“Flop-butt,” Leo adds with a cackle. “Butt!”
I keep my eyes on the bedspread as I smile. Sylvie resumes reading, and though I’d like to escape the accusing stare I’m fairly certain Maria levels my way, I won’t give Paul the satisfaction. After a few minutes, I’m listening intently. Reading aloud isn’t easy, and Sylvie’s good at it. Every now and again she affects a Yorkshire accent that makes everyone laugh. She read aloud in an Irish accent while I was sick, before we really met. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I knew she was silly—someone I’d like—although I didn’t consciously remember until now.
Sylvie closes the book at the end of the chapter. “All right, I’m on watch. Tune in tomorrow for more, folks.”
“That was great,” Paul says. “You should read Leo his bedtime story.”
Leo jumps on the bed. “Yes, read to me!” Paul catches him mid-jump and throws him over his shoulder.
“I will tomorrow, squirt,” Sylvie says as they leave the room. She sets the book on the nightstand and gets to her feet. “I have a date with a roof. I’ll see you later.”
“Thank you, mamita,” Maria says. I hear Sylvie kiss her cheek and stand to follow, but Maria reaches for my hand. “Stay for a minute?”
Sylvie kisses me before she takes off. I’ll see her at bedtime, since watch shifts have shortened in length as it’s gotten colder, but sometimes I miss having her all to myself like I did a week ago.
Maria tugs me down. “Sit.” She looks tired, not angry, and her eyebrows nearly touch in concern. “I think I owe you an apology.”
I shake my head.
“Yes,” she says firmly. “I do. I know you feel guilty, mijo. I can see it. It’s been hard because I see the girls when I look at you, so I didn’t look at you. And now you think I’m mad.”
My throat is shut tight. I ignore the tear that escapes, but Maria wipes it with gentle fingers. “Sweetie, I’m not mad. Or disappointed with you.”
If she won’t say it, I have to. I unlock my jaw. “If I’d gone when I said I would, this might not have happened.”
“I’m the one who told you to wait,” Maria says, voice as tender as my mother’s always was. “It could’ve happened whether you were there or not, and I’m glad you’re safe. I know you’re hurting and want someone to blame, but it’s not yourself.”
Tears two and three are on the loose. I swipe them away.
“You’re like your dad,” she says. “Always wanting to protect people. But you can’t always protect them, no matter how hard you try. He would be disappointed we didn’t get there in time, but he would never be disappointed in you. He’d be so proud of the man you’ve become.”
I’ve lost count of the tears now. My dad is what I aspire to, but I wonder if I’ve made him out to be infallible in the years since his death. Do your best, is what he’d say. And I did the best I could, even if I made mistakes in there. He wasn’t perfect, either, and he was the first to admit it. I seem to have forgotten that.
I rub at my eyes. “Thanks.”
“There’s nothing to thank me for. Thank you for going, and for coming back, and for making sure Sylvie was safe. She’s keeping me sane.”
“Me, too. She’d say we’re both crazy for that.”
Maria raises my chin, smiling, though her eyes brim over. “I know what you think happened upstate. I thought knowing would be better, but since I can’t know, I’d rather believe they’re okay.”
I understand that. She was gutted by the thought, and with no hard evidence, she doesn’t want them dead and buried in her mind. Maybe that’s how I should view Cassie—out there somewhere, brown hair swinging and laughing up a storm. Cassie must think I’m dead; how could she not? I would give anything for one radio call, a note, a damn smoke signal, to inform us of each other’s fate.
“There’s always the chance,” I say, not untruthfully, and with it comes a small flicker of hope.
Maria pinches my cheek. “That’s my boy.”
She’s found something to hold on to, and though there’s nothing to do with this optimism—no action to take—it feels fitting to be hopeful. It’s comfortable, like an old chair.
Maria hugs me, then pushes my hair back and searches my face. “I want you to know I’m not being delusional. I don’t think I’ll ever see my girls again, but I’m not letting go so easily. Okay?”
“Okay.” I can imagine Dad saying the same thing. He’d never give up hope until all hope was truly gone, and neither will I.
