1 After the boat, something broke. I felt like I’d been pushed sideways out of my own head, and was living somewhere else. My mind was a balloon tethered to the top of my skull, pulling behind me as the wind blew.
After raping me, he went back to the front of the boat, whistling, and steered to where I was going. He took me there anyway, as if he hadn’t just done what he’d done, as if nothing had happened. I curled up in the back of the boat, shaking. I was a fucking numptie, I thought, and it was all my fault.
In the stairwell of my grandmother’s building, there were no fluorescent lights blinking like they usually were. There was no light from my now-dead cell phone. I didn’t have a flashlight, so I stumbled up through the darkness. I didn’t know I was myself. I didn’t know what it was to be somewhere, where I ended and the darkness began. It was only when I tripped and stumbled, fell flat down on my hands and knees, and felt pain that I knew I still had a body.
My grandmother was waiting in her little apartment with just the light of her religious candles burning. She opened the door and sat back down on the couch, looking off into the dimness of the room.
“Granny!” I yelled, hugging her. She squeezed me back, but it was only for a minute. She’s never been big on affection; before my father died, he once told me that growing up, my grandmother and her sisters hadn’t been hugged or kissed much, and it had been hard for her to show any kind of love to my father when he was small. Now she just squeezed me briefly and said, “Makayla. You came.”
I checked to make sure that everything was as upswing as it could be, that she’d had enough food and water, that she wasn’t scared or shocked.
“Damn it, what do you think happened here?” she asked. “I was just in the dark, was all.” She swatted me away as I touched her face, her arms, making sure she was whole.
After I was sure she was fine, I went into her kitchen and I grabbed her biggest butcher knife and a candle, and I made my way back down the stairs. I looked around outside for Peter’s boat. I could still taste him in my mouth. My heart was pounding, my blood slamming through my veins. I was going to fucking kill him. But he must have known, because he was gone. I stared out over the floodwaters that blended into the ocean. He was gone, and maybe he was gone to do the same thing again. Maybe there was someone in his boat right now, and he was whistling and getting ready to pull down some dark alley. Maybe he felt like this sort of thing was owed to him, and now, with no one around to stop him, he was just going to get what he deserved. The balloon over my head felt tight like it was being squeezed and getting ready to pop. I had to sit down and breathe until the squeezing stopped.
I went back to my grandmother’s apartment and let her talk to me until the shaking stopped.
“Why are you shaking, girl?” she asked me, half concerned and half annoyed.
“It’s just the cold, Granny. The cold and all the bad things out there. I’ll be fine.”
I couldn’t let her know. I could never tell anybody, because then they would look at me and see how broken I was. I could not be broken. I had to make it through this.
It took hours before the shaking stopped. After it did, I got some slurree for my grandmother and me and we drank it. It was the government-issued kind, the kind that would do the bare minimum to keep us alive, and even then, not for long. Then I went down to the fire escape and tried to flag down a boat. I didn’t get one that day, and when night started making the sky pastel, I went back inside. I slept on my grandmother’s couch and went back to finding a boat early in the morning. I was able to flag one down around noon. There were more of them out here near the coast than there were inland where I’d been. I made sure, this time, that there were more people in it, that I found one piloted by people in uniforms. Not that I was sure any of it would help. In this new terrain, anyone could be the enemy.
They took us back to the emergency shelter where Jaden and the boy were. Jaden was furious with me. He had searched the entire shelter, sure I’d checked, waiting to find my body in a corner or down a hallway. Finally he had found someone who thought they’d seen me looking for a boat out to Gravesend. Then Jaden had known where I’d gone, but still not what had become of me. He didn’t know until I came back into the room we’d been holed up in. I threw my arms around him. I don’t think he’d ever looked more dap even though it must have been days then since any of us had done anything to look okay. He looked like home. I squeezed him and thought I would never stop.
We hid out in the small room for days, drinking slurree, trying to stay out of fights and away from trouble. Then the water went down and we were able to walk out into the streets. The whole city seemed like it was covered in mud. I wondered, like I’d wondered about the water, where it had all come from. Our shoes squished through it, making noise as we went. The sky above us was clear and beautiful, with pigeons flying through it as if everything below them was just the same as it had always been.
