The City Series (Book 3): Instauration

by Lyons Fleming, Sarah

  Most of the block on this side is a concrete wall that makes up the foundation of Tudor City, an old apartment complex that sits above First Avenue. Just outside the Ford building, a staircase rises from the sidewalk to Tudor City Greens—the park at the second story level.

  One side of the twelve-story Ford Building overlooks the green space with a wall of windows. Another twelve stories of windows face the street, though the ground-level glass has been covered with plywood sheets that read POST NO BILLS. It resembled ongoing construction when we passed on the way to Sylvie’s office. Up close, it seems more like a barricade.

  Carmen catches up with us and motions to Kieran, whose long red hair pronounces him aptly named. “We’ll check if we can see in from the park.”

  They trot up the stairs two at a time, rifles aloft. Brother David stills abruptly. “Did you hear that?”

  A bang comes from inside, and we press our ears to the wood. I can’t make out anything through the seams where the plywood meets, though it should be plenty light inside with glass walls and roof.

  “Think your staff is strong enough to pry?” I ask Brother David.

  He fits the pointy end in the seam and rocks the top of the axe. I could do without the loud squeak, but the wood pulls from the glass another inch. I get a glimpse of abundant green foliage, a flash of something round and red, and a short staircase before a Lexer slams against the glass of the revolving door, trapped in the triangular space where door meets curved glass walls.

  “Nothing in there,” Carmen says from behind us.

  Brother David lets the wood fall into place, muffling the sound of the Lexer’s pounding. “The plants look watered,” I say. “There might’ve been a tomato.”

  Carmen points to Sylvie. “Like she said, it used rainwater. Maybe it’s self-watering. Tomatoes will grow from old tomatoes dropped on the ground. All we saw were walking corpses and a lot of leaves.”

  “And a pile of dead bodies,” Kieran adds. “Nothing’s alive in there. We’ll come back another time.”

  Carmen waves toward the FDR, and the ten people from Central Park dutifully comply. When she looks our way, her expression says Well, what are you waiting for? She gives us the back of her army green coat and moves in that direction.

  Indy stares after them in disbelief. “If there are only a few Lexers, they could take whatever’s in there. If there are plants, there are seeds.”

  “If the people who lived inside died, they could have a lot more than seeds behind that glass,” Brother David says.

  “You guys read my mind,” I say.

  “It’s weird,” Sylvie agrees, and then shrugs. “But they have cows. Maybe they don’t need to forage the way we peasants do.”

  We chuckle and trail after Carmen. “We’re here to put in our good faith effort,” I say. “If they don’t want to go in, we don’t go in. We’ll do what we promised and hope they keep their word when it’s our turn.”

  “You think they will?” Micah asks.

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Lucky raises his palms. “Then why’d we come?”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “You mean peasants can’t be choosers,” Sylvie says.

  Our next stop is a burnt row of five-story brick buildings on the Upper East Side. Two ash-covered vehicles that once belonged to Central Park sit at the curb, stocked with what Carmen and the others verify as stolen goods.

  She motions to the tall building at the top of the block. “We thought we saw people up there recently. We think they usually live in the shorter buildings for the running water, then they have rooftop gardens and caches in taller buildings. Every once in a while, we find one.”

  “You need a helicopter,” Jorge says.

  “Tell me about it.” Carmen swipes her hair back from her forehead, the creases around her eyes deepening. “We’ve followed them to a building, only to have it be empty. We think sometimes they use zip lines.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  A corner of Carmen’s mouth rises infinitesimally before she reverts to her normal jaw clenching. The rest of Central Park hangs back, deferring to her and inspecting the buildings. “Found something, Carmen,” one guy says.

  Her boots clomp on the way to a half-gone front door. She crouches and sifts through where he points, then lifts a charred bone from the ash. A few vertebrae follow. “Human. Let’s go in and check for more.”

