“I want to see Jersey,” I say. “Check if the mobs are still there.”
The radios have gone dead. No one has heard an American broadcast for weeks, though we heard a few from other countries. Their reports were of mobs marching toward the north, and, in some cases, south. From the sound of it, we may be one of the last Safe Zones in the U.S.
“That’s a great reason,” she says brightly. “Have a good time.”
“I’m not leaving you here alone.”
Indy plops beside her. “She won’t be alone. I’ll make the noble sacrifice of staying while you go.”
“Forget it. We won’t go.”
“But you can see how to get to the High Line,” Sylvie says. “We could bring things there if we know the route.”
I lower an eyebrow. “We?”
“Okay, you. That was enough sewer to last me the rest of my life.”
“Are you sure?” I look to Paul, who nods his seal of approval. He wouldn’t do that unless he wasn’t worried. “All right.”
It would take about half an hour to get to Tenth Avenue by walking on a city street at a good pace. In the sewer, it’s two hours before we’re close, and it feels like forever. The tunnel has narrowed and my back aches from stooping. At one point, the water is knee level and gushes from higher, smaller sewer pipes into ours. I have no plan to drink it, but it almost looks clean.
“This must be one of those creeks they covered up,” I shout to Paul.
Over a hundred years ago, the streams and ponds of Manhattan, already polluted, were built over. Some became sewers. Canal Street wasn’t named Canal Street for the fun of it. I wish I knew more on this subject. A trip to the library might be in order once the Lexers freeze, if I’m not dead by Walt’s hand.
Finally, boots full of freezing water and feet numb, we climb the rungs of a manhole. Paul grunts as he lifts the cover and slides it to the side, then peeps out the hole.
“Fuck.” He uses his halligan to yank it back into place. “Too many.”
Roger motions at another tunnel, this one shorter. “We can try down there.”
Paul drops into the few inches of water with a small splash. “What do you want to do?”
It’s been a long day. My muscles tell me that as clearly as Paul’s I’ll soldier on if I have to expression. “Let’s go back. We know we can make it if we need to. Next time, we’ll plan better.”
We need better shoes, better weapons, and more time. I know Sylvie and Indy are likely fine, but I hate the idea of them out of the walls alone.
42
Sylvie
“Let’s drink,” Indy says after the guys leave.
I stand from the couch. “We can’t, although I wouldn’t mind being drunk the next time we pass that roach pile. However, we can snoop and pilfer.”
Indy claps, and together we dismantle the couch. We sort through Roger’s liquor. He tends toward whiskeys and vodkas, though he has random bottles thrown in there, and half a cushion section devoted to wine.
“This is nice wine,” Indy says of a bottle. She lifts another. “This one, too. I think he knows his wine.”
“I know nothing of wine, except red gives me headaches.”
“That sucks.”
“Only if you like red wine, which I don’t.” I lift a bottle of Moscato. “Yum.”
“Did your tastes ever evolve past that of a ten-year-old?”
“Nope. Think he’ll let us have this?”
“He’ll let you have it.”
I narrow my eyes. “It is not that way at all.”
Indy heads for the bedroom. “You are not that way at all. Roger doesn’t know whether he wants to curl up in your lap like a puppy or sleep with you.”
“Gross to both those things!” I call on my way after her. I help her drag the mattress off the bed. “Why does it have to be about sex all the time? Paul and I are friends, no sexual anything.”
“Because it is about sex a lot of the time. I’m just saying Roger is attached.” She roots through the canned food and comes up with two cans of fruit salad in syrup. “You like white sangria? We’re going to make apocalypse sangria when we get back.”
I sit on the box spring frame, stomach uneasy. Roger can be as attached as he wants, but not in that way. “You’re making me feel icky. Can you stop?”
“With sangria?”
“With Roger. We’re just friends. Besides, I’m a cat person.”