Chapter 69
The idea that Cassie could be at a Safe Zone hasn’t left my mind, and neither has the fact that I asked Jerry to check with New Hampshire. We keep the radio on most mornings, but it’s been silent, and we get no response when we call Wadsworth to check in. Last anyone at SPSZ heard, while Sylvie and I were upstate, they were headed out to save people stranded by a mob on the Long Island shore. Even if the boat never made it back, the rest of Wadsworth’s residents should answer, and that they haven’t doesn’t bode well.
Which is why Eli, Paul and I are in the boat, on our way there. Paul rows, working against the garbage, which has lessened some—likely sunk to the bottom of the bay. Eli watches the distant shore, occasionally inspecting the water with distaste. “Anyone in the mood for a swim?”
“You first,” I say.
He leans back in the bow with a smile. The smell could be worse, and definitely was worse when the hot sun cooked the bay like a big pot of soup.
Paul grunts as he pushes past a dead body—one who doesn’t grab at the oars. “Think we could clear this shit out?”
“With enough explosives, maybe,” Eli says. He gestures at half a yacht that bobs in a interlocked mass of boat parts, bodies, rope, and trash. “It’s like that garbage island. The one in the Pacific? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
“Also known as the trash vortex,” I say. “But you can sail through that one. This is more like the New York Garbage Swamp.”
“We one-upped the trash vortex,” Paul says. “How nice.”
We make good time. After both Eli and I have a turn at the oars, we’re nearing Staten Island, but we can’t get close to Wadsworth with the half-mile of refuse that rests against the collapsed bridge. Binoculars provide a detailed view of the beach full of washed-up garbage and moving bodies, which also doesn’t bode well since Ren mentioned they took care of the ones who came ashore.
Eli points out an empty pier where the swamp is dispersed enough that we might be able to squeeze through. “Looks like we can get there.”
“It’ll mean a walk,” I say. “Are you up for it?”
“What else do we have to do today?” Eli asks. “Not die?”
I laugh, glad I asked Eli along. Sylvie was less pleased, but Maria insisted she needed her help at home. I have a sneaking suspicion Maria would rather I die than Sylvie. When I jokingly said as much, she laughed but didn’t dispute it, and, honestly, that’s fine by me.
We make it to the pier, tie to a piling, and climb the wood into a small shipyard closed off by corrugated metal gates. With no bikes, we travel on foot through yards of the vinyl-sided houses of this area, taking the easy way down streets when we can.
The Lexers are few until we near Fort Wadsworth’s grounds, where the streets are jam-packed. A few blocks away, we travel up a barricaded entrance ramp to the Staten Island Expressway and Verrazano Bridge. The road will offer us a bird’s-eye view.
Barring a few stragglers by the toll booths, it’s clear, and, after a few minutes’ walk, the park grounds appear below. The spread-out brick buildings of the base are intact, the few streets empty, and the gardens mulched for winter. The fences may be surrounded, but inside is a Safe Zone that appears uninhabited by humans or anything else.
“It looks safe enough,” I say. “We could take the anchorage down.” I used the triangular concrete anchorages on both the Staten Island and Brooklyn side of the bridge when I crossed months ago.
Paul and Eli assess the scene. “
I want to see what happened. Let’s do it.” Eli says, and Paul nods.
We continue walking. Last time I was up here, the thick main cables exited the anchorage and soared into the sky to meet up with the bridge towers. Both the cables and towers are gone, lying somewhere beneath us on the ground and stretched across the water, and the roadway ends in a jagged drop-off.
We step over the guardrail and onto the anchorage. From here, it’s a steep but simple slide to ground. The inner fences look solid from a distance—metal fit into steel girders and supported by angled beams—but we walk as soundlessly as possible toward the buildings.
Inside the long brick dormitory building where I stayed with Blake, we find uninhabited halls and rooms, though the inhabitants’ belongings remain in drawers and on desks. The interconnected brick buildings that housed families are in a similar state. There are some signs of disarray—a teddy bear in the hall, a shoe by a door—but nothing that screams of danger the way Kingsborough did.
