by Ginger Booth
Reading the traffic tracks on the filthy floor, two doors looked occupied. She pointed them out to Cookie, but reminded him to hang back. She cocked her head, listening. She was pretty sure there were people above them, as well, on the fourth floor. Probably no higher than that. Why bother climbing, after all. Although top floors often held residents who farmed the roof.
Ava stepped to the left-hand door that appeared in use, and banged on it. “Sheepshead militia! Anyone in there?”
“Rat!” Cookie startled, jumping back from one.
Ava automatically kicked the offending rodent into the wall, to bounce down the stairwell. “Stomp it on the way down, buttercup,” she growled. She channeled Calderon on automatic these days.
Her target door opened a crack, with a chain still in place. “Qué quiere usted?” What do you want? The woman’s voice was tremulous.
“Evacuation,” Ava replied. “Comprende? Exit the building. Open the door.”
“No. Estamos enfermos,” the woman returned.
“She says they’re sick,” Ava translated for Cookie. “Watch the other door.” She banged on the door again. “Let me see! Now!”
Reluctantly, the woman opened the door. Ava stared a moment. The middle-aged woman was thin, of course, thinner than Ava had seen in months. Her cotton print dress hung from shoulder joints large over skeletal arms. A distended belly jutted out as though she were pregnant, though she surely was not. Her eyes shone bright with fever. Her arms and bare calves sported a rash of rosy spots, but not her face and palms.
On this beautifully sunny day, with an active tsunami threat, the curtains were drawn inside. Eyes sensitive to light. Ava remembered that, hiding behind the curtains in their apartment above the dojo, listlessly waiting to find out whether they’d live or die, and almost too weak to care. She got well before Frosty. But they probably contracted the disease at the same time. Most of the gang did. A quarter of them died of it.
She nodded to the woman, and backed away from the door. “They’re not going anywhere,” she told Cookie. “Don’t let anyone touch you.” She banged on the other door.
“Son muertos,” the sick woman said, as she gently closed her door. They’re dead.
“Out,” Ava told Cookie, her voice husky.
“But –”
Ava crowded him onto the stairs leading down. “I think it’s typhus. Need to tell Calderon. Outside.”
Cookie wanted to argue further, but Ava’s face was grim. He turned and trotted down the stairs obediently. “That’s bad, right?”
“Probably needs quarantine. Stay away from the rats.” Let the rats keep their fleas. Let the people keep their lice.
Cookie took a moment to process that. “God, Panic. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Ava got busy with her phone, and sent a mesh text to Calderon. On arrival in the city, their student meshnet was promoted to emergency worker status, and not blocked anymore.
Calderon asked whether she was immune. “Don’t know,” Ava said aloud, as she tapped out her reply.
“Don’t know what?” Cookie asked.
“I don’t know whether you can get typhus twice. I’ve had it before, I think, what that woman has. Hard to tell. A bunch of these diseases look alike. It’s not like we had doctors.”
“Did you live like this? Look like that?” Cookie knew in theory, that his apple squad-mates had survived the epidemics and near-starvation, violence and worse. Being close enough to smell the misery was different, though. He looked at Ava’s body and tried to imagine her like that.
Cookie was proud that he’d visited the Apple Core before, unlike the other seven Upstate recruits who filled in the squad for Basic. His family traveled in to take the voter test in October. They joined one of those tours to walk the Calm Parks. They took a ferry ride, visited the model ville of LES, ate dinner in Chinatown. He knew they were showcases. But seeing the real Apple was still a shock.
Ava tilted her head to regard Cookie with a blank stare. “The food started reaching us last spring. The typhus epidemic hit Manhattan the spring before. I got thinner than her.”
“Why are they still starving? We need to get some food and –”
“Feed a cold and starve a fever, Cookie. Food can’t help them now.” Ava’s phone pinged. “Regroup on Calderon.”
31
Interesting fact: Epidemic typhus is a bacterial infection, spread by human body lice. Several diseases, including typhoid, look much the same. It is unclear whether Ebola or typhus killed more people in the Apple Zone. Without the right antibiotics, typhus is up to 60% fatal.
