Quarantine (4 page)

“It's just he's so busy, running around treating everyone who passes through here,” she explained. “He's, like . . .
frustrated
I guess—like all of us, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna put your pack over there?” she asked, pointing to the doors that led to the terrace.

“Okay,” I said. I put my pack down next to some others, hung my FDNY coat over it, looked at the Glock pistol's handle hanging out the side pocket. I reached for it—

Her tanned hand touched my arm as if to hold me back. “You won't need that here,” she said. “We're safe here. If that's what you're worried about.”

“Oh, no, it's cool. I'm just—”

“You're just—what?”

In that moment, I'd lost any ground I'd gained between us. How could I bring up what I needed to say?
I just want to know if you guys will leave with me—as a group, safety in numbers and all that.

“Hungry?”

I smiled, saved from the moment. Be patient.
Get to know them
. “Yeah, starved.”

“Come on then,” she said, reaching out to lead me by my good hand. “I'll show you where the food's at.”

I
don't know why I hesitated to leave the gun behind—we were safe behind these walls, with all these people, right? I nodded, and took the pistol out, ejected the magazine, pulled back the slide so that the round in the chamber popped out. I tucked the empty pistol deep into the backpack's side pocket, zipped it up tight, then pocketed the ammo.

“I just thought—I mean, there's kids around,” I said, “and I'm used to always having it loaded and—”

“It's cool,” she said, smiling. “Come on, let's get you fed.” I followed Paige down the walkway, into a putting green where the barbecue was set up. There were a couple of guys cooking away—they had piles of the cooked meats I'd smelled stacked up on a table, while others served people with scoops of pasta salad and tinned vegetables. There were literally hundreds of condiments on another table, where people queued and helped themselves to pickles and sauces and sauerkraut; another table had stacks of cups and giant steaming urns labeled
COFFEE, TEA, COCOA.
People sat around in little groups, chatting and eating, a constant hum of conversation.

“What is it?” Paige asked.

I looked across at her, realizing I'd just been standing there inside the doorway, watching, my mouth hanging open like I was catching flies.

“I . . . I've kinda dreamed about coming across a place like this.”

“Like this?”

“A refuge, full of life,” I said. “I haven't seen so many people like this, not for ages. And they're all—they all seem, so—”

“Normal?”

I nodded.

“That's a cycle on a washing machine.”

I smiled.

“Normal. It's a cycle—”

“Right, got it,” I said, following her inside.

“I so understand if you want to sit on your own,” she said. “If you're a bit shell-shocked by all this.”

“No, not at all,” I said as we approached a table. On the way in we collected a plateful of food each. We sat down next to a woman whose ears were wadded with gauze, with a bandage wrapped around her head like a headband. It reminded me of bodies I'd seen, of people who'd bled from the ears and eyes, as if the concussive force of the explosions had expanded inside their heads. I'd seen a lot of things that I never wanted to be reminded of.

“Jesse, this is my stepmom, Audrey,” Paige said. Audrey smiled at me. She was pretty, far too nice-looking to be with Tom. Paige wrote something on a little spiral-bound pad and Audrey read it and looked at me and said: “Hi Jesse.”

She put out her hand and I shook it. It was soft and warm. She looked at my bandaged hand, where the blood had soaked through, with concern.

“Drink?” an older lady asked me. She stood by our table, with a tub of little juice boxes.

“Thanks,” I said, taking an apple juice. Paige took one too. The old lady winked at me as she left.

I ate a piece of steak with some fried onions and tomato sauce, a big slice of fresh warm bread on the side.

“Have you not eaten in a while?” Paige asked.

“I have, but . . . it's—I was going to say, ‘it's a long story,' but I guess it's just that I'm hungry and exhausted today,” I said through a mouthful, then I made myself slow down. I tried to eat with more decorum, to give a better impression—but then I bit the inside of my cheek. I hid my pain with a drink of juice and tried to smile.

“Where have you been living?” Paige asked, reading off her stepmother's pad. Pity, I'd have liked her to ask such a question of me of her own accord.

“30 Rock, mainly,” I said, eating some pasta salad. Oh man, this food was good—plenty of basil pesto, cheese, and olives. I added some dried chili flakes.

“30 Rock—as in the TV show?”

“Um, I guess that's where they set it—there's a TV studio in there,” I said. “It's the GE Building, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Big and safe, above the city. I stayed on the sixty-fifth floor, the Rainbow Room. Great view—and there's observation decks above that. Well, I mean the view wasn't
great
—but it's high, you can see a lot from up there.”

“How does the city look?” Paige asked.

I put my fork down for a moment, and described the destruction I'd seen. She wrote all this down for Audrey. Audrey smiled, gave a little nod of approval, and said in a little, tired voice that clearly couldn't hear itself: “How—many—people—were—you—with?”

