We package a small snack—a granola or candy bar, a bottle of water, chips or nuts—for each person to bring tomorrow. It’ll get us started on our way. After that, we’ll have to find our own food and water. Once we’ve laid them on a table for morning, I walk to where Maria packs medicine vials in a small bag. “Are you leaving?”
“I’m going up in the morning. My girls should be out of the city.” She points to Olga and the other nurse. “They have families. I hope you’re leaving.” I nod. “Good. I’ll try to get out once the patients…” She shrugs.
It’s too close to giving up. I know this is different—noble, even—but being noble to keep people alive so they can ultimately die in a few weeks is pointless. If anything, we should wheel them up the streets of Brooklyn to give them a fighting chance.
“But
you
have a family,” I say.
“They have young kids. People they need to take care of.” She drops a roll of gauze in the bag. “I can’t leave sick people here. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Wouldn’t the right thing be to stay alive for your daughters?”
“They’d understand why I stayed. Anyway, they’re gone.” The last part is more a wish than a statement.
“You’ve seen the streets. Are you sure they left? What if they’re still at home waiting and you don’t show up?” I feel guilty at the way the skin around her eyes goes soft, but I’m sure her daughters want their mother alive. And, against all odds, she is alive. I’d bet a lot of New York City, and the world, aren’t. “Even if they did leave, they’ll want to see you again.”
Maria twists the gold chain around her neck. “Why do you care so much what I do?”
I care because of her daughters and because I like her and because I can’t stand the thought of one more senseless death. But I’ll cry if I try to articulate any one of those reasons, and I have no business arguing with a decision that should be hers alone. I look away with a shrug. Across the room, Grace performs the second daily systems check of her phone. If Logan and her parents are dead, I think—I hope—it won’t destroy her. I don’t want to find out.
“I’ll talk to Bart.” Maria touches my arm. “I’ll think about it, Sylvie. Okay?”
I nod and head for Grace, who has tossed her phone to the side and closed her eyes. As I near, she opens them. “My phone is dead.”
“Mine has some battery left,” I offer. She shakes her head. Maybe she’s come to terms with the fact that phones are a thing of the past. Another line in the sand washed away. “We’ll see them soon.”
Grace nods unconvincingly. Whether she isn’t convinced of us reaching them or of her family still being counted among the living, I’m not sure. Both possibilities have the odds stacked against them.
Chapter 14
Second Meal is decent: Fries, cheeseburgers and a soda. I ignore the canned corn because I barely eat vegetables when they’re fresh, which makes canned vegetables a sacrilege. We eat at pushed together tables and pretend it isn’t our final meal before the electric chair.
Bart holds his drink in the air like the best man at a wedding. “I want to wish everyone good luck tomorrow.”
I clink my plastic bottle on Grace’s. Maria watches the wall, deep in thought. I haven’t asked her what she’s decided because I’ll get angry if it’s the wrong answer, and I’m sane enough to know she doesn’t need that.
“I don’t want to go last,” Craig says. Now that he’s going home, he’s taken to repeating this.
“I’ll go last,” Jorge says.
The diners’ eyes cruise around the tables, possibly measuring up who can be shoved to the side in order to get out first. This is never going to work.
“How about we draw straws?” I ask. “Or numbers?”
“That’s fair. Does everyone agree?” They do. Bart hurries off for paper and then returns. “How many numbers do we need? Raise your hand if you’re going.”
Maria’s hand edges halfway up, lowers, and then commits to the air. Bart nods. I catch her eye, and she gives me a look that says it’s my fault she’s going to die tomorrow. Or maybe I’m projecting.
Bart scribbles on the paper, then rips it into squares and dumps them into a paper bag. “Okay, one is first, obviously, and twenty last, since Jorge will be twenty-one.”
The Giants jerseys go first. The woman holds up her number. Three. Her husband is ten. “I’ll trade with someone who gets nine or eleven,” she says.
The bag makes its way down the table under the scrutinizing gaze of the number pickers. When it reaches me, I take a slip of paper quickly. Eleven. Grace is next, and I wait to see what she gets before I offer to trade with the Giants lady. She pulls out five.
“I’ll trade with you so I can go with Grace,” I say to the woman before whoever gets nine can beat me to it. Grace exhales. Three and five. I’ll let four go in front and we’ll be together.
