Apocalypse- Year Zero

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  He frowned.

  She said, “I just need to find out where my baby sister is so we can evacuate together.”

  He grimaced and turned back to his cases of water.

  She said, “Look, I’ll pay you, OK?”

  This time he seemed to consider it, though he shot her a look of skepticism. “Ten dollars.”

  “Jesus! Fine, ten dollars, carpetbagger.”

  He pulled a Nokia from his pocket and handed it to her, then went back to loading the water into the ambulance. She punched in Ingrid’s number, two digits off from her own, and turned her back to him. Ingrid answered on the second ring.

  “Ingrid, it’s Rook.”

  Silence, then: “Where are you calling from?”

  “Listen, I need to know where Daryl is.”

  Ingrid said, “Are you at the hospital? I don’t recognize this number.”

  “I don’t have time—”

  “Oh? You don’t have the time? You never have the time. Always the end of the world. Well I have lots of time. I’m at a standstill on the freeway, this so-called evacuation route, with nothing to do but think of you.”

  Rook asked, “Is she there with you?”

  A flat, toneless, “No.” Then, “This is how it is. This is how it’s always been. I babysit for you. I help you get custody. I try to give you love and support. But to you, I’m just—”

  “Ingrid. Listen to me. Tell me where Daryl is. You have to answer me.”

  “No, I don’t. You don’t answer my questions. Why should I answer yours?”

  “What questions?”

  “When I asked you why you feel the need to sleep with those men. You never answered me.”

  “Ingrid, stop it. This is Daryl we’re talking about. Daryl.”

  An extended heartbeat. Rook pressed the phone to her ear, straining against the roar of the wind to listen.

  Finally, Ingrid said. “She’s with a foster family. She’s better off.”

  “Who? I need an address and phone number.”

  The line went dead.

  Rook gave a shout of frustration and hefted the Nokia like a baseball, but Speck snatched it from her before she could launch it across the parking lot.

  “What the fuck?” He stuffed it into his pocket.

  “I have to find out where they took her. She’s only twelve, I’m her guardian and I’ve been…” she waved her hand at the idiotic hospital gown, tied in three bows down the back over her cargo pants.

  Speck looked pained. “Listen, they’re probably evacuating your kid sister. And you need to go too, OK? Now. Forget about the ten bucks.”

  “Ten bucks?”

  He rolled his eyes and went back to loading the ambulance. “Of course. Already forgotten.”

  Rook had no money on her. Not a dime. Of course, back home, in the trash can on the porch…

  She seized Speck’s shoulder. “Hey, whatever happened to Adam?”

  “Adam?”

  “The guy in the warehouse?”

  Speck frowned. “Your crazy dealer boyfriend? You’re kidding, right?”

  “No! Did he survive?”

  Speck nodded at a bus no more than twenty feet away. “Evacuating, just like everyone else.”

  Rook followed his gaze. A hospital employee was pushing a wheelchair along in a slow queue, and shuffling alongside it was a uniformed guard handcuffed to a patient: Adam. Rook sucked in her breath.

  Speck said, “Listen. If you’re going to be stupid and try to ride this thing out, go to Memorial or the Superdome.”

  From across the way, Adam lifted his head as though he sensed Rook’s stare. “Rook! Hey!”

  He jumped to his feet and the wheelchair toppled over. The handcuffed guard nearly went with it.

  Adam pointed straight at Rook, “Where’s my money? Where the fuck’s my money?”

  His face. It looked striped as though with war paint. Rook stared. Speck paused in unloading his cases of water and stared, too.

  “Hey!” Adam called again, his voice rising.

  Everyone was staring. The guard tried to subdue him but Adam shook him off like a toy, even though they were still cuffed to one another. The hospital staffer who’d been pushing the chair was backing up.

  Adam’s guard was shouting at Adam, and he pulled something—a weapon of some sort, Rook couldn’t tell what—from his beltline. Adam took it from him and threw it at the bus, smashing a window.