“No!” Yoda yelled. “I won’t do it!”
“Excuse us,” Ava told the squad. She and Sauce grabbed Yoda’s arms and dragged him backward before them, up the street a ways from the squad. Calderon had collected them in mid-intersection, away from the buildings.
“Let me go!” Yoda screeched.
“No. Returning a favor,” Sauce said.
Ava added, “You can freak out over here for a minute. Then you’ll do it.”
“No! No…”
“Hit me if you want.” Sauce dropped Yoda’s arm and invited a punch. Ava followed his lead, both of them blocking his path back to the squad.
“I don’t want to hit you.” Yoda was sobbing now. “I didn’t join the Army to do this. To pen people up to die. Like they did to us. I can’t do it!”
Ava folded her arms, looked down, tapped a booted toe. “You can. It’s not the same, Yoda.”
“Like hell it isn’t!”
Sauce didn’t bother to appeal to Yoda’s reason. “Who’d you lose?”
Yoda’s face crumpled, then his body. He sunk to his heels and grabbed his knees, shuddering.
Ava scowled at Sauce, who shrugged. She tapped Yoda’s knee with her booted toe. He huddled tighter. She kicked him a little harder. He swatted her boot. She pushed, toppling Yoda to land on his butt. He glared up at her, face red and splotchy, wet with tears.
“Dance with me,” Ava invited.
“No!”
“I’ll kick your butt if you don’t.”
“I don’t want to fight you!”
“That’s because you’ll lose.” She squatted down and struck his shoulder with a soft jab, then a cross.
“Damn you!” Yoda sprang forward to grab her legs, but she easily hopped out of reach. Sauce grabbed him around the waist from behind, lifted and swung him a quarter arc. Back on his feet, Yoda spun on him, and lashed out. Ava punched his shoulder lightly. Yoda turned back toward her, and attempted a blow she blocked with a forearm.
“ARGH!” Yoda screamed.
“Scream again,” Sauce invited. He stepped back.
Yoda screwed his eyes shut, bunched both his fists, and screamed a few more times.
“Do you need help over there?” Calderon called.
“No, sergeant!” Ava and Sauce called back in unison. Yoda just screamed again.
“Did you lose anyone to typhus?” Sauce asked Ava conversationally, between Yoda’s screams.
“Friends.” Ava had friends in the gang, at the beginning. Kat was her sidekick, almost as close as Maz and Frosty, for a few months. A couple others. She never replaced those friendships. To be honest, she never tried. “Family was already dead. You?”
Sauce waited out another scream from Yoda before replying. “There were three of us banded together. After that, just me.” The thought inspired him back into a fighting crouch. He traded a few more jabs with Yoda.
“Pathetic,” Yoda croaked. “I could never beat either of you.”
“Draw on the Dark Side of the Force,” Sauce recommended. “We each of us hold within us both sides.”
Yoda actually landed the next jab on Sauce. He half-laughed through the tears.
“Some of us favor the Dark Side,” Ava quipped. “Others, just kinda young.” She smiled apologetically at Yoda. At seventeen, he was the baby of the family. He wasn’t that much younger than Ava. Except boys seemed younger, at
that age.
Yoda dropped his fighting stance and held hands out to placate Sauce, who agreeably dropped his guard.
“My family stayed together,” Yoda said, defeated. “Until the typhus. After, I got well and joined the gangs.” He stood panting, staring at an old dead horror writ on the asphalt, that no one else could see.
Except Sauce and Ava could see their own versions. They closed the lid on those memories, tucked them back away.
“You don’t want it to spread again,” Ava said practically. “That’s all quarantine is, Yoda. We hang yellow tape. Warn people to stay out. We notified the CDC. They’re crazy busy today. Maybe they’ll come, maybe they won’t. All we do is hang yellow tape.”
“And let them die inside,” Yoda said.
“Or live, if they can,” Sauce countered. “We did.”
“We can help someone else,” Ava said. “Lot of people need help. Yoda, any other day, doctors would be swarming this place. But today they need to save tsunami victims. Don’t give up on the Army over this. Let’s help where we can. Curing typhus isn’t our job.”
