CHAPTER 1: A MYSTERIOUS RESCUE
Boxed in on all sides—how had I let that happen? I’d known better than to go out alone, unarmed, unprepared. When I left the vault at sunup, I hadn’t intended to stay out so late. Sunset signaled the beginning of the definitive countdown, the ticking time clock warning the quick and the breathing to get behind closed doors. Fast. The staggering, groaning figures shuffling toward me would hear no pleas for second chances, and they never forgave mistakes, especially the stupid ones.
I reached into the deep front pocket of my leather blacksmith’s apron and clenched my trusty stiletto’s handle. The slim blade was the only weapon I’d brought with me. Neglecting to stock up on more firepower was not my only error today, but I’d have to save enumerating my many failures for later... if I survived. Spreading my feet wide for balance, I raised my arm like a constable stopping oncoming traffic then bent my wrist, fingers up, palm toward me. I flicked my fingers twice in a come-hither gesture.
It was all bluff. I wasn’t that brave, and by no means did I want to face my death. Not like this.
The winds changed, swirling loose curls around my temples and driving the sickly-sweet ammonia scent of rotting flesh up my nose. My stomach rolled, and bile climbed up my throat. I choked it back. Tears welled, and I was tempted to let them blind me. Don’t really want to see what’s coming for me, do I?
The first one, the most eager and ravenous, shambled close enough to catch a slash from my knife. A cut wouldn’t do it, though. I needed to sink the blade in deep, damage the brain or spine. I’d killed the nasty critters plenty of times but with a rifle or a handgun from several yards away. Hand-to-hand combat had never been my forte, but neither was having my guts ripped out by a mouthful of putrid teeth.
Drawing in a deep breath, I tensed for a lunge, but at the same instant I shifted to strike, an arm snaked around my waist. A hand as strong as steel clamped around my stiletto. I shoved and struggled, kicked and clawed, but the hands were too powerful, the arm too binding. I screamed loudly enough to shred vocal cords.
See? Told you I wasn’t all that brave.
“Quiet,” a male voice whispered harshly in my ear—not one of the dead because they never spoke. “Follow me. Quickly.”
“But there’s nowhere to—” I said, but the figure that had materialized at my side had already dashed away, his wool coat swirling like a black cape. After several long strides, he flung himself over an iron railing behind me and landed—thunk—at the bottom of a stairwell. I’d known about the stairwell, but it led to the access door for an unfinished subway tunnel. Those doors were solid steel and, in my experience,
never unlocked. I’d failed to consider the subway as an escape route for that reason, but I swore to never make that mistake again along with all the others I had already committed today.
Without hesitation, and with the undead’s hot, pestilent breath following me, I cleared the railing and landed gracelessly at the bottom of the stairwell, taking the brunt of the fall on my tailbone. Rolling to my feet, I rubbed my bruised rear end and muttered curses under my breath. The stranger was no longer near enough to hear my complaints though. He had opened the access door and disappeared into the darkness on the other side.
“Hey. Wait for me!” I said, calling into the subway’s shadows.
A hungry growl slithered down the stairs. Turning, I recoiled and backed away from the creature leering at me from the top step. Something resembling a woman wearing a mink stole and a pale-pink gown took her first clamoring step. She was nasty, missing at least half her jaw. How did she intend to bite me without it? But yellowed nails at the tips of her skeletal fingers clawed at me, eager and hungry, promising to inflict the damage her missing teeth could not.
Spinning around, I scurried toward the subway’s darkened doorway. As soon as I cleared the threshold, a cool breeze blew past me, and the steel door slammed shut. In the draft, I caught a faint whiff of sandalwood and male sweat. A spark from a lighter sputtered, and a flame erupted from the fist of a gloved hand. He touched the flame to a lantern wick, bringing to life a warm, yellow light. Before he turned away, the glow revealed a striking profile: dark hair, sharp cheekbone, high brow, lush-lipped mouth. He was young, possibly my age, but certainly no older than Bloom.
In a city bereft of the living, I was confident I’d never seen him before, which was odd. Not impossible but certainly improbable. There weren’t so many of us left alive that we didn’t all recognize each other, even in passing. And almost all human relationships in this city were passing.
“Follow me,” he said in a gruff voice.
“Where are we going?"
I asked.
He declined to answer. Instead, he led me down subway tracks, laid but never used. We dodged the occasional puddle when possible and plowed through them when it wasn’t. He moved fast enough to discourage conversation, and we raced the distance of several city blocks before he stopped at an open doorway. A warm draft wafted over us, and the lantern’s flame flickered.
“There’s a ladder at the end of this hallway,” he said. “It’ll lead you to a storm drain. That storm drain ends a block from your place. You can find your way from there.”
“How do you know where I live?” I asked.
He ignored my question and shined his lantern down the hallway, keeping his face averted to the shadows. I stepped forward to get a better look at him, but he must have sensed my intentions because he backed away.
“You can’t show up out of nowhere like that and tell me nothing,” I said. “Who are you?”
