I back up, hoping she hasn’t seen me, but she says, “Sorry.”
“I once threw a dresser drawer into my wall. It happens.” It isn’t a particularly helpful comment, so I add, “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”
I’ve taken two more steps when Maria says, “I’ve always done one thing right, and that’s take care of my kids.” She removes the trowel with a vicious tug and drops it on the shelf. “And now they’re God knows where. The worst part is that I don’t know.”
She stares into the distance as though it offers a clue. When it doesn’t, the look of utter misery that crosses her face makes me want to both comfort her and escape. I move closer; Grace would be proud.
“You did take care of them,” I say. “You told them to leave.” I’m sure it won’t make her feel better, but this is when normal people say something consoling. Plus, it’s true. “You did the best you could do.”
“I should’ve had them leave earlier, without me. I didn’t know they were going to blow up the bridges, but I knew…” She looks me in the eye. “I knew the infected were zombies. I knew for hours. I wanted them to wait. I told them to get ready to leave, but I didn’t tell them to go. I kept them here for me.”
If there has ever been someone who doesn’t need to beat herself up for selfishness, it’s Maria. I’m living proof of that.
“You say Ana’s a lot like me, right?” I ask. Maria nods. “If you were my mother, I would’ve waited until the last possible second. I wouldn’t have listened unless I had no choice.”
“That’s Ana,” Maria says with a small, reluctant smile. “Penny wouldn’t have, either. It would be the one time they’ve ever agreed on anything. They didn’t want to go when I called, but I made them promise.”
“See? And they did. They’re lucky to have you.”
Her eyes are still sad, but the anger has abated. I hope the blame has. For once, I’ve made someone feel better instead of worse. Maria comes to the doorway and gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Thank you.”
“De nada,” I say.
“Oh, we’re speaking Spanish now?”
“If all we ever say is thank you, you’re welcome, and hello, then sure. Oh, and a few curses I picked up here and there. Yiddish might have curses, but all I know is tuchas.”
Maria smirks. “Butt? Ooh, tough girl.”
I suck my teeth. “I’ll pound that tuchas if you don’t watch out.”
Maria’s laugh is loud as we move toward the house. An answering moan from the street carries over the buildings. “Vete pa’l carajo, motherfuckers,” Maria mutters, and then glances at me. “That means go to hell. I think you know the last word.”
I repeat the words with a laugh. It’s a lot more satisfying than tuchas. Look at what you learn when you stick around.
Chapter 34
Jorge is on the fire escape, plotting the yards on his hand-drawn map. I’m in the kitchen, assessing Cassie’s knife collection. They look to be good-enough knives, but they’re made for cutting through carrots and cheese, not skull. The skinny knives feel flimsy and the weighty ones are too wide for an eye socket. I swung the poker around for three minutes before admitting defeat. It’s too long, too heavy, too un-pointy.
I open a drawer filled with cooking implements—I can whisk them to death. I look through a small drawer that contains assorted junk and a few basic tools. That’s when it hits me: I’m an idiot. I pick up a long screwdriver. Like Maria’s ice pick but thicker and sturdier. The slim metal will plunge into eyes and mouths and ears, and it’s the same length as a knife. I’ve been thinking kitchen utensils and hunting gear when it comes to weapons, but it’s time to get creative.
“Can I use this?” I ask Maria.
She stands at the counter and dumps pasta into a pot of water to soak. The theory is that it cooks faster, thereby limiting fuel usage and time spent in the yard. We’re saving the freeze-dried food because it’s light and so easy to prepare that we can take it with us if we leave.
“Of course,” she says. “Why, you have a loose screw?”
“I have a screw loose,” I say. She laughs, probably in agreement. “No, I think it’d be a good weapon.”
“It’s all yours.”
Grace walks into the kitchen, eyes puffy. I show her my screwdriver. She takes another for herself then turns it over in her hands.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Do you realize I haven’t killed one yet?” she asks, ignoring my question Sylvie-style. “How do I think I’m going to get to Brooklyn Heights when I haven’t even killed one?”