“We follow orders,” Sauce agreed. “If we can help more than that, great. If not, oh well. But we obey Calderon. You can do that, Yoda.”
The boy swallowed dully, nodded. “I can do that.”
Ava glanced over her shoulder. Only Calderon remained, his back turned to them. The other recruits had dispersed to hang warning tape. “Need a minute more, Yoda?” she asked.
“No, I’m good.” Yoda sounded like a death dirge. But he strode slowly back to Calderon, and meekly apologized for his outburst.
“Understood,” Calderon said. “We can spare some drinking water. Panic, deliver a few gallons to that apartment you visited. Sauce, Yoda, go with her. Report back here in ten minutes.”
“Thank you, sergeant.”
They sprinted to the bus and grabbed two gallons of water apiece. Sauce also stuffed some MREs into his uniform shirt, and insisted Ava and Yoda do the same.
“Gatorade mix, salt and sugar in the MREs,” Sauce explained.
Ava kicked herself for not thinking of that. Her gang used to keep a stash of candy, salt, and sports drink mixes. It wasn’t the real stuff, oral rehydration salts, but close enough. They used it to rehydrate gang members recuperating from diarrhea, whatever its cause. The troops had been issued MREs only once before in Basic, on an overnight camping excursion. The weather, more seasonably snowing that night, made the drink mix unappealing. The unfamiliar sugar high from the candy left them bouncing off the tent walls. But the fake food would be perfect to rehydrate typhus victims.
They ran much slower with jugs gurgling in both hands. Sauce, with fluent Filipino Spanish, explained to the woman in the first apartment how to use the drinking water and the MREs. In return, she told him which other apartments were occupied.
A shell-shocked, but otherwise healthy guy on the 7th floor – yes, he farmed the roof – thanked them for an MRE, and declined on the water. He collected plenty of rain. He said the gay couple on the second floor – ‘son muertos’ – regularly partied several blocks east of here. He suspected they brought back the contagion. He kept to himself, with two empty floors between himself and his neighbors below. He didn’t talk to the others or share his produce. But he kept watch from his roof above it all.
This conversation took place through a still-chained door. Sauce slid him the flat MRE box through the crack.
The three recruits skidded back to a stop before Calderon a few minutes late. The sergeant agreed that intel on a possible locus of contagion was worth the holdup. He tapped a mesh text to Captain Deluca.
Cookie shook his head in amazement. “Living like this, they go out to a gay bar?”
“Why not?” Puño growled. “They live here.”
Ava said, “Cookie, they only got water and sewers hooked up again in Chelsea after I left in August. We all lived like this. You just live.”
Puño nodded. “It’s nice here by the beach.”
“Glad you approve,” Calderon interrupted. “Listen up. The Coco suspended the evacuation until the docs can check it out. Next we’re carrying bodies off the beach. Stow your guns and ammo. Won’t need that. Bring your emergency blankets. We might find some live ones.” Calderon didn’t bother to mention water anymore. The recruits knew to keep their water bottles topped up.
“What about the tsunami waves?” Marquis asked.
“Dying down. And we’ve got an effective warning system now. They think. If you hear sirens, drop everything and sprint for high ground.”
“Or train track,” Ava suggested. The neighborhood had an elevated train track.
“Strong building, overpass, whatever,” Calderon agreed. “Key point, drop what you’re carrying. Even if it’s alive. Need to run like hell. Might get less than a minute’s warning of another tsunami wave. But it looks safe enough now. And the body collectors need some muscle.”
“Wow. I’ve never seen a dead body before,” Cookie confided. “I mean, except at a funeral home.” He blushed as Calderon and the urban recruits turned to stare at him.
Cookie led the charge to the bus to swap out his gear.
As they regrouped outside the bus, Marquis asked, “Hey sarge? Do we know what caused the tsunami yet?”
“News at eighteen hundred hours. Maybe we catch the rerun at twenty hundred. Until then we work. Puño, catch.” He tossed Puño the keys. “Find a useful place for the bus, and stay with it. We’ll be around West End and Oriental. The rest of you, with me.”
Calderon set off toward the waterfront.
