The City Series (Book 3): Instauration

by Lyons Fleming, Sarah

  I can’t finish. Jorge hugs me to him. “No, mami. People like Walt shouldn’t happen. You just said it yourself.”

  I wipe my cheek as the remaining tightness in my lungs releases. Stale building air has never tasted so wonderful. I rest my head on his shoulder and exhale, then draw in another deep breath while I can.

  “Feels good to say it out loud,” Jorge says. “You’ve got to tell on yourself. You stay quiet, and it eats you from the inside out.”

  “It’s hard.”

  “Nothing is ever easy. Everything has its hard parts, but some things are worth the hard part.”

  He means now. He means everything. I can look back on Eric and me and think of how easy we were together, though getting there was hard. Loving people is hard, losing them harder, but Maria was right: it’s worth it. I don’t want to wake up in the morning late for Blaze because then I wouldn’t have had them at all. And I wouldn’t have Jorge, whom I love with every bit of my heart.

  “There’s a word for this feeling,” I say. “Weltschmerz. World-pain. A weariness that the world isn’t how it should be.”

  “Then let’s fix it.”

  I nod. It’s too late for how I truly wanted it to be, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. Make the best of it. That might be the hardest thing of all.

  My bed is comfortable, if lonely, and the chilly air outside my covers makes it hard to leave in the morning. I lie under my blankets and peer through the crack I leave in the curtains at night once my room is dark. Half the leaves are gone from the trees now, having blown away during that storm, and the others hang limp and discouraged. It’s fitting for my current mood—perky leaves and sunshine would only make me feel worse.

  Leo throws open my door and bounds in. Privacy is a thing of the past. I don’t mind, as I need an impetus to get out of bed.

  “Cold,” he says, shivering in his pajamas. His legs have lengthened by an inch in recent days to give a hint of the adolescent to come, though his chubby cheeks remain. He’s growing, which means we’re feeding him enough. He doesn’t have an endless supply of Goldfish crackers and raisins for snacks, but he doesn’t go hungry like the rest of us.

  I lift the blankets, and he snuggles against me, his knees digging into my bladder. “Morning, Syls,” he says an inch from my face.

  “Ugh. Did you not brush your teeth, or did you eat dog poop for breakfast?”

  He cracks up. It’s our morning ritual, though I vary the question each morning. “What are we doing today?” he asks.

  “Today is super fun. After our breakfast of pancakes, bacon, and orange juice, we’re heading to Disneyworld. Or maybe we’ll go to Great Wolf Lodge. Which would you prefer?”

  “Great Wolf. They have a wave pool.”

  “I think you mentioned that.”

  Leo went to an indoor water park called Great Wolf Lodge just before zombies hit, and it will go down in history as one of the Great Wonders of the World. I’ve heard about it so many times I’d swear I’ve been there.

  “Leo?” Paul enters the bedroom area. “Is he bugging you?”

  “Nope,” I say. “We debated what small animal crawled into his mouth and died during the night, then we decided what exciting thing we’ll do with our day. Today is Great Wolf.”

  Paul opens the blackout curtains and settles on my lounge bench in his T-shirt, bare feet on the table, like the room isn’t forty degrees. His muscles haven’t yet taken a hit from our diet, in that they’re well-defined, but his girth has decreased overall. Every morning he comes in to verify that Leo isn’t bothering me, but I suspect he’s lonely, too. Or he wants to be sure I haven’t offed myself during the night.

  Paul stretches his arms and yawns. “Sounds good. Are we going to the FDR today?”

  After a week of watching, we’ve ascertained that StuyTown leaves every two days to patrol the FDR. They could be looking for anything suspicious, and our plan is to give it to them.

  I assess Paul over my blankets. His face gives nothing away. “Go get your toothbrush, stinky,” I say to Leo. “We’ll brush together.”

  He slides onto the floor and runs from the room. I throw back the covers and grab my jeans, then head to the bathroom, where I ditch my pajama pants for icy denim that makes me gasp. Every morning I remind myself to put them under the covers at night, and every night I forget.

