The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious

  “We should boil it first, right?” Jorge asks.

  “Probably,” Maria says. “Let’s see if there’s something in the fridge.”

  In the kitchen, she sets bottles of warm root beer and brewed iced tea on the table, then grabs the backpack on the chair. “They left some of my things. I’m going to change. Be right back.”

  I drink half my iced tea in one gulp. Jorge and Grace do the same and then we stand awkwardly in a strange kitchen, nursing the rest of our beverages. The refrigerator is covered in magnets and photos and notes under notes, much like the corkboard in the bedroom.

  “The clothes in the bedroom will fit you two,” Maria says to me and Grace upon her return in a clean outfit, and then she shifts her focus to Jorge’s attire. “There might be some men’s clothes in the basement. We should wash yours out.”

  “Let’s see what there is first,” Jorge says. “I don’t want to waste any of the water.”

  Maria finds a small flashlight in a drawer and leads us to the basement door.

  “So, whose house is this?” Jorge asks.

  “Penny’s best friend, Cassie.” Maria turns to me and Grace at the top of the stairs. “There’s enough light to see in Cassie’s bedroom. Why don’t you change first?”

  Cassie’s bed is unmade and, inside the large closet built out from the wall, clothes hang with no apparent rhyme or reason. Shelves hold jeans and sweaters that are folded but still manage to look untidy and precariously balanced. I stare at the clothes, unable to motivate myself to look through.

  After she’s taken a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt for herself, Grace hands me a pair and drops a black shirt on top. “Look, your favorite color.”

  She finds a pair of underwear and a bra in the dresser, then peels off her old clothes. Grace is petite, so she cuffs the too-long jeans at the bottom, buckles a belt to keep them up and sits on the bed with a sigh while I stand clutching a strange girl’s clothes.

  “Syls, you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I whisper.

  But I’m not. It’s possible I’ll never see my stuff again, never have anything that’s truly mine. I like having things that are mine. Things that aren’t suddenly lost to an eviction notice ignored too long. Things that aren’t stolen and sold by my mother for easy cash. Things that aren’t left behind because I have to move in with my best friend’s family in order to finish high school.

  I’ve spent years amassing things that are mine and mine alone. Years not depending on anyone. And now I have to ask for food, for water, for clothes. There’s no end to the amount of stuff I’ll need to survive. I’m happy to be alive, but no matter how I tell myself to be grateful, I think I’d rather be dead than be at someone’s mercy ever again.

  I inspect the underwear drawer. Pretty but comfortable, with a few racier things thrown in. The bra is close enough to fit. I put on my new outfit. It’s almost like wearing my own clothes, but it still feels as if I’m disappearing one article of clothing at a time.

  Chapter 28

  Grace and I descend the stairs to a basement that’s nowhere near as creepy as I expected. Two camping lanterns illuminate smooth, dry concrete walls. Ziploc bags cover a ping pong table. Plastic storage bins were opened, gone through, and left with their lids off in front of additional bins stacked against one wall. It’s reminiscent of the bedroom.

  “Go look at the back,” Jorge says. They must have found him some clothes, because now he’s outfitted in a clean shirt that strains at the seams.

  Wire shelves line two-thirds of the long space and are loaded down with the contents of a bodega: cans of tomatoes, beans, pineapple and even some cans that claim to be brown bread. A clear plastic bin filled with boxes of pasta. Jars of sauce. Peanut butter. Crackers. A line of bags of just-add-water pancake mix. Glass mason jars full of fruit and maybe jam. Mason jars of something chunky. Lidded white buckets sit on the floor, carefully labeled. One says sugar, another flour, the others wheat and beans and rice.

  It might be more food than I’ve ever had in my house. Not all at one time—ever.

  A plastic barrel with a spigot is in the corner, with a few cases of bottled water stacked alongside. The opposite wall holds old kitchen cabinets. The open doors display neat rows of shampoo, conditioner, soap and mouthwash. Ample boxes of toothpaste are stacked beside packages of floss and extra toothbrushes.

  I catch Grace’s gaping mouth in the lantern light before it turns to a smile. “What is this place?” she asks.

  Maria waves a hand. “This is nothing. You should see what they have upstate. This was in case they couldn’t leave the city. I think it’s enough for four people for a month, maybe two. Some of it’s probably expired. Cassie added back what she took but, mainly, I think she didn’t touch it.”

  “But why did she have it?”

  “Her parents were preppers. People who store food and things for emergencies.”

  “I’ve heard of them,” I say. “Like Y2K, right?”

  “Yes, but they did it before that, too. They were back-to-the-land kind of people. Always growing and canning things.”

  “Does anyone else know about this?” Jorge asks.

  “No. Abby and Pat were very careful.”

  “I thought Cassie lived here,” Grace says.

  “She does. But her parents lived here before.” Maria points to the barrel. “That’s water, we checked.”

  It won’t last forever split between four people, but this food means a chance to figure out our next step. We won’t have to do something stupid just to stay alive until we leave for Grace’s. We won’t die of thirst within the week. If Maria is willing to share, that is.