The tables in the windowed galley are neatly arranged, but the kitchen is a mess. Unwashed dishes. Food on the floor. Discarded cans and paper packaging. The large pantry is bare-shelved. It’s a ghost town. And eerie as one. I’ve got a serious case of the creeps, enough to make me shiver.
“Goose walked over your grave,” Eli says.
“I don’t like this.”
“Me neither. Makes no sense.”
We find the police department offices in another building. What was likely a communications room is lined with desks, with useless screens and phones, and cords no longer attached to anything. I’d bet any useful electronics were taken wherever the food went, and they didn’t move the behemoth radio that’s more like a piece of furniture and likely an antique. None of us would know the first thing to do with it, anyway, if we could get it across the water.
I stop outside an office door with a nameplate: Jerry Strand, Chief of Police. “Where’d you go, Jerry?” I ask quietly.
Blake, Ren and his family, the other guys on the boat, the people who lived here—all missing. I only met them a few times, but there was reassurance in the fact good people were alive, pulling what was left of the world together.
Paul sits in a desk chair in the main room. “I don’t see anything. No note, no nothing. Should we check out the rest, see if there’s anything worth taking?”
The thought of any decent supplies is appealing, even if coveting them feels shitty. “Sure.”
We spend an hour searching buildings in vain, and aside from a long-desired shortwave radio and a few weapons, there’s nothing of value we don’t already own. In the final room we search, Eli finds a stash of candy bars. He hands us each one and takes one for himself. “We’ll give the rest to the kids,” he says.
Paul and Eli open theirs, but I tuck mine in my coat. “Saving it for Sylvie?” Paul asks, and makes a whipping noise at my nod.
This is the guy who brought Hannah flowers every week, opened her car door after years of marriage, and basically did everything he could to ensure his wife knew he loved her. He’s a romantic, though you’d never know it by his posturing.
“I’d save mine for Grace, but you know she wouldn’t eat it,” Eli says. He seems to think better of that, carefully rewraps the bar, and tucks it in his pack. Grace talks a good game, but when faced with chocolate, she usually gives in.
We head for the anchorage. “How’s that going?” I ask, mainly to break the unnerving silence, and also because Sylvie will ask me a dozen times if he mentioned Grace. Eli shrugs. “Eli, you’ve got to give me something to tell Sylvie or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Why doesn’t she ask Grace?”
“She says she doesn’t want to make Grace feel weird.”
“All right, tell her I said things are good. We’re friends.”
“She’s not going to like that. But it offers just enough non-information that she’ll believe you said it without my prodding.”
For once, Eli’s laugh is loud and unrestrained. Unfortunately, it’s answered by footsteps and moans from the road to our left. A crowd pours out from the trees around Fort Tompkins, just down the road and above Fort Wadsworth, which sits closer to the water. Maybe a hundred Lexers, maybe more, and we don’t stick around to count. A pounding starts up behind us, on the metal fence at the end of the road we walk.
We clamber up the anchorage before they close in and watch from the top while they teem below. They could be Wadsworth’s residents, or Lexers that made their way in, maybe from the water or a breach in the wall. Though it’d be difficult to recognize people I don’t know well in this decayed form, I search in vain for Jerry’s white hair or Blake’s blond head or Ren’s solid form. The distant pounding becomes the sound of shearing metal. A fence weakening, possibly coming down.
We step to the expressway and turn for home without a word. There’s nothing to say. It’s another group of people gone. Another Safe Zone unsafe.
***
The shortwave sits in the rec center, where people crowd around it day and night. Often, there’s nothing but static, but we’ve heard languages from all over the globe. May tells us a group in China says they’ve built a walled compound and want to trade with others. Aliya, a young mother of two, tells us the same of a group in Jordan.
Sylvie did some reading in the school library and relayed the information that shortwave radios make no sense regarding what you hear or what you don’t. Or, rather, the radio waves are reflected and refracted off the ionosphere, so you can just as easily listen to someone in China as in New Hampshire, depending on time of day and atmospheric conditions.