“We might be able to find a zombie for you to kill. I can’t make any promises, but maybe if we look hard enough…”
Grace gives me a light stab with the screwdriver, along with a slight smile. Outside, we climb the ladder Jorge sets by the fence and drop into the next yard. It’s mostly grass, like ours. Ours—the word makes me cringe. None of this is mine.
We have an idea of what lurks on the upper floors of the houses, but the garden apartments are a mystery. Jorge knocks on the back door a few times before he breaks the glass, and we walk into a kitchen that hasn’t been remodeled since the 70s. Avocado green everything.
“Hello?” Maria calls.
It’s silent as a tomb. Which is a horrible metaphor for this world, and I pledge not to use it in my head ever again. We open the kitchen faucet, as both Tom Brown, Jr. and Jorge recommend, then walk through the tidy apartment and call into the basement. I go first, screwdriver raised, with Grace shining the flashlight over my shoulder. An eighty-gallon water heater sits beside a furnace in a roomed-off area in the musty basement. The valve turns with the help of my trusty screwdriver for leverage, and water spills into my cup. I give Grace a V for victory. Eighty gallons is twenty more days of water.
The next few houses are fairly empty of food, but we find more water heaters, clothes for Jorge, and batteries. The two yards at the top of the block parallel the backs of stores on the avenue. One of the yards ends at a brick wall. The other has two tiny courtyards behind its fence—back entry to a couple of the stores.
“I think we can get into those stores from here,” Jorge says, after he takes a look. “You know what else I’m thinking? If we clear out the houses on the blocks around us, we’d only have to cross the street and then go through the yards to get to the next block. We could make a whole route to get around the neighborhood.”
It’s brilliant. Cross the street into a building, walk the block through the yards, then cross the next street and do the same. Less opportunity to get eaten is always the superior choice.
“Jorge, I think I love you,” I say.
He lifts his shoulders. “We’re gonna check those houses for food anyway, right? We might as well.”
“It’s a great idea,” Grace says. Jorge waves away her praise.
“All members of the Jorge—wait, what’s your last name?” I ask.
“Rivera.”
“All members of the Jorge Rivera fan club, raise your hands.”
Maria and Grace stick their hands in the air. Jorge’s cheeks go ruddy. “All right, all right, let’s keep going.”
We scale the fence—lugging the ladder around is more trouble than it’s worth, and we need practice scaling fences if it’s to become our main mode of travel. The next house has two raised garden beds that are empty of plants but full of dirt. Maria mentions the garden store again.
“That’s a better idea,” Jorge says. “You know how to grow stuff?”
“A little,” Maria says. “We’ll get some books. Sylvie will read them, take notes, and tell us what we need to know.”
“I don’t know if putting Sylvie in charge of vegetables is the best idea,” Grace says.
I stick out my tongue. “I won’t kill them on purpose as long as I don’t have to eat them.”
Jorge tries the knob of the door, then knocks a few times. A woman in her early twenties, with short bangs and a hideous blouse that should’ve stayed in the 1980s, h
its the glass. Grace yelps, but I manage to withhold any sound. I’ve transitioned from frozen in terror to somewhat horrified at the sight of a zombie. It’s a step in the right direction.
A guy appears beside her, his beard, shirt and suspenders caked with brown. Suspenders. Hipster zombies. The glass of the door shatters under his fist—he’s strong. The sounds that were muffled now waft through the air, as does the smell. Hipster Zombie’s arm is through the glass to his shoulder, and, predictably but fascinatingly, he’s untroubled that his biceps are being sliced to ribbons. Black fluid drips from the slashed flesh. This couple’s blood has darkened over time—it smells worse, too—but it no longer gushes red.
We have to kill them. I don’t know what else to call it—off, finish, end, destroy, terminate? It doesn’t matter, but since they’re already dead, a better word might be in order.
“It’ll never be easier than through a door window,” I say to Grace.
