She lightly punches Eli’s arm, and he lets it drop to his thigh, though his teeth remain gritted. Indy’s eyes sparkle as she smiles at Joe, who doesn’t exactly smile back but doesn’t give her the same scowl. His stance eases slightly, and I force myself to do the same. This is escalating quickly, and we don’t have the upper hand.
“We just wanted to give you a heads up that we’re here,” Indy says. “You don’t want to be shot at and neither do we, right? Can we agree not to shoot each other?”
“If we see you out there, we’ll back off. That work?”
“That’s more than fair,” Indy says. “Thank you.”
“We don’t want any trouble. You leave us alone, we leave you alone. You tell your people that.” He directs the last part of his statement my way, so I nod and hold his stare until he turns away. “Emilio, get the gate for them.”
Emilio strides down the walkway. Joe gives the five of us a single nod and goes inside, allowing the door to close without a backward glance. Apparently, this meeting is over. Kirk holds his rifle aloft as we head for the gate.
“It’s all clear,” Emilio says, and swings open the gate. “Reverend Joe could use some better people skills, but he does what he says.”
“
He’s
the Reverend?” Guillermo asks.
Emilio grins. “That’s his nickname. He hates it. We call him that ‘cause he’s always in the church.” He closes the gate once we’re on the sidewalk and re-wraps the chain. The lock clicks shut. “Maybe we’ll come down to Sunset Park sometime. Boring as shit here.”
“Anytime,” Guillermo says. His handshake is friendly enough, but if you know his usual outgoing demeanor, you’d notice the tightness in his jaw and the lack of friendliness in his dark eyes.
We head for the corner, and I turn just before we’re out of sight. Joe has come out to stand at the gate with Emilio and Kirk. I can feel his cold stare blasting through the warm May sunshine from here. I don’t like our new neighbors. I don’t like their weapons or their food or the fact that they have a complex the size of a city block that’s more fortified than ours. And I absolutely don’t like Joe.
We stop in a house five blocks away, after we’ve made sure we’re not followed.
“You trust them?” Guillermo asks.
“As far as I can throw them,” I say, and Eli and Paul murmur agreement.
“I couldn’t wait to get out of that place,” Indy says. She stands beside Paul, arms crossed, and shivers.
“I thought you and Reverend Joe were besties now,” Paul says.
“That’s why they call it acting.”
“I knew you couldn’t be that dumb. You deserve an Oscar.”
Indy punches him and then points at the four of us. “You all need to learn how to sweeten people up. If we’d kept going the way we were going—”
“
You
need to stop calling me little brother,” Eli says. “You were born four minutes before me.”
“Four minutes is four minutes,” Indy says, and stands on tiptoes to pat him on the head. “You are, and forever will be, my little brother.” Eli shoves her away with a smile.
“Did you see all those boxes with Chinese writing on them?” Guillermo asks. “They could be different ones, but they had a lot of those over in Chinatown, and those guys didn’t let shit sit around. If there was food anywhere in their neighborhood, they had it.”
“I heard something in the church’s garage when I passed that time,” I say. “They could’ve been there for longer than they say. Obviously, they’re not broadcasting their location.”
“Right now, we act like we’re friendly and think they are, too,” Guillermo says. He walks to a window and looks out at the street. “But I’m thinking they’re not.”
The assholes have finally come out of the woodwork, and they live less than a mile away. It’s a sobering thought that makes me want to leave everyone behind in the city even less. Paul and I return home, where Maria and Jorge still wait for Sylvie and Grace. The sun goes down without their arrival, and my heart sinks along with it.
Chapter 77
We wake to a droning sound and follow the noise to Fourth Avenue. We stand in an apartment that overlooks the wide street while the windows vibrate with the crowd of a thousand Lexers that marches past. I spend an hour viewing the procession before I can’t take the bodies or noises or the thought that if Grace and Sylvie ran into this, or people with guns, there’s no hope for them.
The next day, the mob has passed. Maria yanks at the gold cross around her neck and peers out the parlor floor windows twenty times an hour. I make excuses to go to the roofs. Once to show Leo, another time to check out Manhattan, again to make sure the downspouts aren’t clogged. The streets are quiet. No gunshots or voices, but I feel a steady pulse coming from the church blocks away.
