“It smells like snow,” Eric says, and points to the low clouds rolling in with night. “That looks like snow.” He stops. “I’ll meet you there. I’m going to make sure the chicks are warm enough.”
We have seven chicks. The first eggs rotted into stink bombs, but these finally hatched under a hen last week. They’re fluffy and cute and I don’t want our future chickens to freeze. Indy used our few eggs to make that Twinkie cake, and if I’m ever going to get more, we need those chickens.
Maria scrutinizes the sky. “You really think it’ll snow?”
“If we can get out there one more time, we can reach JFK,” Jorge replies.
The airport is full of zombies, but, as a new resident of SPSZ reported, also of food. Snack boxes of cheese spread, crackers, cookies, peanuts, and other shelf-stable foods abound, though the route must be cleared of cars to get to it. We don’t have many Lexers by us, possibly because we killed most of them while frozen, but more likely because the largest mobs marched off toward Queens and haven’t yet returned.
We walk into the rec center and down the hall to the dining gym. It’s full of people eating at tables and a few waiting for a spot. Leo waves to Emily and Chen but sticks between me and Indy, a hand in each of ours.
“Lift me up,” he says.
“I didn’t hear the magic word,” I say.
“Please?”
“That’s not the magic word.”
“What’s the magic word?” he asks.
“Guess.”
“Abracadabra!” I shake my head, and he says, “Thank you?”
“Nope.”
He stomps his feet. “Alakazam? Rapunzelstiltskin?”
That last one cracks me up. I love to tease this kid. “I already told you what it was, a minute ago. Think about it.”
He scrunches his eyes. Finally, he shouts, “Guess!”
“There it is.”
Indy and I lift him into the air and swing him around, then set him down and do it again. This is a game of which he never tires. Ever. “It’s a good thing you’re cute,” Indy says to him.
Grace and Eli arrive as a table opens up, and we haul Leo through the air to reach it, then go in shifts to get our food. Eli and I stay behind to keep our spot. He’s not a chatterbox in general, and now that he’s always with Grace, he lets her do the talking.
“So, how are you and my best friend?” I ask.
“We’re good.”
“That’s not nearly enough information. I need to vet you more.”
He puts his elbows on the table and eyeballs me over laced hands. “What do you need to know?”
“We’ll get straight to the nitty-gritty: How you plan to support her in the style to which she’s become accustomed, kids’ names, possible dog acquisition, and anything else of importance.”
He stares at me for a protracted moment, then says, “By killing zombies until the world is safe again. Girl’s name: Lorraine, after her mother. Boy’s name: James, after my father. Maybe a dog, but not one of those little yappy ones. And a spare room for her best friend when she visits.”
I punch his arm. “You have it all worked out to include me. Perfect.”
“I hear I have you to thank for telling her to give it a chance.”
“She told you that?”
He cocks an eyebrow. “It’s Grace. She never stops talking.”
“You know, Eli, you’re pretty funny. Maybe we should gag her so you can speak more.”
He smiles and then nods at Paul and Eric’s arrival. Paul is mud-free, and they both have wet hair. “Freezing rain out there,” Eric says. “And it’s turning to snow.”
Guillermo makes a beeline for us from Rob and Dennis’ table. “If they freeze, we do JFK.”
“If they do, it won’t be until the day after tomorrow,” Eli says.
“Sure,” Guillermo says. “But you’re in?”
“Of course,” Eric says. “How many trucks?”
“Four, at least. It’s supposed to be crazy over there.” He claps his hands and then holds one in front of me until I slap it. “Woo, baby! We’re goin’ in!”
“Yay,” I say, because I can’t muster up the same fervor, even if the trip does involve cookies. We have enough food stored to make it through the summer even without the garden. I shake my head as he dances away to talk excitedly to another table. “What’s gotten into him?”
“More like who he’s gotten into,” Paul says. We turn to him. “He’s banging Elena.”
“Way to make it sound romantic, Paul,” I say. I’ve seen Guillermo and Elena together, but I thought he was only helping with the kids. “How do you always know this stuff, anyway?”