All around us, the city was a wasteland. Nearby was a burnt, blackened building. In the buildings beyond that one, a row of doors gaped open, and above them were smashed windows. As we walked, we passed a car that had been flipped over on its roof. The roof had crumpled from the weight of the car, and the windshields imploded. Downed power lines curled through the mud like snakes.
“Where do we go?” Jaden asked. He turned in a slow circle, his boots squelching in the mud. “They said at the shelter that FEMA was coming, that they’d set up trailers, but where do we go until then? What do we do?”
I opened my mouth to say I didn’t know, but then, before a sound came out, I did. In the middle of the ’trosh scene, there were still these high-rise buildings, luxury condos. I found a stone the size of my head that must have drifted in in the water. I picked it up in both hands and walked over to the glass door of one of the buildings. Lifting it high up over my head, I threw it through the door. The whole pane of glass shattered and what stuck in at the edges fell away as I kicked at it with my boots. Then I put one arm across my waist, stretched the other out toward the door, and bent.
“After you, milady,” I said to my grandmother. Granny’s seen some shit in her day, I know. She kind of giggled in this tired way, and stepped through the empty frame.
I picked up the big rock and we made our way up the dark stairs to the third floor, where the water hadn’t reached.
Light was streaming in through a huge window at the end of the hall when we came out onto the third floor. There was a long hallway and only four doors on it. The apartments must have been enormous. I walked over the first door and tried the handle. It was locked. I lifted the rock up and smashed it down. The door moved a bit, but remained closed. I lifted the rock again. I don’t know where the strength came from, how I was able to lift it and smash it over and over. I’m not even sure how much time passed. But what seemed like an instant later, I was standing there with my arms shaking, the rock at my feet, and the door smashed wide open.
The apartment was as beautiful as the rest of the city was destroyed. There was a plush white couch in the center of the living room. Placed at welcoming angles around it were white leather chairs. They were so pristine it looked as if no one had ever sat down in them. Off to the back of the room, there was a marble fireplace. I had never seen a fireplace before in Brooklyn, and I wondered if it worked or was just an elaborate show.
I turned around and, behind me, Jaden, my grandmother, and the boy were all standing, staring. My arms were still shaking. They were looking at me like I had just crawled out of the floodwaters and had scales.
“Well?” I said. “Come in. I know I’ve always wanted to live in a place like this.”
Before long, we were searching the apartment, opening every closet, looking in every pantry. In a bedroom, I found a closet full of warm designer clothes. I pulled a thick, woolen sweater down off a hanger and wrapped myself in it, feeling it around me like a hug from my mother. I found a mink coat and ran over to the bedroom where my grandmother stood, pulling it over her shoulders and laughing. She laughed, too. But then the laughter turned into tears, and I wrapped my arms around her, around the fur coat, and held her close. The boy stood across the room, his thumb in his mouth. Jaden had said he’d started that after I left the shelter, and hadn’t stopped since. I reached my arms out to embrace him, too, and, to my surprise, he came into them slowly. His little shoes had stopped flashing pictures. As I hugged him, I felt the cell phone still inside the front pocket of his hoodie. We all sat down on the bed, holding on to each other. After some time, my grandmother’s tears stopped, and we went back to searching the house.
The place kept amazing me. The kitchen was bigger than my entire apartment had been, with a huge, heavy wooden counter that wrapped around it, and shelves and storage spaces made of the same wood above it. The sink and the refrigerator shone deep silver. There was a walk-in pantry the size of my old bedroom. It was stacked up with all kinds of nonperishable foods—beef, turkey, venison, and ostrich jerky; wasabi peas; dried apricots; trail mix with raisins and little buttons of yogurt in it; cans of soup; cans of salmon, sardines, anchovies; glass jars of caviar; candied kiwi fruit; nuts; dates; cereal; crackers; chips; canned peaches, pineapple, tropical fruit. There was every food I could imagine, and some that I couldn’t. I grabbed a jar of caviar. I had always heard about it, and wondered what it tasted like. I took it to the kitchen and tore open drawers until I found a spoon. I opened the lid and dug a spoon into it. It was like inhaling the ocean at Gravesend.
