“I know what I like,” he says, and pinches my butt. Fortunately, the wind carries my squeak from the zombies below.
“Save it for home,” Paul says. He’s smiling, though, as are the others. This is a topsy-turvy world when I’m the one in a relationship and everyone else isn’t.
“Listen to Paul Baloney,” I say. “He’s being sensible.”
“Maloney,” Paul says.
“Whatever.” I know his last name, I just like to mess with him.
We continue on, past partially burnt high-rises with toasted zombies on balconies, to the station at which we planned to disembark. Brighton Avenue was always teeming with people, but now it teems with zombies outside the pharmacies, Dunkin’ Donuts, discount clothes, and corner stores.
“Can’t see a thing,” Eric mutters from behind.
I look over my shoulder to find him using a monocular in the direction of Kingsborough. Of course Eric has a monocular. He stuffs it in a jacket pocket and leans over the railing, though everyone else has straightened, expressions grim.
“No good,” Eli says. Eric nods.
“If they follow, they’ll trap us at the school,” Indy says. “How about the next station? Maybe it’s better.”
Everyone approves the idea, and no one comments on the fact Indy has spoken. The next station deposits us near vacant lots and rundown houses, and a pedestrian bridge gets us across the packed highway, saving us a maze of riding.
We reach the peninsula, heading for the main boulevard that will take us to campus. Grace is ahead with Eli and Indy, and when they swerve into a narrow driveway between two brick houses, we follow without question. In the silence, footsteps sound from the street we were seconds away from turning onto. Heavy boot clomps and the soft tread of sneakers, with the slap of bare feet mixed in.
The mob trips down the boulevard away from the school, reminding me of how this might end for us. If not today, then at some point. I’m not a ray of sunshine on my best day, but optimism can be elusive out here.
I link my arm through Grace’s and whisper, “Why are we doing this again?”
“Food,” Grace whispers. “People.”
“I don’t like people, remember?”
Grace puts a finger to her lips, and Indy turns away with what could be a smile. Eric regards me with an expression that’s almost certainly a reevaluation of his commitment to this relationship. Much to my amazement, it’s a relationship I have yet to decimate with one of my trademark explosive endings. I sleep upstairs every night, and I like him more with every passing day, which is not the usual sequence of events—by now I would’ve been out the door. Admittedly, the streets outside our door are filled with zombies, but they’re not what keeps me up there.
It takes fifteen minutes for the mob to disappear before we turn onto the wide boulevard that leads to the college. Aside from the street we travel and the one that parallels it, every cross street dead-ends at the water. If another mob shows up, we’ll be trapped on this peninsula with a swim in the bay our only escape.
The large brick houses have no lurking Lexers out front—maybe gone with that mob. A few zombies roam the playground at Manhattan Beach, but we glide by before they notice. The beach, a half oval of sand that’s packed come summer, is hidden behind baseball fields and the shuttered bathhouse. Since we’re hidden from whatever lies in wait on the sand, I’m happy with the arrangement.
Twenty Lexers groan when they spot us from a fenced parking lot, but it’ll take them a while to navigate the exit, and the campus entrance is only a block away. The sign above says KINGSBOROUGH, and the reinforced iron gates hang open. According to the map Eli drew, the main part of campus is farther in, beyond empty parking lots and under a second-floor skyway that connects the first buildings.
Paul leans his bike against the fence and tests the gate. The two sections swing, yet the bent hinges won’t allow them to lock. “Looks like someone busted through. Should we go in?”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Eric says with a wink my way. I guess his reevaluation was decided in my favor. He unwinds the chain from his bike’s seat post. “Come help?”
I hold the gate closed while he winds the chain through the metal and secures it with a lock. “Combination is 1-2-3-4. I kept it easy so everyone would remember. It won’t hold them off for long, but if a few come while we’re inside it should do the trick.”
The clouds have departed, leaving behind blinding hot sun. I take my sunglasses from my messenger bag and slip them on as we walk our bikes. The out-facing windows of the first low buildings are intact, as is the glass of the skyway, but the air takes on a scorched smell that worsens with every step.
