The City Series (Book 3): Instauration

by Lyons Fleming, Sarah

  “Then you go to plan B.”

  “What’s plan B?”

  “That’s why we’re here. But let me try this way first.”

  I understand his reasoning, and it has its positives, number one being it keeps Sylvie and the others out of the line of fire. But I’ve had time to think, and he’s overlooked a fairly large point. “You’ll take away any element of surprise we might have. If they say no, it’s war, and they’ll be more than ready. Right now, they don’t know about us.”

  “True,” Jorge says. “I’m not looking forward to busting in there, but I’d rather try when they aren’t waiting for us.”

  “How about we scope it out first?” I ask. “We can make a few boat trips to that factory with supplies and stake out the park from there. The first freezing day, they’re bound to go out. We follow and take them by surprise. Get any information we can. We send Brother David once we know more, if it makes sense to send him at all.”

  This receives a chorus of agreement. What I hope is that Walt and Emilio are in that first convoy, and we’ll kill them and anyone with them. It would be poetic justice for those killed on our return from JFK.

  Indy whispers in Sylvie’s ear, then Sylvie catches my gaze and nods. While she may agree with Brother David on sparing as many of our lives as possible, she and Indy want Walt dead as badly as I do.

  Brother David takes his defeat with a graceful bow. “When do you think we should go?”

  “Second week of November, the latest,” Paul says.

  That leaves us about six weeks to get our acts together. It’s both too soon and not soon enough, my worry and eagerness say respectively.

  We spend the next hour working out a schedule and then taking a break to enjoy food and drink bought with saved credits—if we’re going to die in mid-November, we may as well enjoy a small portion of the fruits of our labor.

  Brother David crosses the rug to where I stand with Sylvie and Indy. “Well-played, Eric.”

  “I hope you don’t really think I was playing you.”

  “He didn’t mention it to me,” Sylvie says with a wink. “I would’ve told you.”

  “She probably would’ve, too,” I say.

  His laugh dispenses with my worry that he holds a grudge. “I happen to agree with you. I wasn’t much looking forward to stepping foot in there. I only wanted to minimize the damage. Would you let me join you at the factory?”

  I remember the way he strode through Sunset Park with his old staff, saving people right and left. Either that robe does protect him, or he’s badass. Either way, I’ll happily have him by my side. “I insist.”

  “Excellent.” He lays a fatherly hand on my arm. “I want to talk with Rissa. If you’ll excuse me?”

  Indy waits for him to leave, then says, “I’m there from the beginning.”

  “Me too,” Sylvie says.

  “It’s going to be cold,” I warn.

  “Don’t even,” Sylvie says. “We’re coming.”

  “I was only saying it’s going to be cold.”

  Indy purses her lips over crossed arms. “Good luck using that on Paul. You know he thinks he’s coming.”

  I watch him toss a few chips in his mouth at the table. That conversation is going to suck, but he’ll have to understand he can’t leave Leo for that long.

  Roger joins our group. “Why the long faces? Your plan sounds good.”

  “It sucks that we have to have any plan,” Sylvie says.

  “Well, yeah, but you can capture those guys. I bet we could hold them in Quarantine until you decide what to do with them.”

  “True,” I say, though I have no intention of using precious food to keep them alive. Maybe one day we’ll have jails and a penal code, but they’d deserve the death penalty even then.

  Roger scratches at his ear. “So, what’s this about the High Line?”

  Indy, Sylvie, and I regard each other. “We were thinking of moving there a while ago,” Sylvie says. “We kind of dropped it once things got better here. And now…”

  “You might not have to,” Roger finishes. “It’d be a cool place to live.”

  He doesn’t seem insulted that we didn’t invite him along, but the awkward silence stretches out until Sylvie points at him. “You were on the shit list then. But you’re invited now, wherever we go. Sunset Park is nice.”

  Indy and I nod, though I’m not sure how I feel about the invitation. “I might take you up on that,” Roger says.

  “Cool,” I say, and wonder if it’s the cool that says shit’s not cool. Since no one bats an eye, I guess I pulled it off.