I walked out of the closet and into the living room with the couches and fireplace. There was a big, glorious window where light was streaming in. I walked up to it and put my hands flat on the glass and looked down. All the words that rumble about in my head about life, dissat and ’trosh and sienty, they all flew out. I didn’t have words for this. The glass was cold, but from where I was standing I saw a big chest full of warm woolen blankets. We’d be able to stay warm, whether we could light a fire in that fireplace or not. My grandmother and the boy were sitting on the big white couch now. I took a blanket and wrapped them both in it.
“You stay here and get warm,” I said.
My grandmother scowled at me. “You think I’m some kind of invalid? I’ll damn well walk around and see what’s in this place, too.”
That was my grandmother. Crying one minute and cursing me out the next. I was happy to see that the time she’d spent in her dark apartment after the storm, alone and maybe afraid, hadn’t changed her much.
She stood up, shrugging the blanket off, and I wrapped more of it around the boy.
“We’ll get you some food. And we’ll find you a bed. I think there are three or four bedrooms in this place. You’ll have a nice one.”
When the boy looked like he felt safe and secure, I moved onto the next room. It was a dining room, all set up with an oval table made of mahogany and chairs that matched it. There was a candle holder in the middle with a long white candle sticking up from it. The candle was burned halfway down. Each place around the table was set with a place mat that looked like it had been handmade in some faraway country. Off to the side of the room was a tall cabinet with glass doors and shelves. On those shelves were bowls and plates that look like bone china. There were bright-colored iridescent glass goblets and plates that were clearly collector’s items. Whatever goodbreeds had lived here obviously liked to sit down to fancy dinners. Well, I wouldn’t mind taking their place while they were gone.
I thought back to the fancy apartment in Jaden’s building and how I had wanted to smash and break everything. Here I didn’t. This was mine, ours. We were home.
I went to explore the bedrooms a bit more. Down a hallway that came off of the living room, there were five doors—two huge bathrooms and three bedrooms. One of the bedrooms, the one I had taken the clothes from, was clearly the parents’ bedroom. It was the biggest and had a high, king-sized mattress with a beautiful carved oak headboard. The nightstands on either side of the bed matched the headboard, and so did the huge dresser off to the side of the room. I pulled open drawers. It had been days since I’d had a fresh pair of underwear, and the thought of one trumped the disgust I felt at wearing some goodbreed’s undergarments. I found the underwear drawer before long, and after I pulled out some comfortable cotton pairs, I reached in and took out the warmest, thickest socks I could find. They looked like they were made of wool. I had never owned a pair of socks like that in my entire life.
While I was pulling socks out of the drawer, my hand hit something hard and cold. I pulled whatever it was out of the drawer. There was a gun in my hand. A no-joke Beretta handgun. I looked at it for a minute in the light streaming in from between the heavy curtains. It glinted dully in the light. When I was a kid, my dad took me to a shooting range a couple of times, just because he said I should know how to shoot if I ever had to. He never said why he thought I’d have to, just that I should know. If only I’d had that gun out on that ori Peter’s boat.
I reached back in my brain to remember everything I could about shooting. Stretching my arm out, I aimed the gun at the wall. The feeling of holding it out like that made my arm shake. Making sure the safety was on, I put it down on the bed.
Closing the door, I unbuttoned my pants and slipped them down. I stepped out of them and stood there in my underwear. They were ripped along one side, near the waistband. As I slipped them off, I saw bloodstains in the crotch. I took them off and shoved them in the back corner of the drawer. I pulled the new ones on. I noticed that my breathing was heavy and my heart was beating fast. The boat came back to me then, and I pushed it out of my head by force. I thought of where I was, of all the nice things, of how I was going to keep the boy and my grandmother and Jaden safe forever. I pulled my pants back on and slipped the gun into the waistband.
I went into the bedrooms one by one. From the looks of things, the kids that had lived in the apartment were a girl and one boy. The girl seemed to be a few years younger than me, probably still in high school judging by the textbooks on her desk and the size of her clothes. The boy’s room was filled with Yankee pennants and jerseys, and model trains of every subway line in the city. I wondered if he’d ever ridden the subway in his life. I went into his closet and found that his clothes were a bit big for the boy we’d brought with us, but would certainly do.
