“Maria says you’ve read all the survival books in the house.”
“Not all, but a lot. I like to read.”
“So do I,” I say. “So does my sister.”
“I can tell. She has a lot of books.”
“She has a lot of everything. She’s not the neatest of people, but she’s great.”
“I can tell that, too.” The corner of her mouth edges up, as if she and Cassie have a secret. “Shouldn’t you be in bed? I can finish this and bring you a cup. I don’t mind.”
“I’m healthy as a horse. I’ve spent half my life in that bed, and even Maria can’t make me get back in there.”
I lean against the table. The trees are almost full-leafed now. What made sense before—a tree in the corner of a yard—looks haphazard with the fences down. A shed here, a barbecue there, a random patio, a pile of junk against the back of one house.
“Where did you grow up?” I ask.
“All over Brooklyn. We moved around.” Sylvie motions at the house. “You lived here your whole life?”
“My parents moved here when I was a baby. The rent was cheap and the neighborhood was good. So they stayed and saved their money for the cabin. Where’d you go to school?”
“I went to too many schools to count, up until high school. I even went to Catholic school for part of junior high.”
“Paul went to Catholic school before high school and told me all about it, so I’m sorry,” I say, and she laughs. “Are you Catholic?”
“I’m a mutt,” she says. “Jewish, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“My dad is Italian. He insisted I be baptized. My mother was Jewish, so she said I was Jewish, probably to annoy my father. It’s not like she was religious. But my grandma was Jewish, and I celebrated the holidays with her before she died, so…” She shrugs, although there’s fondness in her voice. “I only remember the Hanukkah prayer.”
She does have a father. I wonder where he is. “How’d you end up in Catholic school?”
“My teacher in fifth grade made me apply for a scholarship. She thought it would straighten me out. It didn’t work.” She peeks under the pot lid, shakes her head that the water isn’t ready, and then watches the backs of houses.
“So, how was Catholic school?” I ask, once it’s clear she has no intention of elaborating on the subject.
She considers the question for a full minute. “It started out great,” she says, with sarcastic emphasis on the
great
. “On my first day, we had a religion test. I forgot there were Ten Commandments. I thought there were twelve. So I wrote down the ten I remembered and then, on the bottom, I explained I couldn’t remember the other two.”
“No, you didn’t,” I say, imagining the nuns’ reactions at the heathen in their midst.
“I did. I’d been to a lot of AA meetings with my mom, which didn’t straighten her out, either. But, you know, Twelve Steps, Ten Commandments—they got mashed together in my sixth grade brain. Sister Jean Marie almost
plotzed
.”
“Please tell me you also said
plotz
to Sister Jean Marie.”
“You don’t want to know the things I said to her. They weren’t very Christian.”
I laugh, not only because the story is entertaining, but because I’m standing in a yard having a normal conversation. The kind of conversation I would’ve had a month ago, where there’s no talk of killing or supplies or viruses. “What did you say?”
“You’ll think I’m evil.”
I nudge her arm. “C’mon. Tell me.”
She twists her lips. I wait her out, and she says, “Okay, think of every evil teacher nun you’ve ever seen in a movie, and that was Sister Jean Marie. The only difference was she wasn’t allowed to smack us with a ruler. I got straight A’s even though she hated me, which made her hate me more. But she couldn’t get rid of me. Not until I got into a fight with her in seventh grade and they kicked me out.”
I stare at her wordlessly. I think she might be insane. In a good way, possibly, but still crazy. “You punched a nun?” I finally ask.
“No, I didn’t punch a nun!” Sylvie screeches at a low volume. “She was a bully, so I told her off.”
“What’d you say?”
“You have to know the backstory,” she says. “Sister Jean Marie had a scapular—that’s a special religious necklace—and she loved to tell us how we were all going to Purgatory when we died, but she would go straight to Heaven because of this stupid necklace. She’d pull it from her blouse and wave it at us and gloat. It was like she
wanted
us to suffer in Purgatory.
“She picked on this kid, Kevin, all the time. He was one of those small, quiet kids. One day she was screaming at Kevin over nothing and her face was bright red and there was spit flying everywhere. He’d sunk down in his chair and I could just see his will to live ebbing away. She seemed like she was getting bigger, like she was sucking all the life out of him. Feeding on him, you know?”