I rip every finished page off the calendar up until the day they left. Sylvie might be angry when she returns, since she didn’t want to disrupt anything or leave her mark. But she has left her mark, and I’m tired of the calendar looking as though she hasn’t.
Leo has taken charge of feeding Cat, who’s come inside a few times. He gets nervous when the door closes behind him, but he’ll sit on the couch, paws tucked and giant eyes surfing the room. At first he flinched when I pet him, but now he melts into my hand and purrs while his dark eyes entreat me to be kind. When I think of what Sylvie said to Leo in the yard—that Cat wanted love but wasn’t sure he could trust us—I realize she could’ve been talking about herself. Maybe she
was
.
They didn’t come yesterday or this morning. Maria has stopped checking out the window and now stares into space in the kitchen. She’s barely sipped her coffee. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because when you meet people in a situation like that you make a bond. Maybe it’s because they remind me of…” She turns her head away.
Jorge steps in from the yard and watches Maria wipe her cheeks. His natural jolliness has been replaced by sorrowful eyes and a downturned mouth. He pulls something from the pocket of his jeans that might be a lump of tin foil.
“Sylvie made this for me, for my tenth year sober,” he says. Maria and I look from the foil to him, confused. “It’s my ten-year coin. I had my anniversary a little while ago. You get a coin for every year you’re sober and, when I told her, she held a meeting and made it for me.” He tucks it back in his pocket and turns to the window.
“I don’t think they’re coming back,” Maria says. “We should stop waiting.”
Now that she’s said it aloud, my chest constricts more. Maybe it’s absurd, but it feels like grief for something I almost had before it slipped away. Something I could’ve had if I’d only said or done something different. I thought I’d learned my lesson from Rachel: say the goddamn words when they come to you, before it’s too late. But I dropped the ball again.
Maria’s right, whether the reason is that they didn’t want to come back, or they couldn’t. And she’s right that we should stop waiting—waiting
here
. I’ll search Brooklyn Heights block to block until I find out what prevented their return. I’m about to say as much when Maria pushes back her chair and walks outside without a word. A minute later, a scraping sound comes from the yard. We find her at the compost pile.
Her shovel plunges into the mound, then she throws the scoop onto the concrete and digs through it with her fingers. “We might’ve composted the note they left last time. It was yellow. Grace wrote it on a yellow Post-it note.”
Jorge shovels a quarter of the pile onto the concrete. We don’t have much to compost yet, so it hasn’t had time to generate enough heat to eat away paper. I crouch and sift through the muck of plant odds and ends, old coffee grounds and other assorted items.
Thirty minutes later, Jorge stands, carefully smoothing a soggy yellow square with a missing corner. He squints. “There are two addresses on here.”
“That’s it!” Maria jumps to her feet, wipes her hands on her pants, and peers at the paper. “Grace’s apartment and her parents’ house.”
A steady rhythm of hope beats in my chest, and I see the same optimism on Jorge’s face when he turns to me. “Want to go for a ride?”
“Do I ever.”
He disappears to get his gear together. I move through the living room for upstairs.
“I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” Maria calls from her bedroom. I stick my head in to find her throwing clothes around. The color has returned to her face, and she looks ten years younger again. “Yes, I’m going. Paul can stay with Leo. You might need someone to boss you around out there.”
Chapter 78
Sylvie
We came back to Grace’s. It’s where Logan and her parents should be; where they’ll come if they can. They weren’t among the zombies we killed. Maybe it would be better had they been. Now we’re in limbo—or maybe it’s purgatory—sitting in an expensive apartment where Grace won’t speak to me. I sleep on the couch and she stays in her bed, although I hear her leap for the windows at every noise from outside.
She had enough water for two or three days and now we’re almost out, though we rationed. Killing zombies makes you thirsty. I’ve checked every relatively safe spot of every floor except one, and so far there’s no water to be found. Grace shows no signs of leaving. I remind myself that this is my fault. I’m not big on Confession, but I’m doing my best to perform an act of contrition worthy of my sin.
I read a book and eye the water in the bottom of my bottle. Two inches left. I tiptoe into the bedroom. “Grace?” The mound of blankets on the bed moves, sighs. “I’m going to see if I can find some water again, okay? We don’t have enough to stay much longer.”