As I was yanking his clothes off the hangers, a dissat feeling rose up in me. I was in some kid’s bedroom. The kid didn’t know anything, didn’t know that his family was filthy rich, or that they were forcing people like me and Jaden farther and farther away. He was just some kid who liked the Yankees and trains and went to school every day, and loved his parents. Here I was, invading his space, tearing apart his room, taking his things. But I only felt like an ori about it for a minute, because we needed to survive.
I laid the clothes out on the bed, then went and got the boy and brought him into the room. I talked to him even though I wasn’t sure he understood me, telling him to get dressed.
“This is all yours now,” I said.
I left the room to give him some privacy and went back into the kitchen. I started taking food out of the walk-in pantry. I kept pulling food out and laying it on the table until finally Jaden came over and stopped me.
“We have to make this last, Makayla,” he said.
“Oh, no, we don’t,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“There are other apartments here that I bet are just as well stocked. And besides, I found something back in the parents’ bedroom.” I lifted up my shirt and showed him the gun. “We run out of food, we go find more.”
Jaden grabbed me and pulled my shirt back down, as if the gun would disappear if it wasn’t in his line of sight. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked, his hands gripping my arm so tight that they made little circles in my skin.
“Make sure we survive,” I said. I pulled my arm away from him.
The boy came back into the room in new clothes, and my grandmother came and joined us at the table. We put the food out on plates and tore into it.
“Caviar,” my grandmother said, eating a spoonful. “And cashmere sweaters. Next thing you know, we’ll be driving a damn Bentley.”
I looked over at the boy. He had a bowl of peaches in front of him. He picked up the slices one by one with his fork and took little bites off of them like a bird until they were gone. He almost looked like he had a smile on his face, too. It was the first time I had seen him look that way since we found him. I stood up and found a box of matches up in the breakfront with the dishes. I lit the candle on the table and brought it in front of him.
“Blow it out and make a wish,” I said. He looked up at me with his huge black eyes. I puffed up my cheeks and pretended to blow. A real smile stretched across his face now, and he blew out the candle and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Alejandro,” he said. He pointed to himself. “Ale.”
“Your name’s Ale?” I asked. It was the first time he had spoken since we’d found him.
He nodded and went back to picking at his peaches as if the best thing I’d seen in days hadn’t just happened.
We ate and ate. We ate until our stomachs were full and their emptiness back at the emergency shelter was a memory. Someone said something mildly funny and we began to laugh and laugh, big belly laughs. The boy was silent at first, but as we laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop, he began to laugh, too.
For the first time in a long, long time, it felt like we might pull through.
2 When we finally got to bed that night, everyone insisted that I take the parents’ room. My grandmother took the girl’s room, and Ale was in the boy’s room. Jaden said he would take the couch.
“Let’s face it,” he said. “It’s nicer than any bedroom I’ve ever had.”
That night, in the huge bed, I wanted to rest. I stretched out on my back, curled up in a ball, laid on my stomach with my arms and legs spread out at angles from my body. None of it worked. I couldn’t make my mind stop. All that I’d seen in the emergency shelter, what had happened in the boat. Every time I fell asleep for a minute, I woke back up right away, my mind feeling stretched out and dry. After hours of it, I tiptoed back over to the door, my wool socks not making a sound in the deep piles of the tan carpet. I crept out to where Jaden was sleeping in the living room and put my hand on his shoulder.
He jumped awake and I felt terrible. Then he saw, in the dark, who I was, where we were, that everything was upswing. He smiled.
“Makayla,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t stop my phrenic brain,” I whispered, pushing back my hair and squeezing my forehead with my right hand. “Maybe you could come into my room until I get to sleep?”
He walked with me back across the apartment and into my room where we sat down on the bed.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Get under the covers. I’ll sit here and talk to you.”
I curled up under them. I still didn’t feel 100 percent safe, but I felt safer than I had in a while. Jaden. I thought about all we’d been through together since the storm, and even before that. Kids in the old neighborhood. I thought about his crush on me, what a goofy kid he’d been. That had changed so much. The man before me was tall, handsome. For the first time, I admitted to myself that maybe, just maybe, these lights on inside me when he was around meant something.