  Adam strode toward Rook, dragging the policeman along behind. “Hey! Rook! Fuck’s my money?”

  Rook stepped up to meet him. “You want your stupid money?”

  “Woah,” Speck murmured.

  The marks on Adam’s face were burst blood vessels. Tiny black capillaries that mottled his skin in clusters near his mouth, nose, and eyes. Pupils wide.

  Rook said, “You want your money? I’ll tell you where it is. It’s sitting in a trash can on my front porch. You want it you come get it. 2101 Louisiana Avenue.”

  Adam lifted his fist like he was going to hit her, but she put her hands against his chest and shoved. “Get back in your chair!”

  He flew backward. Rook knew that shoving him had nothing to do with this, that the power was in the way she’d yelled at him. He hurtled back along with that police escort of his. Just like the nurse had, only the distance was a little further so that they lost their balance completely. People were screaming and crouching low. Adam slammed into the wheelchair, and the two men and chair tumbled together against the bus.

  Chapter 10

  The walk felt good. She’d walked back all the way from the hospital in the wind and rain. A moonwalk. Slow motion. Long, long steps. The streets had been crammed with cars, all windshield wipers and brake lights reflecting on pavement, all stuffed with people and their valuables and pets. The low crossings had already been flowing with frothy water though the full storm had yet to land. Not until the morning.

  Rook stepped onto the porch. Thieves had been there. She could tell because her bike was gone and incredibly, so was Daryl’s Fourth of July flag. Who steals an American flag? Likely, plunderers were having a heyday with the evacuation. But this wasn’t exactly the best neighborhood, and under the most docile conditions, Rook wouldn’t leave her bike sitting on the front porch for almost a week and expect to find it waiting there upon return. The only things left on the porch were the hanging ferns, three junk newspapers, and another one of Daryl’s windsocks. And of course the galvanized metal trash can with the lid on. The hiding place for Adam’s money. Rook didn’t look inside.

  No keys. She’d have to go around back and break in.

  She worked her way through the mud and weeds as the downspouts showered her—only to find the back door slapping open in the wind.

  Great. Thieves had been there alright. Word gets out fast.

  She swung the door out. Up on the kitchen counter sat Fleecey. Filthy with mud.

  “Fleece!” Rook said.

  The cat gave a soft, sweet mew in greeting and leapt down to the linoleum, padding to Rook and brushing close against her. She purred, walking back and forth against Rook’s leg. Whatever had gone down the day they took Daryl, Fleecey seemed to have made a full recovery. The kitchen, however, looked like a scene from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The threshold was slogged with water and wet trash from the open door. Something brownish red was smeared on the linoleum.

  Rook picked Fleecey up and ventured in deeper. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She checked the bedroom, the bathroom, the living room, but everything looked to be in about the same condition as she’d last seen it. All but the mess in the kitchen. Rook returned to it, and noticed that on the door jamb were bloody fingerprints. Whoever had broken in had been injured, or had gotten injured inside, and left without taking anything.

  She looked at Fleecey again. The cat wasn’t just covered in mud. She also had blood on her paws and muzzle.

  “So that’s how it is now?” Rook said.

  The wind sounded wonderfull
y alive. Seemed it wanted her to ride it like an ocean wave, let it carry her to wherever Daryl was. She went to the center of the house where the ceiling hatch to the attic was. Ordinarily she’d have to get up on a chair to get into it. But now she knew things were different. She jumped, easily, lazily, up toward the ceiling. She could have jumped so much higher than that. She could have jumped to the roof from the porch. She grabbed the rope handle and pushed off the ceiling, falling slowly back down toward the linoleum. A manner of displacement, the way a stingray moves through the tide.

  The hatch open, she pulled out the wooden folding ladder and climbed up into the dark, musty attic. A few boxes full of pictures and relics (and creepy-crawlies by now, probably) they’d kept from the days of her parents. But most of the stuff in the attic belonged to the landlord.