Eli motions us under the skyway and to the right, where buildings ring around a central lawn, and the first definite signs that all is not well come into view. The windows of a few are shattered, and the light brick around the window frames is streaked with soot. Another aroma mingles with the charred scent. Bodies.
At the base of the nearest building, what was once a large atrium is now a heap of tinted glass beneath a blackened framework of metal. Several bodies lie in the heap, sliced by showering glass, and, if I wasn’t used to corpses chasing me, the pink cracks in their charbroiled and bloated skin would give me nightmares.
Paul and Indy cross the grass to peer into the broken bank of windows of a smoke-stained building. They turn back and wave us away, hands over their noses.
“Looks like someone locked them in and torched the place,” Paul says upon their return. “They chained the door handles. Most probably died of smoke inhalation.”
I shiver though I’m sweating. They were locked in a fire with no oxygen, no exit, no hope. We listen to the whining bugs in the overgrown grass, eyes roaming for murderous people, but it has the muffled, lifeless atmosphere of a graveyard—it is a graveyard.
We follow Eli toward a rounded building at the far corner of campus, which is adorned with a metal structure on the roof. “Marine building. That’s a lighthouse up top.”
It’s quiet but for the wind, which is ever-present. We trudge past the building to the road that borders the water on three sides of campus. “The beach is around that corner and down,” Eli says.
“They have a beach?” Indy asks. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
“Because you would’ve made me bring you,” Eli jokes, which helps to dispel the pall that’s fallen.
The water side of the road is fenced off by metal chain strung between short concrete posts. I peer down the rocky slope to the water and move away before the bodies stranded at the base notice, though I’m sure they can’t climb it. If they were a threat, the Safe Zone would’ve closed it off. The real threat seems to have been people with chains and incendiary materials.
“I have to see this beach,” Indy says. She rounds the corner of the Marine Center and doubles back quickly. “There’s a mob. They didn’t see me.”
“How many?” Eric asks.
“A lot.”
He peers around the building wall. “Maybe seventy-five that I can see. More than fifty.”
“They could’ve washed up on the beach if they didn’t come through the fence,” Eli says. “Let’s check the other buildings, but we’ll watch the road.”
After a quick look inside the closest buildings yields nothing, we head for a cluster of white metal structures across a parking lot. The door of the first stands open, and we walk down a hallway lined with classrooms.
Paul leans into a doorway down the hall. “Got something.”
Flattened cardboard boxes are stacked in one corner, stamped with EMERGENCY RATION MEALS in green letters. The rest of the room is empty but for a dead body. Its hands and head appear to move in the dim light of the window, and I step closer for a better look.
Roaches swarm on his hands. In his hair. On his eyelids. A golden-brown horde of insects that I can hear munching in the stillness. Horror prickles my neck and my stomach upends. I slam into Indy on my way o
ut of the room, down the hall, and into the sunshine, where I put my hands on my knees and swallow sea air. I never considered the possibility that roaches eat corpses, and now I am done with this place. So very done. I wait for the others while I try to rewind my life ten minutes to erase this newfound knowledge.
Indy is out first. She walks toward me shaking her head. “That was disgusting. Grace threw up.”
The roaches will probably eat that, too. I stamp my feet in case I’m the unwitting transport for any insect passengers as the rest of our group exits the building, Grace looking pale. She comes to rest her head on my shoulder. “I now have a roach phobia, too.”
“I told you. No one believes how horrible they are.”
“They’re the worst things ever,” she whimpers.
Grace drinks from the water bottle in her pack and spits out a mouthful, then chugs half the bottle. Indy digs in her back pocket for a pack of gum and hands Grace a piece.
She offers me one with a sheepish smile. I take her peace offering and ask, “So we’re friends?”
Indy rolls her eyes and slips on her sunglasses. “Yes, dumbass, we’re friends.”