“Hey, Makayla? Did you used to think about being famous when you were a kid?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes even behind my closed eyelids. I should’ve known that Jaden would be back to the questions. He’d let them die down in the last few days, but here we were, as safe as we were going to get, and he’d started up on them again.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thought I’d marry a prince and everything. Turned out that princes don’t come to our part of Brooklyn too often. At least, they didn’t used to. I guess if you’ve got apartments like this here now, anything’s possible.”
“Always the smart-ass,” Jaden said. “Can’t you ever answer one of my questions straight?”
“Just get jawing,” I said. “Answer your own question. I’m supposed to be the one going to sleep, not the one talking.”
“When I was a teenager, I’d get myself to sleep at night by thinking about being an Olympic cyclist,” he said. “I would imagine races where no one could even come close to me. I’d think them all the way through—the aches in my legs from peddling, the shortness of breath on the hills, it was all part of this enormous feeling of victory I’d get to at the end. Then I’d imagine the medal ceremony, and standing up at the top of the platform, but knowing that even though there was a second and third place, nobody had been within a mile of me when I crossed that line. I’d think it over and over. It was like what sucking your thumb feels like when you’re little—using part of yourself to soothe your entire self—but in this case it was my imagination, not my thumb.”
As he spoke, I let the words drift over me. I felt the feelings of excitement he must have felt, the quiet thrill inside me that feel like snuggling down in the warmest bed on the coldest day of the year.
“But you never entered any races, or anything like that,” I said, opening my eyes. “I would’ve known. I would’ve come and cheered you on.”
He shrugged. “People like me don’t get to be Olympic champions. We get to ride around on errands for goodbreeds and get paid for it, if we’re lucky. And besides—if I made it real, it would’ve taken away the secret feeling about imagining it. And that was the best part. I’ve never told anybody about it until right now.”
“Why are you telling me?” I asked. My eyes were all the way open now. I propped myself up on one arm so that I was on level with Jaden.
He shrugged again, but this time the nonchalance felt forced. “I don’t know, Makayla. I guess I’d tell you just about anything.”
I sat up against the fancy headboard. Our hands were just a few inches away on the bed, and then there wasn’t any space separating them at all—I had my hand clasped over his. I wasn’t sure how it happened, just that it felt good. We’d slept near each other every night in the shelter, but there it had been for protection. I reached out my other hand and curled it around the back of his neck, feeling the little hairs at the base of his skull. I began massaging his neck with my hand, and then I pulled him closer to me.
Our lips met gently. For a minute I just sat there, doing nothing. My mind was blank, and it felt so good. All I could feel was the sensation of his soft lips. I didn’t think of the past, or the future, or anything but their softness. I felt so warm. He began to move his lips just a bit, pressing them against mine. Our mouths opened and I felt his tongue. He tasted wonderful, a hint of the bottle of wine we’d found and drank after Ale went to bed still on his lips.
My hands were in his hair, pulling his face closer to mine. Our kisses grew longer, deeper. His hands moved over my shirt to my breasts. My nipples were getting harder and more sensitive. He slipped his hands under my shirt and the touch sent shocks through me.
Before long, we were out of our clothes and our bodies were pressed up against each other. He was warm everywhere despite the chill in the air of the apartment. I touched his chest, his ass, his cock. I wanted to touch every part of his body. When my pants were off, he touched me, and for a minute I felt the pain still there from a few days before in the boat. My entire body tensed up.
“Makayla?” he asked. “Are you okay? Are you sure this is something you want?”
I took a deep breath. These were Jaden’s hands touching me softly and tenderly, not some attacker’s.
“Yes,” I said, unclenching my muscles. “Yes, I’m sure.”
I wondered for a moment why I had never done this with him before, why I had waited so long. But all the other times had not been right. This moment, safe and secure, warm and happy, was the right one.
3 For days, I woke up next to Jaden, stretched, kissed him, went into the kitchen and ate, and came back and went to bed. It seemed like it would never get old. I filled my belly, then snuggled up in his arms and breathed in deep the smell of his skin and his hair. Sometimes, I ran into someone else in the kitchen—my grandmother, Ale—they seemed to be doing the same thing I was: sleeping, eating, and sleeping some more. I was so happy to have the simple comforts of a safe place to lie down and food to eat, that it was all I wanted to do.
After I don’t know how many days, I woke up feeling like I needed to do more. I sat up in bed and shook Jaden awake.