  “Nope.” Sylvie’s smile is a touch wicked. “You can only come if you show us your secret way out of here.”

  “I think that’s a fair trade,” Indy says.

  We’re dying to know how he does it. Out of general curiosity, and because every other exit is well-trodden. He can get out when there’s a mob ringed around us, and that’s information we’d like to have.

  “All right,” he says. “I’ll show you.”

  41

  The day is blustery and cold. Not cold enough to freeze zombies, but cold enough to make you want to park yourself inside rather than skulk toward a seldom-used corner of StuyTown. It’d be a miserable existence without Artie’s steam heat. The plant had full fuel tanks last year, and they have enough for heat this winter; next winter they’ll have to figure out something else. They might be cold at Sunset Park, since the water pressure had dropped toward the end of last winter. Without water, the boilers are useless, and despite the fact that inoperative heat will mean extra work when we recover SPSZ, I hope they’re freezing their asses off.

  StuyTown isn’t the most easily fortified or guarded area, but it does have growing space and heat in winter. Buildings form most of the outer barriers, and the remaining spaces only had to be filled in. And they were, with the street-facing windows of the lower floors bricked over or boarded up, in what must have been a gargantuan task. The one-story areas between some buildings, which hold parking garages or stores, were walled off.

  The loops that cut into StuyTown’s rectangle make our living space into more of an X-shaped area. The First Avenue and Avenue C Loops are gated on one end and walled along their curved boundary inside the complex, with only a single gate that allows for entry to the Oval. The 20th and 14th Street Loops are solid barriers.

  It’s to the walled 20th Street Loop that Roger leads me, Sylvie, Indy, and Paul, through a building on the perimeter. He strolls past empty apartments and out a door to a ramp just behind the loop’s wall, where over a foot of brick and metal sits between us and the mob outside. This curved street is No Man’s Land, as it’s gated off from our lived-in X. Roger grabs a bent steel pole from the dirt beside the building and moves to the manhole cover in the street.

  He sets the bent end into the edge of the round cover and heaves it up an inch, saying, “I got lost the first time I did this. Now I can get crosstown without a problem.”

  The cover swings to the side and drops with a clang no one will notice. The guards watch these walls from their perches down the street, but they can’t see us inside. StuyTown is too big to cover every square inch, and the mobs outside are more effective at keeping out live people than the walls. When the mobs move, the guards shift to cover the open areas.

  “Did you bring rubber boots or plastic bags, like I said?” Roger asks. “It’s usually not bad, since the only sewage is from us. It rained yesterday, and that cleans it out, too.”

  “No way,” Sylvie mutters beside me. “I am not going down there.”

  “That’s why we have the bags,” I say. Waders would be great, but good luck finding those easily in Manhattan. “It can’t be that much poop.”

  “I don’t care about poop, I care about bugs.” She stares at the hole and wets her lips. “I can’t do it. I’d rather walk a tightrope to wherever we’re going.”

  “Why?” Roger asks.

  “She’s terrified of roaches,�
� I explain.

  “I don’t like them, either,” Indy says. “But they don’t hurt you.”

  Sylvie shivers. “They hurt my sanity. You guys go. I’ll wait here.”

  I’m not leaving her here, but I’m also not forgoing a chance to get down there. Roger crouches and shines a light inside. “I don’t see any. I’m not going to lie, there are a few. But a lot of the roaches died off last winter.”

  “They did?” she asks.

  “That’s what Artie says. They need warm weather. Most of the city had heat, even underground. The steam tunnels, the subway, the basements, were all places that kept roaches alive. When they lost it, they died. I’ve seen some huge piles.”

  A hopeful smile spreads across Sylvie’s face until it’s ablaze with joy. “Really? They really died?”

  Roger shrugs. “I think so.”

  Sylvie hugs Indy and kisses me full on the lips before she stops, head tilted in calculation. “But they didn’t die where it didn’t freeze. Which means—” she observes the buildings of StuyTown with trepidation— “they live here and in the sewers, don’t they?”

