Indy raises her hands to her heart. “Tell him I love him,” she says, voice cracking, “and I’m going to see him as soon as I can.”
I touch her shoulder when I move past to warm my feet at the stove, both to relieve the ever-present burning and pretend Roger doesn’t exist. Pretend I don’t want one of the cigarettes I can smell on him, along with the usual stench of liquor.
Julie has organized our food from Charlie, and now she calls Leo over, motioning at a cardboard box on the table. “Guess what I have for you?” she asks.
“What?” he asks.
“Guess!”
“You found a kitten!” Leo cries out.
Julie screws her mouth to the side, shoulders rounding. “Well, no.”
“You never say ‘Guess what’ unless it’s the ultimate find,” Chris says. “You’ll never top a kitten now.”
She sighs and pulls a Whatchamacallit candy bar from the box. “Here.”
Leo lifts it in the air while dancing in place, which cheers her up some. “Have you ever had a Whatchamacallit?” I ask him. “Those are the best.”
“You say that about every candy bar.”
I think for a minute. “I do, don’t I? Well, Paydays are not the best. Only old ladies like them. And 3 Musketeers make me sad. You bite into them expecting something substantial, and then they taste like disappointment.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Next time I find a 3 Musketeers, it’s yours. You’ll see what I mean. Did you thank Julie?”
“His dance was the best thank you,” she says. She moves side to side doing a 70’s hustle and Leo joins in with gusto. His willingness to be silly is one of the things I love most about him, and I hope he never stops.
I return the smiles on everyone’s faces, then frown at Roger. If he has nothing else to report, he needs to leave. For now, our private agreement is that we let him help us. No one fully trusts him or wants to accept his assistance, but he’s our only connection to StuyTown. We need him on our side, a fact which sticks in my side like a giant thorn.
Kate, Jorge, and Artie do their best to be hospitable. Brother David is as kind as ever. Julie and Chris keep their distance from him, though they’re not overtly hostile, and Paul gives no indication of any emotion, something at which he excels. Casper is quiet, wary, and if Roger says anything faintly offensive, I swear I will kill him.
Once my feet are warm, I head for the bathroom. Roger waits in the hall when I exit, blocking my way into The Box, so I leave for the terrace. He follows me outside. I cross my arms to ward off the cold and him. “What? Why are you following me?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
His speech is slightly slurred, which, for Roger, means he’s wasted. “You shouldn’t be out this drunk,” I say.
“Didn’t know you cared.”
“I care about my one link to the people inside. If you die, we have no link.”
Roger lets out a sour laugh before he pulls a small bottle from his backpack, twists off the cap, and takes a swig of brown liquid. “My brother only gives me the amount of insulin I’d need if I wasn’t drinking. For my own good. He says he doesn’t want me to die any sooner than I have to.”
“How old are you again?” I ask. “Why do you let him do that?”
Roger runs a hand through his hair and plops into a chair. “I don’t have a choice. He—he gets in your head. He tells you it’s for the best. And you believe him. His people love him. Like, really love him.”
He closes his eyes, idly scratching at the dark scruff on his chin. His hand drifts off his face to hover in midair, and then he jumps back into lucidity. My stomach turns—I can spot opiate abuse a mile away, and Roger is flying high.
“What’d you take?” I ask him.
“What?”
“What are you on? Besides whiskey or whatever.”
“I found some pills. Just this once. You don’t know what I have to deal with. I feel—”
My laugh has no humor in it. I want to smack him across his stupid face. “Oh no, is poor little Roger sad?”
“Hey,” he says, though he can’t rally genuine outrage now that the pills have kicked in.
“Grow the hell up, Roger. Just because his people are mindless bullies doesn’t mean you have to be. Why are you even here? Do you actually want to help us?”
“Of course. ’Course I do.” He shakes himself awake. “Sorry. I didn’t realize my tolerance was so low now.”
“That’s why you’re sorry?” I ask.
“No. Here.” He fumbles in his coat pocket, then sets a prescription bottle on the ground. “I promise that’s all of them.”