“Hey, Jaden,” I said, shaking his shoulder. “Jaden.”
“What?” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“We’re going to stay here a long time, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, Makayla, we’re gonna stay here until they drag us out.”
“What about water damage and things?” I asked. “Won’t mold grow on the carpets and drywall downstairs? We’ll get sick.”
He sat up in bed. He still looked sleepy, but his eyes were open now.
“I didn’t even think of that. But you’re right. We should get that stuff out on the ground level as soon as we can.”
“This place is huge, though, and that ground floor’s all carpet,” I said. “You and me can slag, but Ale’s too young and my grandmother has arthritis in her hands and knees. Are we going to do it all ourselves?”
Jaden leaned back, shifting all his weight onto his arms, and exhaled. Sunlight was coming in around the edges of the heavy curtains. A pool of it spilled on his shoulder. He was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “We can’t. We’d have to pull up all the rugs, pull out all the drywall . . . that’s a lot of slag, and we’re only two people. Whether we want to or not, we’re going to have to get more people into this building.”
I was shaking my head before I even knew what I was doing. “No, Jaden. We will not. This is our place, and we need to keep it that way. We need to be safe, we can’t get in another situation like in that shelter.”
“Funny you say that, because the shelter was the first place I was going to suggest we go to get people from.”
“Are you phrenic?” I asked. “Are you absolutely outside of your goddamn mind?”
“There were some good people there, Makayla,” Jaden said. “People who deserve to be safe, too.”
Suddenly, I felt cold. My arms were shaking just a bit. I pulled the covers around me. Good people, he said. I thought about the same words going through my mind as I rode on the boat out to Gravesend to find my grandmother.
“How could we ever know who’s good?” I asked. Inside my head, my voice didn’t sound like mine. I felt like I was somewhere else.
Jaden put his arm across my stomach, cupped my hip, and pulled me just a bit toward him. “We can’t do this alone. Remember when our parents used to help put on those block parties? And how everybody had a piece to do? And who were those people? They lived down the street from us, they were our neighbors. These people are, too. Maybe even more than those who used to live here before, because we’re the only ones left. Maybe not all of them are good, but we have to trust at least some of them.”
I steadied my arms. Jaden was already up and pulling on his clothes. We went into the bathroom and bathed as best we could with the hand and face wipes we had found there. They wouldn’t last long. Maybe nothing would. We had to figure out what to do next.
4 The girl in the cutoff shirt’s name was Kristen, and she smelled like patchouli so bad I could hardly breathe around her. As we walked around the ground floor of the building with her and the other people who lived in the building with us now, she wouldn’t stop jawing to me about extreme sports.
“I was space diving when I was fifteen,” she said, shrugging. “Not a big deal at all, Mach 1 without a craft is only scary if you can’t get your spin down, which really isn’t that hard if you know what you’re doing. I was practically pro by the time I was seventeen. But by then I was more interested in surfing really big waves—which you don’t see unless you go somewhere where tsunamis happen a lot. So that was how it started, the disaster thing. And then, the thing got to be the people—that was more extreme than any of these things. People doing all kinds of shit, killing and dying and freaking out. You never know what people are going to do.”
“So you follow disasters?” I said.
“Pretty much all the time, now,” she said. As she talked, she pulled an elastic band off her wrist and wrangled her tangled blond hair back into a ponytail. “It’s been a few years. Place to place, never stopping really because the disasters never stop. You see the wildest stuff. I saw a mother kill a dog with her bare hands, roast it over a fire, and feed it to her children in Oakland.”
As she talked, she walked around the lobby, looking the walls up and down. There were grayish water marks on them. She walked over to one and kicked it.
“Drywall’s painted,” she said, “which is great fucking news. The best you’ve heard all day. Because that means we don’t have to tear every piece of it off the beams.”
Jaden and I looked at each other. He nodded his head once and raised an eyebrow at me. Back at the shelter, I had nearly flown off when Jaden suggested we ask her to come back to the building with us.
“Her?” I’d whispered. “Jaden, you must be phrenic if you think I’m bringing that girl back to live with us.”
“She’s a professional at this shit, Makayla,” he said. “I guarantee you she’ll come in handy.”
And he’d been right.
“What do we use to get rid of the mold, then?” I asked.