  She didn’t bother pulling the chain for the light bulb. Instead, she went to the window and opened it. It took some doing. The frame had sealed itself into the sill—probably hadn’t ever been opened since the house was built eighty-odd years ago—so she had to take a deep breath and blow on it. The glass flew out with a sound like a cymbal clang. The wind immediately swallowed it.

  Daryl was out there somewhere. What were the chances that some foster family would have been able to cram her and that little Lion King backpack into a car? Not without heavy sedatives.

  But, that was impossible, too. No one was going to make a house call to sedate a nutso kid when the entire emergency management system was collapsing. The foster family might have given up on her and dumped her at a hospital. But that would still mean getting her into a car. So what would they have done? Knowing they would have to evacuate or they could die. Stuck with some crazy kid they’d just met who refused to budge. What would they have done?

  The more Rook thought about it, the more she felt sick.

  She pulled herself through the window. Climbed onto the roof. Stretched out under heaven.

  Chapter 11

  Rook lay on the roof throughout the night, feeling the storm build, rain sizzling her skin. Fleecey stayed next to her. The night smelled like damp earth and ions in frenzy. It had Rook’s breath in it.

  She closed her eyes and felt the tilt. A tunnel. Chasing down a path of polished Louisiana agate that fell away to the corridors in the sky. She could hear Daryl, and she ran after her, laughing. A game of tag, was all. She could hear the others, too. With each step she rocked the warp in the atmosphere, building the surge, feeling both fury and delight. She knew what Daryl was doing.

  “I’m unna get you, Daryl!” she called.

  Daryl, always so serious, did not laugh. She hid herself well. They were all so damned serious.

  “Daryl!”

  That heartbeat sound. Rook didn’t want to listen, she wanted to run, wreak, soar, play. The sound throbbed like drums. Only the drums were not barrel shaped, they were caves, and the drum heads were human skins sealed tight.

  And then Rook stopped short. Someone was nearby, not Daryl. Rook crouched and waited, growling, ready to spring. She could fly like a Harpy and tear with her nails and teeth if she had to. It was her other nature. The reason she existed.

  A woman emerged from the corridors. She had blue eyes and skin that glimmered in the heavens. Rook couldn’t recall ever having met this woman before, but somehow she knew her. Her heart knew her.

  “Lucy!” Rook said, and she threw herself at her, laughing.

  She grabbed Lucy’s hands and spun her. Round, round, round, faster. Twisting arms and heavenly bodies.

  “Stop it!” Lucy cried.

  She wrenched herself free. They tumbled over one another, falling in a heap. Rook laughed gales into the atmosphere. Lucy was gasping, a beautiful, shimmering nymph of a thing.

  Rook reached over to touch her soft skin, bringing her lips near. . .

  “No!” Lucy grabbed her wrist.

  But Rook couldn’t stop grinning, lost in Lucy’s gorgeous, glittering eyes.

  Lucy spoke in a crisp English accent. “Rook, quit acting like a child and start taking this seriously.”

  She pointed to the Earth below where the vortex churned over the Gulf. And then the other one over the desert. The one they ought not allow. A hurricane of fire and dust, forming in a concentrated mass over the angels, and then bursting in a wide yawn across red plains. All the lights, distant and near, went dark under its warp. It swallowed all the water. People vanished, and the ones who survived couldn’t last long.

  When Rook looked at Lucy again, there were tears in her eyes.

  “Quit acting like a child and start taking this seriously,” Lucy said again, this time in the patois.

  Chapter 12

  Finally, in the morning, the full hurricane hit. Katrina. Rook and Fleecey watched dim shapes flying by—first branches and ice chests and smaller debris, then garbage cans; and then entire trees, pieces of buildings. She could sense when something was hurtling toward her, and she could deflect it in the same way she displaced the air around her. The sound was like a train, and it even whistled like one, too. A finer sound threaded beneath it. Rook listened: a sort of howling that was not the wind. After a while, Fleecey howled with it, her feline voice just a small but indestructible filament in the maelstrom. It went on for hours.

  Then, it subsided to a drenching storm.