My urge to smack him triples. “I’m not your keeper. I’m not your jailer. I’m not your fucking sponsor. I’m nothing to you.”
“I thought you were my friend.”
“If this is what you do to friends, no thanks. I’ll take enemies. You took everything from us. Everyth—”
I stop when I realize he’s nodded out, and I watch his deep, even breaths while I seethe inside. Finally, I leave him sitting on the terrace. If we didn’t need him, I’d wish for him to freeze to death.
63
Jorge made sure Roger didn’t freeze to death and that he was sober enough for the trip home. He promised to return soon, though Jorge wasn’t sure if he believed him. Roger was ashamed, and that could mean either Roger will keep using or he’ll use it as a wake-up call. Since he took his pills with him, it’s likely the former.
Without Roger, we need Mo more. It’s not cold enough to freeze, but it’s cold enough to slow the Lexers down. The black mold is spreading, and we hope it might slow them more in the near future. The zombies on the mainland appear moldier, which makes us think it took a while to cross the water. Whatever the case, the one I’ve just finished off had an arm reduced to stringy muscle in a network of black webbing that was once skin.
“It reminds me of pulled pork,” Paul says. No matter how hungry I am, you could offer me pulled pork right now and I would puke.
“Buffalo wings,” Indy says. “When you pull the skin off and the meat separates.”
“Stop,” I groan. “Can we not ruin food we don’t have?”
Our bikes lean against the wall of the park at Tudor City, which sits above the sidewalks and is now free of Lexers. Casper lowers his gunked-up sword. He’s kickass when he forgets to be self-conscious.
Julie and Chris stand in the playground, gazing down into the Ford Foundation’s atrium through the building’s glass wall. “The plants are gone,” Chris says. “It’s all dirt.”
“I don’t see anyone,” Julie says. “I think I see an entrance down there.”
Paul leans over the ledge of the raised playground. “There’s a ladder shoved in over there. Hang on.”
He lowers himself, hanging from the metal bars set into the ledge, then drops to the ground. Down below, he fiddles with a narrow pane of glass at the end until it swings open, then sets the ladder against our ledge.
“He is handy to have around,” I say to Indy, who doesn’t answer. I make comments like this and wait for her to agree. I’m still waiting.
We climb down and enter the atrium, where the air is twenty degrees warmer, if not more. Aside from small trees, the dirt between walkways and stairs is denuded, though Eric got a glimpse of tomatoes and greenery months ago. The atrium rises twelve floors to a roof made of glass. Offices line the two sides that aren’t windows, and their glass walls allow us to see office furniture and what appear to be mattresses and bedding. Dead greenery hangs from terraces outside the offices.
“Well, they’re not here anymore,” Julie says. “Let’s see if they forgot anything.”
Even with the ground floor windows blocked off, the building is bright. It must have been nice working here, as if you’d never truly left outdoors. On an upper terrace, every planter is empty save for one, which has a wilted lettuce plant and a stunted head of broccoli that must have grown after Mo left, possibly water
ed by that cistern. We pack them away and sit on the floor to eat lunch: Chef Boyardee from Roger’s stash. According to him, he did leave it there for us, though it was a coincidence he came to the High Line on the same day. He’d known where to find us but hadn’t been able to get away on his own.
“I can’t believe I’m eating this crap,” Indy says. “And that it’s good.”
I spear a meat ravioli with my fork. “This was a treat when I was a kid.”
“Me, too,” Chris says. “We’d beg our mom, but she’d say it was too expensive. If our food wasn’t homemade, my dad would smack her around, so we stopped asking. But she always snuck it to us on our birthdays.” He chews a ravioli and swallows before he notices our startled expressions. “Sorry. Buzzkill.”
“I can’t imagine,” Indy says. “My dad worshipped my mom. He always said, ‘Whatever you decide, Lily,’ like she could do no wrong.”
Paul nods. His mom died when he was young, and Eric told me his dad dated on and off but never remarried. He never wanted to. I’m hoping against hope that Paul doesn’t follow in his footsteps.