The sand on the streets grew deeper, and redolent with seaweed. Telephone poles, wires, street signs, and other debris tangled. They weren’t worried about live wires. There hadn’t been power here in years.
They skirted Sheepshead Bay to their left, which separated the eastern end of the barrier strand from the Brooklyn mainland. The sheltered water looked normal enough, like a wide river. But lower balconies on the deluxe apartments facing the bay were shorn off. Through a parking lot, they spotted their first set of pancaked wooden houses, walls skewed from their foundations to smash across the next like dominoes. By the next cross-street, most of the wooden houses had suffered the same fate. Soon, the smaller brick homes were shattered as well. The sand grew ever wetter and deeper, and the walking more tiring.
Ava could sympathize with people choosing to stay here, though the Rescos slated all this for demolition. The seagulls still circled and cried raucously above. She could hear the slow waves crashing. The wind was fierce here, but in some ways this neighborhood was nicer now than when these homes commanded multi-million dollar prices. Living here cost nothing anymore. Watching the arrhythmic waves was a balm to the troubled soul.
Wool-gathering, she walked into Marquis’ back. “Foot,” he said, pointing. The water had scoured the sand shallower by the edge of the avenue, where they walked, but deposited a ridge along the middle, deep enough to almost hide the body.
They dug it out – a woman, maybe in her 30’s. She weighed less than Ava once they stripped her wet and sandy clothes. In the way of apples, they left her panties for modesty. Bodies were used for fertilizer, but clothes were recycled. Besides, wet clothes were heavy. Ava carried those. Fakhir and Fang spotted a folding lawn chair among the wreckage. They used that as a litter to carry the body along.
Calderon stood and observed the local funeral customs without comment. Cookie was quietly sick. A few of the other Upstate recruits hung way back, as though unwilling to be associated with these people. They often did that. Home table’s two Upstate newbies were thoroughly assimilated into the clan, and another black kid from Rochester merged with the Midtown rats. The others were more standoffish, including the three new girls.
At Oriental Boulevard, their destination, one last white 14-story brick apartment building stood to their right, its lower balconies shorn off, entrance and windows broken to the 6th floor. A brown 7-story building stood beyond it, it
s side facing the ocean crumbled like a bite out of a cookie. Everything else, to the water a double-length block away, was flattened. They practically waded through brick rubble and sand, liberally seasoned with broken glass. These blocks held nice free-standing single family homes and duplexes. None of them survived the tsunami onslaught.
Calderon told them to wait here at the intersection, while he sought out his contact among the rescue workers scattered through the area.
Ava spotted the clothes recycling pile and dropped her load. A line of stripped bodies lay on an embankment of sand sloping to the second story of the tall white apartment building. Fakhir and Fang deposited their offering. Fakhir said his religious words, joined by Tarek, the other new recruit at home table, a Syrian immigrant from Utica, Upstate. Ava estimated thirty bodies lay there at the moment. Vehicle tracks spoke of previous loads carried away.
Ava followed the others to the top of the tallest brick rubble pile nearby, an accidental dune seeded by a tangle of fallen telephone poles. The footing was treacherous and tended to slide, but a sandy coating kept the falls painless. The view was worth the climb.
“My God,” Ava murmured, as she reached the top. From this height, above the broken houses, she could see to the beach, stretching in either direction. By half the block away, sand already half-buried the rubble. Dozens of people wandered through, each alone, hunting for survivors, or bodies. Above the water, she saw a darker bar against the sky, and puzzled at it. There was nothing in that direction but open Atlantic. “What is that? On the horizon.”
Jenn, a recruit from near Buffalo, stood beside Ava, gazing through small binoculars. “That’s the next wave,” Jenn reported. “They’re still rolling in.”
Jenn offered Ava a turn at the binoculars. It was hard to comprehend just how large that wave was. Ava walked the view back toward her, along the track of where West End Avenue used to be. “About ten houses down from here, a wave washed recently,” she advised. She slowly lowered the glasses and handed them off to Doc, at Jenn’s invitation.
“Something’s moving!” Doc cried. He handed the glasses back to Jenn. “Spot from here!” He skidded down the wreckage mound, several others close on his heels.