  “We had a little problem last winter,” Roger admits. He sees me making the universal cut it out sign at my throat, and adds, “But we fixed it. Lots of poison.”

  Sylvie whips around. I wear my most guiltless expression. “What? They couldn’t have survived that.”

  “Can we do this already?” Paul asks. He’s slipped a garbage bag over each foot and zip-tied them just below the knee. At the manhole, he takes stock of the interior, then steps onto the ladder in the hole. “See you down there.”

  Roger salutes us and lowers himself after Paul, calling up, “Indy, you’re next.”

  Indy walks for the hole in her rubber boots. “C’mon, don’t be a chicken.” She climbs down, her chicken-like squawks echoing.

  Sylvie clutches my arm. “Will you protect me from the roaches?”

  “You don’t want me to protect you from zombies or people, but you want me to protect you from roaches?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I promise to protect you from roaches.”

  “Thank you.”

  I help her into bags, then put on my own. She goes first, feet finding the ladder rungs and eyes wide as the darkness swallows her up. Once she’s clear, I follow suit.

  The rain might’ve washed away most of the sludge, but it didn’t wash away all. A hundred or more years of sewage have run through this tunnel, and the musty, shit-tinged smell won’t let you forget it. But I’d wager it was worse when tens of thousands of people were flushing their toilets, showering, and washing dishes at all hours of the day and night.

  Our flashlights illuminate rounded walls of brick patched with concrete. I figure we’ve gone a block when Indy shines her flashlight into a stream of water in time to see something oblong whiz past. “Was that a rat? I don’t like rats.”

  Paul’s snicker rebounds off the walls. “That was a turd, Indy, sent our way by one of our fellow StuyTown residents.”

  “Good. But gross.”

  Sylvie grips my hand tighter. Her squint is just wide enough to view where she steps in the dim light, but she refuses to look up. I tried to talk her into it until I saw the first roach skitter along the crevices in the brick. By the tenth, I almost insisted she close them all the way. If these move inside our warm buildings in wintertime, Sylvie is going to lose her shit.

  “Oh, Lord,” Indy says.

  “What?” Sylvie asks, her voice panicked.

  “Nothing.” Indy shines her flashlight on the ceiling with a horrified grimace. A dozen or so waterbugs congregate less than a foot above my head. The largest one I’ve ever seen waves its antennae before it lumbers out of sight. The thickness of its legs alone would give Sylvie nightmares for a month.

  “I felt you shudder, Eric,” Sylvie says. “Tell me what.”

  “Do you really want to know?” I ask.

  She keeps her feet moving while she contemplates the question. “No.”

  “Good.”

  We pass under a manhole, where shadows move in the light filtering through the holes. Footsteps and a few moans make their way in. “We’re at First Avenue and 19th,” Roger whispers. “Two more avenues.”

  We’d seemed to be cutting on a diagonal, but now we head straight. The tunnel narrows some, and I have to bend so my head doesn’t get closer to the ceiling than I’d like, considering the size of that waterbug. Roger said there were a few zombies down here once upon a time, and that they didn’t freeze in the winter, but he took care of them and no more arrived.

  Paul’s boot squelches in over an inch of something brown and foul-smelling. “I have to say, I am not enjoying this.”

  “Claustrophobic?” Roger asks.

  “Sane,” Paul replies.

  We pass a smaller branch of sewer here and there, dark holes through which we’d need to crawl. Our tunnel appears newer, with sections of smooth concrete, but many of those are old brick, with long strings of a snot-like substance hanging from their ceilings. I shine my light into one and quickly turn it away before Sylvie sees the pile of insects at its entrance. They’re dead, but I don’t think that will make it okay.

  “Almost there.” Roger jumps to the side, using the opposite wall to brace himself. “You might not want to step in that.”

  Paul and Indy stop, flashlights bobbing. I train my beam on a two-foot-high pile of shiny brown carapaces and legs. A plank of wood is wedged crosswise on the tunnel floor, with something fibrous caught on it, and the mass of insects and trash is stuck in the netting.

  “You’re going to have to look to get past,” I say to Sylvie. “Because if you step in it, you will lose your mind.”