Craig shouts in dismay when he sees his twenty. “Will someone trade with me? I have kids. I have to get home.” I shake my head in apology, which is more than a lot of people do, although I feel guilty. He holds out the square of paper. “Please? I can’t be last.”
Lucky picks a number and grimaces, then lifts his chin at Craig. “I got fifteen. Not much better, but I’ll trade.”
Craig practically throws himself across the table to snatch Lucky’s paper. “Thank you. Thank you so much!”
“Yeah.” Lucky pushes back his chair, sticks his paper in his shirt pocket and strolls away.
Once the trading has finished, with Maria at number seven, the mood grows more somber. We’ll run straight into a world of zombies tomorrow. And, although dinner is decent, I can’t choke down the last half of my burger before bed.
***
I wake to a shout in dim light. Grace kneels, still half asleep. I get to my knees beside her while my brain fights to comprehend the dozen zombies in what was the safety of the cafeteria. More feed out from the serving area. Coming in through the kitchen. Our escape.
Igor yells in Russian. His wife screeches. He wraps his arms around her and drags her to the wall, but she’s a siren calling the zombies their way. I lose sight of them behind bodies, then hear his screams add to hers. A gun goes off in a corner of the room. Zombies head that way.
The knife I used upstairs is in my bag. It was stupid to think I shouldn’t keep it handy while I slept. It was stupid to think we were safe. I dig through my things with unsteady hands and try not to scream when the cold steel eludes me.
We’re low and across the room from their entry point. We haven’t been noticed yet. Cafeteria furniture scrapes across the floor. Fast-moving figures sprint amid the slower ones. On a gurney nearby, Nancy beats liver-spotted hands at the man bent to her abdomen, her mouth gaping in agony. Her eyes are unclouded. She’s back in this world again, and it’s a terrible place.
We can’t get through the thickest part of the mass to reach the kitchen, but we have to go somewhere—two women, both dead, have spotted us from ten feet away. We stand. They’re five feet away now. Brown and blond-haired. An alternate version of Grace and me.
Grace points toward the hall. Deeper into the hospital. Safety for now, not later, but now is more important. We race past bloody gurneys where zombies eat, we dodge filthy hands, and then we halt at a group who advance in a line. The hall is just behind them, but there’s hardly a chance we’ll both get through unharmed. The zombie directly in front of us drops to the ground mid-stride, just as its neighbor’s head explodes with the help of a bullet. Jorge and Clark stand in the open space, and we run through before more bodies block our escape. Maria, Bart, Dawn and Kearney stand on a table by the hall entrance.
“Anyone else?” Jorge yells to them. Their eyes rove the room and four heads shake. “Let’s go.”
We make it to the elevator bank with no trouble, as the hall is still empty. Jorge fits the key in the panel and jabs at the call button. I poke my head into the hall to watch the cafeteria entrance. Dozens of zombies stagger in our direction.
“They’re coming,” Grace calls.
Jorge slams a fist on the doors and curses. Another ten seconds pass with no elevator. They’re twenty feet away. We’re out of time.
“The bathroom!” Jorge yells.
The men’s bathroom is in the direction of the zombies, and, by the time we reach it, the gap has closed to less than ten feet. Jorge holds the door open and readies the key. Grace enters first, running so fast she stops herself two-handed on the back wall. I’m just behind. The others follow us in, and Clark and Jorge push at the door.
A finger snakes over the doorjamb before it slams. The appendage drops to the tile—a thick gray worm that twitches once before it goes still. Jorge turns the key and falls against the door as it shakes from the zombies’ assault.
I take in the bathroom. It might as well be a coffin. This is where we’re going to die.
Chapter 15
They still pound hours later. Jorge sits with his back to the door, his big body moving forward a millimeter at every crash. His mouth is set and eyes downcast. Jorge is nothing if not optimistic, and to see his expression only cements my belief that we’re waiting to die. Kearney holds his gun in his lap, ready for the inescapable wave of zombies that will come through the door soon.
Craig slipped out early. He didn’t wait for Bart to try to distract them from above, as was the plan. When he ran, he opened the door so wide it stuck open and allowed the zombies to make their way in. This is according to Jorge, who managed to shut the door and then came back in to save who he could. That he closed it means we don’t have an endless number of zombies in the cafeteria. That he closed it and didn’t take off himself means Jorge is one of the best people I’ve ever met. That’s twice now he’s saved my life.