“I prefer tea tree oil, because I like the way it smells,” she said, “but try getting that shit in the middle of a disaster zone. Still, if there were any holistic wellness stores in the neighborhood, we could always raid them and grab some. But really lots of other stuff will do. Ammonia, bleach, or vinegar would all work. I just wish they didn’t all smell so bad.”
I looked around the room at the other people assembled with us, many of whom we’d found back at the shelter. Some of them I had seen there, like the woman who had grabbed all the extra slurree for her children, Drusilla. Others had been hidden off in corners, trying to survive just as we had. And they’d still been waiting there for help or something when we came along. I wondered what had lead them to believe, after the lives they had lived, which had to be not too far off from our own, that help would ever come. That they wouldn’t have to make it themselves. But there they had been, waiting for FEMA or the Red Cross or whoever people had told them to wait for. In the end, it had been us who came to the rescue.
Kristen was still talking.
“Floors are fucked, though. All this carpet. We’ll have to rip it up and take it out of the building. If there’s wood underneath, we’ll treat it the same way we’re treating the walls. If there’s concrete we don’t have to do shit.”
I looked once again at the people gathered in the lobby. There were about twenty of them. Most of them were darkskinned, some had faces lined with age and stress and the terror of what we’d all been going through. Their clothes were dirty. Some had children with them, little ones looking around in wonder and fear. But these people were listening to Kristen talk, and some of them looked hopeful. They looked like they had looked when I touched their shoulders at the shelter, or in the street where we had found them amid garbage and not too far from bodies. Something had come into their eyes then, as I leaned down and rapidly explained the building we had, how it had everything we needed, and how we were squatting it. Some of them had closed their eyes, and a few had cried.
Drusilla stepped forward toward where Kristen and I were standing.
“You mean my children won’t get sick here?” she asked. She looked hard, not hopeful. She reminded me of a lion, how fierce she was, and how that fierceness faded when she touched her children’s cheeks, or looked down at them. The children were up in one of the apartments, one that I wished we had picked when I saw the antique oak furniture and rows of old books.
“They won’t get sick if we do the work,” Kristen said. “Not from mold, anyway. But there are other ways they could get sick. Hep A, cholera, typhoid fever—that shit all comes from contaminated water. Now, FEMA should be here with clean water before too long, so we just have to find ourselves some until they get here. And don’t let your kids touch anything outside. Leptospirosis comes from rat piss in the mud and dirt and can kill you.”
I saw Drusilla tense up. She looked back behind her shoulder, as if she could protect her children just with her gaze.
A man who looked to be in his late thirties spoke up.
“I’ve been doing construction work for years,” he said. “I can look around for tools, I can teach people how to rip up the carpet. I can help.”
A tiny woman wearing a filthy sari spoke up in halting English. “I don’t know how,” she said, “but I will help.”
Other people in the lobby nodded, or looked me and Kristen in the eyes. The man who had said he worked in construction clapped his hands together. The sound bounced through the big, empty lobby.
“Yes,” he said. “First we go into the apartments and look for the tools. Then we make this place ours.”
“Yes,” I said, almost in a whisper. I found Jaden a few feet away from me and slipped my arm around his waist. I squeezed him. “Ours.”
“Wait,” Jaden said. “Some of us should be slagging on the carpets and the mold, definitely. But with all of us here, the food and water in this building aren’t going to last forever. Or even very long. We have to send people out for supplies, too.”
A murmur went through the crowd as my stomach tightened. This is what I’d been afraid of, letting all these people in—all those stores of supplies being gone quicker than anything. And it was obvious that none of us wanted to go out there.
“Some of us have children to worry about,” Drusilla said. “If I go out there and don’t come back, who’s going to take care of my babies?”
I felt like snapping at her, like telling her to shut up. But someone else spoke before I could, the woman in the sari.
“You’re right,” she said. “Only people who can accept the risks should go.”
I softened then. I thought about this woman, this Drusilla. What had she been through? With the way she protected those children, had she had to fight at some time to keep them? How many people had promised her help only to give her nothing? Who the hell was I to judge her?
“We need committees,” I said. I was thinking again of those block parties in my childhood. This was a pretty ’trosh excuse for a party, but here we all were, and we had to slag to make it go.
