Survivor (5 page)

W
e made our way along the hall, keeping to the shadows and watching as the Chasers joined another pair at the foot of the stairs leading up to Fifth Avenue. One turned and looked back, but we may as well have been invisible from where we were hiding. Another two figures I guessed to be the ones who had peeled off from the group a few minutes earlier appeared at the top of the stairs at street level. They must have called or signaled down to their comrades, for the four of them climbed the stairs fast and disappeared down Fifth Avenue.

“What brought you here?” Rachel asked as we wandered back into the zoo grounds from the rear of the arsenal building.

“Being chased by those guys,” I replied.

“Sure, but chased from where?”

“Near the Plaza Hotel, after I'd gone searching through another section of the park.”

“What were you searching for in the park?”

“A girl.”

She looked at me, smiled, and shook her head like I was nuts. I followed her to the locked door of a storeroom. Inside was dim, lit by snow-covered skylights, but she navigated with ease and passed me a couple of buckets of feed, which I could hardly lift. I followed her out.

“So you went out there in the park, with these—Chasers, you call them?—around, to look for a girl.”

“Yep. A girl from a video.”

“You don't even know her?”

“Nope.”

“And you didn't find her?”

“Nope.”

“Well, Jesse, at least I know now that you're a little crazy and reckless.”

“I don't regret it, though,” I said. “At least I found you.”

 

As the afternoon grew darker and I continued to follow her around, Rachel remained wary, always keeping a safe distance, as if she might have to make a run for it at any moment. I found I liked just being around her, being around someone nonthreatening, residing in the comfort of our community of two. I hoped that she'd learn to share in that.

“You sure I can't do anything more to help?” I couldn't think of how to reassure her other than by proving myself by doing chores.

“This is my job, I have to do this. These animals—I'm all they have.”

I got that. But couldn't I do something beyond lugging a few buckets? I kept a lookout, figuring maybe she would like me hanging around for that.

She checked on the penguins and the puffins and the sea lions who watched us closely. I saw she looked sad, worn out, beat. She finally stopped to rest and asked for my help in carting some water.

“I mean,” Rachel said, out of breath, sinking onto a bench, “if you're just going to keep following me around . . .”

I used two large buckets, making trip after trip between the tap and the huge enclosed building that housed the tropical birds. After about ten minutes, Rachel joined me, lugging one bucket at a time.

On one trip I saw a sign for the polar bear enclosure. I wondered about sharing that vision I'd had of a new earth—a future where some kind of garden would secretly be growing up through the ruined ice rink, ready for the polar bear's return. He'd be king again, maybe start a family. But would that seem crazy to Rachel, who was coping with the day-to-day business of keeping the animals in her care alive? What did her idea of the future hold?

We were taking the water to the Tropic Zone, where inside it was warmer, a kind of big greenhouse island in a sea of snow. Hydrodynamic-something-or-other heating . . . My dad would know; he'd designed it into our house back home. It was some kind of system where heat was brought up from the ground in fluid-filled tubes and fed into the concrete slab floor to radiate the earth's natural heat. That, along with all the glazing that trapped what little sunlight there was, would be what warmed this place.

“Passive solar,” she said, following my gaze up to the roof. It had an aluminum foil-type section in the middle with massive skylights; big angled windows that caught every ray of daylight. “There are solar panels on the roof too. They power the heating pumps. We wouldn't have been able to survive this long without them.”

I liked that she referred to her family—her and the animals—as “we.” Whatever was coming in the days ahead, there was a future right here.

“What are you smiling at?” she asked me as we stopped and caught our breath.

“Nothing,” I said. My grin wasn't disappearing and neither was her look. “It's just nice to be useful.”

Rachel nodded and went back to the colorful birds. One was an orange so vivid, I could not imagine it appearing in nature. It let her pet him while it stood there, pecking at the food.

“What is he?”

“A scarlet ibis,” she said. He waddled along a branch and preened himself some more, oblivious to how the world had changed outside his enclosure.

“So, you've been studying veterinary science or something?” I asked.

“Yeah. I come from a family of doctors, but that wasn't for me.”

“You like animals more than people?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Animals are easier than people and a lot more reliable. And as much as I've cared for these guys here for the past two weeks, they've saved me too.” She nodded, and another small crack appeared in her standoffish demeanor.

It made sense, summed her up; explained how she could go on caring for this menagerie. Rachel's fondness for the birds was mutual. And like her, they were keeping themselves busy, picking and preening, never still.

I followed her around some more, helped her repair a fence at the back of the zoo, carted more water until my arms felt like they'd fall off, then watched as she launched a bucket of meat into the snow leopard enclosure. We stayed there, leaning against the fence, watching them eat. It was getting dark, and the wind had picked up.

