The City Series (Book 1): Mordacious

  “What’s that going to be?” I ask Grace.

  “Spinach.”

  “Ah, my old nemesis.” She doesn’t reply. “I’ll bet you’re excited for spinach. You can sprinkle it with those dried cherries and walnuts and have your big old salad.”

  She raises a shoulder. We’ve found more food: someone had a stash hidden in their basement, probably acquired sometime after the madness began. They had water, too, so why they left is known only to them. Possibly to find people—we have both food and water but Grace is as unhappy as ever, maybe unhappier, because of her missing people.

  Guillermo was near Downtown Brooklyn the other day. Although Grace didn’t ask him to check, he did and was sorry to report that Brooklyn Heights still looks bad. We did, however, ask him to bring food to Brother David, and Brother David sent back his regards along with the Precious Moments picture, out of its frame and rolled in a tube. Leo admired it so much we let him put it in his room. The look on Paul’s face when he realized he would never talk Leo out of hanging up the cute puppy was worth getting thrown from my bike a million times over.

  Brother David held a special mass and gave Guillermo their improvised Communion wafers to bring home to his mother and sister. Not sure that was kosher, but I have a feeling Pope Zombie the First won’t mind. Upon Guillermo’s insistence, Brother David said they’d relocate to Sunset Park if we can figure out a way to move the church’s residents.

  “Hey, want to meditate?” I ask Grace.

  Her eyes narrow into the look of subtle irritation she wears much of the time. “No. And neither do you. Stop, okay?”

  I turn my face to the sun instead of answering. When I open my eyes, Grace is gone and Eric watches me, head cocked. “You’re not Grace,” I say.

  “Good to know you can still tell us apart. What are you doing?”

  “Enjoying May.”

  He tilts his face to the sky. “It’s pretty enjoyable,” he says, eyes closed. He opens them again. “Or did you want to enjoy it alone?”

  “No, you’re good.” He’s so good that enjoying May with him is even better than doing it alone—and I don’t feel that way often.

  “I wish we could enjoy May somewhere else. Go someplace.”

  “You could, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” I say. If he spends all his spare time hiking and climbing things and gauging his distance in miles, our closed space must resemble a cage. “Where would you go? If you could go anywhere?”

  “Anywhere in the world?” he asks, and I nod. “Besides the cabin, I’d go to Prospect Park.”

  “I’ve just given you free rein to go anywhere in the world and you choose the park two miles away?”

  “It’s one of my favorite places. Especially this one part.”

  “Which part?”

  “It used to be a formal garden with a fountain, but the plants have taken over. It’s like an abandoned ruin in the middle of the city. The water is full of algae and the trees hang over the pools and walkways. It’s so…lush.”

  Grace and I used to roam Prospect Park when the weather was too lovely to attend high school, and one day we happened upon a place that sounds similar. “I think Grace and I were there once.”

  “Really?”

  I close my eyes, drawing out the memory from wherever it’s been hiding. And with it comes the remembrance of being a teenager. The freedom of charting my own direction, even if it was just for the day. The belief that I could do whatever I wanted with my life. I would never work a job I hated just to pay my bills. I’d have a husband who stuck around and, possibly, kids I cared for. I wouldn’t hold back. I’d never be my mother.

  I miss that girl.

  “You walk down steps to the round fountain,” I say. “It’s surrounded by those zigzag red bricks instead of concrete. There are benches to sit and watch the pool. Except there wasn’t any water when we were there.”

  “It’s dry if it hasn’t rained,” he says softly.

  I nod with my eyes closed, picturing the sun-dappled walkway. The fountain filled with greenery that had spilled over from what were once carefully-planned beds. The trees that moved in the wind and silenced the noises of the city. “No one came by the whole time we were there. It felt enchanted. We tried to find it again but we never could. I asked a few people, but no one knew what I was talking about. I thought maybe we’d suffered a mass, two-person hallucination.”

