and save the remaining survivors. Colonel Ash Margolis had taken over now, directing the rehabilitation for the martial law government. And Adam Lacey, now a private citizen who chose to settle in Staten Island, led the first Coast Guard engineers back into the city. They got the ferries running to transport survivors out. The survivors lucky enough to be offered new homes outside, that is. The towns Oska named were the model mini-cities of the reconstruction, this year’s finest neighborhoods of the Apple Core, the ones re-developed first as proof of concept of what the new Apple could become.

  Soho Ville didn’t look anything like those charming green showcases.

  At last, the moment Ava had been building up to. “And do you take apprentices?” she asked hopefully. “I would love to do what you guys do!” Hazel eyes shone with earnest appreciation.

  Juan Carlos, their leader, chuckled. “You have no idea how many volunteers are on our waiting list! Sorry, Ava, we get that question all the time.”

  “We don’t take anyone under twenty-five,” Oska added. “With experience.” She quirked a quick regretful smile at Ava to soften the blow.

  Ava’s open friendliness snapped shut like a clam. “Right. ’Course not.” She rose, scraping her chair backward. “Well, screw you too. Thanks for blowing up the hood, though. Looks much better leveled. Wish you’d blow it all to hell.”

  “Hey, kid –” Oska attempted.

  But Ava slammed her empty chair back in against the table and stormed off outside.

  “Don’t mind her,” LaTisha sang out from her own table of sixty-something aged cronies. “Gang rat trash. Place is infested with them.”

  “LaTisha, cool it,” Larry called from another table. Larry ate with his own teen crew. “Sorry Panic was rude to you guys. She’s just frustrated.”

  Juan Carlos waved the apology away. “No problem. Like that all over.” The rest of his demolition crew nodded. “We’re used to it.”

  Once outside, Ava kicked at a concrete step with her high-top red sneaker. Dammit.

  “Shot down again, hey, Panic?” one of the older girls on her crew jeered. “You just trash like the rest of us. When you gonna learn?” She shoved Ava’s shoulder. “Gonna fight back? Huh? Huh?”

  Ava danced backward. “If I did, you’d be hamburger, Cavey.” She didn’t know why the nineteen-year-old’s handle was Cavey. She never liked her enough to ask. “No fighting in the work crew.”

  “Ooh! Then we fight after work. Everybody hear that?”

  “I don’t need to fight you, ever,” Ava said flatly. “Look, idiot. Fighting with crew will get your wages docked. You’ll get fired, and I won’t stop them.”

  “I don’t need you to protect me, White Trash!” Cavey screeched. “Maybe it’s worth it, huh? Prove to you, you’re no better than us!”

  Yes I am. “Right, Cavey,” Ava said. “I’m no better than anybody. But I don’t fight with crew and lose my job.” She turned and walked away. Once around the block ought to kill enough time for this lovely lunch break to end.

  But Cavey wasn’t having it. She screeched again and tried a running tackle on Ava. Ava heard her coming and dodged left, kicking out her right leg low to trip the girl. Cavey landed badly, face-first on the sidewalk, yet somehow still scraping her hands.

  Learn how to take a fall, idiot, Ava thought. She crossed her arms and shook her head. “Stay down,” she advised Cavey, and strode away again.

  Cavey growled inarticulately, and lunged for Ava’s legs. Ava nimbly hopped out of the way, and followed up with a spinning roundhouse kick, just inches above Cavey’s head.

  “You tried to kick me in the head!” Cavey screamed.

  “No, I planned to kick over your head. If I wanted to bash in your skull, the kick would have landed. And then you’d stop talking,” Ava explained. “Stop talking, Cavey. Just shut up and stay there. Could you people make yourselves useful?”

  The rest of the older teen contingent from their crew had tagged along to watch. Reluctantly one of the ‘loser guys,’ Ricochet, piped up. “You lost, Cavey. Give it up.”

  The biggest of them, not terribly large, planted a work-boot on her back. “Yeah, stay down already. She’s not worth it.”

  Ava gave him an exaggerated bow. “Thank you, Smuts. That’s right. I’m not worth anything at all. And this never happened.” She thoughtfully stepped on Cavey’s finger on her way to anywhere but here for the few minutes left to her lunch break.

  “What you thinking, Cavey?” she heard Ricochet say behind her. “Panic was queen bitch of White Trash. You don’t stand a chance against her.”

  “Used to be,” Cavey argued. “She lost it! She down!”

  “She didn’t lose. She walked away, fool. Just like she walked away from you.”

