Maria sees me watching and pads close. “You’re wondering what that was about.”
I’m fairly certain I’ve just watched them euthanize a human, and it doesn’t upset me as much as it would have yesterday. I’ve seen the alternative. “He was bitten?”
Maria nods. “A small bite on his arm. We didn’t want to scare everyone. We’ll move his body to the freezer in the kitchen.”
Whatever was in the morgue is now in the hall where we left the bodies. The doors are locked and have no windows, but if you knock you get an answer, although it’s more of a body slam. I make a mental note not to eat anything frozen. “Won’t that…infect the food?”
“No, we’ll wrap him up first. He won’t touch the food.”
I imagine them laying him on a counter next to one of those industrial-sized rolls of Saran Wrap and spinning him around. It’s completely inappropriate and hysterically funny at the same time—in the hysteria sense of the word. I bite my lip so I don’t laugh aloud.
“That injection is how we took care of them once they finally told us there was nothing else to do,” Maria says. “It destroys the brain stem so the virus can’t take hold. They waited too long. If they’d told us sooner, maybe…” Her shoulders raise and drop almost imperceptibly. “You should rest.”
“I can’t sleep. I can help, if you want.” It’ll be better than sitting and thinking. I’m not much of a joiner, but I like to pitch in.
“You can check on the patients, give them water, and get one of us if they need something. It would be a big help. Thank you.”
I remember she’d said something about her girls. “You have daughters? Did they leave the city?”
“Two, about your age. They should be gone already. They had somewhere safe to go. I hope they listened.”
She clasps her hands so tight her fingers whiten. It must be nice to have a mother who worries about your own welfare more than hers. Who calls to keep you safe rather than to ask for money.
“Why wouldn’t they listen?” I ask.
“My younger daughter is…stubborn. Her sister will make her go.”
“I’m sure they left.” I don’t say it just to make her feel better—I can’t imagine why one wouldn’t get the hell out of New York if they could.
Maria rests the back of her hand on her forehead and closes her eyes. “I hope so. I’m going to get some sleep.” She pats my arm and walks to where the nurses sleep in shifts on the floor.
I spend the next hours touring beds with the young nurse, Olga. I bring patients sips of water while trying to ignore things like surgical wounds closed with staples. Although, after today, I’ll take an open wound on a living person over a zombie. People once boasted about how they’d be super-fighters and run around cracking heads when the zombies came. But now that the once-fictional creatures are a reality, I’m pretty sure most of the world isn’t doing anything of the sort. They’re either dead or running or hiding.
“Nurse?” a voice asks.
It belongs to a teenager. I thought he was older from a distance, but up close I see he’s eighteen at most, with a skinny face and dark eyes that look the tiniest bit sad with the way they turn down at the corners. He wears scrubs and looks healthy enough until I notice the sweat beaded on his temples and along the part shaved into his fade. His arms move to clutch his midsection and he breathes shallowly.
“I’m not a nurse, but I can get one for you. Are you okay? You don’t look okay.”
“I’m all right. I just need some water.”
“That I can do,” I say. “What’s your name so I can find your cup?”
“Everyone calls me Lucky. But I think it says my last name, Michaels.” I run to find his cup and then watch him drink. The sheen of perspiration on his face is already drying by the time he hands it back. “Thanks.”
“Are you here by yourself?” I ask.
His eyes seek out the visitors who sleep on the floor beside gurneys, but he shrugs. “Yeah.”
“Did you get in touch with anyone?”
“Nah, I couldn’t get through.”
I don’t want to pester him, but he’s just a kid. He needs a mother or a father or someone to be with him. “I’m Sylvie. Why are you here?”
“Kidney stones.”
“It looks like it hurts,” I say. “Maybe they should call you something other than Lucky.”
He finally smiles and, when he does, his eyes turn up and he looks like the kid he is. “It’s a little better now.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me know if you need anything else, okay?”
He nods. A deep rumble penetrates the subfloor of the hospital. Another follows. I take hold of a gurney, scaring the shit out of its old-lady occupant. The next two tremors aren’t as strong, and by now the entire cafeteria has woken. I run to Grace, who sits with her good hand braced on the wall, eyes unblinking.