She nods even as she pales a shade. Jorge knocks at the shards of glass stuck in the frame, since he wears men’s leather gloves we found in the basement. Cassie is a mitten girl, which is great for winter but not for dexterity. The Hipster Zombies snap at Jorge’s fingers whenever he comes close, and once the glass is gone they lean over the frame, arms extended and mouths wide. Everything about their gray-lavender skin is appalling—from the way it’s gone grainy and sunken, defining all the bones you know exist but don’t want to see, to the way it darkens around their eyes. Their eyes are atrocious: yellowed whites and irises that have lost their color so that they nearly glow. They resemble dead fish in a seafood market. Angry, ravenous dead fish.
“How—” Grace begins, then swallows. “How do I get close with their arms in the way?”
Jorge stretches the guy’s arm tight by the wrist so that the mouth can’t reach and mimes a knife blow into its ear and eye. He releases the arm. “Hold up.”
He hands his gloves to Grace, who shakily dons them over the latex gloves from the medicine bin in the basement. She grabs Hipster Guy’s arm and swings for his head. The screwdriver glances off skull above his ear. She curses. On her next, more energetic swing, a few inches of screwdriver disappear into the side of his head.
Hipster Guy sags over the door. Hipster Girl uses the opportunity to take hold of Grace’s shoulder, and Grace spins with a shriek. She takes Hipster Girl by the hair and brings the screwdriver into her cheek, then yanks it out and strikes again, this time aiming toward the brain. She does it again. And again. Globs of pinkish brown jelly hit the ground. Hipster Girl is completely dead, but Grace doesn’t stop. Her lip curls so that her teeth show. At strike six, I call her name. She turns, panting and eyes wild.
“Think you got her, there,” I say.
The left side of Hipster Girl’s face is obliterated. She hangs out the door at an angle, fingers of one hand brushing the concrete doorstep. Grace opens her mouth and lets out a squeak, then bends to allow her breakfast to splatter to the ground.
I pat her back. “You did great.”
She groans and throws up again, then spits. “Sorry. I can do it, I know I can.”
“You did do it,” Maria says. She rests an arm around Grace’s shoulder. “It takes some getting used to.”
“I’ll move the bodies to the front,” Jorge says. Once he’s put on his gloves and dragged the girl away, we step over the guy and into the kitchen. They have food in the cabinets. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods kind of food, including soy milk that hasn’t been opened.
“Look, soy milk,” I say. “Your reward for a job well done.”
“Don’t. I’ll throw up again.”
I open the fridge and grimace at the rotten smell. Grace lifts a vitamin-type bottle from the door. “Ooh, those are the best probiotics. I’m taking them.”
“You find probiotics and suddenly you’re fine?”
She holds the bottle up and gives me a cheesy smile. “Good for the digestive system even before you take them.”
I laugh. “Probiotics are your version of my finding a box of chocolates, and there’s something very wrong with that.”
Jorge returns for the guy’s body. “You should see the front.”
We walk past IKEA furniture to the splintered front door. An almost fully-consumed body lies in the hall. Someone broke in, and they ate him. “Zombies would make good guard dogs,” Jorge says, which gives us all a good, if tasteless, chuckle.
Jorge drags all three bodies to the front patch of concrete and ducks back inside, then consults his homemade map. “We didn’t see one at the windows upstairs, but we’ll check when we can. Too many of them out there right now.”
We know not every zombie made it to a window, and we plan on a thorough search of each house, but this garden apartment has no way to access the top floors of the brownstone without a trip up the stoop—out of the question today. We have a look through the goods in their bedroom and find clothes in Grace’s size, including some vintage stuff that’s useless except for a pair of opera-length leather gloves that fit her perfectly. I’d do a whole lot and then some for a pair of gloves like them.
We score another water heater in the basement and leave for the next yard. Grace breathes deep outside the house, screwdriver at the ready, and she and Jorge take care of the couple upstairs. Grace’s gloves have emboldened her—no gagging and no hesitation.