“Yes,” Kristen jumped in, but I kept going over her.
“A food and water gathering committee, a cleaning committee, a defense committee. Am I forgetting anything?”
“Clothes,” Jaden said.
“Childcare,” the woman in the sari added.
“Food prep,” said a man we had found in the streets.
“I’ll take charge of the food and water committee,” I went on. “Anybody who wants to join can go with me.”
“But no one should be in charge for too long of anything,” Kristen said. “It’s better if we all take turns leading.”
“Fine,” I said. “But for now, everybody who wants to go out there and look for food and water, be ready at the front doors in half an hour. Bring comfortable clothes and boots if you can find them and something to defend yourself with.”
5 There was only one other person. Even Jaden wanted to stay behind and do work in the building. I came down the stairs to meet him in a pair of Italian leather boots that I was going to destroy in the mud and the dirt. But there was a whole closet full of them in my size, so I could afford to waste this pair.
He was carrying a crowbar. I had my gun tucked in my belt where no one could see it, and was carrying a butcher knife. I felt like that gun was my ace in the hole, and would protect me against anything if need be—even this guy who was supposed to be on my side.
We stepped out into the chilly air outside the door. The sun was shining down, but the mud on the ground was still wet and sucked at our boots. The bodies we had seen in the streets in the days before hadn’t been moved, and there was a smell in the air of rotting and decay. We tried to avoid where they lay, walking across the street to get around them. Cars were slung across the street at every angle, and we had to climb up and over the roofs of some of them, our boots leaving dents in the hoods.
We walked for a few blocks, and found two stores across from each other. One was a corner store, an upswing one from the looks of it. The other was a chain pharmacy called Allen Brewster’s.
“We’ll get food and water first, then look for bleach and vinegar in the AB’s.”
The guy I was with was named Mo. He wore ripped jeans and an old button-down blue work shirt. We hadn’t talked much prior to him joining me in the excursion, and now didn’t seem the time to. He bounced a crowbar in one hand nervously. We looked at each other. After a tentative moment, he smiled at me and jerked his head in the direction of the store.
“Let’s go find what we can,” he said.
His heavy work boots that looked like he had arrived in them and my fancy Italian boots crunched over broken glass, slid in the mud. We were wearing heavy clothes and gloves, but if we fell in this shit, it would rip us to pieces, and the wounds would be hard to clean. We walked as carefully as we could toward the store.
The store had already been ransacked somewhat, but a lot of good stuff remained. I found a pack of cigarettes forgotten behind some cans of food. I grabbed both. I hoisted my ass up on the counter and ripped open the pack. I found a lighter on the counter near where I was sitting, in an almost empty display of them. I lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. I hadn’t had one since my oussies ran out back in Jaden’s building. I coughed and coughed, and then inhaled deeply again, closing my eyes. It was so good that for a minute, I forgot where we were.
When I opened my eyes there was a guy in a uniform standing in front of me, pointing a gun directly in my face.
“Don’t fucking move!” he yelled.
“What?” I said. My cigarette dropped out of my mouth and onto my lap. I let it burn there because I was afraid to move. I felt it singeing through my pants and into the flesh of my leg.
“Let me guess,” he said, “honoring the memory of people who died in this disaster by looting a fucking store?”
“I’m just hungry, I’m thirsty,” I said. “What are you, some kind of cop or something?” My hands were up and my voice was shaking. I was staring down that barrel, knowing it could hold the end of my life. I wasn’t ready to die. I was not ready for everything to be over.
“Yes, I’m some fucking kind of cop. Now get the fuck down from there before I put a bullet in your motherfucking head.”
I jumped down, my hands still in the air. Then I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t even hear anything, just saw a flash. Then the cob roller was on the ground, and a puddle of blood was forming around his head on the dirty tile floor. Mo was standing over him with his crowbar, shaking.
“What have I done?” he kept saying. “What have I done?”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said.
We ran for the door. We ran as fast as we could, not thinking to drop the precious things we had gathered, even as they slowed us down.
Finally, far away, we stopped. I looked over at Mo.
“We don’t know that he’s dead,” I said.
He was shaking. “Please, please don’t tell my wife.”
I looked down, breathing hard. As I bent over my knees, I saw that my fancy Italian boots were splattered in blood.