Talkeetna, a small Alaskan town, is a thriving Safe Zone, and their zombies have already frozen. I’m familiar with the place; Talkeetna is the jumping-off point to climb Denali, something I always dreamed of doing. If I could transport us all there, I would. It doesn’t get much better than frozen zombies and gorgeous mountains.
We caught the tail end of a broadcast from New Hampshire but lost it again. A guy near D.C. says the whole District was bombed, though a group of farmers in Virginia have banded together and are now five hundred strong. The Amish aren’t broadcasting, of course, but the woman who does it for them informs the world they’re thriving in Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, and a few other states. A lonely man in Kansas broadcasts almost nightly, and he plays the guitar before he signs off weeping.
Hearing these things doesn’t help us in any practical way, but, as Jerry said, the knowledge we’re not alone may be just as important. We got along all right before we could speak to Wadsworth, and we’re doing well now, but their absence has served to remind us of how quickly that can change.
Chapter 70
The greenhouse is warm in late November as long as the sun is shining. When it’s not, it takes a minimum of heat to keep it at the proper temperature. We haven’t tested it below freezing—so far, the climate won’t cooperate. I hoped for an early snowstorm or bitter cold spell, since our tests indicated it takes a couple of days to freeze the Lexers, but the lowest we’ve gotten is a brief dip to thirty-two in dead of night, then back into the 40s.
I envisioned the greenhouse as a peaceful place, full of vegetation and quiet, but it’s become the hangout of various young people and an outdoorsy yet warm area to occupy small children. I step over Rissa and April sprawled on the floor on my way to a potting bench and hear a laugh from the back—Carlos, who is currently attempting to lift a garbage can of soil single-handedly. Micah and Lucky watch him from where they sit on an empty potting bench, and I shrug when they cast an apprehensive glance in my direction. Carlos will tire himself out, and I grew tired of my schoolmarm act weeks ago. As long as they don’t irritate the hell out of me or get in my way, I let them be.
The greenhouse is large enough that I can ignore them. At 50 by 20 feet, there’s room to go around. Built-in benches line the outer walls, and a motley assortment of tables line the middle space, leaving two aisles for travel to the doors on either end. The f
oundation of the greenhouse is brick, but the top two-thirds and roof of the structure are made up of windows and French doors we salvaged. It’s a hodgepodge, but I like it.
I lift the spinach I’ve repotted into larger containers and head for the table where the remainder sits. Sylvie, Paul, and Indy enter through the door at the end closest to me, Bird just behind them. Indy’s gaze moves over the teenagers who pay her no mind. Finally, she crosses her arms and calls, “Lucky Michaels, get off your butt and help Eric.”
He rushes to take half the pots. “Sorry,” he mumbles.
“No worries,” I say to him, and then to Indy, “They’re fine. If they were on work duty, they’d be working.”
“They’re a bunch of moochers,” she says, and knocks Lucky’s shoulder lightly as he passes. “Your grandma would’ve kicked my butt for sitting around.”
Lucky sets down the spinach in the right spot—he’s been paying attention—and rolls his eyes. “I know. Nothing is handed to you. Do what’s right, work hard, and get rewarded. I lived with them, too. Now tell me how I’m going to go to Yale by moving spinach.”
You can see the gears in Indy’s brain working as she tries to formulate a retort. “All right, you’re not going to Yale. But it applies in other ways, dummy.”
“Yeah,” he says, grinning. “I’ll be the kingpin of spinach. Take over the world.”
“Where did you get such sass?” She shakes her head when he opens his mouth. “Don’t answer that. You’re too smart for your own good.”
“I thought I was a dummy.”
Indy widens her eyes at Sylvie. “I can’t even. Somebody take him away from me.”
Sylvie laughs and pulls Lucky toward Carlos and Micah. Bird follows on the tables, staying clear of the plants. Sylvie would say it’s because he’s perfect, and I wouldn’t tell her it’s because I cursed loudly the time he knocked a few seedlings over. I might’ve scarred him for life, but I gave him treats to make up for it.