I back away from a man who has 200 pounds on me. His shirt is gone, his hanging stomach a mass of ropy gray-black innards. I’d hand him off to someone bigger, but Jorge and Eric are busy, and he’s coming for me with the flesh of his outstretched arms jiggling. If I run, he’ll go for Grace, who has her back to me while she fights another. I slant my chisel under his chin and his dead weight falls forward, arms locked on my waist.
It’s either allow myself to go down with him or go down anyway, only with two snapped legs. I drop with my bottom half under his weighty torso and extricate myself quickly, but the damage is done. My jeans are covered with rotten liquid and entrails, all of which the rain ensures will run down my legs and into Ana’s cute sneakers once I’m on my feet.
Something moves at eye level. A girl, maybe four. One side of her face is normal zombie and the other is skull with a staring round eyeball. Whatever made her faceless had to be brutal, but it didn’t remove the sequined pink headband with an offset bow. It perches over the skeletal side and makes her a contender for Worst Thing I’ve Seen So Far.
I twist her Disney princess shirt in one hand and bring the chisel into the side of her head. The eye is a better target, but I can’t bring myself to puncture that orb of yellow jelly. She was someone’s kid, like Manny. Like Leo. The thought of this happening to Leo is so awful—instant cold sweat awful—that I feel a little sympathy for Paul. Not much, but a little.
The other residents of the pizza place are finished off. I slowly lower the girl to the sidewalk and get to my feet. Grace moves beside me, her gaze on the bow. “That is…”
“I know.” I drag her into the store and away from the scrawny, sprawled limbs of the little girl.
Our flashlight beams cross over the empty counter. Bodies lie between red plastic booths. The door to the storage room is on the back wall, but I don’t have high hopes now that I’ve seen the number of people who took refuge in here.
Eric and I guard the front door while Grace and Jorge check. Grace comes rushing back. “There’s a ton of food. Oil and canned tomatoes and flour. Come look!”
I leave Eric at the door. Large cans of tomatoes are stacked on the shelves along with metal cans of olive oil. Jorge opens a cabinet to reveal more large bags of pizza flour than we can possibly carry. All the ready to eat foodstuffs—mozzarella cheese and meats and drinks—are eaten or rotted away.
“How do we get it all home?” I ask.
This is more than we anticipated, and more than our bags and two folding metal carts can hold. We thought if we found a lot, we’d take what we could carry and return for the rest. But now that I’ve seen all this glorious food, I can’t bring myself to leave a shred of it here. Not a grain of flour, or whatever you call flour. A sifting? A powder? It doesn’t matter—it’s coming with us. I’ll stay to guard it if I have to. It might be gone if we don’t.
Jorge cradles a can of tomatoes in one arm and runs his other hand along the cans and bags while he sizes them up. Based on his caress, I’d say he’s as reluctant to leave as I am. “The streets are clear enough to roll it home, if we can get more of these carts.”
“How about a discount store? I’ll see if there’s one nearby.” I run to the front and stick my head into the rain. There, on the next block, is a store that’s bound to have them.
“What’re you looking for?” Eric asks.
“We need more carts to bring it all back. They should have them in there.”
“I’ll come.” Eric watches in the direction Paul traveled. There’s no sign of his friend, although an alarm still sounds in the distance. It’s a good trick, one we can use until car batteries die. When they do, we can use something else that makes noise—a boombox, maybe. It could be a viable plan for when we return to Brooklyn Heights.
Grace slides the wood into place, and Eric and I step into the rain. He yanks me down between two parked cars so unexpectedly my back slams into a bumper. I swallow my yelp of pain.
“Sorry. Six coming,” Eric whispers, and points to the street side of the car. “Get ready to move.”
He’s coiled and crouched, knife in his hand on the bumper ahead of us. When he leans past me to check their progress, the soft skin of his neck, cool with rain but warm underneath, rests on my lips. I feel a single beat of his pulse before he pulls back and motions to the road.