  As directed, we stay on the sidewalk to keep watch. The brick buildings were painted at some point, and the lower floors are sooty gray, though the upper floors remain a pristine shade of cream. It’s unusual, from what I know of fire, though I admit I don’t know as much as I could. Or should, having a firefighter best friend.

  “This is the second time today we’ve needed Paul,” I say. “He might be able to tell how these fires started.”

  “What was the first?” Lucky asks.

  “His halligan,” Sylvie says. “To pry the plywood. He could’ve ripped that entire wall off the Ford Building in twenty seconds.”

  “Don’t tell him,” Indy says. “I can’t take the smirking.”

  Five minutes later, Carmen exits the building with her troops behind her. All are smeared with ash. “Think it was them,” she says. “Too bad. There were little bones in there, too. Not everyone was completely burned.”

  One woman in her group is gray, as if she’s just finished puking. A man in a studded leather coat staggers to the curb and upchucks his lunch.

  “You all right, Steve?” Carmen asks without looking back. Before he can reply, she says to us, “We won’t need your help anymore. You can get on the FDR where we came off just now.”

  “How about the next spots?” Kate asks.

  “They’re like roaches,” Carmen says. “If any of them are left, they’ll scurry into the light soon. I’ll tell Teddy you did what you said you’d do.”

  We get in our trucks. Once on the FDR, Sylvie presses her forehead to the window and watches the streets go by. “If nothing else, we learned three things today.”

  “What are those?” I ask.

  “The mobs have moved for now, Carmen is an unfeeling android, and Paul is handy to have around.”

  “But we can’t tell him that!” Indy yells.

  38

  Sylvie

  We’re into the second week of September and, as in Sunset Park last year, the preserving is endless. Eric pulled off this harvest big time. I might be biased, but Kate said as much herself. Eric’s seeds brought us the soil, the soil gave us the plants, and his babying of the plants through the heat wave worked.

  It worked so well that I now hate tomatoes and chutney and pickles and anything else that comes in jars. The store is closed to customers much of the day due to the addition of two electric stoves on which Indy and I can vegetables. They’ve set up two stoves everywhere we have electricity, since more than two would overload our solar power per building.

  While all the survival books say not to reuse canning jar lids, those books were written when there wasn’t an apocalypse. In the apocalypse, you use whatever you have, and we have spaghetti sauce jars, pickle jars, relish jars, salsa jars, and jars that have lost their labels. As long as the lid sinks in after the jar exits the canning bath, it’s deemed good to go.

  Indy clasps her hands together at the rows of various tomato products on the store shelves. “Aren’t they pretty?”

  They are beautiful, shining like rubies in the sunlight through the glass. Especially because they mean not starving to death. “I’ve been thinking—”

  “Lord help us all,” Indy interrupts.

  “Shut up. I was thinking that most of those back-to-the-land bloggers would be freaking out right now. It’s terrifying to know that if we don’t grow it or make it, we die.”

  “I loved those blogs,” Indy says. “Even the bread glowed with tranquility.”

  “Grace loved them, too. You know photo filters were responsible for that glow, right?”
>
  I haven’t said Grace’s name aloud in recent months, and I’ve never spoken of her in past tense. Though we don’t often mention Eli or Grace, they live in a shared space between us, and now Indy scoots closer in a way that makes the space feel a little less empty.

  After a minute, she breaks the silence with, “I wish I could walk around with a filter.”

  She’s dewy with sweat, which sits in a few inviting droplets on her smooth cleavage, and she’s put on some weight to fill out all the right places. “The last thing you need is a filter,” I say, “except maybe on your mouth.”

  Indy shoves me and snatches me back before I collide with a pot of boiling water, then checks the timer on the last of the jars. “We’re done in five minutes.”

  “No, you’re not,” Paul says, entering with a huge cardboard box.

  “Were you out there waiting for me to say that?”

  He unceremoniously drops the box full of tomatillos at our feet. I know what to do with tomatoes, but I have no clue about these. Indy perks up. “Ooh, tomatillos!”