“None, there,” I said, picking at my food now, pushing it around, my appetite disappearing as the memories rose inside me. “It was just me. I was on a subway when the attack happened—”

I told them my story. Not from the optimism of my initial airplane ride from Melbourne to New York, nor those first few exciting days of being in this bustling city, the introductions when I arrived at the UN leadership summer camp, making unlikely but cool friends, but from the moment of the attack—that moment when we all became the same, when we all could be labeled
survivors
. I told my story from when I emerged from the subway tunnel, to describing in more detail what I'd seen from 30 Rock.

Then I explained about Anna, Mini, and Dave. Of all the kids on the UN Ambassadors camp, the four of us had got along best. We'd become a good team. Although maybe we'd just spent a little too much time together, because the conversation on the subway as we headed for the 9/11 memorial was more fraught than usual.

But it was nothing compared to the panic when the subway car tilted and the lights flickered. A vast ball of fire chased the train and sent us crashing to the floor, awaiting the oblivion that came—first, darkness and pain, and then, a last exit for them. For me it began what was to be the delirium of my first twelve days of being alone. But I broke from my solitude—I had to. I had more than cherished the memory of those friends. I'd made them live on in my mind right up to the moment where I was at last able to accept that they were dead and that if I were to survive, I needed to rely solely on myself.

I waited for Paige's notes to catch up. The gentle rhythm of her writing, the faint scratching of pen on paper, put me at ease; as if it put a distance between me recalling and telling the events, reminding me not only of the importance of information, but of sharing in whatever humanity might be left.

“That's so awesome of you,” Paige said. “I mean, there's no way I could have survived all that on my own, like no way.”

I told them about Rachel and Felicity at the zoo. I suspected that Bob and Daniel would filter the story of Caleb's transformation when they felt it was time. I'd told
my
story, and it took the rest of my meal and a half block of chocolate, while Paige sat there and ate the other half. Her stepmother had two cups of tea and twenty new pages of closely written words in her notebook. I'd thought it was hard enough being a survivor without means of communication, and not knowing what had happened and who did all this: imagine being in her situation, wholly dependent on others to hear for her.

Audrey had tears in her eyes when I told her and Paige that I had to let Mini, Anna, and Dave go, on my way to the 79th Street Boat Basin. Especially Anna . . .

“Because . . . they would have held you back?”

“Yeah, that's right.” I nodded, wondering if I sounded totally nuts to the point where Paige's dad might try to put me in a straitjacket. “They'd kept me sane—well, if you could call it that. They kept me company during my time at 30 Rock, through the briefest of glimpses and conversations. Then, when I was being chased, I knew I could survive out there alone, and I was right: letting them go helped bring me here, right?”

“You must miss them.”

“I—yeah, I do. But mainly I regret that I couldn't do anything to save them.”

Audrey cried, then Paige put an arm around her shoulders. A single tear fell from her blue eye and several more were held there, on her long eyelashes. I blinked away some tears of my own, and let out a funny noise, part whimper, part embarrassed cough.

“I'm sorry,” Paige said, reading from the pad those two words that her stepmother had written, and since we'd bonded over this, since it had been such an intimate session of storytelling, we all felt it hit home.

S
ensing that Paige and her stepmother needed to be alone to reflect on the people they'd loved and lost, to say nothing of the new facts I'd burdened them with, I headed up to the top level of the complex.

Everyone in this place had work to do; they'd settled in for the long haul. They had formed into groups, little cells designed to accomplish tasks or else just to hang around with, seek companionship and consolation. Each had their delegated tasks down pat, and I felt pretty useless being the new kid on the block. People seemed content—happy even—doing their jobs. Did I want to feel that, as long as I was here? Doing something each day to merely survive? Hadn't I had enough of all that? Even back in the pre-attack world, I knew that, no matter what, when I finished high school I was not going to embark on a career where I “lived to work” like that. I mean, where was the freedom, the choice, in such an existence? If I was going to do such work
all
day,
every
day, I'd much rather do it back at the Central Park Zoo with Rachel and Felicity. They had more on their plate than merely seeing out each new day; they had many mouths to feed, living creatures that needed their help, a purpose that transcended selfishness.

Bob was up on the roof, doing a final security sweep of the area while the sun was still up. The smell of smoke and ash hung in the wet air. Dark water swirled and eddied in the Hudson. A few overturned hulls of broken boats floated about. Across on the street side there were good views up and down Eleventh Avenue: smashed and burned-out wrecks of vehicles were dotted all the way up and down it, blotches against the white-gray streetscape.

“Looks like a war zone, doesn't it?” said Bob.