A hand comes up through the striped duvet cover and waves me on my way. I don my gloves and leave for the hall. I want to scream, or at least mutter to myself, and neither one is a good idea. Grace is killing us both. Maybe she wants to die, but I don’t. I want to go home.
It’s starting to feel unreal. Like my belonging anywhere was a fantasy I cooked up in a barren, lonely world. “They’re real,” I whisper.
I’m talking to myself. This is not good. I’ll give Grace until tomorrow and then insist we go. We can leave a note.
***
The third floor is the only remaining floor I can get onto without dying immediately. The hall is bare, as are most of the apartments, of both zombies and food. I’m sure Logan visited every one of these at some point, barring the one at the end of the hall. I knock on the door and something slams back. It sounds like only one. I can take one.
I steel myself and turn the knob, thinking it’ll be locked, but the door moves inward and is pushed shut again. I give the now-wild zombie a minute to calm and shove open the door. It falls to the floor—a teenage girl about my size, with dyed black hair and an extra helping of black eyeliner. My chisel sinks through the center of her face in a sick crunch that jars my neck; I was aiming for her eye until she moved.
I spin at a hiss from my left, but the coming body slams me to the wall before I can run. He’s older than the girl, bigger, with preppy blond hair that swoops over his forehead and high cheekbones that peek through putrefied flesh. I duck out from under him, but he blocks the door. I amend my plan and run for the couch far across the large room, where I can strike from above.
Halfway there, my foot catches the edge of the large area rug. I trip forward, spinning my arms to stay upright. My chisel flies from my hand. I’m going down, but if I land facedown with him on top, I’m done. I manage to twist and hit the floor back-first with a thud that jostles my brain. His head smashes into my stomach and he slithers up my torso. I wedge my left forearm under his chin before he reaches the exposed skin of my neck and face and buck to no effect. He has extra weight and more strength and no fear to slow him down.
My right arm is pinned at my side. His elbow grinds into my biceps until my hand goes numb. His mouth gapes above my arm, his teeth chinked with flesh he didn’t swallow, and it’s close enough to taste his rotten breath. If I had a weapon, this would be over. My chisel isn’t far—the handle peeks out from just under the couch with the dust bunnies—but it might as well be a mile with all the hope I have of reaching it.
He lifts his head and sinks his teeth into my forearm. Pain blossoms all the way to bone, even without breaking skin, but enough grinding and they’ll make it through the leather. Maybe they already have. A shriek builds and then rips from deep in my chest. More follow, one after the other, as keening and desperate as any I’ve heard. I can’t make them stop.
I’m going to die. Right here, right now. This screaming and the roar in my ears and my utter powerlessness are the horror of being eaten alive.
He shifts. My right arm frees. I use my weakened hand to push at his forehead until his teeth come loose, then I twist out from under him and drag myself to my knees. There’s no time to get to my feet. No energy to get to my feet. I crawl for my chisel and he crawls after me—prep school boy turned nightmare.
I can hardly breathe for the fear I’ll miss my chisel. I’ll go for the handle with my numb hand and it’ll skitter all the way beneath the couch. My purple-gloved fingers reach out, and I will them to get this right. I’m dead if they don’t.
They curl around the wooden handle. I take it up two-handed and hack into his head with more screams, though I’m not sure I ever stopped. I bring my chisel down over and over, until there’s more brain on the rug than in his skull, and then sink to the floor beside his body. I can’t summon the strength to move. I’m sure Grace doesn’t miss me. My eyes roam over the pictures of the girl and boy with their parents. She was blond as a little girl, like the rest of them.
In the end, thirst gets me to my feet. A gallon jug of water sits on the kitchen counter. Maybe they were waiting for their parents. I remove my gloves, open the top and gulp down the liquid. That was the most scared I’ve ever been, alone and struggling with that boy on the sisal rug, wondering if I’d die. And if Grace would care if I did. If anyone would.
I head into the girl’s room. Everything is black—the clothes, the comforter, the shoes, the Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees posters. She was Goth in a big way. I find a pair of broken-in boots in my size. Black, of course, with silver buckles and steel toes. New jeans and an extra shirt. I don’t think I’ll have need of the fishnet stockings or black corset, so I take the jug of water, their jar of peanut butter and bag of stale pretzel sticks, and leave.