The City Series (Book 3): Instauration

by Lyons Fleming, Sarah

  There are no signs of life, but the entire place seems to be holding its breath, waiting for us to leave. I would bet my next measly meal there are people inside.

  “Should we say something?” Chris whispers.

  “Yo!” Paul calls over the gate. “We’re looking for Mo! Anyone know where we can find him?” I keep my eye to the crack and shake my head when barely a dead leaf moves.

  “Say something about Teddy,” Indy prompts.

  “Teddy’s a fucking douche!” Paul yells. I don’t have to hear Indy’s sigh to know she has.

  “We’re from StuyTown,” Indy calls. “A man named Walt took over, and Teddy’s working with him. Maybe we can help each other.”

  Julie scribbles on paper, using the stone for a writing surface. She hands me the folded note. “I put the same time and place as the one at the church.”

  I slide it through the crack at the hinges. “We’re leaving you a note, in case you want to meet up,” Indy calls.

  There’s no response. After another minute, groans come from the top of the block. More Lexers will be on their way soon. We walk our bikes to the opposite avenue, where only two mold-eaten bodies wait, and set off for home.

  Though Kate and Louis have warned everyone to enter Chelsea Market at their own risk, I’m curious enough to risk it. I find them in a large office kitchen-slash-café lit by daylight from the ten-foot-high open windows.

  “Goggles, mask, and rubber gloves!” Kate yells when I enter.

  She sits at a counter in the center of the room, and I suit up as ordered while taking in the assortment of items on the tables: everything from bags of pool chlorinator to instant cold packs to camping fuel tablets. I stand far from where she moves bottles around and decants various liquids into new bottles.

  Kate waves me forward. “It’s fine to come close now,” she says, voice muffled by her mask.

  They’re not quite gas masks, but they fit over your nose and mouth with a big pink filter on either side. Louis carefully opens a large bullet on a counter five feet away. He dumps what I assume is gunpowder onto paper and folds it into an envelope.

  “You can really make bombs out of this stuff?” I ask.

  “We’re going to try,” she says. “Remember, I’m going on memory and college chemistry here.”

  “How much chemistry did you take?”

  “I started off as a science major. One of my dad’s good friends was a bomb-maker, and he taught me more in Ireland. The IRA used mainly fertilizer bombs and Semtex, but he was a chemist and he loved his nitro. Want to see what I’m doing?”

  I move closer. After a few minutes of her explaining the process, I’m fascinated. I thought a bomb just went boom, but you need to balance your chemicals, mix and filter them correctly, and detonate it with a primary explosive. A smaller bomb to light the larger one, which means we also have to make detonators.

  “What are we going to do with them?” I ask.

  “I figure we’ll blow up some zombies.” Kate notes what she can see of my grossed-out face above my mask, and she laughs. “I know. But it’ll be a good test of what it can do.”

  “Can I help?”

  “It’s dangerous. It can be really dangerous. People blew themselves up all the time.”

  I’m not looking to be blown up, but I’ll do anything that might bring down Walt. “Teach me,” I say.

  Three hours later, she’s walked me through the process and we’ve organized the materials. The sun is going down when we head back to The Standard for the night.

  “Funny how all these years, I swore I was a born-again pacifist,” Kate says. “But you never know what you’ll do in a situation until you’re in it.”

  Louis, on my other side, says, “I swore I’d die instead of going with the militia. But I wanted to live. I ran their errands and cleaned their weapons. I saw the older boys—the kadogos—killing people. The men would say they were strong and brave, and I wanted to be like them. Until, one day, I saw them kill a girl who reminded me of my sister.”

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “I ran away. After a year living on the streets, I went into a program that eventually brought me here. I was lucky, but I’ve always been ashamed that I chose to stay with them.”

  I’ve read about the child soldiers of war-torn countries like Congo. In truth, it’s not a choice. It’s grown men taking advantage of the malleable minds of children and offering them the safety and family that the men stole in the first place. “No one could blame you for that, Louis. How old were you when you came here?”