  And then, only a wind.

  Chapter 13

  The doors at Family Services had all been locked, but the windows had blown out. It had taken Rook about twenty minutes of rummaging through Ingrid’s cubicle before she found the tickler file.

  The tickler file wasn’t an actual file. It was just a piece of paper listing about fourteen names with addresses and phone numbers for each. This was Ingrid’s collection of foster families she could call at weird hours or with weird requests. The families in that file were the ones who took in the handicapped kids, the addicted kids, the kids suddenly needing a bed at three in the morning. It’s where kids went if they needed temporary placement when the juvenile facilities were overflowing, which was always; or before getting assigned to the oxymoron known as the ‘permanent foster family.’ If Ingrid really had placed Daryl like she said, it would have been with a family from the tickler file, which was now folded in Rook’s cargo pants pocket.

  She moved across roofs and treetops. Swift, light, skipping on the breeze that swelled from the Gulf. Much easier to navigate up here than down below on the streets, where flooding and debris made it near impossible to pass. Along the way, the dead appeared in those streets below. But there were people who seemed fine, too. Lots who weren’t fine. So many that it overwhelmed a body to even think on whether to lend a hand. People headed north, east, south, and west without any apparent pattern to where they were going. Rook saw a family of four wading through waist-deep water carrying everything they could salvage, and the older child held a three-foot iguana over his head. They all had their eyes on the ground or on the devastation around them. Few people looked up and saw her. Until Speck.

  He was loading someone onto a stretcher down below. She wasn’t sure which street. It all looked so different now. He closed the doors to the ambulance and then turned around and looked directly at her. She was up on someone’s roof. When they made eye contact she backed up and skipped off the rear awning so he couldn’t see the manner in which she took flight.

  Good of him, she thought, to keep the faith. Old Speck the knife-nosed EMT. Gonna help out where he can. Too bad it was like pissing into the ocean. Rook had no intention of wasting her energy on anyone but Daryl. Daryl she could find. Daryl she would save.

  And yet, for all her resolution, when she came across a woman lying face down on a porch, Rook took the time. Just like Speck might have if the passage here was ambulance-friendly instead of filled with water. Rook rolled the lady over and saw that she was dead. She gave her the breath. It seemed right. She couldn’t help in the conventional way that Speck could, but this she could do. When the woman’s legs started to kick, Rook left her th
ere to figure it out on her own.

  She made it to three of the fourteen foster homes on the list, all of which were either vacant or flattened. Ingrid’s was flattened, too, with the lower level submerged. So damn hard to tell one street from the next, but Ingrid’s was swarming with a cloud of insects that were not palmetto bugs and were not locusts. They had faces and curling, stinging tails.

  Ingrid’s house was so ragtag that the only recognizable features were the fake stained glass windows suction cupped to the real windows on the top floor. The one with the purple iris would have been Daryl’s room, had things been different. A muddy grey Toyota had lodged itself through a pile of kindling where Ingrid’s kitchen had been.

  Rook made it to a fourth house from the tickler file and found it standing, but the occupants long gone. The sun was down by then but Rook kept it up through the night, hitting another four houses where she could figure out the addresses. The result was the same for each—either pulverized and abandoned or still standing and abandoned. The going was dark. No electric lights to be had. Only flashlights from the occasional wanderer or National Guardsmen. From somewhere in the darkness came that same lonely howling she’d heard during the hurricane. By the time the dawn had begun to spread, she’d made it only halfway through the list, but she didn’t know the neighborhoods where the rest of the houses were. No Google Maps to be had.

  She needed help finding Daryl. Even with all these strange new abilities, she had the choking sense that she wasn’t going to be able to pull it off by herself.

  She climbed an old oak, hand over hand, moving higher until she was balanced on her toes at the apex, on a thin twig fit for a bird. The sun was just cresting the other side of the river. It threw flames across the rolling sky, which was mirrored in a grid below where the water filled the streets. It looked gorgeous and furious all at once.

  “Where are you, baby?” she whispered.