  “We’re going to the FDR,” I say. “You’re not.” I come out to find Paul wearing his stony expression. “I want you to come, but you can’t. What if something happened to us? Leo needs someone. He needs you.”

  The straight line of Paul’s mouth slants down. “I feel fucking useless. I—”

  Leo enters with a tube of toothpaste and his toothbrush. I shoo him into the bathroom and wait for the sink to run. “Paul, you’re not useless. You can make all the beds and straighten up while we’re gone.”

  “You’re an asshole, Rossi.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  I pat his head and duck from his swat. By the time Leo and I are done brushing, Indy sits in the sleek brown chair at the table, in mid-conversation with Paul. She definitely comes in every morning to make sure I haven’t offed myself.

  “It makes sense,” she says to Paul. “You can finish that heater before we freeze to death.”

  “The two of you suck big time,” Paul says, but he’s cheerier than before.

  “We love you, too.”

  Indy unleashes a dazzling smile that leaves Paul blinking on our walk down to our living area, now called The Box. Julie hands us breakfast: crackers spread with peanut butter. I’d rather have the pancakes and bacon Leo and I planned, but I’m gratified they found enough food to keep us at eight hundred calories a day for the next week.

  We sit at the tables and gaze at the now-familiar view of this section of the High Line. Withered brown grasses in the gardens on the path, an old brick factory on the corner a quarter block away, and the two-story brick Samsung building with its oddly twisted steel and glass roof addition.

  Breakfast takes all of three minutes, even trying to make it last, and then we visit Artie midway down the room, where he stands over bricks he’s arranged in a six-foot-long rectangle. “Paul,” he says, “we’ve got our work cut out for us here. Those firebricks are just what we needed.”

  It took them half a day to disassemble the oven in a nearby wood-fired pizza place, and those bricks will make up the firebox where the fuel burns. Regular bricks will create a maze of channels through which heat will travel on its way to the vent—piping stolen from a metal chimney. Kate has a list of items she requires to be a mad bomber, and a trip to a hardware store supplied some of them. Still more were found at a high school, and a few remain undiscovered as of yet.

  “I’m not sure how long or complex the channels should be,” Artie says. “But we’ll have a riser with a cooktop.” He strokes his hair until it sticks up straight. “The internet would come in handy. But we’ll figure it out.”

  This is the kind of thing Eric loved. If he were here, he’d be at a table with paper and pen, yapping with Artie about the mysterious—to me, anyway—properties of combustion. My crackers roil in my belly, but there is no way I’m losing this meal. To distract myself, I ask, “What will we burn?”

  “Lumber!” Artie says, excited to have a clear answer for something. “We can cut down a tree or two, but they’ll have to season. You know you can’t burn green wood?”

  “I’ve known since last year,” I say. “Before that, I thought wood was wood.”

  “There’s plenty of lumber at construction sites and that Home Depot nearby. There are a few woodworking shops. And we can always burn furniture. If we build the stove right, we could get through winter four times with what’s laying around.”

  Paul lifts Artie’s plans and begins to ask questions. Indy and I take the opportunity to visit Kate and Louis on a couch by the window. “Casper’s out looking for Charlie,” Kate says. “Julie and Chris will be ready to go in a few, an
d Jorge and Brother David are out checking which exits are clear.”

  “We might have heat soon,” Indy says.

  Kate watches Artie with affection. “Good old Artie can build anything.”

  “It’s cool how you two are together after so many years apart,” I say.

  Kate breaks into laughter. “Artie and I aren’t—” She snaps her fingers. “Hey, Artie! Sylvie thought we were together.”

  Artie looks up from the papers he and Paul peruse. “Wrong gender for me, sweetie. But if you find me a fella like Kate, I’ll date him.”

  Indy laughs. “I thought that, too. Especially since he came out of your room the other morning.”

  “Artie and I have late-night conversations,” Kate says. “Which usually end in us both falling asleep mid-speech. Artie.” She smacks her leg, still amused. “He’s not my type.”

  “I heard that!” Artie yells.

  She blows him a kiss as she rises to her feet. “They say you get one great love. I don’t know that it’s true, but I can’t imagine anyone else after Dex. You girls ready? We’ll leave in fifteen.”