“I’m the guy who just saved your life.”
“That’s it?”
His silhouette shrugged. “Yup.”
I snorted and rolled my eyes, although the darkness had probably concealed my gesture. If he wanted to be a mystery, who was I to argue? I glanced at him once more before turning for the ladder.
“Wait a sec.” His hand flashed out and hooked my elbow, stopping me mid-step. “Take this.”
He dumped something into my palm, something hard, dense, and warm from his touch. My thumb swiped a rough engraving on the object’s flat surface. I leaned closer to the lantern, and its light reflected off a small square of rustless steel: a lighter. Before I could say thank you, my rescuer doused his lantern and dissolved into the gloom, disappearing like a ghost.
CHAPTER 2: GET LAZY, PAY THE PRICE
Iclimbed 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.
CHAPTER 3: MINT JELLY AND LITTLE GREEN PEAS
Bloom and I always waited until the brightest part of the day to do our foraging. The dead shied from direct sunlight, and that gave us our only advantage. While they were uncoordinated and easy to kill, there were at least twenty Rotters for each living person, and the dead liked to roam in packs.
“Find anything?” Bloom asked as she searched the storeroom of a little Italian restaurant we had discovered miles away from the Savings and Loan. We’d never needed to go so far for supplies before.
“I found some crackers.” Crumbs sputtered from my lips as I exited the kitchen.
“What else?” Bloom peered into the dining room and glanced out the restaurant’s front windows. In one hand, she clutched her Colt Walker, a .44 caliber revolving pistol. In the other, she carried a .22 Bloomington rifle. Both guns had once belonged to our father, who had spent most of his life working as an engineer with the Bloomington Arms Company. If you haven’t caught on by now, Bloom’s name was no coincidence. Neither was my affinity for firearms.
I remembered how Father’s slim, calloused hands had guided my smaller, paler ones as, together, we broke apart one of his many, many rifles. We oiled and swabbed the chamber and pin and polished the barrel until it shined blue. “Always wipe off the excess polish, Sera,” he’d said. “Don’t gum up the works.”
He would watch me buff the walnut stock to a warm, rich gleam. I reloaded the cartridges and raised the stock to my shoulder as if to fire, finger resting beside the trigger. Peering down the sight, I admired my handiwork. Then we broke the rifle apart and did it again.
“Unless we’re practicing, never fire it unless you mean to kill someone,” Father had said. “And, darling, I hope you never have to...”
Bloom wasn’t the only one packing heat. I carried the sister to her Colt, and my trusty stiletto rested in the pocket of my leather apron. I kept the knife as backup only. Despite my mistakes the day before, my number-one goal was to never get close enough to one of the rotting Bone Bags to have the need to use it.
We might’ve had a hard time finding food, but guns and ammunition were plentiful enough. People had hoarded them when their neighbors started falling to the Dead Disease. Not many of those people had managed to survive since then, but their guns and bullets sure had.
“Got some more tea,"
I said as I crammed another stack of crackers between my teeth.
Bloom scowled. “Quit stuffing your face, and let’s go. You know I don’t like standing around in one place too long.”
I shoved five boxes of saltines into my canvas duffel and buttoned it closed before joining my sister in the dining room. “Let’s go on a little bit farther.” She kept her attention on the plate windows framing the empty street outside. “I’d kill for a tin of sardines.”
We searched for a few more hours and found several more boxes of tea in a basement apartment. Then, with delirious relief, we stumbled upon a tin of dried fruit almost entirely free of mold. I inhaled the sweet perfume of shriveled apricots and currants and longed for the summer, when we would keep a container garden on the Savings and Loan’s roof. We grew tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and whatever else we could convince to take root in buckets and empty wine casks.
Occasionally, Bloom and I braved the lengthy walk to the river to fish. We resorted to roasting squirrel and pigeon when we were hungry enough, but I longed for a nice beef rib roast. Bloom was wrong. We wouldn’t starve to death if we stayed in the city, but the question came down to what we were willing to do, or eat, in order to survive.
The sun was sliding fast from the sky, slinking toward the horizon. If we stayed out much longer, we risked walking home in the dim light of dusk. We’d seen no signs of Flesh Eaters so far, and that made it a good day. But I didn’t want to foul our good luck with unnecessary risk-taking.
“What I wouldn’t do for a hot cherry pie.” Bloom licked her lips as she stuffed a dried apricot between gum and cheek. She held it there like a plug of tobacco.
“I’d like a meatloaf,” I said, holding out my hand. She plied it with an apricot, and I followed
her lead, packing the fruit against my gum to slowly dissolve.
“Meatloaf?” Bloom pursed her lips. “Why not a rib eye? Or a lamb chop?”
“With mint jelly?”
“And little green peas.”
“And whipped potatoes?” My mouth watered, and the apricot turned to mush. Most days, I missed real food more than I missed people.
“And gravy,” she said. “Don’t forget the gravy.”
“What about dessert?”
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