  “Nine when I was with the militia. Seventeen when I came to America.”

  “You did what you had to in order to survive,” I say, then add, “But I’m never complaining about my crappy childhood again.” I say it because I know he’ll chuckle, which he does.

  “And now you’re here,” Kate says. The three of us take in the neglected buildings, disgusting Hudson, and the occasional moan from below. “Such as it is.”

  “Such as it is,” Louis agrees.

  64

  The masonry heater is the best thing ever. It distributes heat all day and night using hardly any fuel, and it provides a surface on which we continuously warm a restaurant-sized pot full of water. For the first time in weeks, I’m semi-clean and not freezing my ass off.

  Our rooms are another story, but I sleep in mine anyway, tucked under multiple covers. At first, I tried to sleep in The Box with everyone, but the proximity of people and their various nighttime noises drove me crazy. Artie has plans for heat upstairs, too. As long as we keep room doors open, he says it’ll heat them enough to make it bearable.

  I’m not the only one looking forward to it. In the warmth of The Box, Indy has just finished castigating Paul for talking in his sleep. “What was I saying?” he asks.

  “There was one point where you and Leo were having a conversation. He said it’d be cool to have a million dollars, and you were like, ‘Yeah, Buddy, that’d be great.’ ”

  Leo falls to the floor, pounding a fist into the wood, and his hysterics cause the rest of the room to break into laughter. I’ve dragged a chair close to the heater to warm my feet, which are cold and itchy. The pinkish patches on and between my toes have spread in places. Casper comes by as I’m rubbing the foot cream into the spots while restraining my urge to scratch until I draw blood.

  “They don’t look better,” he says. “Maybe it’s not athlete’s foot.”

  “That’s because it’s chilblains,” I say.

  “Would you stop with the chilblains?” Indy says. “You don’t have some medieval disease.”

  “It could be St. Anthony’s Fire. Maybe I need my humors balanced.”

  “You need something balanced.” She sets a mug on the table attached to my chair. “Here, I put sugar in it.”

  I sniff the beverage. “Coffee? How’d we get more coffee?”

  “A giant bag of ground at the back of a restaurant. Artie found it.”

  I take a sip and close my eyes in ecstasy. My feet are warm and have stopped itching for the moment, and I have coffee. There’s only one thing that could make it better, and I found two packs of them recently. I pull on a pair of clean socks—one thing of which we have plenty now that we’ve raided nearby apartments—and throw on my boots. A cold wind waits for me on the terrace, but so does a cigarette. I light one and sit in a chair, sipping at my coffee.

  I’ve done my best to allot myself only a one a day, smoking a half at a time. Which is to say it started as one, then went to two, and now it’s three. This is how I end up smoking a pack a day, but I refuse to beat myself up over it. There’s a greater chance of dying from our general activities than there is from smoking.

  “We’re leaving for the lab in a few,” Kate says, sticking her head out the door. “Do you still want to come?”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty much ready.” I hold up my cigarette. “Another minute?”

  “Far be it from me to infringe on a smoke.” Kat
e takes a big whiff. “I do love that smell.”

  “You want one?”

  “Nope. My dad died of lung cancer, and I quit a week later.”

  “I’m sorry about your dad.” I take a drag of my suddenly not-as-delicious cigarette. “That is not helping me to enjoy this more.”

  Kate sits in a chair. “He wasn’t as old as I wanted him to be, but he’d had a good life. And he missed my mom, who didn’t smoke, and who’d died of a brain aneurysm ten years before. Maybe when it’s your time, it’s your time.”

  I don’t know how I feel about that. If you go when it’s your time, then there’s no use in fighting for anything. I want to think we have at least some power over our fates. That the universe takes into account how hard we try to change them and gives us a little wiggle room.

  “I wish he’d seen my daughter all grown up, but, if he was right about God and Heaven, then he did.”

  “Your daughter’s in Oregon?”

  “She is.” Kate keeps her eyes on the water and nods as though acknowledging a remark only she can hear. “Or was. I think, if there was somewhere for her to find safety, she would have. She’s a New Yorker, and we don’t fuck around.”