  I nod, though my stomach returns to roiling. If we get one great love, then my love life is officially over.

  56

  We rode bikes to the FDR, since dodging the Lexer mobs in a noisy truck would’ve been impossible. Bikes were hard enough as it was, and the sun had burned off the clouds and moved above the buildings by the time we reached our destination. Every time we’ve seen the patrols, it’s been afternoon, but we want to be in position long before that.

  The plan today is to see what happens when we throw an obstacle in their way. Literally. And the first step of our plan is a lot of steps. Nineteen flights of them, to be exact, in a building that straddles the FDR. I’m not the only one who’s out of breath when we enter the hall of the nineteenth floor, and we take a break before we continue to the next part of the plan.

  Jorge guzzles from his water bottle, his sweat visible in light from the window end of the hall. I told him to stay on the ground, but he insisted on coming with Kate, Indy, and me, despite Louis offering to trade positions. Jorge barely leaves our sides when we’re off the High Line. While I love him for it, I don’t want him to die of a heart attack in his quest to protect us.

  “I am not as young as I used to be,” he says.

  “You and me both,” Kate says. Her ponytail is bedraggled, and she fans herself with her shirt. After another minute, she motions at the apartment doors of the hall. “You ready?”

  We made noise earlier, then watched the windows on the top floors. Thirty seconds of banging brought enough Lexers into view that we didn’t have to drag bodies up the stairs, which almost certainly would’ve sent Jorge into cardiac arrest.

  Kate pulls something similar to Louis’ pistol-shaped magic door opener from her pack. “Let’s save our shoulders.”

  “Good thinking,” Jorge says.

  “I can’t take the credit. Chris keeps a lock picker in his Go Bag,” Kate replies. “When he’s not doing his stand-up act, he’s a worrier. Get out your weapons. I think this is the right apartment.”

  I pull my chisel. The wood handle is darker from blood that’s soaked in over time. Eric gave it a few coats of polyurethane to protect against germs, even as he shook his head over my choice in weapons. I slam that file drawer and lock it as Kate unlocks the apartment door. Almost immediately, a woman appears. The past year has not been kind. Her skin is shrunken over her skull, her breasts are sunken into her rib cage, and she topples aside as a man pushes past.

  Jorge may be older than he was, but his cleaver slices into the spot where skull and spinal cord meet with an impact I could never generate. I move to the door and shove my chisel in the woman’s eye. Seven new Lexers stumble into the foyer, though we only saw four from downstairs.

  “More than we thought,” I manage to say before the first reaches me.

  He wears a gray doorman’s uniform, the white braided trim on the sleeves and collar stained brown. I shove him back so that he sends another Lexer to the floor, and then I brace myself for his charge. Three more squeeze out behind him, and I hear the thwack of Jorge’s machete joined by Indy’s and Kate’s knives.

  My doorman has the round face and white beard of a zombified Santa, and he drops at a chisel in his non-twinkly eyes. The next is a woman in an outfit of pink pleated shorts pulled so close to her bosom you can barely see the cat on her T-shirt. I move down the hall, away from where Kate hacks at a man six inches taller. The woman follows, her white canvas sneakers squeaking on the tile.

  “You had terrible taste in clothes,” I say.

  Her mouth opens, dropping something to the floor. I raise my chisel, but, before I can strike, the woman goes down. Jorge stands behind her, cleaver in his hand. “You’re talking to them now?”

  “Look at her outfit,” I say. “Sometimes it’s kinder to say something, even if they’re dead.”

  Indy and Kate laugh while Jorge assesses her clothing with a stupefied shake of his head. I inspect the clump of black that fell from Cat Lady’s mouth. When I can’t identify it in the dim light, I bring it to the window. It’s fur. A strip of chewed and mangled fur. I drop it with a shiver.

  The apartment has parquet floors, leather furniture, and a glass dining table set by the walls of windows, though it was likely nicer when not splattered with gore from the brouhaha that occurred. Bags and suitcases give the impression the people gathered in this apartment for safety. Safety in numbers is great, as long as one of your numbers isn’t hiding a zombie bite. I don’t understand how someone could do that, but people must. Not everyone is Maria.