  Since this happened so quickly, there might be food in stores and houses. We can put out containers for rain, like that barrel under the downspout, and use the rainwater. I come up short after those ideas—that’s all I have in the survival tactics department. I wish I knew anything at all that would earn me a right to this food. But I have nothing to offer except another mouth to feed.

  The others’ excitement grows with each pass of the light over the shelves. Grace discusses dinner plans with Maria, as though she’s settling in for the long haul. I have nothing to offer in the cooking department, either. I make the excuse that I’m chilly and leave for the bedroom, where I throw a hoodie over my shirt and sit on the bed. I don’t like new people and new situations. I don’t like figuring out how I fit in. Very often I don’t, even if I try.

  Cassie’s stuff calls to me from her dresser. I crumple a pile of receipts and toss them in the wastebasket by the desk, since I don’t think she’ll return anything to the store anytime soon and the majority are for milk and random purchases. I examine a wooden box adorned with a cat wearing a feathered hat. It’s something a grandmother would own and doesn’t fit in with the rest of her things. Maybe it was her grandmother’s. I’d like to have something of my grandmother’s.

  A word-of-the-day calendar peeks out from under a book on the desk, still on January instead of our current month of April. I have one on my kitchen counter, although I rip the page off every morning. I won’t rip these, but I can pretend this one is mine. A little piece of home. With my own calendar, I play a game where I use the word at some point during the day, whether aloud or in my head. Aloud is worth more points, but since I’m the only player I suppose I always win. I fasten a paper clip to today’s word: Rebarbative—repellent, irritating.

  I inspect a framed picture of that family. Both kids appear to be in their twenties at the time it was taken. I assume the grinning girl with long brown hair and pretty hazel eyes is Cassie. Beside her stands a tall, good-looking guy with the same eyes and hair color, although his is a tousled medium length. His relaxed stance, easy smile and hint of scruff make him look as though he stepped from the pages of an outdoor catalogue. Their mother has a few lines and hair going gray, but it’s obvious from whom they got their features. The broad, bearded man next to Mom looks like the kind of dad who doesn??
?t cut out on his kids, probably even likes them. The perfect nuclear family.

  I’m used to looking at other people’s family photos by now. For years I was consumed with jealousy, but I’ve seen too many instances where pictures don’t necessarily tell the true story. The coworker who posts on Facebook about her romantic weekend cries at lunch on Monday because she suspects an affair, or the father who proudly displays his family on his desk goes home to ignore them all night. Or worse, slaps them around.

  Cassie and family look happy, but it’s possible they’re not. It’s likely one or more of them is rebarbative. Of course, they could be similar to Grace’s family—they have small problems like everyone else, but they love and respect each other. They laugh together. The kind of family that still makes me envious.

  I know I’m allowed to poke through her drawers for my own use, but not in the way I do now. I want to know what was wrong with them. Under the tank tops sits a plain black journal. Cassie might be the kind of girl who puts hearts over the letter I, which is most definitely rebarbative.

  I hold the book by my side when Maria walks in saying, “I need a sweatshirt or something.”

  “She has plenty.”

  Maria waves at the desk. “Cassie never throws anything out. She’s not the neatest person, as you can see. There are probably clothes from high school in that closet.”

  “What does she do?” I ask. “Is she a painter?”

  “She did paint,” Maria throws a couple of sweaters on the bed and then gives a sad sort of smile, “but she stopped after her parents died in a car accident. They died three years ago this month. Her work was beautiful.”

  “Oh.”

  That happy family isn’t exactly happy anymore. Cassie wouldn’t have pictures of them everywhere if she didn’t love them.

  “Cassie does art programs with the kids at the Community Center. It’s the only time she still paints. She grew up in this apartment. The landlady’s gone most of the time, visiting her grandkids in Chicago, so she let her have the apartment cheap as long as she watched the upstairs. Cassie and her brother got some money after Abby and Pat died, but they decided to use it to pay off the house upstate.”

  She pulls on a sweater and looks at me intently. “Cassie would like that you’re here. She’d want you to wear her clothes and eat the food. I feel better that my girls are with her.”

  I can tell she loves Cassie, maybe loved the whole family, and I don’t think Maria pretends to like people. She leaves the room, and leaves me feeling small and petty for wanting them to be as miserable as I was. As miserable as I still am, possibly, since I take to doing things like rifling through drawers in order to curb my envy. It won’t make my childhood any better for hers to have sucked, too.

  I open the journal, no longer looking for faults. I don’t know what I’m looking for now, except maybe to know this girl whose life I’ve stepped into. The first page is dated less than three years ago, which would’ve been after her parents died, but the writing under the date has been blacked out. The next pages are the same, and all that remains of another few are the torn edges where they were ripped from the spine. The date skips a few months ahead, then six months, the short paragraphs all solid black. Every single word has been redacted.

  The last, undated page says only: FUCK THIS. It’s underlined twice. No exclamation point, no heart over the I—just a simple statement. It’s pretty much the way I feel about journals, about feelings in general. I understand the sentiment, but I wish I didn’t, and I feel a bit better about myself when I wish she’d never had to understand it either.