I scuttle behind him to the opposite side of the car. Footsteps grow close then fade away. We run on the diagonal to the next block and step through the broken glass of the discount store’s window. The contents of shelves and bins have been tossed around and the candy aisle is a memory, as is any scrap of food. The party aisle is untouched. Understandably, no one’s been throwing parties.
Something crashes at the end of an aisle, and we freeze on our way to the far side of the store. Feet shuffle. A fuchsia and white marbled rubber ball rolls out of a center aisle, bumps off a hair dryer box and continues toward the door, making cheerful little bounces on its way. It’s almost as creepy as that little girl.
“Maybe it wants to play?” I whisper.
Eric shushes me. It’s coming anyway; we might as well speed up the process. The front of the store is a gloomy gray and the rear borders on charcoal, but it sounds like only one set of feet.
“Oh, just come out already,” I say in my normal voice.
“Geez,” Eric says with a shake of his head, but he’s resorted to his normal voice, too. “Don’t you know to be quiet?”
“So it can sneak up on us? If you’re going to have to deal with them, you might as well call them out. I do have some experience with this, you know.”
He huffs. Footsteps drag. A dark shape grows lighter with each successive step until a tiny, hunched old lady comes into view, probably moving as fast as she did in life. Eric steps in front of me and plants his knife in her forehead as if it takes no effort. Foreheads take a lot of effort.
“Through the skull,” I say. “That’s pretty impressive.”
“I do have some experience with this, you know,” Eric says in a high voice that’s supposed to mimic mine. I trip him on our way to the baggage aisle.
We grab the metal carts. I don’t want to waste any more time, but since the health and beauty products are up for grabs, I shove a few boxes of tampons in my bag. Eric looks away.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those guys who grow faint at the sight of pads and tampons,” I say.
“I’ve bought many a tampon in my time, I’ll have you know.”
“Many a tampon? Like, how many? A thousand? A million?”
He blatantly ignores me. We head for the pizzeria with carts still in their packaging. Eric gives a human-like knock on the plywood, and it slides over to reveal Paul. He thumps Eric’s shoulder as we enter. “We’ve got a few minutes ‘til the alarms stop.”
The food fills the carts and a couple of backpacks. There have to be forty large cans of tomatoes, hundreds of pounds of flour and a whole lot of olive oil. I don’t know the calorie count, but I’m guessing it’s pretty high. I give my assigned cart a tentative push. The cans of tomatoes, garbage bag wrapped flour bags, and oil are heavy, but I’d push a ton of food home singlehandedly if I could find it. And it’s better than carrying a hundred pounds on my back, which is what I’d have to do otherwise.
The rain has lessened. We move at a steady pace for the first few blocks, although the grinding of wheels on sidewalk is louder than I’d like. Another few blocks and we run into our first zombies. I grab my chisel, but Jorge strides forward with his cleaver while Eric and Paul make quick work of the other two. Even with the rain, their blood is thick, a viscous black. Aged zombies.
Two blocks from home, my cart wobbles for a couple feet before a front wheel splits and it tilts forward to rest on its metal axle. Grace stops beside me, brow furrowed and wet hair stuck to her face. “Just leave it.”
“No way. We can’t leave all this food. Let’s at least bring it to a house.”
Eric pushes his cart toward Paul
. “Can you get two? I’ll help carry it, you go ahead.”
Paul arranges the two behind his back to pull instead of push. “Maybe we should leave it.”
“I am not leaving this cart.” I tilt it and roll another fifteen feet on its rear wheels before one of them goes with a solid crack. I want to scream, but I mutter, “Stupid made in China piece of shit.”
“All right, all right, just wait,” Eric says.
He wraps a hand around one of the uppermost bars and lifts the front into the air while I raise the handle. We move slowly, as two people attempting to move in sync with an unwieldy cart are wont to do. The lower end swings into my shin and then the handle takes a turn on my rib cage with every step. I’m dripping with warm sweat, cold rain and an unreasonable amount of rage directed toward a red metal cart and my now-defunct country’s trade agreements. After the tenth jab in my gut, I want to drop the stupid thing.