  I open my eyes to find him lit up by more than the sun, as if we’ve stumbled upon the magical place together, and I have the absurdly fanciful longing for it to have happened that way. If I’d found it again and he’d been there, I might’ve met Eric years ago—that girl might’ve met Eric.

  “I can’t believe you know it,” he says. “It’s called the Vale of Cashmere. From a poem, but I don’t remember which one.”

  “That’s a pretty name. Vale means valley.”

  “I know that, thank you very much,” he says haughtily, and then pokes me in the shoulder. “But I had to look it up.”

  I laugh. “I wish I could see it again.”

  “I’ll take you when the zombies die.”

  “So, never?”

  Eric’s next words are drowned out by Paul, who sticks his head out a back door and yells, “Bro, I need you.”

  Eric doesn’t respond. Paul comes puffing into the yard. When he nears, Eric says, “We were just discussing the Vale of Cashmere. Sylvie knows it.”

  “That old fountain?”

  “Yeah. We’re going when the zombies die.”

  Paul’s eye twitches. “That’s great. I need your help.”

  “All right.” Eric leaves with him, walking backward for a few steps. “It’s a date.”

  I’m flustered enough that Paul’s scowl doesn’t inspire outright hate, though I do turn to the garden and make a face more suited to a six-year-old than an admittedly immature twenty-seven-year-old. From what I can tell, the spinach doesn’t appear offended, but it doesn’t deserve that.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to the plants. “I don’t want to eat you, but I’m not mad at you.”

  “Who are you talking to?” comes from behind. Thankfully, it’s Leo’s voice.

  “The spinach.”

  “You’re cuckoo in the brain,” he says, and for a five-year-old he sure does have his sanctimonious face down pat.

  I bend to tickle his sides. “If you can have imaginary weapons, I can talk to spinach, right? Right?”

  “Okay, okay!” he gasps out, and then goes still. “Sylvie!”

  I follow his gaze to the bowl of cat food by the back fence, which we refill with a bag of kibble I found in a house. Every morning it’s gone, and up to now I thought it might be squirrels, but that black and white cat is crouched with his head in the bowl.

  The cat looks up as we edge closer. Leo is picking up speed, so I say, “Don’t make any sudd—”

  Leo’s off and running. The cat streaks under the fence. Leo stops, shoulders drooping, and by the time I catch up, his eyes are wet and his lips are set in his harbinger-of-tears pout.

  “Don’t cry,” I say. “You scared him, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll be back.”

  He shakes his head, ripe for a breakdown. I give him a mock incredulous face and put my hands on my hips. “Seriously, squirt, what’d you expect? He’s eating lunch and all of a sudden this giant monster the size of eight cats comes running toward him like a bat out of hell.”

  Leo keeps his sad face in place, milking this for all its worth. I continue, “What if you were sitting in the yard, eating cupcakes happy as can be, when a giant came bounding toward you? Would you say, Hey, a giant who might kill me, that’s cool, or would you run for your life?”

  He finally cracks and, with a laugh, jumps and screams, “I’d say Aaaaaah, a giant! Run for your life!”

  What I like best about Leo is that he’d rather be cheerful than sulking, and the most effective way to change his course is to call him on his drama. However, his volume control could use some work. I h
over a finger over his lips. “There’s not really a giant. You didn’t have to give me the full dramatization.”

  Paul comes out the back door and moves toward us. He probably heard the scream. Leo giggles, then climbs a chair and holds out his arms. “Pick me up, Syls.”

  “Aren’t you too old for that?” I ask.

  He flings himself so I have no choice. At least with Leo I don’t have to coo and make noises. Whenever I’m handed a baby, I suspend all movement until they take it back again. He hangs by my shoulders to look into my face. “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  “I do. Everyone needs food and, if you have some, they’ll want to stick around. Same thing for cats.”

  Paul removes Leo from my arms. “True. You’re still here. It must be the food. Or is it that you have nowhere else to go?”