Chapter 34
Grace and I don’t enter the other buildings, but we’re told they contain more bodies, every last one of them murdered. No one mentions whether or not they’re roach meals, and I don’t inquire. There’s not a speck of food to be found until we discover the KCC Urban Farm tucked between two buildings, where we harvest enough new greens among the uprooted plants to fill bike panniers.
“They started the seeds on time,” Eric says. “That’s why their plants are ahead of ours.” He crunches on a snap pea and holds out another. “Try this.”
“No, thanks. Peas are like vomit encapsulated inside a chewy skin.”
Eric winces and swallows his encapsulated vomit with noticeable difficulty. “That’s the most disgusting description I’ve ever heard. Just try it. Have you ever had a fresh pea?” I take the pod he waves in my face and break it open. “You can eat the whole thing.”
“Baby steps,” I say, and put a green orb in my mouth. It’s crunchy, kind of sweet, and nothing like the grayish, wrinkled canned peas you get in school lunches and food pantry boxes. “It’s okay.”
“You like it.”
I try another. They’re good in a weird way, doubtless because I’m steadily starving to death. “I don’t know if I’d say I like it, but it’s better than vomit.”
“You like peas, you like peas,” he sings.
I stop chewing. “Really? A toddler song is my guerdon for trying something new?”
Guerdon: a reward or compensation. He laughs at my use of today’s word. “You deserve the point, but I’ll get you tomorrow. What’s the score now?”
I don’t keep score; playing the game is its own guerdon. But I say, “More than you, that’s all you need to know.”
Eric yanks me close with a good-natured growl. I love you, my brain whispers as I grin up at him. The words feel true—and breathtakingly formidable—but perhaps not-impossible to say at some point extremely far in the distant future, if this whole thing hasn’t crashed down around me.
“I think I like peas,” I whisper, dizzy from the notion of uttering those three syllables. “But only fresh ones, and you can’t tell anyone. Grace will make me eat vegetables if she knows.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.” Eric presses his lips to my forehead—a sweet gesture that slows the whirring of my mind. Not for the first time, I’m struck with the thought that he’s paved a path through my crazy that eludes my own self. “Let’s check the marina and go home. Sound good?”
I breathe in his woodsy, sun-warmed scent. “Sounds great.”
A grassy lot holds the rusted shell of a boat and boat-shaped patches of dirt where vessels sat not long ago. That mob of beach zombies is elsewhere, and we stay close to the structures to keep it that way. Grace and I wait outside while they check the final building. It’s nice to have another roach phobic person around.
A body pulls itself up a ramp at the squared-off corner of the concrete seawall about a hundred feet away. “We should get that,” I say. We reach the seawall as the Lexer drops to the road on her hands and knees, and I thrust my chisel into an eye so sandy I doubt she can see.
Grace points out the long metal dock a few hundred feet down, which, unsurprisingly, has empty posts to which one would tether a boat if there were a boat anywhere in this godforsaken city. The marinas across the narrow bay are just as vacant. Bodies and trash float in the water, though far less than New York Bay, where the collapsed Verrazano has trapped the insanity of the first days of the virus.
Sheepshead Bay feeds to the ocean. We could take off for anywhere if we had a boat. Eric could reach Jersey and Cassie, and, with no bridge to cross, I could invite myself along. There’d be hundreds of miles of zombies, which is plenty scary, but not as scary as watching Eric leave with a pack and a promise he’ll do his best to return. Honestly, a bridge isn’t as frightening as that.
Distant groaning breaks through my thoughts and draws my eyes to the far end of the road, where five zombies stick their hands through the bars of Kingsborough’s second gated entrance. The gate must be intact, as they don’t advance, but we should get the hell out of here before they attract more.
An engine roars behind us. We spin to see a large silver and orange boat racing our way on the open water, white spray spouting from its sides. A siren pierces the quiet and wails over a deep voice from a loudspeaker. I can’t hear what it says with the crashing of my heart, but they’re closing in fast and we don’t want to be here when they arrive.
We run for the buildings. The amplified voice shouts, two gunshots echo, and we drop to the ground. I don’t feel like I’ve been shot, though I can’t feel much under numbing fear. Grace is round-eyed with her cheek pressed to the asphalt, but she gasps from terror, not a bullet.