“They say dysfunction makes you funnier,” I tell Chris. “So there’s that.”
Chris lifts his fork. “To dysfunction.”
I lift my fork in return, then toss another ravioli in my mouth. “How about you, Casper?”
Casper tucks his hair behind his ear. “Oh, um, my parents were normal. They both went to work and stuff, and they loved me. They paid what they could for college, so I wouldn’t have a lot of loans.”
“Hey,” I say, “I forgot about my student loans. I won’t have to pay those back.” I’d planned to pay them off with my bonus, so I didn’t have thirty-five thousand dollars in debt hanging over my head while I figured out the rest of my life.
“You know they’ll come for them,” Chris says. “It’ll be the first thing the new government does. Sorry, we have no food or housing or army, but we loaned you money for college, remember? You can pay us in Chef Boyardee.”
We laugh. He’s probably right.
Our next stop is a Baptist church in Hell’s Kitchen. The red doors are unlocked, and inside is an airy sanctuary with large stained-glass windows, an old painted ceiling, and no pews. We head for the roof, where Charlie thought he saw people. We find kiddie pools full of dirt and a roof deck, along with a sign declaring the space a community food project. A few small trees grow in larger planters, and one has a single, shriveled apple. Similar to the state of the apple tree we finally investigated, which was surrounded by rotten apples and rotting bodies.
Indy stands with her hands on her hips, surveying the maze of concrete ramps that run into the Port Authority Bus Terminal a block away. “Now where to?”
“Let’s leave a note,” I say. “Ask them to name a place and time to meet, or we can name one ourselves. Or both.”
We decide on a place and time, then tape an envelope to the outer door with MO written on the front. Charlie’s next clue was vague, in the blocks of the Eighties and Nineties on the west side. We ride our bikes forty blocks, evading Lexers as we go.
“How the hell does Charlie get around so much?” Chris pants from his bike. He whips out an inhaler and puffs, then sticks it in his pocket.
Julie slows her bike to a stop outside a grand old apartment building on West End Avenue. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Just out of breath. Inhalers are only going to last so much longer, and there’s a ton out there. I might as well use it whenever I want. I’ll keel over and die after they’re gone.”
“Don’t say that,” Julie snaps. She brushes her bangs off her forehead and keeps her face to her feet. From the side, I see she’s blinking quickly, about to cry. “What are we going to do when they don’t work? What if you have a bad attack?”
Her voice is small. Chris’ eyes shift uneasily, as blindsided as we are by this quiet breakdown in Julie’s sensible facade. He scoots his bike over and leans to hug her. “Hey, hey, I’m not dying, I promise. I have a plan—I’m going to sit around and get fat while you do all the work, so as not to stir up my asthma.”
She laughs, and his panicked expression turns to relief as he hugs her tighter. “You won’t mind, right? You pop out the kids, and I’ll let them watch TV while I lounge on the couch and pick up things with my grabber.”
She nods, arms fastened around his thin frame and head buried in his chest. I miss physical comfort more than anything. The talk of a future. Knowing that someone wants you to live because they want to spend a lifetime with you.
I turn to watch the street that I can’t see through tears, and I focus on breathing—if it works for panic, it should work for this. After a minute, it’s clear some things can’t be breathed away. You have to live through them, let them strangle you, and come out the other side.
“You ready?” Indy asks quietly.
I turn. They wait astride their bikes, Julie with a remorseful expression that melts away at my smile. I was jealous for too many years to begrudge anyone happiness now, and I understand her fear all too well. “Ready,” I say.
We skirt around vehicles that were never cleared. This far over, the West Side Highway is only a block away, and it’s a zombie thoroughfare. Maybe no one wanted to chance it. We move slowly once we reach the high Eighties, until Paul swings his bike in an arc, forcing us to squeal to a halt.
“What—” Indy cuts off as she follows Paul’s finger to where thick black wire, almost invisible against the asphalt, is strung across the path between a UPS truck and two cars. Paul drops his bike and follows the wire to the right. He peers over a car, past a jumble of trash on the sidewalk, and then climbs the car for a closer look.