  As soon as she turned the corner, Ava breathed out. She looked back to be sure none of the crew still trailed her. Good. Then she shifted into urban workout mode to burn off the adrenaline. Step, squat, kick left, spin, kick right, spin, repeat for ten. The sidewalk cleared nicely of onlookers. Adults got nervous when they saw a gang rat workout. Jog up the front steps of a brownstone, jump off the steps. Repeat for ten. Now punches alternated with roundhouse kicks. Repeat from the top.

  That blew off enough steam, killed enough time. She sprinted back to work, the long way around the block.

  3

  Interesting fact: The Ebola epidemic and the Starve culled the population of the Apple Core disproportionately. Resettlement exaggerated the effect. Children under age 10, and caregivers if they still had any, received priority evacuation. Of the remaining population, 50% were between the ages of 10 and 19, and 25% aged 60 and over, leaving only 25% spread between the prime working ages of 20 to 59. The largest demographic cohort was feral orphans aged 15-19, a whopping 35% of the population.

  “Saw you working out earlier, Panic,” Guzman said, as he took a seat beside her on the church steps.

  St. Anthony’s of Padua was an old grey stone edifice with black iron portcullises at the top of its broad steps. The church faced Sullivan Street, where both of them lived, at the corner of the broad greensward that used to be Houston Street, the ‘Ho’ of ‘SoHo’ – south of Houston. Houston Street itself was gone, a greenbelt now where they buried the dead of the epidemic and the Starve to build the soil. The Houston Calm Park was its official name. They even consecrated it at Halloween a couple weeks ago. Over a million people traveled in to attend the city-wide memorial service for the millions of dead.

  Goats and chickens grazed there during the day. They’d grow crops in the spring. That’s what would happen to the collapsed buildings of NYU, too, eventually. Minus the corpses. They’d finally run out of corpses. Ava was thankful she came in after that grizzly task was complete. The Houston green lay black and quiet in the night now. Only sporadic lights from windows shone on the dark street. It was nearly 9 o’clock curfew.

  “Got to exercise less and put on some weight,” the ville chief Guzman advised. “We don’t feed you enough to work a full day, then train at night.”

  Ava nodded. “I noticed.”

  “Talk to me, Ava,” Guzman encouraged, leaning back on the cold steps.

  Guzman wouldn’t understand. In her world, she couldn’t stop fighting. She had to keep in shape, practice her katas, to win. Once a queen bee of a gang, everybody wanted a piece of you. Then again, maybe he would understand.

  “I thought I could come in. Leave the fights behind, you know? But there are too many of us. There’s no way out, even here.”

  “They won’t kill you here,” Guzman suggested.

  They would if I let them. “Maybe not,” Ava allowed.

  “It’s weird. How we ended up with so many kids left behind, the adults dying.”

  “Cytokine storms,” Ava said.

  Guzman chuckled. “Say what?”

  Ava said, “Ebola triggers a cytokine storm. Other diseases do it, too. It’s when your body over
reacts to the disease. Basically you end up killing yourself. It’s worst on healthy adults, because their immune system is the strongest. Kids and old people get sick, and get over it. More of them, anyway.” Deda was old, but the cytokine storm killed him.

  “You learned stuff like this at Brooklyn Tech, huh? Heck of a school.”

  Ava picked at her sneaker. “Cytokine storms were in a project for biology. My parents were nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital. That’s how we got here, America. Critical skills visa.”

  “I didn’t know you were an immigrant! Where from?”

  Oops. “Shh,” she whispered. “Please, Guzman, it’s important. Never repeat that. Frosty doesn’t know.”

  Guzman scratched his jaw. “How long did you date this guy?”

  “Two wonderful years.” Sarcasm dripped to congeal on the cold stone.

  “You might want to be yourself a bit more in your next relationship, Ava,” Guzman suggested. “He has some kind of problem with immigrants?”

  Ava blinked. “Guzman, ‘White Trash’ is what the other gangs call us. Frosty’s gang is White Supreme. As in, white supremacists.”

  Guzman, a black immigrant from the Dominican Republic, stiffened beside her. “You believe in that crap, Ava? You disappoint me.”

  “Not like that,” she breathed. “Guzman, you think the black gangs aren’t racist? The Hispanic ones, the Chinese? The Muslims? They all are. Got to stick with your own kind on the street.”

  “Hell. And you look down on blacks? And immigrants?”

  “I didn’t agree with Frosty,” she said quietly. “There was nowhere else to go. Until you offered me an option. And I took it. If he knew what I was, Frosty wouldn’t want me any more than the other gangs.” Maybe. She hadn’t dared to test him.