He taps his temple. “I watch, I listen. I knew Eric loved you before he did.”
I turn to Eric, who raises his shoulders. “He’s smarter than he looks.”
“Don’t give away my secrets, bro. Sylvie thinks I can’t read.”
“I think you can read small words,” I say.
Paul puts me in a headlock and refuses to let go until the others return with their plates. We head into the kitchen, where Lupe runs tonight’s show. Rissa is at a stove, hair tied back and face glistening with sweat. While I fill my plate with rice, bread, and a small amount of what might be mashed squash—if I don’t have vegetables, Grace scolds me for setting a bad example for Leo—I notice Rissa rolls her eyes at her mother every five seconds.
Ever since Carlos and Gary, they’ve been at odds. The relief that Rissa was okay wore off after a day, and she’s since been on house arrest, except for my party. I walk to the stove. “What’s that in there?”
Rissa scowls before she sees it’s me. “Oh hi, Sylvie. It’s bean chili.”
I hold out my plate, wait for a spoonful, and lean in. “If you keep rolling your eyes, they’ll get stuck in the back of your head.”
“Are you even allowed to be grounded when you’re eighteen?”
“Apparently. When do you get paroled?”
“When I’m nineteen, probably.”
“Let me see what I can do to get you a furlough to the garden.” I walk to Lupe and put on my sweetest smile. “Hey, Lupe. Can Rissa help in the garden the rest of the week? We have a lot to do.”
“Okay,” she says. “But don’t let her do anything but work.”
“Of course not.”
She leaves for another oven, and I give Rissa a thumbs up. Rissa folds her hands in thanks before her eyes fix on something behind me. She uses her sleeve to wipe her face, and her expression changes to what can only be described as puppy love. I turn. Micah is at the stack of plates, with Lucky, Harold, and Tommy behind him.
He waves at Rissa in a friendly fashion, oblivious to her adoration. “Hey, Sylvie,” he says. “Did Guillermo tell you about JFK?”
“Yeah, are you going?”
“He wants me to.” His eyes skim around the room. “I don’t know.”
The plate he holds quivers. I’ve made it a point to check on him and play games, or do whatever will cheer him up. Tommy and Harold live in his house, but he seems lonely. He and Carlos became best friends, and ten months together these days can form a bond that feels like a lifetime.
“You don’t have to,” I say. “It’s okay.”
“It just feels like everything’s going wrong, but I guess I am.” He nods somberly. “Thanks. I’ll see you later.”
“Why don’t you stick with us if we go?” I ask. The others won’t mind. Everyone likes Micah. He shrugs, and I say, “C’mon, I need a Bill to my Ted.”
“So I’m Bill?” he asks, a faint smile on his lips. “How about Eric?”
“He’s Eric. He’ll never mess up an adventure the way we can. It’ll be fun.”
He finally laughs. “Okay. Thanks.”
“Thanks? I like having you around, Micah. As long as you don’t make me play charades.”
I give him a hug before I head for the dining room, thinking about what he said. Everything’s going wrong. I could chalk it
up to Carlos, but this sudden trip has caught me unprepared, and I find myself half-hoping the Lexers don’t freeze. I’m glad I made Micah laugh, but now I don’t feel much like laughing myself.
Chapter 81
Eric
The world is coated in snow again. They call it the poor man’s fertilizer when it snows late in the year, the idea—or, more likely, old wives’ tale—being that it brings nitrogen from the air to the ground. It shouldn’t hurt what we’ve sown, so I’ll take any help we can get.
The temperature hovers just below freezing, but the zombies still move. I stand on a roof at Fifth Avenue with Rob and Guillermo, the latter of whom leans his elbows on the ledge to watch a Lexer shuffle on the street below, then whistles to get its attention. “Look at that.”
Rob and I move beside him. The Lexer hisses up at us, half of its face obscured by a mask of black. “A few at the warehouse had smaller patches of something like that,” I say. “But I didn’t take a good look.”