  Three pet carriers sit empty. In the corner, I find small bones and dark striped fur, different from the black and white fur in the hall, and what could be the remains of a ginger cat. Their owner, who I assume was Cat Lady, must have brought them in the hope they’d be safe. I imagine she’d be appalled to know she ate at least one of them.

  Of the apartment’s two terraces, one overlooks the FDR and provides a view of the East River and the tip of Roosevelt Island, where a few bodies stand. Kate lifts her radio and presses the button three times to signal we’re inside. We found two cheap radios that don’t carry far, but Louis, Julie, and Chris are stationed close by. We get three bursts of static in reply.

  “The more apartments I see, the more I realize how much money I didn’t have,” Jorge says.

  “Eli and I scraped together for our house,” Indy says. “The mortgage was crazy, and you should’ve seen how much work it needed.” She turns from the window at a clunk from another room. “Did you hear that?”

  We nod and pull our weapons. Kate moves down the hall and into a room we’ve already checked. The bedroom is as nice as the rest of the apartment, and bloodier. Another clunk comes from the closet. Jorge opens the door and steps back, cleaver raised. A Lexer lies face down, hands tied behind her back with shoelaces, and legs cinched with a belt. Her feet and forehead smash the floor as she attempts to wiggle her way to us.

  Jorge moves to finish her off. “Hang on,” Kate says. “Maybe we should use her this way. It’d add the believability I think we lack.” The thumping is so loud now that Kate shouts to be heard.

  “Leave her like this?” Jorge asks.

  Kate shrugs like why not? Jorge frowns, very clear on the why, then shuts the closet. He stands at the bedroom door until we pass through, closes it behind us, and waits until we’ve moved down the hall to ask, “Now we’re dropping live ones?”

  “Just one,” Kate says. “You’ve seen them fall. Do they always die?”

  “No,” Indy answers.

  “Right. If they’re all dead, won’t that look suspicious? Just one, alive, will erase any suspicions. We’ll untie her before we toss her off, and we’ll make the others look like their heads smashed at impact.”

  Kate, for all her playfulness, is astoundingly detailed. I don’t know that the people in StuyTown’s vehicles will stick around long
enough to notice, especially with the second part of our plan, but the more things you control, the more likely a plan goes as expected.

  Jorge nods grudgingly. “But I’m throwing her off. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Do you want me to fight you on that?” Kate asks with a grin. “I can, if you want.”

  Jorge walks to two cardboard boxes against the wall while he mutters, “How did it work out that all the smartasses survived? Dios mi—” He cuts off as he lifts a flap. “Hey, this is food.”

  We rush to his side. The top box contains canned vegetables, a couple of boxes of Minute Rice, a bag of star-shaped pasta, jam and peanut butter, polenta tubes, and a random assortment of other items. The lower box contains two loaves of bread that have turned to moldy powder, but under those are granola bars, sunflower seeds, and a bag of oyster crackers. At the very bottom, we find canned chicken and a few bags of M&Ms.

  We came with bags only half-full in case we found something valuable, and food is the most valuable thing of all. We sit on a clean spot of floor to pack it into our bags.

  “What should we eat?” Kate lifts the oyster crackers. “Want to open these?”

  Jorge and Indy gaze longingly at the small puffed white crackers. “I want to strap it over my head like a feedbag,” I say. “But shouldn’t we wait for the others?” I can almost taste their Saltine-like flavor. When I was a kid, sometimes I’d buy them with our food stamps. You could get a big bag for a dollar, and, when you don’t have much money or parental supervision, you go with things that are cheap, tasty, and plentiful.

  “We burned a lot of calories on those stairs,” Kate reminds us. Her wrists are thinner than they were, her eyes rounder. She eats less food than most of us, though she thinks we don’t notice. “We’ll only take our share.”

  Honestly, I’m not sure I can sit in this room with this food for the next few hours and not eat something. This way we’ll do it fairly instead of ripping into it like animals when we can stand it no more.