Her voice is heated; she still feels sorry for Kevin, and I think she wouldn’t mind taking a swing at Sister Jean Marie. I grimace at the image, so lost in the story that it’s only now I realize Sylvie is talking without coercion.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up from my desk and yelled at her to stop. She screamed that I wasn’t Catholic and I was going to Hell. So I said that her scapular would burn just fine in Hell, because that’s where she was going, and I’d see her down there.” She cocks her head. “Oddly, that didn’t go over well. The next day they sent me back to public school.”
The whole thing is awful, but I can’t stop smiling at the image of a seventh grader telling off a bully nun. My mother, champion of the forgotten and downtrodden, would’ve loved Sylvie. From what I heard, Mom was a tough cookie in her younger years. By the time we came around, she’d mellowed out for the most part, but if she got riled up about something, you did not want to be on the opposing side.
“That’s not evil. She deserved it. But I can’t believe you told a nun she was going to Hell. That might be worse than punching her.”
Sylvie plops in a chair, spent from reliving Sister Jean Marie’s trespasses. “She was, if there is a Hell. Or at least Purgatory for a million years. So, how about you? Religion?”
“Agnostic humanist.”
“Is that a thing?”
“I don’t know, but I like it. The humanists haven’t come after me with pitchforks yet. I think I’m safe.” Steam escapes from under the pot’s lid, and I jump to turn off the stove. “We wasted some fuel. I won’t tell if you don’t.” Sylvie casts an anxious glance at the propane tank. “Don’t worry, I just came up with a plan. Soon we won’t need to use the fuel
and
you’ll still have hot coffee every morning.”
“What is this plan?” she asks.
“I’m calling it Operation
Caffeine Strike
.”
Sylvie laughs. “It’s all in the name.”
***
I know they’re gunshots and they’re close by. It’s dark in Cassie’s room, but I’m on my feet, pistol in hand, before I’m fully awake. A pounding comes from above and I step into the hall as the door to upstairs flies open. The light blinds me for a moment before I make out Sylvie holding a lantern and staring at my gun, pale as a ghost.
I lower it immediately. A few more shots come from outside, still close but farther now. I move forward to put my arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”
She nods, still stiff. “Where are they?”
“Not sure.”
Jorge, Maria and Grace come down the hall and into the lantern light. We wait for the next volley, but nothing comes. It could be people against zombies, but it could be nothing as innocent as that. Sylvie’s breaths are tiny puffs of fear, and I think it’s more from my gun than what’s outside. I had it ready for whatever was coming, but I have the control not to shoot blindly at any movement.
“Guess they’re gone,” Jorge says in the silence.
“How close were they?” Grace asks. She crosses her arms and shivers.
“Maybe five blocks the second time,” Jorge says. “Not too close.”
“How can you tell?” Maria asks.
“You grow up in the projects in the ‘80s, you learn these things.”
Maria laughs. “Well, I’m not getting any more sleep tonight. I’ll make coffee.”
Grace and Jorge follow her down the hall. Sylvie steps out from under my arm, and I say, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“This is why I hate guns,” she says. “What if you’d shot me?”
“I wouldn’t have shot you.” Her face makes it clear she doesn’t believe me before she lowers the lantern to her side. “My finger was alongside the trigger. I didn’t know you were up there.”
“I go upstairs to wind the lantern. Just so you know not to shoot me next time.”
I look away. It’s stupid, but I’m insulted she doesn’t trust me. She steps on my foot playfully. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t shoot me.”
“Only pretty sure?”
“You never know.” She lifts the lantern and peers into my face with wide eyes. “There are at least a few people who wouldn’t mind taking a shot at me.”
I hold in my laugh at shuffling from the street. They must be moving toward the gunshots. The gate at the sidewalk rattles when a body brushes against it. Sylvie switches off the lantern. The chance that they’ll see through the entry gate, then at an angle into the window of the inside door and notice the dim light is slim, but I, for one, feel no need to test out that hypothesis.
“Want to look at our word?” Sylvie whispers. “Since the new day has dawned.” She turns on the lantern in the curtained room and lifts the page with the paperclip.
“Why don’t you tear them off?” I ask.
“It’s not my calendar.”
“My sister wouldn’t mind.”
“It’s bad enough I’m wearing her clothes and eating your food,” she says. “I’m not going to start tearing calendars.”