  There are things I could say—I’ve added to our food, I only take my share—but I’m shocked into a silence where none of that matters. I’m still the girl who relies on others. Free school breakfast and lunch, free clothes, free school supplies where the pencils lose their lead and the notebooks are so flimsy they tear when you erase, a free home with my best friend’s parents. The kid with nothing and nowhere to go. I’d thought I left her behind, but she’s caught up with me.

  I turn for a house—any house—and end up in the one where the pretty woman lived with her husband. The cast iron pan and bodies are gone, but I can see it all anyway. The stupid girl who hoped for something better, only to be bitten by the person she loved. A cautionary tale if ever there was one.

  Eric strides in, shoving his hair from his face. “Did Paul say something to you?”

  I press the power button on the dead TV. I don’t expect it to play Murder, She Wrote, but I don’t want to face him. “No.”

  “He did. What did he say?”

  There’s no way I’ll tell him. The chink that’d leave in my armor would be far too large. “He didn’t say anything. Sometimes people just want to be alone, Eric.”

  “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  He exhales noisily. “Leo won’t tell him if he saw anything happen to Hannah, but he has nightmares every night. Both of them are having a rough time of it. I’m sorry if—”

  “Don’t apologize for him. He’s not sorry. You can’t make people like you. Or maybe you can, but I can’t.”

  “I just want you and Paul to get along.”

  I push down my rising frustration. Paul times his jibes for when Eric isn’t around, so Eric doesn’t know that every time I speak to Paul, which isn’t often, I walk away feeling weak and blinking back tears. “Do you think I don’t? I’m trying. It may not seem like it, but I am. It’s hard for me to back down from a fight.”

  “I think I might’ve picked up on that.” He gives me a smile I don’t return. “I know you are. I tried to talk to him, but, believe it or not, you’re more reasonable. He’s been through a lot.”

  “You don’t have to keep reminding me of that. I’m not a heartless bitch.” My voice is weary. I’m tired of people thinking they know me, or what I feel or think or anything else. They don’t. Probably because I don’t tell them, which makes it my own damn fault.

  “I never for a second thought you were.” He takes my arm. “I know you’re angry, but—”

  “I’m not angry.”

  I free myself from his grasp. He studies me, fingers in the air as if still curled around my bicep. “No, I guess you’re not. You’re sad.”

  I fight the tears that threaten to spring forth at his gentle tone, at the fact that he’s cut to the heart of it. “In case you forgot, Grace is a therapist. I’m covered in that department.”

  I look everywhere but at him. This room is full of little pieces of life: Photographs, knickknacks, books, all the things that were theirs, that meant something. I don’t have those anymore, and I’ve never had them with someone. It’s always been mine, never ours. I was so happy to have things that were mine that I didn’t miss the shared things enough to change it. But it’s not the things that are important—it’s the people and memories they represent. And now, with all my things gone, I’m lacking in the people and memories department.

  “Okay. Got it,” Eric says. “The saccade of your eyes made me think you were upset.”

  “You have no shame. None.”

  Saccade: a small rapid jerky movement of the eye as it jumps from fixation on one point to another. I shake my head in wonderment that he would slip it in now, although I welcome the subject change, which I suspect was deliberate. I should probably thank him.

  “C’mon, you can’t blame me,” he says. “It was perfect. When else was I going to have that opportunity? You can have my point.”

  “I don’t want your point, jerk.”

  He smiles, but it’s swapped for a frown a second later. “I’m done making excuses for Paul. Either he’ll come around or I’ll bring him around.” I open my mouth to object, but he raises a hand. “Yes, I know you don’t need help. Or want help. Or know what the word help means. But sometimes you have to accept help. Do you think I wanted to show up here and have people take care of me? So don’t argue, or I’ll knock you into the middle of next week.”

  I burst out laughing, and he asks, “You like that one? There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  “How’s the weather on Planet Dorkatron?”

  “Sunny, with a zero percent chance of zombies.” Leo calls my name from the yard. Eric takes my arm and leads me outside. “Don’t try to tell me that kid doesn’t like you.”

  “Fine, but I don’t know why.”