We only have to get it into a house—any one of our safe houses will do—and then we can pick up our dry food later or tomorrow. If we leave it out here the flour might be ruined, or stolen, and this flour could be what keeps us alive in the not so distant future.
But the next side street has zombies and our house is only a zombie-free block away. At the rate we’re going, the last block feels more like a last mile, and that’s with Eric taking the brunt of the weight. Nine zombies spill from a bakery’s recessed entrance. Paul and Jorge pull ahead, carts rattling on the concrete. Eric lowers his end and jogs to help while Grace and I watch the corner we passed. The Lexers are wet, but they definitely saw us and must be on their way. In no time at all, the bakery zombies are dead.
“Should we have helped with that?” Grace asks.
“We’ll bake them cupcakes,” I say, and she snorts.
Eric returns for our load. The rain turns to a deluge once again. Grace catches up to Jorge, who holds his thumb in the air at the corner to convey that our block is safe. Around the bend and we’ll be home. They wait for us to cover the half block, but Eric waves them on. After a moment’s hesitation, they disappear from sight. No one wants to chance wet, ruined flour.
Rain pelts my head and runs down my back. I turn to look behind us. A single Lexer has rounded the corner. The others can’t be far behind.
“Forget it,” I say.
“What?” Eric yells over the rain.
“Let’s leave it in the bakery,” I yell back.
Eric looks over my shoulder, where three more have joined the first, and nods. He doesn’t look worried—maybe a little concerned, but not nervous. He turns into the bakery entrance and stops short. The front of the cart drops with a crash and the handle slams into my gut hard enough that I gasp.
“Don’t do it!” a voice shouts. A teenager no more than sixteen stands in the open doorway, dull black pistol in his hand. He’s dressed to the nines in new sneakers, a leather coat and perfect cornrows in his hair. His round cheeks still have baby fat and he has round eyes to match. He doesn’t look tough, but his gun does.
Blood roars through my arteries, filling my brain with a steady thunk louder than the rain. Eric’s hand drops. Another kid steps out from behind the first and pulls Eric’s gun from his holster. This one has a pale skinny face, spiky dark hair, two gold chains and a colorful tracksuit. He couldn’t be more Brooklyn Italian if he took a time machine back to the 1990s. If his name isn’t Vinnie, I’ll eat my wet sneakers.
“Bring it in here,” he says in a heavy Brooklyn accent, and opens the plate glass door.
Eric is expressionless except for very pissed off eyes, and he motions that we do as they say. We carry our load into the bakery followed by the two kids. The glass cases have been smashed, the shelves behind them picked clean. All that remains are the plaster models of tiered wedding cakes for order, although one has been sawed into pieces, possibly by someone so hungry they thought it worth a try.
We set down the cart. Any minute now Paul or Jorge will come to see what’s taking so long, and, when they do, these kids will be sorry. I console myself with that thought until the Italian kid says, “Take it in back.”
Eric lifts his end with a calm nod in my direction. I think he’s telling me to bide our time. We walk through the raised section of counter and into a kitchen with enormous mixers and ovens. The floor is tracked with the dirty, pasty remains of flour and sugar, but otherwise empty of food. Once in, Baby Fat lets the door close and stands in front of it with his gun.
Paul and Jorge call from outside. They might hear if I scream, but Eric wraps his hand around my wrist until my fingers go numb. Their voices are frantic over the drumbeat of rain.
“Don’t make no noise,” Italy says. I swear his voice cracks.
With the two windows of frosted glass on the back wall, there’s enough light to see Italy and Baby Fat exchange a look of delight when they inspect the cart’s contents. This is our food, and they think it’s theirs. I suppose the guns make that the case, but we earned this food, not them. I’m covered in pieces of rotten intestine and gristle. We’ve spent weeks clearing out houses and working for the acquisition of this broken-down metal cart.
“Why don’t you just take our food and let us go?” I ask.
It kills me to say it. If they didn’t have guns, I’d scratch their eyes out. I had no patience for bullies and thieves before zombies, and I have even less now. I don’t care if these kids are both that—kids. If they want to play with guns and rob people, they’ll be tried as adults.