“Oh, my God,” she says.
I sink to my hands and knees as the floor shakes again. There’s nothing to grab onto in any sense of the word. Nothing to stabilize the shaking of the room. No clinging to hope that the plan will change. They’ve done it. They’ve really and truly just killed us all.
Chapter 5
The nurses hand out food that was made yesterday. I’ve barely eaten, but I’m full after one bite of a tasteless sandwich. The rumbling and shaking finally stopped, and it’s been quiet in here ever since. I don’t imagine it’s quiet outside, though. I imagine it’s anything but quiet.
Across the room, Jorge talks to Bart. He points to the ceiling and then jiggles his keys. Bart sets down his phone. It was attached to his ear all night, but the same people who were supposed to get him out of the city couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer his pleas for help. Godspeed and good luck, they said, before they stopped answering.
“Excuse me, everyone?” Bart calls. It was close to silent, but now you could hear a pin drop. Or a bomb. “We’re going to go up to the roof to check out the situation. We’ll give a report when we come down.”
“Can I go?” Craig asks, though he’s already heading for the hall in his jacket.
After a moment’s hesitation, Bart nods. I jump to my feet; if he gets to go, then we get to. Grace is with me on this, I know, because she has her coat in hand. The Giants jersey couple is up, too.
Bart looks to Jorge, who says, “All right, we’ll take the people who are well.”
Maria confers with a few nurses, then places her stethoscope on a table and joins our group.
Jorge unlocks the service elevator call buttons. As we rise, he tells us that most of the top floor and the last few flights of the closest stairwell are clear. We step from the elevator into a hall with a few office doors. It ends at the same type of double doors as on my mother’s floor.
There are several elevator banks, positioned in different hospital wings, and Grace and I were lucky enough to be in a part of the hospital where we could be rescued. Others weren’t. The hospital’s layout confused me when I arrived to find my mother, as it varies floor to floor, and now it feels like a labyrinth of death. But, as long as I stick close to Jorge, I suppose I’m safe.
Jorge motions us up the staircase to the roof. The muffled whup whup of helicopters makes its way through the thick door. When Jorge pulls it open, the sound thumps like a second heart in my chest and the acrid aroma of electrical fire stings my nose.
I’m afraid to see, but afraid not to. Maybe the world isn’t ending, though it sounds and smells as if it is. Either way, I want to know—I need to know. My shoulder presses to Grace’s as we walk to the center of the roof. I’d envisioned a helicopter pad, but the roof is only vents and tar paper, with a large, round wooden water tank and metal rectangles that house mechanical things.
Smoke drifts above our heads. Something pounds from a distance, like a giant hammer beating at the city. Helicopters swing and dip over the water. Gunshots pop. Car horns bleat under it all. It mixes into a disharmo
ny that makes my heart misfire.
We trail Jorge and Bart to one end of the roof. I stand well away from the edge and look to the wide expanse of water a block away. New York Bay stretches for a few miles, I think, until it hits the shore of northern New Jersey. And every inch of it is full of boats—small boats and yachts and ships, and the bravest of souls in kayaks. They must be trying for Jersey or open water past the Verrazano, but no one in the jam of boats has gotten far.
A ship loaded with containers blows its horn. Ant-sized figures run and wave on the smaller vessels, but the ship stays on course. The figures jump into the water before the metal plows through, leaving fiberglass and wood and bodies in its wake. A yacht bursts into flames and a solid wall of black envelops the scene. Maybe the ship couldn’t stop, or maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, people just died in front of my eyes. Again. My hand rises to my mouth of its own accord, as shaky as my breath.
To the right, boats attempt to dock on the crowded shores of the oval of Governors Island. Farther upriver, swirling dust and smoke hide Manhattan from view. Bart bends to the street below and shakes his head. Grace does the same and comes toward me, eyes tearing from the particles in the air or the hopelessness of the view.
“They’re everywhere!” she yells in my ear.
