by JJ Pike
She slid around the open door and into the store. The shelves had been picked clean, the fridges emptied. Why was the owner in here, when there was nothing to sell? Actually, no, that was a stupid question. She wanted to protect her store so she’d at least have a business to run once things got back to normal. It would take the authorities months to clear the mountains of debris, but eventually New Yorkers would want their bagels and snacks and cigarettes, just like before.
Barb flicked a quick look at the ground, just to make sure she didn’t step on something and alert the robber that way. She was behind the wire bread rack, so if he raised his head he’d be able to see her immediately. She needed to move quickly and quietly, line her shot up so that she got him and not her, then pull the trigger.
The store owner raised her eyebrows. She’d seen Barb. Slowly, slowly the store owner shook her head. What did she mean? Don’t shoot? Don’t kill him? Don’t kill me? If she shot and missed, he might have time to kill his victim before she could get another shot off. Barb took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger. She dropped him like a rock. One minute he was there, next minute he was gone, slumped on the ground.
The store owner ran around the counter and squeezed Barb. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. He was going to rip me off. That double-crossing SOB.”
“Sorry?” Barb’s gun hung at her side. She’d ended a man’s life. He was doubtlessly a bad man, but it hit her harder than she’d expected it to. She was now, officially, a killer.
“Al and me worked these streets together. There’s not much left, but we lucked out here.”
“Worked the streets? I’m not following.”
“Yep. We’ve run this grift for years, but it’s never been this good. We hit the motherlode with all the panic.”
Barb was having trouble processing what she was hearing. “You were working together? You and this man? Together?”
The woman nodded. “Places have been abandoned, their doors left unlocked, cash registers left full. It’s a gas.”
“You?” Barb didn’t want to believe what she was hearing. “You and him?” She’d shot a man she thought was a villain. Was it okay to do that if the person you were rescuing was also a villain?
The old woman grinned. “I know. No one suspects an old woman. They think we’re has-beens. What do I care what they think? I get to do what I do and they never see it coming.” She slapped Barb on the back, laughing and heading back behind the counter. “They hoard stuff, you know, for their friends and relatives. Never let a store owner tell you that they have no stock, it’s almost always a lie. Soon as I sniff them out, know there’s something worth having, I signal Al. This cash register had more money than any other place we’ve cleaned out. Most people have cut and run. Don’t know what happened here or why there was something left. There was a large beam blocking the door when we arrived. Took us a couple of hours, but we moved it. Chances are the store owner saw it and gave up. Or was already gone. Or lives outside the city. Though, who owns a small store like this and doesn’t live nearby?” She was removing the money from her former partner’s pockets by the handful. “You want to join me? It’s a good grift. Still has legs. You could be a rich woman by the end of the week. Or, if not rich exactly, you’d have enough to keep you going for a few months. I’m going to head up to the diamond district next. They were shut down tight a couple of days ago, but more people have been leaving. Could be there’s gems to be had. Come on, what do you say?”
“No, thanks.”
The old woman—less frail and fluttery now that she’d admitted she was a straight-up thief—turned back to her former partner’s body, checking every pocket for cash. “His eyes got bigger than his belly. Turned on me for no reason. One minute we’re working this joint together, next he’s pulled his piece and is threatening me. Lost it. Plain lost it.”
Barb inched her way towards his body. He was slack and broken, his head at an angle that no head could ever reach, the hole she’d made in his forehead, cavernous. The spatter had coated the wall behind him, but there were also globs of yuck on his hands. She peered harder. The bullet went through his head, taking brain matter backwards, not forwards. That wasn’t brain she was looking at; it was a gloopy scab that hadn’t healed. He had three of them on his left hand. It gave her the creeps.
“I’m Flora, by the way.”
Barb backed up. She wanted some distance between her and Al. The scabs on his hands were familiar. She’d seen them twice. Once on Pete’s arms when she was bandaging him up, then again on Bill’s face. They were dry and scab-like on the outside, but open sores towards the middle. On closer inspection Flora’s cheek wasn’t bruised so much as broken. “What happened to your face?”
Flora reached up, but didn’t touch the wound. “No idea.”
“How long have you had the abrasion?”
“Couple of days. We’ve hauled a lot of trash out of a lot of doorways and climbed through a heap of rubble. Probably got it on the job.” She laughed. “No workers’ compensation for me, though.”
“When did Al get those cuts on his hands?”
Flora bent over and squinted. “I lost my glasses. Can’t see worth a damn.”
If she’d run into Flora and Al with their mystery contusions, but hadn’t seen Pete and Bill, she wouldn’t have thought much of a couple of looters being cut up, but she had a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach that the sores were more than simple “workplace injuries.”
Pete had barely moved from his seat on the subway when she and Alice found him. She’d assumed his cuts were from falling debris. Now she was beginning to doubt that assumption. The huge gash in his upper arm might or might not have been inflicted by his dog, Maggie-loo. Seeing Flora’s face and Al’s hand made her doubt that, too.