  She leans past me. “Oh, God. What is th—okay.” She breathes in and out. “Okay, okay.”

  Paul jumps past. Indy goes next. Sylvie minces up to the pile. Her gloved right hand stretches to touch the wall, then she yanks it back and shines the light there. When she sees bug-free concrete, she places her hand and lifts her foot on the opposite wall to hurdle past.

  On the other side, she stands pale but calm while I cross. “Are you okay?” I ask as we continue on.

  “I’m not thinking about it,” she says. “It’s in the compartment.”

  “What compartment?”

  “The one where I put things that I don’t want to think about. It’s like a brain filing cabinet.”

  She’s eerily serene, but it’s working. “What else is in there?” I ask.

  “The usual: childhood and more recent trauma, vegetables, and diet soda.”

  I laugh and take her hand. We reach one of the rounded sections that signifies a manhole above. This one has a strip of plastic orange flagging tape that hangs to eye level. Roger climbs the rungs and pushes aside a heavy piece of plywood instead of a steel cover. Daylight floods in, and we turn our heads from the glare. All told, it’s been less than an hour underground.

  “It’s safe,” he whispers down. “Just be quiet.”

  Sylvie may have been last in the sewer, but she’s first out. We stand on asphalt just off the corner of 19th Street, in a triangular space bordered by a building on one side and by vehicles on the others. One side of our makeshift barrier is a city bus that crashed into the side window of the Italian eatery on the corner. The other cars—three taxis and an SUV—form the other side of the triangle, and the scaffolding and wood of a construction job litter the scene as though part of the accident. When viewed closely, it becomes apparent the jumble isn’t a jumble at all, but instead strategically placed to plug up holes through which Lexers could enter.

  Roger ignores the bodies outside the barrier—five, all coming our way—and walks to the six-story corner apartment building in the space. The partially-lowered fire escape ladder rolls down noiselessly. We remove our foot coverings and follow him up the fire escape into an apartment on the top floor. It’s your standard decent city apartment. One-bedroom, updated kitchen, refinished parquet floo
rs. All nice, but nowhere near worth the thousands in rent it likely cost.

  “Was this your apartment?” Indy asks.

  “No,” Roger says, obviously amused at the thought.

  “He lived in the gutter, remember?” Sylvie opens a kitchen cabinet, empty but for dishes and glasses. “This is your stash?”

  Roger lifts a few cushions off the sectional sofa, then removes a sheet of plywood cut to fit the frame. The inside space is lined with bottles of liquor, cartons of cigarettes, and cans of food, as is the other section. In the bedroom, under the unmade king-size mattress, the box springs hold a surprising amount of the same.

  “There you go,” Roger says. “I have another one, too. Different building, not near here.”

  “Did you ever think of stocking up on vitamins?” Sylvie asks.

  Roger lowers the mattress. “I won’t last long enough to need vitamins.”

  “At least you’ll go out in style,” Paul says.

  We follow Roger to the living room, where he takes a few bottles and a few cartons from his couch before he replaces the wood and cushions. “Water works if you want to wash up.”

  We fill our bottles and rinse off what grime we can in the cold water from the tap. This apartment is nice, and Roger’s stash is impressive, but the whole situation is depressing. There are books on the bookcase and a few blankets thrown around, and I can’t erase the image of Roger drinking alone the way he does in his apartment. But he’s a grownup, more than capable of choosing a different hobby, and he’s selfish to have kept his route out of StuyTown a secret from Kate and the others—this would be invaluable in an emergency, and as a way to move mobs from our walls. Though I suppose it says something that he’s showing us now.

  “Why so quiet?” Sylvie asks by the sink. I shrug.

  “Do you guys want to head west or go back?” Roger checks his watch. “We have plenty of time.”

  “How far west can we go?” Paul asks.

  “All the way, pretty much.”

  “Let’s go west,” I say.

  Sylvie sits on the couch with her feet on the coffee table and her expression set to no way. “You all have fun with that. I’ll sit here and eat some canned food, have a drink, and smoke.”