In another house down the line, Maria and Jorge check upstairs while Grace and I head for the basement. I’m crouched and wrestling with the water heater’s spigot when a cockroach skitters across my latex glove. I leap to my feet with a scream that would wake the dead if they weren’t already up, then hit at an itch on my leg and jump around, hoping to shake off what I know in my right mind are imaginary bugs. But roaches don’t put me in my right mind.
“Check my back!” I yell to Grace.
Grace raises her flashlight and, in doing so, illuminates three more roaches on the wall. Their antennae vibrate as they scurry away in streaks of brown. I hold in another scream and run upstairs, where I slam into Maria and Jorge in the dim hallway.
Jorge dashes to the basement. Maria takes me by the shoulders. “What happened? Where’s Grace?”
“She’s fine.” I smack at my arm. The roaches were in the basement, but where you see four, there are twenty million more. “There were roaches.”
“You mean cockroaches?”
She’s unfazed by the news, and I wish I hadn’t freaked out. “I don’t like roaches. Like, really don’t like them. It’s kind of a phobia.”
Grace enters the hallway shaking her head. Jorge follows, red-faced. “Roaches,” he gets out, and then loses the battle with his sense of humor and collapses against the wall. I watch the ceiling while they get in a good laugh at my expense.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “I know. It’s their color. That brownish golden shiny—” I shiver. “And when they run, they rise up on their horrible legs like a tiny car lift. Their legs fold. And they skitter. And they’re fast.”
I’ll gladly take a giant spider outside. I’ll even let it live in my house, especially since it might eat a roach. Give me a tissue and I’ll squish a centipede without a second thought. I don’t even need a tissue for little ants. But I live in fear of roaches—everywhere I’ve ever lived as an adult has been thoroughly sprayed by an exterminator prior to my moving in, and monthly thereafter. The thought of a roach or, God in Heaven, a waterbug—the American Cockroach, a roach on steroids—is enough to send me straight to the looney bin.
“Girl, you live in the wrong city for a roach phobia,” Maria says.
“Tell me about it.”
“She won’t eat dates,” Grace says, “because they’re the same color as roaches.”
This elicits more laughs. I doubt I’d eat dates with abandon anyway, but their color keeps me far away.
“Did you know that roaches live in the engines in the back of the bus?” I ask.
No one knows what to do with this bit of information, as shown by their puz
zled expressions. Unbelievably, no one seems upset. We aren’t hopping on the B75 anytime soon, but roaches live on the bus. It’s the reason I avoid buses. If I absolutely have to take one, I stand in the front and hold a pole rather than sit. One summer night I saw an army of waterbugs spilling from a grate in the sidewalk and I never walked down that street again. They hide behind dumpsters and under things and between things, and if I think too much about it I’ll die.
“It’s called katsaridaphobia,” I say. Again, blank stares.
I know why I hate them. Growing up, we didn’t live in the most opulent of accommodations. I can still see the dark spots floating in my mother’s forgotten drink when the sun shone through our plastic cups. I would stick bits of toilet paper in my ears while I slept so none could decide to call the warmth of my ear canals home. I was terrified to pee in the night. First, I’d put on shoes. Always shoes. Then I’d stumble my way to the bathroom. I didn’t want to watch the dozens of roaches race across the tile floor when I pulled the light cord, but I had to know if one was near the toilet. It’s the reason I left almost everything behind when I moved in with Grace’s family. They wanted to pick up my stuff but I refused, making sure I washed and dried every article of clothing at the laundromat first. I checked every shoe and every book and then sprayed them with poison for good measure. I felt pitiable enough taking them up on their offer without bringing an unwanted houseguest or thousand with me.
“Let’s switch jobs,” Jorge says. “If there are roaches in this basement, they’ll probably be in the next house, too.”
I thank him and smack at a tickle on my thigh, then roll my eyes at their snickers.
“I bet you didn’t scream that loud when you first saw a zombie,” Maria says.