“Well, tearing calendars is pretty offensive, but I think Cassie will find the strength to go on.”
“I’m serious. I don’t take shit that’s not mine. I know I owe you.”
Her eyes are shiny in the light, and I decide that her sense of humor must be absent when it comes to this topic. I don’t see what the big deal is, but bugging her about it will probably only make it worse. “So, what’s our word?”
“Esurient: hungry, greedy.”
“All right, I’m ready,” I say. “How about some coffee? You know Maria probably has it finished already. She’s pretty esuri—”
“Don’t even!” Sylvie whispers. “You’ve got to wait a minute or three.”
She frowns and walks away muttering something about people who point guns at other people and then try to cheat. I follow with a grin.
Chapter 51
Later in the morning, I inspect the patches of green yard interspersed between concrete. I’m no longer convinced the city is the worst place to be in a situation such as this. It’s not my first choice, but it isn’t as bad as I expected. One could remove the fences in the yards of adjacent blocks for more garden space. Rooftop gardens could work as well, though locating and then carting all that soil up would be a Herculean task.
Water is an issue, but water is an issue anywhere there’s not a natural source. The average house sheds a lot of water from its roof, even in a light rainfall, and we’re surrounded by roofs. There’s plenty of water in water heaters, even accounting for the ones blocked by sediment. Getting water from a water heater is so basic it’s laughable, or it would be if so many people hadn’t died. The water tanks on buildings are a great source as well—thousands of gallons already in storage.
But it’s the buildings I like most of all. The houses on a city block remind me of a fort or the walls of a castle—a rectangle of brick and concrete that protects the central yard. Try recreating that in the country without tons of concrete and a hundred workers. Even Fort Wadsworth is more susceptible to zombies than your average city block, unless they transfer the fort. If it were any other type of apocalypse, I would prefer the country, the woods, a farm—and I still might—but I’m kind of digging this right now.
Granted, we have a leg up in terms of stored food and water, as well as the knowledge of how to get more. It doesn’t make me want to stay here forever, but, if we can’t get out of the city for a while, we’ll be okay. We’ll need more food, especially if I find Paul, Hannah, and Leo. I plan to head to them tomorrow, now that I’m well enough, although I haven’t yet told Maria. That part might be trickier than fighting off zombies for two miles.
Jorge comes out the back door and joins me. “When would we need to plant?” he asks.
“A week ago.”
“Great.” He sighs, but there’s a quiet laugh in there. Jorge finds humor in everything—something I can get behind.
“It’s a longer growing season than upstate. If we can get seeds now-ish, we should be good. My friend Paul doesn’t live far from that gardening store, so I thought I’d run by there when I go.”
Jorge glances behind us at the empty yard; Sylvie, Maria and Grace are in a house somewhere, sorting through clothes. “I’d ask if you want some company, but I don’t want to leave them alone after last night.”
“For the record, I agree. But don’t let them hear you say that.”
“You kidding? I wouldn’t say that to those three. I don’t want to die.” Jorge’s warm eyes match his smile, though, and there’s no question he likes them. “Thanks for this place. Anything you need me to do, I’m happy to help out.”
I raise my hands. Sylvie thanked me for breakfast after our talk this morning, then for water, to drive home the point that she owes me, I suppose. I almost offered her a notebook so she could write down exactly how much she owed, but I was afraid she’d jump on the idea.
“Listen, the food was my parents, the apartment is Cassie’s and I’m just glad someone’s putting it to use.” It comes out more defensive than I’d planned. “Sorry, Sylvie’s driving me crazy saying she owes me for the food.”
“She’s got a thing about that. But she’s good people. Did you hear how she had us get that dialysis machine at the hospital?”
I haven’t, so Jorge tells me a story of how Sylvie was going to go alone if she had to, fight off no one knew how many zombies, even though she hadn’t killed a single one prior to that. I try to reconcile that person with the one from this morning and, maybe not so unexpectedly, it fits.
She wants to help, especially someone helpless—like Kevin or this boy Manny—but she doesn’t want assistance. She doesn’t want to
take shit that’s not hers
. Knowing what little I know about her life, I wonder how many times she’s had to wish for things I never once had to wish for, how many times she’s gone without. She probably prides herself on not needing anyone. The only problem with that is that we ordinary people like to feel needed, if only just a little.