“Well, you found yourself a puppy.” Indy crawls across the box springs to the center, then sits on the top edge, feet on cans and bottles, and lifts a girlie magazine wedged along the side. She leafs through it, then another, and lifts her eyes over the top of the page. “For all his tribal tattoos and rock and roll rebellion, Roger’s tastes are pretty vanilla. Don’t get me wrong, all ethnicities are represented in this outstanding periodical, but—”
“I know what vanilla means,” I say with a laugh. “What is with you today? You’ve lost your mind.”
Indy twists a curl around a finger and releases it. “I don’t know. I feel good.”
“You know that’s actually a good thing, right?” She shrugs, and I say, “I’m glad you got rid of that idiot.”
“He got rid of me.”
“He did you a favor. You wouldn’t have stuck it out much longer. He had to know that.”
She tucks the magazines into the box spring, head lowered, and peeks at me sideways. “The Tony Award was a little much.”
I attempt a straight face, but, once the first giggle escapes, I’m crying with laughter. Indy rests her head on her knees and gasps out, “Batteries are so expensive, and he had to buy them every week. I wanted to smack him upside the head with that stupid thing.”
A clang comes from the street, followed by the distinctive thump-crunch of sharp weapon through flesh. Our laughs cut short, and we leap to our feet. My hand finds my gun. A real gun. A your finger is the safety gun. I have a soft spot for the purple .22, but not soft enough that I’ll die for it.
We creep to the window in time to see three figures round the corner out of sight. A moment later, a familiar figure trails them down the sidewalk. I’ve met Charlie a few times at the gate, when he stops by to give us news or get something to eat, though you’d remember him after one meeting. He glances up to our apartment as if aware we’re here.
I move to the living room window and wave him up. He raises a finger and approaches the corner quiet as a cat. Quiet as his cat, Mischa, who pads behind him. He watches the avenue for a long minute. A Lexer passes two feet away, heading with zombie purpose in the direction of the first people, and it doesn’t spare Charlie a glance or a sniff.
After the Lexer is gone, Charlie lifts Mischa. The cat runs up his arm to his shoulder, where she perches, claws dug deep into the many layers of his clothing. He scales the ladder effortlessly and takes the metal fire escape stairs with the same grace until he enters the living room.
“Did you ladies get more beautiful?” he asks.
“You’re used to looking at dead people,” Indy says, though she winks.
His lips spread wide, and he takes in the room. “Roger let you into his stash, or are you helping yourselves?”
“Both,” I say. “You know about this place?”
He fastens brown eyes, only a shade or two darker than his dirt-soaked skin, on us. “I do. Roger doesn’t know I know about it, though. Saw you all come up through the manhole, then saw your men leave, so I stuck around. Those three walking the street, I think I’ve seen them before, but not for a long time.”
Indy and I replace the sofa’s wood and pillows, leaving out the bottles we plan to purloin, and offer Charlie a seat. When Eric first described Charlie, I thought he was exaggerating, but Charlie is the closest thing a living human can be to a ghost. Maybe years of homelessness honed his invisibility superpower.
“Drink?” I ask. “Let me guess. Whiskey, neat.”
He holds up two fingers stuck together. I get a glass from the cupboard
and pour him the amount he indicated. Mischa hops to the counter, and I run a hand along her back while she arches and purrs. I pick her up in one arm and deliver the glass to him with my other. He takes it with a nod of thanks.
“Are you hungry?” Indy asks.
Charlie sniffs the liquor like a connoisseur. “No, thank you, but Mischa wouldn’t mind a bite.”
“I saw some canned meat in the bedroom,” she says, and rushes off. Whether person or cat, Indy will feed it.
I sit on the couch. “Do you think those guys were coming here?”
“It looked enough like it that I put a scare into them. If they knew about this place before, though, why wouldn’t they have cleaned it out?”
He sets the hand holding the glass on his knee and watches me stroke Mischa, who has settled in my lap with the half-open eyes of a blissed-out kitty. Every time I see her, I’m not sure if I feel better or worse. Maybe both. I imagine Bird out there, lost, hungry, and lonely, and my chest constricts.
“You take good care of Mischa,” I say.