“You sure you don’t want to join forces? There are some bad people out there. You don’t want to go it alone.” Flora stepped over Al and rounded the counter.
Barb backed up. The theory hadn’t quite coalesced in her mind, but it was dang close. If they hadn’t been injured by debris, what had caused these horrible sores to appear? She and Alice had been underground for a few days. When she’d boarded her train for work, the world above was still standing. By the time she made it out, it was in shambles.
Manhattan was all crushed sidewalks and fallen buildings and mountains of chrome and glass, interspersed with the occasional unscathed storefront. She could see no pattern to the destruction. What had been swallowed into the ravenous earth and what had remained above ground was random and confusing and upsetting and galling and made her want to cry and throw up and go pull the sheets over her head and hide until everything had been cleaned up. But that wasn’t an option. She had to face this thing head on.
She’d been on the #7 train, close to the 34th Street entrance when the disaster began. By a series of miracles—God was looking out for her, she knew that—she’d made it out alongside her new friend Alice. The voice in her head that told her to be kind to herself and give credit where credit was due reminded her that she’d dug Alice out of a mountain of rubble, bandaged Pete’s wounds, and successfully cauterized Bill’s arm stump after removing the ragged flesh and broken bones. It wasn’t only “luck” that had gotten her to this store, it was luck, faith, and determination. She hadn’t given up. She wasn’t about to now.
But the contusions. What were they about? She hadn’t paid too much attention to the ongoing catastrophe when she left Alice to tend to Bill and Pete. Her mind was on finding food and water. The broken buildings, the fires, the explosions, she had to treat them as background noise so she could keep searching, but that might have been an error. People in different parts of town had similar injuries. Why? How?
It came to her in a terrifying flash: there was every possibility that a hospital had collapsed, bringing with it infectious diseases from all over the Tri-State area. Were the authorities careful when they evacuated people with measles, hepatitis, or HIV? What if they were in a rush? Coul
d they have released something contagious into the air?
She kept Flora in view as she sidled towards the door. The sewage slopping around the subway system would have parasites and gross, disease-spreading bacteria and viruses galore. They’d swum in that stinking stew. She was overcome with the urge to find a shower and scrub her skin with a loofah.
She waited in the doorway until Flora had disappeared into the next store, then turned and went in the opposite direction as fast as her legs would carry her. She wanted nothing to do with a thief, let alone a thief who had a skin-eating infection.
Barb marched hard enough to raise her heart rate and work up a sweat. The exercise helped clear her mind and come up with a plan. Flora had mentioned that many stores were already looted out. She’d walked ten blocks east, then five blocks north and she hadn’t seen a single store that wasn’t either shuttered and locked or had its windows bashed in so the looters could carry away everything they could get their hands on.
Conclusion: the stores were a wash. She needed to think bigger. If there were abandoned stores, there were going to be abandoned apartments. She’d find an apartment, or a string of apartments, and get their supplies there.
She picked the largest apartment building she could find. It was upmarket, which meant the people who lived there might have holiday homes in the Hamptons or Fire Island or the Hudson Valley. There were a couple of guys she worked with who had a time-share arrangement with their buddies and went to their “home away from home” every other weekend. The gay guys had it so good. They were the quintessential DINKS “double-income, no kids” types. They had nice clothes, nice homes, ate out, all the things her single friends couldn’t afford to do. New York was impossibly expensive if you were a singleton. All she needed to do was find a couple of apartments that belonged to guys like them and she’d be set.
The front desk was unmanned, the elevators out of order. She took the stairs. The quiet and the dark was unnerving. “I throw myself into your protection, Lord.” He’d keep an eye on her; He always did. She kept one hand on the wall, to orient herself. The fire door to the second floor was locked, but the door three floors higher had been propped open. The light from the far end of the corridor was weak, but it at least allowed her to find her way.
She tried a door handle. The apartment was locked. She hadn’t thought this through properly. Anyone fleeing a disaster wouldn’t leave their front door unlocked. If it had been a hurricane or a tornado, the kind of natural disaster that happens in the Midwest, maybe she’d have found doors ajar or unlocked. Or the doors wouldn’t have been locked in the first place, because you knew everyone who lived in a ten-mile radius and trusted them and didn’t need to shore up your defenses against murderers and rapists and thieves. Did that exist anymore? Had it ever? In any case, New York was the exact opposite. Doors would be locked, bolted, chained, and alarmed.
She headed down to the front desk. Her only hope was to find a master key. It was a long shot, but if she prayed real hard things often broke her way. “Hear me, Lord,” she whispered. “I’m asking for all of us, not just me. If you could see your way to helping a girl out here, I’d be grateful. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
There they were, exactly where she’d thought they’d be. The keys that would give her access to everything they needed. “Thank you, Jesus.”