We see zombies with dirt and oil and grime on them every day. Spotless zombies are not the norm in the city, if they are anywhere. We watch it a minute longer, then duck from view when we grow tired of its I-want-to-eat-you histrionics. “Think we can do JFK if they’re slower?” Guillermo asks.
“Dunno,” Rob says. He sticks his ruddy hands into his Carhartt jacket. “If it warms up, we’re screwed. Even a day of freezing means they won’t be frozen through. That’s bad enough.”
Guillermo sighs. “All right, maybe tomorrow.” Rob nods and takes his leave to let the others know. Guillermo kicks at the snow with his boot. “What good is snow if they don’t freeze?”
“The kids get to sled.” They’ve been at it all day, though they’ve been relegated to the streets outside the garden—no one is fucking up my garden.
“I should take Elena’s kids later. They loved it at Sylvie’s party. Felix went last year, but it was Aurelia’s first time.”
“Cool.”
He glances at me quickly. “What, you’re not gonna ask?”
“Ask what?”
“If I’m with Elena.”
“None of my business.”
“Can you teach my mother those words?”
Maria’s birth control lecture comes to mind. “No one can teach any mother those words. And if they aren’t demanding to know, they’re dying to but not asking.”
“I guess you’re right. I felt bad, you know? My mother said maybe it would be good for me, and for them, to be like a father to the kids. Help out. So I did. And then…” He gazes off the roof. “I had a big crush on her in high school, but nothing happened because she was with Felipe. Now I killed him and I’m with her, like I planned that shit.”
“No one thinks that. And you didn’t kill him, they did.” I point to the world beyond our rooftop.
He turns to me, eyes black. “Maybe, but I wish I hadn’t helped. You kill anyone who wasn’t turned yet, like that?”
I shake my head. I know for a fact I couldn’t have finished Rachel off until she was truly gone, unless she was in agony the way Felipe was, and it would still be challenging. My hand has risen to play with the flap of the left chest pocket of my coat, and I drop it to my side. The picture is in there, and Sylvie’s words are in my mind. I can’t even ponder what I would do if it was her.
“You kill anyone you were close to who turned?” Guillermo asks.
I think of Grant, Rachel’s brother. How it felt almost the same as killing him. “Yeah.”
“Fucked up,” he says.
It’s likely I’ll have to do it again one day. I’ll probably have to put someone out of their misery the way he did. And, I’ll bet, I’m going to have to kill someone just because they deserve it.
“Fucked up,” I agree.
***
I find Sylvie on the street after my thoroughly demoralizing guard shift with Guillermo, where she holds both hands in the air in the middle of a group of kids.
“I said freeze, you lousy children!” she yells. They do, though they giggle. She rolls her eyes at me as I walk near, then she scans the kids who stand, sled strings in their hands, at the top of the block. Her index and middle fingers lift in the air. “Two. Two freaking sleds at a time. Is that so hard? Do I need to cancel sledding and hold math class?”
“No!” they yell. There have to be over twenty kids—five alone are Dennis’ and Rob’s—and they all watch Sylvie intently. They’re not scared, but they’re relishing the way she pretends to be scary.
“So, you sled down the flipping street.” She points to the snow-covered center of the street. “Not the sidewalks, only the street. When you get to the bottom of the hill, what do you do?” She crosses her arms and waits.
“Walk up the flipping sidewalk!” they scream in unison. I choke on my laugh.
“All right, go,” Sylvie says. “Two lines. And if you can’t wait your turn, you get a timeout outside the gates.” They screech at her empty threat and line up while Sylvie comes to my side. “The parents took off and left me in charge. This is their payback.”
“It seems to work,” I say. No one is fighting or pushing—for now, anyway.
“They should’ve paid teachers a million dollars a year.” She links her arm through mine. “You are not allowed to leave me here alone.”
“Where is everyone anyway?”
“You know parents. Any excuse to ditch their kids for an hour, they take.”
“Can’t blame them for that.”
“True,” she says. “What’s the deal for tomorrow?”
“Don’t know yet. If they freeze enough that it’s safe, we go. If not, we don’t.”