  He glances at me and then away just as swiftly. “I do.”

  My heart quickens. Eric lets go when Leo races for me. I have no idea what’s happening between us or what my life will look like past today or if I’m up to the task of pulling off a new life, but I also can’t think of a single thing I want from my old one.

  Chapter 72

  I enjoy May from the comfort of a chair while I wait for the others. We’re heading off our usual route to collect food Paul and Eric found yesterday but couldn’t bring back in one trip. Apparently, it’s a motley assortment of food products, but I’m used to that by now. I don’t think I’d blink if someone told me we were having crushed tomato pancakes with salad dressing masquerading as syrup for breakfast.

  Although I don’t particularly like the idea of going out on the street, we need food. There’ve been no more sightings of men with guns, so while I can’t put it out of my mind, there’s not much to do about it except hope Lexers ate them. The good thing and bad thing about zombies is that they don’t care who they eat, so they might have taken care of that problem for us.

  Leo climbs into my lap. I’m never sure what to do; usually I keep my arms on the sides of my chair. “Will you draw with me when you get back?” he asks.

  “You don’t want to see me draw. It’s horrible. My people look like horses and my horses look like aliens.”

  “Uncle Eric can draw really good.”

  “He can?”

  “But not as good as his sister. He says that’s the only thing she does better than him.” I snort, and he asks, “Are you going to die?”

  “This is an easy trip. We’re gonna zoom there and back.”

  Leo soaks that in, nods, and says, “But you could still die.”

  How we got from drawing to dying is beyond me, but I won’t lie to him. Kids aren’t stupid. I was lied to for much of my childhood, and even if I didn’t know the absolute truths, I knew enough to recognize a lie. “I hope not. I’m not planning on dying, but I don’t know.”

  “I don’t want you to die. Like my mommy did.”

  His voice is small and sad. I look around for assistance. I’ve never wanted to see Paul so badly in all my life, but he’s avoided me like the plague since our last encounter. Grace is inside. I think Eric is in the outhouse. Maria is God knows where. I need some people, stat.

/>   “I’m sorry. You must be really sad.” I roll my eyes inwardly. You must be really sad is the understatement of the century. Although it’s almost certain she’s dead, no one knows for sure, so I add, “She might be okay.”

  “I saw them,” he whispers, and hesitates before he adds, “They ate her.”

  Shit. There’s our answer. I can’t tell Paul. I’ll tell Eric.

  Tears collect on his bottom lids and pour over. A pat on the head isn’t going to be sufficient. When I was young, all I wanted was to feel safe, and for a little kid that usually means a hug. I wrap my arms around him the way my grandma, Bubbe, would do for me. She died when I was six, but my memories of her are of hugs and laughter and the scent of the rugelach she baked because it was my favorite.

  I don’t smell like cinnamon and perfume these days, but I can try for the comfort. “I’m so sorry, squirt. I’m sorry that happened. But your daddy loves you so much, and Uncle Eric, too.”

  I stroke his silky hair. His tiny heart beats out a rhythm against my chest. I’m sure parenting is next to impossible, but this part—where I hold him and he’s warm and I can feel him relaxing by the second—isn’t bad. I hug him tighter. I don’t know this pain, but I know loss. And I know it’s better to get it out. If you don’t, you end up like me.

  “What’s going on?” Paul asks.

  I look up. The sun above leaves his face dark, but he sounds about as happy as I would expect. “Nothing, he was—” Paul snatches him from my arms, which sets Leo sobbing with his arms out for me. I stand to take him, but he’s locked in his dad’s embrace. “Paul, please stop.”

  Paul sets Leo down with a grunt, the victim of a flailing foot to the crotch. Leo takes off for the house yelling, “Meanie butt! I hate you!”

  I had no idea they yelled that at five. I am never having kids.

  Paul glares at me, eyes frostier than usual. “What’d you say to him?”

  I remind myself I’m a better person now. I’m more reasonable. I could wait for Eric, but this isn’t my secret to hold. I wouldn’t want it kept from me.