She flew up the stairs, excited to see what she could find. “It’s not theft if there’s no one to miss it and we’re desperate.” She was talking to herself. It happened from time to time. Most often when she was high on life. This was the break she needed. The key fit, the door opened, there was a chain. Didn’t matter. There were at least a hundred apartments to try. The next door was similarly chained. The next had the most awful smell. The next…she stopped. There was a little creature at her feet, whimpering. A dachshund had crept out of the smelly apartment. The odor was his feces. There’d been no one to walk him for days. What had he been eating? Had he had access to water?
“Stay with me, little fella. I’ll make sure you’re safe.” He was a Velcro dog, sticking close as she went down the line of doors. How many dogs and cats were in the building? How many in the building next door? What about the bedbound humans and the agoraphobics? There could be hundreds of God’s creatures trapped, with no one to check on them or let them out. She was going to go to a hardware store and snag a pair of bolt cutters. She would open every door in the building. Eventually, she’d find someone else who wanted to help liberate the shut-ins. She’d make it viral. In a good way. Like a meme that grew legs and dominated the internet. Boy, she missed the internet. It was the one place her mania subsided, because she was able to feed her insatiable desire for more new-shiny-fun things.
A door opened. There was a smell. Rotting, heavy. Not dog poop. Or cat urine. A dead thing. Had a kitty passed to the other side? She wasn’t sure she could bear to look, but she had to. Her mandate was clear. God had directed her to this place, answered her prayer, given her the keys, so she could liberate those in lockdown. Even if she only confirmed there was no one living in the apartment, she would have done her job.
“Find a marker, Barbara. You’re going to need to leave yourself a trail, so you’re not checking and rechecking each apartment. The Red Cross marks doors and walls with spray paint. You can do the same.”
The light from the window flooded the hallway. She tiptoed in, though if the cat was dead there wasn’t going to be a human around.
The dachshund trotted ahead, searching for a water bowl.
There were shoes sticking out from behind the kitchen island. No, not only shoes. Shoes with feet. Legs. A body. She was looking at a dead body. The August heat had done its work and the woman was already bloated. What a terrible way to end. Alone in your apartment, with no one looking for you.
Barb pulled the throw off the back of the couch and covered the dead woman, sending up a prayer as she did. The silver bracelet on her wrist told the tale. Diabetic. Type 1. She was young. It was hard to know how young because of the decomposition, but Barb was gutted that her first fully-open door led her to a dead body.
She straightened, instantly on high alert. Had she imagined it? So many times that sound had woven itself into her dreams. She slapped her hand, hard enough that it stung, to make sure she wasn’t asleep.
The baby cried again, a thin, sad whimper that shot Barb to her feet. There was a baby nearby. A living baby. She ran from the front room to the bedroom. There, in a crib, rolling in a days-old diaper, was a perfect child.
CHAPTER THREE
“Midge is blind? What do you mean, Midge is blind?” Petra could barely understand what they were saying to her. The doctors kept blathering—cerebral edema, intracranial pressure, optic nerve, “legally a minor” this, “in loco parentis” that—but they made no sense.
How could the hospital staff keep walking and talking and pretending everything was going to be okay? It wasn’t. Even the pictures on the TV in Midge’s room showed that things in New York City were falling apart fast. She knew it wasn’t the whole story. Things on the ground had to be ten million times worse than the shots of burning buildings and flooded streets and people throwing themselves into the river. Dad said they filtered the news, to keep the general public “calm and compliant.” She shouldn’t watch it, even though it was the perfect distraction. It was pointless. She wouldn’t learn anything true and she certainly wouldn’t see anything that would help her solve her current crisis. She needed to pull herself together. For Midge.
Her baby sister looked impossibly tiny in the massive hospital bed. It could have been the tubes or the beeping machines or the steady stream of nurses taking her temperature, writing on her chart, running their thumbs over the wheel that adjusted the flow of meds, but the entire effort to keep her “stable” made her seem like she wasn’t really there. Petra had trouble holding onto the idea that it was Midge under all that equipment and technical jargon. Or that she was the one who was supposed to give the doctors permis
sion to do “the procedure” as they called it. How could sawing into someone’s skull be called “a procedure?” How had this responsibility landed in her lap?
The papers the chief neurologist had handed her swam in and out of focus. What were they asking? Did she understand right? They were going to drill into Midge’s skull in order to relieve the pressure that was caused by the head trauma? That bullet had looked like it hadn’t done too much damage when they first brought her into the ER, but as it turned out it had skimmed her skull just enough to send the brain to wibbling.
“No Bueno,” as Paul would say.
Petra wasn’t sure she could keep the facts straight. “The brain isn’t supposed to move that violently and crash against the inside of your skull, is it?”
The surgeon talked to her like she was five. He was so condescending she wanted to scream or punch him or, at the very least, turn the volume down on him all the way. But she couldn’t. Tuning out wasn’t an option. There was no one else in the room to listen to all the facts and make a decision. “That’s why there is cerebral fluid in the first place, to cushion your grey matter and keep it safe from trauma. But Midge’s brain fluid hasn’t protected her entirely.”
