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I climbed the ladder at the end of the short hallway, and exactly as my rescuer had said, it brought me through the floor of a storm drain. I stopped and flicked the striker of my gifted lighter, and its small flame illuminated a long, narrow tunnel of brick. Something skittered beyond my small ring of light. Maybe it was only rats, but no point in waiting to find out if I was wrong.
I moved on, making my way in a slow, steady shuffle, my boots scraping over a mostly dry floor. Thank God it hasn’t rained in a while. The night sky illuminated the storm drain’s exit, where murky purple light oozed into the darkness. I crept forward, trying to make no sounds or attract unwanted attention. Rotters loved the night, and their activity increased as the darkness thickened. Maybe the black of night reminded them of the safety in the graves they’d left behind.
The end of the storm drain emptied into a refuse pond at the bottom of a gully. I leaped diagonally and landed beside the pond in a soft, marshy patch of mud that smelled like mildew and sour milk. My boots withstood the wet and cold, however, and lent me traction as I fought my way to solid ground. After climbing the gully’s steep embankment, I stopped to catch my breath and gather my bearings. Sharpening my ears, I listened for the presence of the undead—groans, gnashing teeth, or scraping footsteps—but I heard nothing to rouse my worries.
Pale moonlight illuminated the familiar landscape of a park I used to play in as a small child. Bloom and I had lived in a large townhouse then, one in a row of homes adjacent to the opposite end of the park. Their dark and empty skeletons blotted out a patch of night sky. No one had lived there in years. I knew where I was, and I knew how to get home. My stranger had been right—I was no more than a block away.
For the past five years, my sister, Bloom, and I had lived in a bank vault, one in the basement of what used to be the Savings and Loan. The vault was cramped and claustrophobic, but only Bloom and I lived there, so we made do. We could also seal it up at night and sleep without worrying that we might wake to a horde of hungry, rotting corpses snacking on our livers and spleens. The bank building had suffered a lot of wear and tear during the Dead Wars. Somewhere along the way, an explosion had torn a chunk from the offices on the upper floors and cracked the vault’s roof. The crack let in enough air to breathe and leaked something awful in a rainstorm, but it was a reasonable price to pay for our security.
“Serendipity Blite, where in hell’s blue blazes have you been?” When she was angry, Bloom sounded a lot like our father. She looked like him too—long, lanky, and pale as milk with dishwater-blond hair. Physically speaking, she was a stark contrast to me—short, curvy, and auburn haired. I favored our mother, who came from an indecipherable blend of backgrounds and ancestry. As for our personalities, we were complete opposites as well.
Perched in an upper window of the Savings and Loan building, Bloom’s dark silhouette watched me creeping along the sidewalk. I suspected she wore a deep scowl, but the light from the dim lantern beside her failed to reach her face.
“The King of England asked me for tea,” I said, “and I thought it rude to decline.” In truth, King Edward was probably a hungry corpse by now. We didn’t get much news from across the pond these days, though, so I couldn’t be sure.
A ghastly howl from somewhere nearby raised the hairs on the back of my neck. An answering moan had me shifting nervously from foot to foot as I waited for Bloom to lower the ladder from the fire escape. The moment it touched down, I scurried up, quick as a lizard.
“You weren’t supposed to be gone so long,” she said as she hauled the ladder back into place.
“Someone found our stash.” I grabbed Bloom’s lantern and led us through a broken window into a dusty office. “There was nothing left when I got there, so I went looking for another cache.”
The probability of finding food decreased every year, but Bloom and I had lucked out about a month back and found a mercantile with a basement smorgasbord of canned foods, coffee, and crates of flour, cornmeal, and sugar. We should’ve hauled every ounce of it back to our place a long time ago, but Bloom and I had seen no one—no one living, anyway—in our part of town in weeks. It had been a dumb mistake, because our number one rule for survival was “Take nothing for granted.” We got lazy, and we paid the price.
Bloom noted my empty hands. “Did you find anything?” She turned a gear that lowered sheet metal shutters over the broken office windows. Then she brushed her palms on the seat of her pants. Bloom loved devising mechanical things like those shutters. She would have done something really amazing with all her smarts if the Dead Disease hadn’t ruined everything.
“I did, but I had to dump it and run when the Rotters caught my scent.”
“We haven’t seen anyone in weeks, Sera.” Bloom guided us from the room and paused while I held the lantern over the stairwell leading to the basement. We both held our breaths and listened for sounds of movement. Ever since a Biter had found its way in through an air vent we had overlooked, Bloom and I always double-checked.
Bloom exhaled first and moved toward the stairs. “Who do you suppose it was that took it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But they got the whole stash. There wasn’t even a coffee bean left on the floor.” My thoughts flickered back to my strange savior. Who was he, and where did he live? More importantly, was he the one who’d found Clawson’s Mercantile and its store of dry goods?
“Damn,” Bloom said. “Cleaned out.”
“I found a place a little farther away that had sugar and some old, musty coffee. That’s what I was bringing back when I ran into the Rotters.”
“Did you fight any of them?”
“No.” I thought of the desperation I’d felt as I stood there, waiting for the inevitable. I would have fought them, but it would have done me not one lick of good.
“Are you hurt anywhere?” She sounded like a concerned sister, but she mostly had her own self-interest in mind when she asked that question. It was okay. I also had my own self-interest in mind whenever I asked her the same question after she’d been out foraging. Early on, people figured out the Dead Disease traveled through a bite. The knowing didn’t help. The only remedies involved decapitation or a bullet in the brain, and that wasn’t much of a cure, in my opinion.
“No, they didn’t get close enough to bite,” I said.
“So, no dinner tonight, I guess.”
“Won’t be the first time.”
Bloom answered as always, “Won’t be the last.”
In the vault, Bloom plopped onto her canvas cot and reclined, exhaling a noisy sigh. “We’re going to have to get out of the city before long. There’s nothing left, and I’m tired of scrounging so hard for the little we can make on our own. If we stay here, we’re going to starve to death. Or worse.”
There had once been a time when I’d believed nothing could be worse than death. I had since amended that belief. “I don’t want to leave,” I said. “This is our home. I’m attached to it. We’ve had this discussion before.”
“Everyone’s gone, Sera. What reason do we have to stay?”
I had no reason other than that the city was a part of me. Leaving it would have been like chopping off an arm or something. “We’ll look tomorrow,” I said. “Both of us. We’ll find some more stuff.”
We had to.