The boat swings out to avoid shallow water and enters the bay, moving slower now that we’ve made it known we’re not dumb enough to run from the giant gun on the front. It bumps to the dock, the siren quiets, and the Lexers at the gate emit a crazed chorus of hissing in the silence.
“On your feet and drop your weapons!” the voice commands.
I rise on wobbly legs, drop my chisel to the ground, and raise my hands in the air. Grace’s knife hits the road with a clatter. Something moves in my peripheral vision: Eric, Paul, Eli, and Indy, edging along the side of the building out of view of the dock. Rescue would be nice, but the gun’s presence makes me hope they stay back.
“Move forward,” the voice says.
Grace and I stumble past painted lines of parking spots on the roadside while the machine gun tracks our progress. The gate rattles in the distance, and I risk a glance. We now have thirty Lexers who want in. Two armed men step off the boat, walk the ramp to the road, and stop ten feet away. They wear dark blue uniforms with a black vest over top. The blond one looks young, with pale skin and anxious blue eyes. The other is Asian, with a bulky build and short dark hair. His mouth is tight and his eyes are heated.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
I breathe deep. There’s still time to talk our way out of this. The boat is Coast Guard. Wadsworth is Coast Guard, and they’re friendly. Unless these people killed the Coast Guard and took their boat, which wouldn’t surprise me after seeing this place. “We heard this was a Safe Zone and we wanted to—”
“Ren? Blake?” Eric shouts from behind.
They keep their guns on us but swing their gaze over our shoulders. Eric’s footsteps near. “It’s Eric Forrest. I was at Wadsworth? Crossed the bridge?”
The blond guy holsters his gun with a wide grin, exhaling as though relieved he won’t have to shoot us. The other guy doesn’t. Eric steps sideways in front of me and Grace, hands open at his sides. “Hey, Blake,” he says to the blond one. He lowers his head at the other. “Ren. What’s up?”
“Why are you here?” Ren asks.
>
“We were checking the place out. We came by bike on the subway tracks.” Eric motions to our bikes against the building. “We’re living over in Sunset Park. There’s a Safe Zone there.”
Blake’s head bobs up and down. Ren’s head tilts like he’s reserving judgment, but his gun lowers so that he’ll shoot me in the leg instead of the heart.
“You don’t think we did this,” Eric says more than asks.
“Not today,” Ren says, “but what’ve you been doing for the past week?”
“Not murdering people.” Eric’s voice is icy. “We came to see if there was still a Safe Zone and, if not, to see if there was food to be had. Just like anyone would.”
Blake looks from Ren to Eric and back again with a plaintive expression. “Ren, Eric wouldn’t do this. They don’t have a boat or a truck. Why would they come back without one if it was them?”
Ren’s dark eyes skip to me and Grace, then he holsters his weapon and motions at the guy behind the boat’s gun, who relaxes his grip. “Sorry. People have gone fucking crazy. I don’t know who the hell to trust anymore.”
“It’s fine,” Eric says. “What happened here?”
“Bro!” Paul calls. He steps out from the side of the building, finger pointed the way we came. Far down, though not far enough, those Lexers from the beach have answered the siren’s call. The ones at the gate are now losing their shit, and I’d bet my potato chip lunch the gate secured with a bike lock is in a similar state.
“Ah, fuck,” Ren mutters. “How many people do you have with you?”
“Six, total.”
Ren finally smiles, teeth white against his dark scruff. “Want a lift?”
Chapter 35
Eric
Ren tells us Fort Wadsworth is doing well. The Commander died in a zombie attack shortly after I left for Brooklyn, which left Jerry, the Chief of Police, in charge. They’ve built a sturdy boundary, as planned, though they left the old stone forts intact as panic rooms of sorts. The deer that had grown common in Staten Island the past few years use the park grounds as their own Safe Zone. If allowed to procreate, Wadsworth will have a steady source of venison in the future.