  Chapter 29

  Maria and I stand over the camping stove outside, where she heats jars of soup and I watch the houses across the yard. Evidently, the fumes from a camping stove used inside can kill you. Another thing I didn’t know. Even Grace knew that, and she regaled us with a cheery story of a family who died while trying to heat their tent. I’m beginning to think I’d be dead in a day if left to my own devices—I would’ve fired it up in the kitchen without a second thought.

  The houses’ windows are empty, but I have the disturbing sensation of being watched and jump every time the wind rustles tree branches. “There’s nothing we can do about it if someone’s here,” Maria says. “We might as well let them know we are. The more people we have, the better.”

  I make a noise that isn’t quite disagreement. People are unpredictable and dangerous. Plus, more people means less food. Less food means the sooner we have to find more or die trying. More people also means more, well, people.

  “All right, we’re good,” Maria says, and lifts the pot to bring inside.

  Once we’ve served ourselves soup and sat in the living room, I take a tentative bite of the vegetables and chunky chicken. I promised my body vitamins, so I’m planning to take one for the team, but the soup is surprisingly tasty. I keep the information that I had no idea you could can your own soup to myself—I knew about fruit and jams, but I thought soup and stuff like that had to be canned by a factory—but I do say, “This is really good.”

  Maria nods. “I haven’t had Abby’s soup in years. It’s old but it tastes fine.”

  “I brought up that bucket and put it in the bathroom,” Jorge says of the five gallon bucket with a toilet lid that attaches to the top. These people thought of everything, whereas my cabinets at home are close to empty and my fridge littered with the remains of various takeout dinners.

  “We’ll have to do something else soon. Bad sanitation kills millions of people every year. We’ll need somewhere to put it.” Maria turns to me and Grace. “You girls can have the bedroom since you don’t mind sleeping in the same bed.”

  Grace and I object, but Maria holds up her hands. “Don’t argue. I’m too tired to think about it. The couch folds out, and tomorrow we’ll bring down a mattress from upstairs.”

  We eat the rest of our soup quickly in order to beat the setting sun. We won’t put on a lantern until we’ve blocked the windows and know who or what is nearby. Jorge goes outside to close up the stove, and I turn on the tap before I remember that it will only mock me with its aridity.

  Maria laughs. “I’ve done that five times.”

  “I flick on the light every single time I go into a room,” Grace says.

  The garden apartment is darker than a higher floor, but fewer windows mean fewer entry points. And, with the locked wrought iron gates on the front windows, someone is less likely to attempt entry.

  “Old habits.” Maria shakes her head as she wipes out the bowls with a dishtowel. “We won’t wash them until we have more water.”

  “The food would last a lot longer by yourself,” I say.

  Grace frowns at me before she leaves for the living room. I thought it while I watched two jars of soup disappear. Our one meal could’ve been two days of food for Maria. She doesn’t seem disturbed, but that could be because we have a lot of food at the moment.

  “But who would I have for company?” she asks. I shrug and turn to leave, but Maria catches my arm. “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t want to be alone.”

  Her eyes flick between mine so sincerely that I think she means it, at least for today. But I owe her my life and any living I do in the days to come. “Thank you. I’ll pay you back somehow.”

  “There’s no need f—”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  She drops her hand. “All right. Fine.”

  When everything is as clean as it can be without water, we brush our teeth and Grace and I settle under the covers in Cassie’s room. After a hospital mattress and a bathroom floor, the queen mattress is bliss.

  “We’ll go to your house and your parents’ as soon as we can,” I whisper.

  “Do you think they tried to leave?” Grace asks.

  She knows I’ll tell the truth. Her parents have a car and enough money to hole up out of the city. They don’t have a stocked basement, but they usually have a large amount of food. Her brother may be out of reach, but the
y’d starve to death before they left Grace behind in a city full of zombies.

  “No,” I say. “They’ll wait for you. They’d never leave.”

  “I know Logan wouldn’t.”

  Logan is a hulking financial whiz who thinks the sun rises and sets on Grace. He’s kind and funny in a goofy way, and he rolls his eyes at the nutritious, health-craze-fad-of-the-week meals Grace forces on him but eats them in good humor. He might’ve gone looking for Grace, but he would never leave. I won’t mention that he might have come to the hospital.

  “No way would he leave.”

  She exhales. “I know.”

  I picture Maria’s daughters in a van on their way to that log cabin and hope they made it. I want Bart to be cruising off to his family. I want Grace and Logan to be reunited, and for her parents to be safe and sound. I truly want all of these things, even though I have no one with whom to reunite. Maybe I’m done begrudging people their families. Misery might love company, but a world of family-less people is far too miserable of a thought.

  “We’ll find them,” I say. “They might have left for a Safe Zone, but we can find them there once we figure out where they are.”

  “You don’t have to come,” Grace says. “I have to go, but you can stay.”

  She thinks she has to say it, but she also knows it would never happen, just as there was no way she’d leave me alone at the hospital while my mother died. I might not have been the best daughter, but I’m not a shitty friend. My mother put me in the center of it, and, by doing so, she put Grace there, too. I’m used to my mom fucking with me, but Grace is off limits.

  “Are you crazy? Like I’d let you go by yourself. When do you want to try?”