A prickly, awful kind of awe spreads to my limbs and numbs my brain. We’re trapped—in the hospital, in the city, in this world that barely resembles the world of yesterday.
A plane roars overhead. Seconds later, thundering explosions send me to the tar paper, arms over my head. When I’m brave enough to stand, the bay smolders. Another bomb—it had to be. The remaining boats bob and tip until they flip or slip beneath the waves. A man overboard swims amid the wreckage. He struggles atop an overturned hull and then plunges back into the water when the spinning, fiery yacht reduces the hull to shreds.
I search the choppy water, willing him to surface, but he doesn’t. They’re killing him. They’re killing everyone. This is a war zone, a genocide. A populicide. I’ve never put much faith in the government to look out for the little people, but this brazen murder has me icy with shock. Grace clutches my arm. Every bang makes us flinch. Nothing would stop them from dropping a bomb here. In fact, the hospital might be the best place to bomb.
A helicopter hovers at the other end of the roof, where the rest of Brooklyn spreads into the distance. Maria and Craig wave their arms, hair whipping in the air currents of the rotors. It swings and lowers. Maybe they’ll evacuate the sickest patients. Save some of us. Tell us what to do.
Grace and I force our frozen legs that way. It’s only when we near, after Maria’s and Craig’s arms drop, that I see the man who trains a camera on us from above. A news copter getting a close up of the people left to die, to play for someone, somewhere. Bart said the virus is everywhere, but if they’re still feeding off our misfortune, it can’t be as bad. Not yet.
I want to lasso the helicopter and send them down to the zombies, where they’ll find out what it’s like to have no way out. They’ve always been vultures, but now they really do circle the dying animals, awaiting our deaths. I walk to the edge of the roof as if the camera doesn’t exist. I won’t give them their footage of the desperate, pleading woman on the rooftop. Neither do the others, I’m happy to see. In time, it swoops away for more exciting subjects.
Brooklyn burns in places. Something explodes in the distance—a flash of brilliance and then billowing smoke and orange flames. People stand on far-off roofs to watch the streets. I grip our roof’s waist-high ledge and look below. Hundreds of zombies mill in the street. The bodega and few stores have shattered doors and windows where their security gates aren’t down.
A sedan turns the corner. It swerves around the wandering dead and plows under the rear of a parked delivery truck. The wheels spin until they smoke, but the car doesn’t budge. The doors fly open and the couple inside make a run for it. Only ten feet into their sprint, the man stumbles and falls. He’s buried by zombies in seconds. The woman reaches for him even as she backs away, but the infected advance and she disappears around the corner.
Another explosion comes from the water. The sun is blocked by a swirl of black that makes us cough and cloaks our vision. It’s too dangerous, even up here. I was glad to escape the basement, but now I want to go back. I’m no longer uncertain—the end of the world isn’t nigh, it’s now.
Grace and I link arms as we choke on whatever it is we breathe in—brick, concrete, metal, bodies—and make our way to the door.
Chapter 6
Maria comes to where Grace and I sit in silence in our cafeteria floor spot. We’ve barely spoken, and my leftover adrenaline isn’t enough to get me to my feet. I can circle the room like a caged animal or I can sit here, so I’ve chosen to sit. After we left the roof, Grace was a shade of white I’ve never seen. Now, it’s possible she’s meditating with her eyes closed and her hands resting on her knees. That I attempted to follow along made it clear I’d lost my mind, and I stopped when all it did was make me light-headed.
“I have a favor to ask,” Maria says. “Most of the cafeteria staff was sent home. We have to feed everyone on the pediatric floor and down here. Can you help with the cooking?”
“Sure,” I say.
I’m not much of a chef, but I doubt she means gourmet meals. While on my candy-striper shift, I wondered how long our food will last, how long forty-odd people can live in this hospital before self-interest and panic rear their ugly heads. I didn’t come up with a reassuring answer. I want something to do, and a job in the kitchen will allow me to ensure equal distribution of food.
“I’ll help,” Grace says.