  She bends and rubs the papery husk off a green orb. Paul’s eyes flick to her cleavage, then away, and then back again. He and Noli went nowhere, and he’s eschewed all other attempts by Julie to find him a match. I’m not sure why, but I know what I hope.

  “Don’t fight it,” I say. “It’s irresistible.”

  Paul turns his head, hands in his pockets, while Indy straightens. “What’s irresistible?” she asks.

  “Tomatillos,” I say. “Who doesn’t love them?”

  “Anyway,” she says, to indicate she’s aware I’m lying but isn’t going to pursue it. “What are we supposed to do with these?”

  “Do I look like a chef?” Paul asks. “Cook them up or something.”

  “You can’t just cook them up or something. They have to be high acid if we’re going to can them, or we have to add vinegar or citric acid. Are they high acid?” Paul answers Indy with a blank stare, and she throws her hands in the air. “We’re going to kill everyone with botulism if we do it wrong.”

  “Botulism isn’t a sure thing,” I say. “Maybe we’ll kill everyone. We just won’t eat any. If they die, more food for us.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Paul says.

  Eric strolls through the door with a sheaf of papers. “Paul, you forgot these.”

  He hands them to Indy, who takes a quick glance. “Really, Paul? You knew they gave us directions?”

  “I was going to tell you sooner or later.”

  Indy lobs the tomatillo she holds. It hits hard enough to crack on Paul’s chest and drop to the floor, leaving a wet mark and a few seeds on his shirt. Paul raises his head, his look of shock changing to one of reprisal as he reaches into the box.

  “Oh, shit,” Indy says, and takes off for the other end of the store with a screech.

  Paul lifts a tomatillo in each hand and goes after her. Something falls, though I don’t think it breaks, and then Indy races past the checkstands and out the door with Paul just behind.

  “She’s faster,” I say. “Paul doesn’t stand a chance.”

  Eric strokes his chin. “I don’t know, he’s pretty stubborn. But I’m glad the kids are fighting again.”

  “Me, too.”

  The timer goes off. I lift the lids of the canners, which are oversized pots taken from restaurants. Eric uses tongs to remove the jars one by one and set them on the table beside the stove. “They look good.”

  I’m pretty proud of the seventy jars we’ve canned today, though that does not make me want to start on tomatillos. “Break time,” I say.

  I turn off the stove and lead Eric outside, where we sit under the shade of a tree with our backs against the brick building. More buildings stand in our way and block the Oval from view, but I hear a distant squeal that could be Indy.

  Eric eyes the pack of cigarettes I pull from my bag and shakes his head when I offer him one. “Where’d you get those?”

  “Where I always get them. Roger.”

  “Do you ever wonder why he gives them to you?”

  I light one, blow out the smoke, and reaffirm my love of nicotine. “He says that if he wasn’t going to be dead in a year he wouldn’t share them, so his loss is my gain.”

  Eric’s index finger taps his leg. “Do you ever think he’s a little…needy?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure he knows how to have friends. You and I may be the closest things he has.”

  Eric reaches for my cigarette and takes a drag before he hands it back. “I know.”

  I’m certain he’s not saying something. He can’t be jealous of Roger, whose list of attributes includes alcoholic, harasser of the innocent, and star of his own sob story. That assessment may be unkind, since he’s improved in those departments, but there is no part of me that finds even a modicum of those traits attractive. I try to think of times when his behavior was untoward, in case I’ve been blinded by nicotine. I come up with nothing. Roger seeks Eric out as much as he does me.

  “I can say no,” I offer. I may love nicotine, but I love Eric more. “It’s not a big deal. I mean, I’ll be cranky for a month from nicotine withdrawal, but you’ll just have to put up with me.” His laugh is faint, and he shakes his head. “Then what’s wrong?”

  He gazes at the brick wall that runs between buildings to keep Manhattan’s zombies outside. “I’m worried the vote won’t pass. I’m worried about everything. Maybe it’s getting the better of me.”