Grace and I huddle against the back wall. There are three stalls. Three sinks. Two urinals. It doesn’t smell great, but it smells better than what waits in the hall.
Maria runs a jerky hand through her hair. “You okay?” she asks in a low voice.
I shake my head. I’d like to be brave and say I’m fine, but I’m not. Not at all.
Maria squeezes my arm. “We’ll find a way out.”
I don’t want to burst her bubble, so I focus on a sink instead of laughing uproariously at what has to be a joke. Clark takes over door duty so Jorge can examine a grate on the ceiling. Bart joins him a few moments later, and they stand beneath it with their arms crossed like a couple of dudes on a construction site. I watch them with a detached kind of interest—it’s clearly too small for someone to pull the crawling-through-a-duct-to-freedom trick.
Dawn hasn’t stopped crying. “I should’ve gone home before,” she whisper-whines. “I should’ve left when I could.”
She’s right about that. We all should have left. We also should have preemptively built zombie-proof bunkers and stocked them with a decade’s worth of food. Assembled our armories and practiced our kung fu. Whining about it now won’t help. If I’m going to die, I’m going to face it. I won’t be like my mother, killing herself in increments like it wasn’t her own damn fault. I’ll fight back, but I won’t pretend it’s not banging at the door. And the first step of this fight is to get out of here.
I pat Grace’s knee before I join the construction team. “What are we looking at?”
“The vent,” Jorge says.
“Right,” I say, and watch the dust-covered metal. “It’s a nice one, as vents go.”
Jorge lets out a short laugh. “I like you, Sylvie.”
Even now, it makes me feel good. I don’t usually inspire outright admissions of like. “The feeling’s mutual. Wish I could’ve gotten to know you better.” A particularly loud crash on the door makes me jump.
“We’re not dead yet,” Jorge says.
Yet
being the operative word. We’re close to dead. And I have to pee. Which, considering the circumstances, is going to be awkward. I decide to hold it. If we don’t die in the next half hour, I’ll have to go. Kearney steps closer. That makes four people who stare at the dropped ceiling.
“Does the ceiling go through?” I ask.
“Only to the wall,” Jorge says. He steps onto the sink counter, lifts a panel and peers inside. “Dark.”
I retrieve my phone from my bag and turn on the flashlight app. He uses it to peer around and shakes his head, then runs a finger along the thin metal frames that hold the ceiling tiles in place. “Maybe we could make something out of these runners, but I think they’d bend too easy.”
“Make what?” Bart asks.
Jorge jumps down and hands me my phone. “Weapons for when we leave. Who has one?” Me, the cops and Bart raise our hands.
“We can’t leave!” Dawn practically screams. It’s followed by a round of shushing from the rest of us.
“We have to try,” Jorge says. “We’ll die in here.”
“Then give me the key when you go,” Dawn demands. “I’m not leaving. Whoever wants to can stay here with me.”
That’s a fate worse than death, in my opinion.
“I’m going to try for Jersey,” Bart says. “Where would I find a boat?” He’s seen the state of the water, which makes his plan foolhardy at best. It’s full of wreckage and zombies, and I doubt there’s a boat left anywhere in the five boroughs. Bart answers our incredulous stares with, “Just tell me where.”
“It’s far, but you could try Sheepshead Bay,” Jorge says, without the addition of
if you want to die
. It’s clear we all think it.
“Does everyone have somewhere to go?” Maria asks.
“I have to go home,” Clark says. “My wife’s waiting for me. She’s seven months pregnant.”
That brings the conversation to a halt. I can’t imagine being pregnant before this, much less right now. Grace frowns and fingers the pearly white stone she wears around her neck—a moonstone, said to boost fertility. It could be that she’s envious, but Grace isn’t an idiot. It’s more likely she’s glad not to be in the same situation.
I wonder if Craig got out. We agreed to a plan, and then he ruined it for everyone. He killed the people who now roam the cafeteria, possibly himself, and probably us, with his selfishness. He wasn’t the only one who had a family. I didn’t see Lucky in the cafeteria, but that could be because I barely saw anything.
“Did anyone see that kid Lucky?” I ask. “Kidney stones?”
Everyone shakes their heads except Kearney, who says, “Nope.” He doesn’t sound broken up about it.