I watch Rob’s two boys tuck Emily between them on the sled. They’re good kids, and he’s a good dad. I would hate for them to lose him. For any more kids to become fatherless. I have no excuse for not wanting to go to JFK except the conversation with Guillermo and the fact that I’m weary of the continual search for crappy food. I want to plant a garden and raise animals and not have to worry about blowing someone’s head off to spare them some misery.
“Is it wrong that I hope they don’t freeze?” I ask before I can stop myself.
“I don’t want to go, either,” she says. “But it’d be dumb to let it go to waste. And we’ll stay close.”
I want her to stay here, but I won’t say that. She shivers and I wrap her in my arms, resting my nose on the crown of her head while we watch the kids.
“Why are you sniffing me?” she asks.
“It’s my favorite smell.”
She places her gloved hands over mine. A wail rises after two sleds crash midway down the block, and Sylvie drops her head to my chest. “Oh, for the love of— I’ll be right back.”
She trudges down the hill toward the collision, calling, “It’s okay! The ambulance is coming,” and then makes a siren noise the rest of the way.
A kid at the top of the slope sets his sled down over to the right. He wouldn’t be dumb enough to go now, with two sleds and Sylvie below. He scoots it over a few inches and positions himself to sit. He is dumb enough. I think his name is Abraham, and I yell, “Abraham!”
He doesn’t turn. I jog toward him. “Hey!”
The kid drops and starts down the snow packed by previous trips, and then I remember his name: Lincoln. I call to Sylvie, but she’s dusting off a wailing kid. Lincoln maintains his course until he bumps a small mound of snow that propels him left and directly into Sylvie’s legs, sending her down with a short yelp. Lincoln does a three-sixty, gets thrown from his sled, and rolls against the curb.
“Fucking Lincoln,” I mutter, and make my way to the scene.
Sylvie sits on the ground, covered in snow from head to foot. “I’m fine.”
Lincoln, five feet away, wears a look of fear as I stalk toward him. “Eric,” Sylvie says in a tone that means stop. “I’m fine. Lincoln, are you okay?”
“I’m sorry, Sylvie,” Lincoln says. His eyes fill and his bottom lip wobbles. “I didn’t think I
’d hit you.”
The kid is probably ten. Prime idiot age. I offer him a hand. He takes it and gets to his feet. “Anything broken?” I ask. He shakes his head. “Good. Do me a favor and try not to kill my girlfriend?”
“Yes, Mr. Eric,” he says.
“Thanks.” I walk to Sylvie, who still sits on the ground, Leo crouched beside her. I extend a hand. “And you, stay out of the path of sleds.”
“Yes, Mr. Eric,” she says. I pull her to her feet, and she winces. “Knee. It just needs a minute.”
We straighten out the sleds, discuss the flipping rules once more, and head up to our spot. She limps the whole way. “Let me take a look,” I say.
“I have on two pairs of pants and boots. We’ll look later. It’s fine.”
She chews her lip, body slanted to favor her right leg. It’s not fine. “No,” I say, “I’m finding a new babysitter and taking you to Maria.”
Sylvie blows out a breath but nods, which tells me all I need to know about how much it hurts. Fifteen minutes later, she sits on our couch, pajama pants pulled above her red, swollen knee. Maria says, “One good thing is we have snow to ice it.”
“Yippee,” Sylvie says in a monotone.
I sit and put my arm around her. “Just think, you don’t have to do anything for a couple of days. I’ll wait on you hand and foot.”
She growls. “You don’t seem broken up about this, and I know why. But I’m going to JFK.”
I don’t rise to the bait. We both know no one will let her go. “I might have a line on an iPad with movies. And I’ll get you candy.”
Maria pats her good leg. “I’ll get some snow.”
Sylvie sniffs and lowers her head so that her hair covers her face. I try to peek, but she pushes my hand away. “Oh, come on,” I say. “I know you wanted to see the big planes at the airport, but I’ll take you another time. I promise I won’t eat all the cookies before we get them home.”
She sniffs again. “Stop. It’s not funny.”
“What’s not funny? That you were mowed down by a sled the one time you tried to watch the kids, or my eating all the cookies?”