  If he’ll admit to that much, it likely means he’s drowning in worry. “Well, I’m one thing you don’t have to worry about,” I say. “If you knew how much I love you, you’d plotz.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he asks. “How much?”

  “Enough to let you can all those tomatillos.”

  His lips tic upward in response, but I’ve done it again—turned it into a joke. I put out my cigarette and take his hand. I love his fingers—their warmth and their calluses and their strength, and how they perform delicate tasks with the same proficiency as everything else.

  I don’t reassure him often enough. Affirmations don’t easily spew from my lips the way they do his, but that’s a terrible excuse for not telling the person you love that you love them.

  I raise his hand to my cheek. “Thank you for being the kindest, most patient person I know. Thank you for protecting me even when you don’t have to. And thank you for being so good it makes the rest of us look bad.” I pretend to think for a moment. “Actually, that’s kind of annoying.”

  “Had to get one in, huh? Couldn’t just go with mushy?”

  “I tried, but you know me.”

  He runs his knuckles along my cheek, his smile soft. “I do.”

  “God, look at those two,” Paul says. He and Indy walk the path toward us, both out of breath and mud-splattered.

  “You have a little something on your shirt,” I say to Indy.

  She rubs at the brown stain that starts at her shoulder and cascades to the hem of her T-shirt. “I told Paul he could get me back, but he couldn’t ruin more food.”

  “So you put mud all over her?” I ask.

  Paul holds up a big hand, two tomatillos clutched in clean fingers. His other hand is coated with muck, and he spins to show us the dirt-encrusted butt of his jeans. “What she’s not telling you is that she said that after she pushed me into the mud. All I did was try to yank her down with me.”

  Indy’s laugh rises from somewhere deep in her belly. It’s been so long since I’ve heard the genuine article that I’d chime in even if Paul falling ass-first into mud wasn’t funny.

  “Ebullient,” I say. “That’s the word for your laugh—for you.”

  Her lips twist into a lopsided smile. “Thanks.”

  “What does ebullient mean again?” Paul asks.

  “Like you ever knew,” Indy says. “I’ll tell you inside while I hose off your butt.”

  “I know it has to do with cheerfulness. I’m not a moron.”

  Indy pushes him thro
ugh the door. Eric watches the scene with his broadest smile. He’d like them to hook up, but mostly he wants Paul happy. And, recently, Paul seems most cheerful when Indy is nearby.

  “Ebullient, the both of them?” I ask.

  “No argument here,” he says. “Your point.”

  39

  Our request passed consensus. Kate said it was the first thing everyone has ever agreed on. It’s still September and won’t freeze soon, but we spent days organizing weapons and ammo for freezing weather, when not finishing the preserving or working on the greenhouse Eric designed, which will be similar to Sunset Park’s.

  The mobs march in one direction, turn the opposite way, and then do it again. You never know where they’ll be, or when they’ll turn around, and there’s not enough room in Manhattan to run. Across the water in Brooklyn, they turn north and then south again. The shortwave radio is mostly silent, whether due to mobs, lack of power, or any number of reasons that have been debated ad nauseum.

  We live on a tiny patch of earth on a small island in a giant world, and we have no idea what’s happening out there. I wonder how different the mainland must be from our trip upstate a year ago, and I hope the black mold is spreading up there the way it is here. What began as small spots on a few Lexers has turned to patches on many, a few so large the muscles have split and turned to a spongy mass. But it hasn’t stopped them.

  I lean on a roof ledge over First Avenue, watching bodies travel the lanes of the main avenue and service road. Micah does the same, and Casper stands beside me, sword in hand. “Want to try again?”

  I rub my aching forearms. “I think I need a lighter sword. But show me again.”

  Casper brings it up, then down, twisting it sideways and then spinning to puncture an invisible zombie head. I give him a round of applause. He’s good, and the new muscles in his arms attest to how many hours he’s spent working on these moves.

  The roof door opens, and Casper drops the sword by his side as Roger makes his way over. He pulled another disappearing act for a couple of days and must have gotten in, or sobered up, this morning.