  I laugh. “True.”

  “You remind me of her, just a little. She had Declan’s dark hair and eyes.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that, so I take the final drag of my cigarette. Kate stretches her arms above her head. “Anyhoo, let’s get this party started. I think it’ll be the bomb.”

  I groan while I get to my feet, and she stands with a grin. I suspect Kate is full of compartments with the way she can switch back and forth between heartbreaking topics to jokes. “I’m sorry about your daughter,” I say.

  Kate rests her hand on my cheek. “Thank you, honey. Me, too. You know what she’d say right now? Ma, you’d better fuck that guy up.”

  “I’d like her.”

  “She’d like you, too.”

  It’s a good thing we have plenty of cold water. The chemical reaction that turns nitric acid and various other ingredients into explosives needs an ice bath, and a bucket of water is a place to toss any runaway reactions before they blow you up. Kate says the smaller the batch, the smaller the accidental explosion, so we have a round robin thing going.

  At present, I’m releasing the stopper on a separatory funnel, which we’ve greased to avoid any friction. Friction is a no-no. A big one. The nitro solution, which has sunk to the bottom of the funnel, is decanted into a baking soda solution in another funnel. And because nitroglycerin freezes at fifty-five degrees, we’re making nitroglycol to throw into the mix, literally, so we’ll be able to blow things up no matter the temperature.

  Our Chelsea Market office café resembles a chemistry lab, likely because we stole most of our materials from a chemistry lab. A nearby college, a high school, auto stores, and the many metal-plating shops in the city’s Garment District have given us both the chemicals and equipment we need.

  I leave my solution and join Kate and Louis at the newest batch. “What’ll we do with it?”

  “I think we’ll blow something up,” Louis says with a wink. “Jorge and Brother David will return tonight, and maybe they’ll have an idea.”

  They’ve been staking out StuyTown to see what we can accomplish. More weapons would be nice, as would any way to get inside and lead people out. Unrestrained force will kill our own people. As long as they’re alive, we’re basically at a standstill.

  “That has to sit in the baking soda for a while,” Kate says, after I shiver. “Why don’t you go warm up?”

  My feet are killing me. I don’t want to leave, but I’m going to chop off my toes with a knife if I don’t get them out of these boots, and my knee is sore from standing all day. I strip off my long rubber gloves and mask, then place them and my bomb-making coat at the door.

  As I’m leaving, Kate yells, “Don’t smoke until you’re washed up!”

  I pull my hand from my jacket pocket with a sigh. The walk along the High Line to The Standard is short, but it’s enough time to increase my annoyance to an explosive state. We’re not doing anything. It’s not entirely true—we’re keeping ourselves alive, trying to contact Mo, and making weapons—but our main goal is locked behind guarded gates and surrounded by zombies.

  By the time I’ve traveled our obstacle course to the terrace, I’m pissed. In The Box, I ignore everyone as I scoop water from the pot into a bowl and bring it to the bathroom, where I mix in cold water to wash my hands and face.

  That done, I sit near the heater and untie my boots. My feet look worse than they did this morning. One of the red patches is a blister, and I want to scratch all the spots until they bleed. I rub them gently instead. After a minute, Paul asks, “So, how’d it go?”

  “Fine,” I mutter. I can feel the looks everyone exchanges. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of life for today, and I’d go to my room if it weren’t so cold.

  “Syls?” Leo stands beside me, and he opens his hand to reveal a grubby cracker. “I saved one for you.”

  The Triscuit is crumbly at the edges. God only knows where his hand has been, but I’d still gobble it down in a heartbeat if it didn’t mean taking food from his mouth. Not only does my heart melt, but anger flares so hot I find it hard to swallow. We’ve been reduced to a six-year-old giving me one of his daily allotment of six crackers when he barely has enough to eat. After everything he’s seen, if Leo doesn’t grow up to be a serial killer, it’ll be a miracle.

  “You should eat it. I’m not that hungry anyway.” At his insulted pout, I pull him onto my lap. “I appreciate that you’re the sweetest boy in the world. It makes my tummy full to know you’d give me your cracker.”