“Careful,” I whisper-yell. He raises a hand in answer.
A pounding begins as he nears the building’s entrance. Moaning starts as he closes in. The gold and glass doors rattle in their frames, and shadowy figures come into view behind the glass.
“Okay, Paul,” Indy mutters.
Paul inspects the doors, arms crossed, then crouches out of sight. The door opens two inches and slams shut again. Opens. Shuts. With every open, the moans increase in volume, only to be dulled by the closing glass. My feet tap the pavement. Paul promised, if he came today, that he wouldn’t do anything stupid.
The thick glass of the door cracks like a gunshot. “What the fuck, Paul?” Indy yells.
Paul comes our way not nearly as fast as he should. He steps up on the car, then leaps to the street for his bike when glass shatters to the sidewalk. Bodies stagger out, and we wheel around the way we came.
On the next avenue east, Paul leads us into a bank lobby. Before he can speak, Indy stamps her foot. “Really? That’s not being stupid?”
“I knew I had a minute,” he replies. “That glass was thick. Do you want to hear what I saw or not?”
Indy narrows her eyes, lips pursed. Not speaking is as close to agreement as Paul will get. “The tripwire was connected to a pulley with a motor,” he says. “The pulley was connected to a rope tied to the door handle. Trip the wire, it pulls a piece of plastic from the connections, and the battery starts the pulley to open the door.”
“Sending a group of Lexers after you,” Casper says, impressed.
“That’s pretty clever,” Julie admits.
Paul nods. “It means we’re close. We must be. You want to keep looking?”
On the one hand, they don’t want to be found. On the other hand, we need to find them, if for no reason other than to tell them we’re not a threat. We’re not having much success with asking for assistance, though the person who made that booby trap would be nice to have on the team.
We continue on, stopping in an empty dry cleaner to let a group of a dozen Lexers pass. Up here, Broadway is two wide streets separated by a treed median, which offers some cover from the bodies. At 92nd Street, we hit an overturned bus and another tripwire, this one connected to a small white plastic keychain similar to a car door clicker.
“That’s on
e of those personal alarms,” Julie says. “My mothers made me carry one. You pull that pin,” she points to the looped cord on one end, which is in turn connected to a small rod that sticks out from the corner, “and it makes an unholy noise to scare away muggers and rapists.”
We examine the surrounding street uneasily. The drugstore on the corner is looted. The bodega across the street likely hasn’t contained food in a year. Most of the buildings are tall, and we’d never see people on the roofs.
Paul steps over the tripwire. Nothing. We creep past, holding our bikes aloft. Cars are parked haphazardly, though there’s room for a vehicle to drive, and plenty of room for our bikes. Two subway station staircases rise from the sidewalk mid-block—a perfect place for an ambush—but only a few Lexers pace what we can see of the station below.
Casper points to a green plastic box attached to the bank on the corner of 94th Street. It’s rectangular, five inches by four inches, with a white sensor in the center. I spot another on the other side of 94th, and Indy yet another attached to a lamppost on the median. Motion detectors. It’s too late for subterfuge, though, if we’ve set off a silent alarm somewhere.
The way they’re configured implies 94th Street is under surveillance, as do the cars, steel garbage cans, and overturned produce cart that are artfully arranged to hamper Lexers while not advertising the presence of people. My heart speeds as we cross the improvised wall. Apartment buildings take up the first part of the block. After those comes a strip of three-story Tudor homes. Their bottom floors are rough-hewn stone and the upper floors are cream-colored stucco, with exposed timbers set in geometric patterns.
Over an arched doorway between the centermost buildings, a hanging sign reads Pomander Walk, bringing to mind Merry Olde England. The doorway is closed to passage by an iron mesh gate backed with wood, though cracks allow us to see a short staircase that rises to a raised walkway. The walkway is bordered by more peak-roofed Tudor homes. An old-fashioned lamppost sits in the center, and the planters out front of the houses are well-tended, if brown.
The City Series (Book 3): Instauration Page 44