“She takes care of me,” Charlie says. “Cats are smarter than us. They’re survivors. You know cats can be feral or domesticated? Just depends on their upbringing.”
“Kind of like people.”
“True.” Charlie chuckles. “Some say they’re self-domesticated. Thousands of years ago, a cat said, All right, I’ll let these humans feed me, but, if I don’t like it, I’m out.”
I think of what Eric said about me and smile. “I get it.”
“Me, too.” Charlie takes a small sip of whiskey and sets it on the table. “That’s good, but I need my wits about me.”
Indy sets a bowl of potted meat by my feet. It’s a pink paste made from horrible parts of animals, and it smells like cat food, which is why Mischa jumps down to slurp it up.
“Don’t like the stuff?” Charlie asks at what must be my ick face.
“When I was a kid, we had a neighbor who’d invite me in and spread it on white bread with mustard.” I don’t mention she was as poor as we were—poorer, even—but she took pity on me when my mother sold our food stamps. When we moved again, I missed the neighbor, not the meat. “I ate it, though.”
“Hunger is the best sauce.”
Thankfully, we’re not hungry like that now. I stroke Mischa’s gray-striped neck. She mews and twines around my leg before she returns to her food.
“What with the mobs, I haven’t been able to get close enough to tell you this,” Charlie says, “but I’ve seen Mo and them. Maybe you can pass the news to Kate.”
“When?” Indy asks.
“About a week ago.”
Indy’s eyes flick my way, surprised. “They’re supposed to be dead.”
“Well, these weren’t spirits, and a woman called this one guy Mo.”
“Where were they?” I ask.
“All the way uptown, going into buildings in the Nineties.” Mischa jumps into Charlie’s lap, licking her whiskers. “I should go. But I won’t be far.”
“Why?” Indy asks. “Stay here.”
Charlie gets to his feet. “I think Roger wouldn’t like me knowing about this. I wouldn’t want to get blamed for things being taken, especially if those other dudes come back when you’re gone.”
“We know you wouldn’t do that,” I say. “And, if you’re hungry, I give you permission. We have plenty. If you need something, I’ll pay Roger back out of my credits at home.”
The dirt-saturated laugh lines around Charlie’s eyes turn to ridges. Indy leaps from the coffee table and scurries into the bedroom. “Hold on.”
She comes out a few minutes later, a doubled-up bag in her hand. The rounded sides of a dozen or more cans show through the plastic. “He won’t notice. We’ll say we ate it.” Charlie hesitates, but she pushes the bag into his arms. “There’s more potted meat.”
He unzips his backpack and wedges the bag in. He’ll refuse for himself, but not for Mischa. “God bless you, ladies. Not only do you look like angels, you are angels.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew us,” I say.
“I didn’t say you were good angels. It takes all kinds.”
We laugh. Charlie’s a smooth talker when he’s not invisible. He and Mischa head for the window, where he raises a hand before he disappears as inaudibly as he entered.
We watch the street for any uninvited guests, then move to the couch when a few Lexers station themselves below. They’ll stand sentry better than we can, and, if they see us, they’ll whine about it and draw more visitors. After a while longer, in which Indy packs our white sangria ingredients in her bag and we put the bedroom back together, noises come from the street.
Eric’s head pops from the manhole, and he’s through the living room window a minute later with pants soaked to his knees. “Everything okay?”
I nod. Charlie doesn’t want Roger to know he’s aware of his stash, and I’ll save his news for later. Paul enters the window behind Roger, his boots squelching.
“Where’d you end up?” I ask.
“Right at the High Line, but the street was busy. We decided not to take the chance.”
I move toward him and stop at the stench. “Ugh, what’s that smell?”
“Years of compacted shit.” He opens his arms. “No hug?”
“Maybe later.”
“Ready to go home?”
“As long as I don’t have to walk near you.” I stand as far away as I can while I kiss him. “Let’s go.”
43
Jorge and I walk the path home from work. We’ve picked up Jin and Leo, and Leo holds my hand while he goes on about his day. “Guess what, Syls?”