“You can’t,” I say. “Your arm sti—”
“Sylvie, I’m going to fucking lose it if you say another word.”
I shut up. Maria brings us through the door behind the serving area to where Jorge and the woman in the orange sari, Prisha, work in a huge kitchen. Moveable stainless steel counters sit in the center of the space. Stovetop burners and ovens and fryers line one tiled wall, with sinks and industrial microwaves on the wall opposite. Two stainless steel doors lead to what may be the refrigerator and freezer. I swallow excess saliva at the thought of the security guard. I’m not touching that freezer with a ten-foot pole.
“This is the cafeteria kitchen,” Maria says. “The main kitchen is in the other building.”
Maria introduces Dawn, the plump, orange-haired older woman behind the serving counter yesterday. But Dawn runs a finger along a steel counter and stares into space without a flicker of acknowledgement. Dawn does not appear to be adjusting well to our situation.
“Maybe you have an idea of what we should make, Dawn,” Maria says.
“There was no delivery this week,” Prisha informs us when Dawn continues staring. “They were supposed to come yesterday.”
She opens the freezer door. A slew of boxes stamped with labels—chicken breasts, hamburger patties, French fries—sits on the wire shelves. I don’t see the guard. Either he’s hidden or they put him elsewhere.
What I thought was a refrigerator is a pantry of canned vegetables, soups and beverages. The refrigerators are in a wide corridor behind the far wall. Glass doors offer a view of fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, margarine and yogurt containers. I don’t feel hungry, but my stomach growls as if it knows better. To our right, the hall slopes up to the outside door, where deliveries came in and garbage went out. Now it keeps us in and zombies out.
Jorge has changed from his bloody scrubs into a button-down shirt with jeans—maybe his off-work clothes. He rubs his chin, fingers rasping on new-grown stubble. “How many people do we have to cook for?”
“I’ll make a list,” Maria says. “Why don’t you look through the food while I check with pediatrics?”
“We’ll make eggs and sausage,” Prisha says. No one argues. I couldn’t care less what we make and, although she’s tiny, her no-nonsense manner is huge.
Prisha leaves for the freezer
while Grace and I stare through the glass doors. For some reason, the yogurts are getting to me: little cups of normality lined up in bright-colored rows. Cows were milked, yogurt made, fruit added, and then tiny printed cups were filled, lidded and sent here on a truck. A bunch of small things that happened seamlessly to get yogurt behind this glass, and none of them is happening now. They might never happen again.
Grace’s shoulders shudder violently before she bursts into tears. Jorge folds her in his arms and looks at me for assistance. I pat Grace’s arm in a helpless fashion.
“We’re safe here,” he finally says.
“But how about everyone else?” she sobs. “My husband, my family…everyone?”
Jorge exhales. “I don’t know. I’m praying hard.”
She nods against his chest. I have acquaintances and work friends, but no one to worry about the way she does. I’m worried about her family, but I know it’s not the same as if they were my own. For once, I’m glad.
***
Jorge tells us that after the city power goes out, we’ll have the hospital generator, but no one knows how long it will run. Well, someone does, but they’re not here. Bart says a week, usually.
I turn on a gas burner. “How long will the gas last, do you think?”
“I know it’s under pressure,” Jorge says. He finishes arranging an entire loaf of bread on a tray and slides it into an oven to toast. “But that’s all I know.”
Grace cracks eggs one-handed into a humongous bowl. I drop a chunk of margarine into the largest frying pan I’ve ever seen and find a whisk hanging on a hook. I beat the eggs, dump them into the pan and add cheese slices. Jorge fills a pot I could practically bathe in with containers of soup.
“Everything’s so big,” I say. “Like we’ve wandered into a giant’s castle.”
Grace has only sniffled occasionally after her crying jag, and now she giggles. “Jorge’s spoon is as big as an oar.”
Jorge paddles the soup two-handed and hums “Row Your Boat.” I like Jorge, and not just because he saved my life, though that doesn’t hurt. He seems like a teddy bear of a guy, but I have a suspicion there’s a solid interior under the fuzzy exterior.