“Girl, what don’t you understand about don’t make no noise?” Baby Fat asks, cheeks puffing.
We listen to Jorge call for another twenty seconds before there’s a shout and then silence. The zombies from the side street have arrived.
“Now what?” Italy asks Baby Fat. Baby Fat shrugs.
“How about now you let us go?” I ask.
Baby Fat lifts the gun. “Shut up.”
“Did you hear that? That was our friends looking for us. Did you hear why they left? Zombies. If you shoot, the zombies will come in and then we’re all dead.”
I’m scared of the gun, but the way these geniuses take my advice under serious consideration makes it clear they have no plan. Eric raises his gloved hands as if he’s the most sensible person in the world, or the room, which very well may be the case.
“How about you take it all and let us go,” he says. “You guys disappear, we disappear. No hard feelings.”
His jaw is as square as Paul’s. It must be taking all his willpower to stay calm—willpower I’m sorely lacking. I open my mouth, but Eric shuts me up with a low grumble. Baby Fat and Italy almost look relieved someone’s told them what to do. The fact they’re still alive must prove the existence of a benevolent God.
“Sit,” Italy says.
I move until my back is against an oven and lower myself to the floury floor. Eric follows me down, hands dangling from his bent knees and looking unperturbed as can be, but his hand is only inches from where he keeps that knife in his boot. I hope he has it today. They didn’t think to take my chisel, but it’s a useless piece of equipment at the moment. Eric may be right that I should learn to use a gun. Or maybe not, because right now I’m so angry I’d start shooting and get us blown to Kingdom Come.
“Lemme check.” Italy goes through the kitchen door and is back in less than a minute. “There’s a lot of them outside. We’ll go when they’re gone.”
Eric nods. I nod. Baby Fat nods. And then we wait.
Chapter 67
Eric
Thirty minutes after Sylvie and I take a seat on the floor, the chubby kid tires of rocking foot to foot and sits against the wall across from us, gun in his lap but aimed our way. The Italian kid finds an old dishrag and carefully wipes a spot before he joins him. The longer I sit here, the more I’m convinced they don’t know their asses from their elbows.
“Where do you live?” the Italian kid asks.
“Around,” I answer.
He looks at Sylvie, who’s turning ou
t to be as brave as I could’ve hoped and a bit nuttier than I’d like, at least in these circumstances. “You heard the boss, Italy,” she says. “Around.”
I cough to cover my laugh. Italy plays with the chain around his neck, unsure if it was an insult. “It looks like you have a lot of people,” he says.
“Why, how many do you have?” I ask.
“Seven,” the chubby kid says.
Italy smacks his head. “What the fuck, Jayden? Why’d you tell them that?”
The kid, Jayden, mumbles, “I don’t know.”
We revert to silence. I could reach the knife in my boot. But bringing a knife to a gunfight is a bad idea, as they say, especially with two kids this nervous. It could go either way: I get close enough that they give up, or they impulsively shoot us with every last bullet they have. Or I have—and I am not getting shot with my own weapon. But, if I can get them talking, maybe they’ll let down their guard.
“What were you guys doing in here?” I ask.
“Looking for food,” Jayden says.
“Why just the two of you?”
Jayden starts to speak, but Italy cuts him off with, “Shut the fuck up, Jayden.”
My ass hurts from the tile floor. I shift a little and raise my hands when they both start. “Just getting comfortable. This floor is hard.”
Sylvie sits quietly as though all the fight’s left her, but her eyes comb the room. I’ve covered it five times with my own—there’s nothing that will help us. I think they’ll let us go. If not, I’ll figure something out. This situation could be much worse, and I want to keep it at this level for now. What pisses me off most is that we killed the zombies that had them trapped in here, and then, to top it off, hand-delivered them a cart full of food.
“Sorry,” I murmur to Sylvie.
“For what?”
“I should’ve known the Lexers were outside because someone was in here. It was stupid.”