“It is,” I said.

“Yeah. And once again, this is the front line.”

“Once again?”

“Like 9/11,” he said. His words hung there for a while. “All this out here reminds me of some pictures I saw in a book about the first US–Iraq war. Some highway in the desert, littered with thousands of destroyed vehicles, all burned-out wrecks melted into the road and sand.”

He scanned the darkening streets with his small binoculars.

“Have they ever attacked here? The infected, I mean.”

He looked at me. He had a face that could go real hard real quick.

“The infected—
Chasers
you called them earlier today, right?”

I nodded.

“No.” He shook his head. “But we've been hit twice, by people.”

“People?”

“Shootin' at us, at first, and then, the second time, a group of guys drove by and firebombed the storefront down there. Sons of bitches even landed one up on the roof here. Look.”

He pointed to scorch marks on the concrete roof; an area the size of a tennis court was blackened and charred and it seemed the snow no longer liked to settle there.

“What people?”

“Survivors like us. Last week.”

“Shit!” I said, thinking about all the families downstairs, all those survivors, being attacked by their own. I thought about those fresh corpses I'd seen lying on the snow—victims of their need to escape. And I thought about who might have attacked them. There are always people who'll exploit a situation, no matter how desperate life is, even if it means turning on the only other people they might rely upon. Maybe they're thinking that when there's no civilization to be a part of, what's the point in being civilized? We're all killers, potentially; it's inescapable, an instinct that will consume you if you're not careful.

Time was running out. I had to get out of this city. So why was I hesitant about asking him if he'd leave here with me and any other survivors who wanted to tag along? It just didn't feel right to blurt straight into it. I realized that although we'd shared stories, I still knew very little about him.

So I asked, “You live in New York?”

“Only for a bit.”

“Tourist?”

“Nah. I'm more of a drifter, never spend too long in one place,” he said, kicking some snow off the edge of the roof. “Bit of work for the military, bit of work in prisons, couple of rigs out in the Gulf, always someplace different. Worked here way back, returned a few weeks ago.”

He took out a small bottle of bourbon, unscrewed the top, took a swig and passed it to me. I had a small sip; it tasted like bitter fire, made me cough.

“Never really put down any roots, you know? You could say I had nothing to lose when all this happened, but it doesn't make it any easier to take.”

“Yeah . . .” I took the binoculars, looked at the opposite shoreline. “Any family around here?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Just a few friends and, like I said, I was passing through—was gonna bug out once I'd put a bit more money in the bank.”

“Shit happens, huh?”

“Sure does, little buddy,” he said, his expression wistful as he scanned out across the Hudson. His alert eyes took in everything. “Sure does.”

We walked the perimeter of the roof. We talked about the weather and what it'd be like elsewhere.

“How come there are no boats here at the piers?” I asked.

“We figure that those who got here first, immediately after the attack, bugged out on those that were still seaworthy.”

It seemed a reasonable answer and reflected what I imagined went on at the 79th Street Boat Basin. I trudged across to the northern side of the snow-covered roof. I pointed up Eleventh, passed him the binoculars, and he checked out a group of Chasers headed south.

“That kind? They hunt at twilight and into the night,” he said. “They're smart. Probably smarter than us.”

I shivered at the thought.

“Bob, I've got to ask you something,” I said, the moment as good as any: “What would it take for you to try and leave this city?”

“A new dawn,” he said. “Leave here? I'd give it a try in a heartbeat. Wouldn't want to leave any of these folks behind, though.”

“Oh.”

“Look, your friend Caleb?”

I nodded.

“When he came here, he got people all amped up about a route clear out of the city.”

“Which route?” I asked, already knowing the answer—it was something
I'd
told Caleb during our first proper discussion.

“He said there was some road clear to the north,” Bob said, glassing the streets again. “Thing was, it got a few guys so excited by the prospect, they said they'd go out and give it a look-see.”

“And?”

He looked at me.

“Next day, I was out, just six blocks north of here, for supplies; found them, the four of them, dead.”

I felt sick.

“How—how'd they die?”

“Gunshot wounds, but the infected had got to them too; had to chase a couple off their carcasses.”

I
did that.
I'd
told Caleb, Caleb told them, I was responsible for their deaths . . . No, not for their deaths. Crazy people killed them. But it was my news that had put them in harm's way.

“Ain't nothin' to be done about it,” Bob said. “They were grown men, bigger than you. They knew the risks, and they made that choice themselves.”

I nodded.

“Does everyone here know?”

He nodded.

“And now they're too spooked to leave?”

“Give it time, they'll all come around.”

“Bob, we might not—what if we don't have time?”

We passed the charred section of roof on our way to the steel stairs heading down.

“Don't need to convince me of that.”