  He nibbles on the Triscuit. “It’s not that good, anyway. Do your feet hurt?”

  “A little, but they’ll be okay soon, I think.”

  I’m lying away over here, when I promised never to lie to him, though they’re more half-truths. My feet hurt like a bitch, though they’ll likely be okay, and he is the sweetest boy in the world, though my stomach is eating itself at the aroma of that Triscuit.

  I close my eyes and rest my head on the back of the chair, only to jump awake at the clank of metal pots. It seems like a minute later, but the window shades are down for the night and the room smells of dinner. I hate naps because I wake up groggy and stay that way until bedtime, but I’m happy to have missed out on an afternoon of being irritated. I peer at my feet. They may be a little less pink than they were, and they don’t hurt as much.

  Leo draws pictures at a table across the room, and Indy leans over him, speaking softly. He grins up at her, and she takes his chin in her hand the way a mother would. The way I do. It makes me happy, and I’m not the only one—Paul stands in front of the heater, stirring a pot on the cooktop and sneaking looks at the two of them, the lift of his lips just short of a smile.

  “Hey,” I say quietly, though he jumps. “Don’t tell me you made dinner?”

  “You don’t want me making dinner,” he says. “I’m stirring it for Indy.”

  I watch her grab a can from the food storage table before she heads back to Leo. “She’s good with him.”

  “Yeah. I think she likes him.”

  I can read nothing into his comment, but his face before told me enough. “Of course she does. Who doesn’t?”

  Indy comes our way with the open can. “Tomatoes. Not San Marzano.”

  “Then forget it,” I say. “I will settle for nothing less.”

  “I never said thank you,” Paul blurts out. He turns to me, then Indy, who holds her can aloft in confusion. “For getting Leo that day. You didn’t have to. You could’ve gone straight for the manhole instead of going into that crowd.”

  “Paul…” I begin, but he says, “No, really. I would’ve understood. You had no idea if you’d get out, and you went anyway. Maybe it wasn’t for me, but I appreciate it.”

  “It was for both of you,” I say.

  Indy gazes at
Leo, then gives Paul a self-conscious shrug. “He reminds me of Lucky. I was a teenager when he was that age, and I used to watch him all the time.”

  “I’m going to help get Lucky out,” Paul says. “I promise.”

  Indy’s head dips in gratitude. “I should get this in there.”

  Paul backs away from the pot while she dumps it in, then he stirs as she returns to Leo. Under the light of the floor lamps, to which Artie connected batteries that solar charge during the day, Indy’s face is angular and her arms far too thin. “Am I as skinny as Indy?” I ask.

  Paul nods, his mouth a line. I point to an extra giant pot on the cook surface, which is overkill for the amount of food we normally receive. “What’s that?”

  “Indy’s surprise experiment.”

  Jorge, Brother David, Kate, and Louis enter the room. Julie, Chris, and Casper follow with Artie. “We’ll have some heat upstairs tomorrow,” Artie says. He gets a round of applause, to which he bows. “It wasn’t just me. Casper had the idea to build two smaller heaters. That way the weight is distributed, as is the heat.”

  Casper receives his accolades with aplomb. At Indy’s urging, we sit at the table. Paul carries the pot to our dining area, and she scoops some sort of soup-stew into each of our bowls. It consists of tomatoes and corn, and chunks of something that looks like meat.

  “Textured vegetable protein,” Indy says. “Taste it.”

  It tastes like chili, feels like meat, and is perfectly spiced. Food has become something to get inside as fast as possible, all equally canned and semi-tasteless, but this is what food can be. What it was a few weeks ago.

  Indy smiles at our exclamations and runs to the cooktop, where she lifts something from the giant pot. She nears with two round baking pans that sport the browned top of something bread-like. “We had that flour we found, and the cornmeal and baking soda. Cornbread.”

  She divvies it into slices and sets one by each of our bowls. “Holy shit, you baked bread,” I say. “How did you do that?”