“What?” I ask.
“We’re getting three new kids soon. Miss Anabelle had us draw welcome pictures.”
“The ones in Quarantine?”
The mobs moved briefly, allowing sixteen new people to reach the FDR and our gate. They’re in Quarantine until tomorrow, and some people are not terribly excited about sixteen new mouths to feed, though we voted not to turn away newcomers—another of the measures passed when they passed ours. Having been a new mouth to feed myself not too long ago, I couldn’t send them away in good conscience. If we run low on food, my plan is to appropriate Central Park.
“Yup,” Leo says. “They’re our new friends, but we have to give them time to become accustomers for us. So they won’t come to school right away.”
“Accustomed. They have to become accustomed.”
“Yup,” he says.
Jorge listens with Jin in his arms and a grin on his face. Even with the loss of Maria, he still manages to work and parent Jin without complaint while I’d be bitching up a storm. Leo’s one thing. Diapers and constant baby surveillance are another.
“Do you want me to watch Jin tonight?” I ask.
“Why?” Jorge seems genuinely puzzled, and I can’t help but notice the way his arms tighten around his precious cargo.
“I won’t kill him. At least, not on purpose,” I say. “I thought you might like some time off. You could have an early dinner and a night on the town.”
“I wouldn’t mind playing dominoes in the Study tonight.” They get up to some cutthroat games of chess, checkers, and dominoes in there, and they quake when Jorge comes near, as they should. “You wouldn’t mind?”
“Of course not.” I smile at Jin. “We’ll have fun, won’t we?” Jin regards me meditatively, then scrunches his face. The little stinker is cute, and he knows it.
In the apartment, Jorge walks me through the baby routine like I don’t see it every night of my life, until I hold Jin on my hip and steer Jorge to the door. “We’re going to play and have a bottle and sleep. It’s not rocket science.”
Jorge kisses Jin’s forehead, then mine. “Thank you, mami. Having him makes me even more sorry I wasn’t around when my son was little. It’s a lot of work, and I didn’t do most of it.”
This is a penance of sorts. Jorge told me long ago that he wanted to right his previous
wrongs, and maybe there’s no better way to do that than to be the world’s best father to this orphan. But even the world’s best father needs a break.
“Well, I should’ve done this sooner,” I say. “How about I take him one night a week?”
“Let’s see how this goes first.”
I gasp in fake outrage. “Leave now, before I’m forced to curse you out in front of your impressionable child.”
“I don’t know that he’s mine.”
“I know he is.” I lift Jin’s arm. “Say bye-bye to Daddy. Or Papa.” Jin waves his hand at himself, and I grimace. “You might want to hold off on claiming him until we’re sure he’s smart.”
Jorge bursts out laughing, and I kiss his cheek. “Goodnight, Papa. Have fun.”
Eric walks through the door a while later. “Where is everyone?”
“Paul took Leo, Chen, and Emily to the weekly movie, Indy went with them, and Jorge is playing dominoes.” I raise Jin in the air from where I lie on the couch. “Look, we have a baby.”
I bring Jin close to my face, stick out my tongue, and then straighten my arms to push him up. We’ve been doing this for five minutes straight, and every time he thinks it’s hysterical, which is pretty amusing. I lower him again. This time drool splats onto my forehead and slides toward my temple, warm and gooey. I groan. “Gross, baby!”
Eric takes Jin from my hands. “What’d you think was going to happen when you suspended a drooling baby over your head?”
I stand and wipe my face with my sleeve. “True.”
“And you’re not running to wash off the toxic baby germs?” Eric puts his hand to his mouth in a dramatic fashion. “Could it be…you like…Jin?”
“He can hear you, you know. Of course I like him. He’s not like the other babies.”
“You don’t know the other babies.”
“Oh, but I do. They’re terrible creatures.” I pat Jin’s ridge of black hair. “And he has a natural baby mohawk, which makes him way cooler. He needs a bottle before bed. I’ll be back.”
The City Series (Book 3): Instauration Page 29