“Chocolate and Zoe,” she said, detached, as the cats crunched on bones. “They were my primary job—I was one of their keepers.”

“And now you're everyone's keeper.”

Rachel nodded, the concept not lost on her; I think she liked that I got it. She looked at the big cats and they sometimes looked back at her. “They're why I'm still here,” she said, quietly. Then she started to cry. “Long as it's just me here . . . they're why I can never leave.”

I
understood Rachel's feeling of responsibility for the animals, but it played no part in my plans to escape this city. Would I be wasting my time trying to get her to change her mind and to leave with me? I needed to find Felicity. She seemed so full of hope on the video, so determined to escape the dangers we were in. Maybe she could change Rachel's mind.

By evening, there was still some distance between Rachel and me, but I noticed she'd slowed and was showing none of the urgency and drive I'd seen in her earlier. We went inside and I shut the glass doors behind me. It was still cold, but thankfully the wind was shut out. Rachel locked the doors, bolts at the top and bottom.

“You'd better stay here tonight,” she said as I followed her upstairs. “Bathroom's there,” she said, pointing down the hallway. “Do you mind using a bucket—to flush, wash, whatever?”

“It's okay, I'm used to it,” I said.

Rachel led me into an office, the timber floor of the historic building creaking underfoot. There was a big old couch, which she'd obviously been using as a bed, a couple of windows with the curtains drawn, and an open fireplace. I looked at her little makeshift bed, the food, the small stack of clothing, the bottles of drink—all of it enough for one to survive for a short while and not much more. I took off my coat and wet shoes.

“I'll get the fire going,” she said.

There was an old fireplace behind where the desk had recently been, a huge old leather-topped timber construction that was now pushed against a wall, leaving telltale dents of its former position in the ornamental carpet. The coals in the hearth glowed dull through black ash and charcoal. Rachel stoked them back to life with a poker, put on a fresh split log from the big steel bucket of firewood and coal briquettes that stood nearby. She waited a bit for the wood to spark, blew to coax them to ignite, then rose and lit an oil lamp on the desk, the type with a wick and a glass bell and little dial for adjusting brightness. Her face was friendly in that light.

“Sorry, Jesse,” she said, pointing at an assortment of tubs, jars, packets, and cans on the desk. “I don't have much food to offer you—not much variety, nothing exciting. Just what I could keep from the cafeteria.”

“I've got some food,” I said, producing everything I had in my bag. “Soup?”

“Sure,” she said, taking a pot and can opener from the desk. I set up my wind-up flashlight against a wall in the corner, so that it shone up to the ceiling like an up-light. I emptied two cans of chicken and vegetable soup into the pot and set it in the corner of the fireplace, nestled onto a bed of glowing coals. Rachel took off her polar-fleece sweatshirt, revealing just a T-shirt. Her arms were much skinnier than mine.

She looked at me, ran the back of her gloved hand across her sweaty forehead.

“So, you were here on vacation?” she asked.

“It was a UN leadership thing.”

“The UN? As in the United Nations?”

“Yeah.”

“No wonder there's problems . . .”

“What?”

“I mean, you seem a bit young for the UN.”

I laughed. “Camp,” I replied. “It was a senior school camp.”

I told her about how I was on the subway when the attack on the city happened. How I'd gone to 30 Rock to see what I could of the city from the viewing platforms.

Everything I'd seen. I told her about Dave, Anna, and Mini. All I'd been through with them “by my side.”

“That's . . . a special story.”

“Yeah,” I nodded in agreement.

She was being friendly, but I realized that special didn't really explain how I felt. I was sad to realize that, despite everything I'd done to hang on to them, I had been losing my friends gradually from the start.

Was I to blame for deceiving myself? Nobody had forced me to spend twelve days in total denial of the facts. All that time I'd been torn between wanting to leave and wanting to hide and wait until whatever had happened was over, and everything went back to normal. What could I have achieved if I'd accepted the truth the moment I woke up in the smashed train carriage? I wouldn't be here with Rachel, that was for sure. And I wouldn't have found the video of Felicity. There was a sacrifice to be made, however I looked at it.

I told Rachel as much as I knew about Felicity; that she was out there, somewhere, as of yesterday afternoon.

“She's lasted this long,” Rachel said. “She's probably still okay, just had to shelter someplace else.”

“I hope so.”

“And it was this morning when you left hers?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it's only a day. She'll be all right.”

She put a pot of water to one side of the fire.

“So,” I asked, broaching a subject that I knew might well bring her some unwanted memories, “where were you when the attack on the city happened?”

“I was in the basement,” Rachel said, her eyes reflecting the red of the embers. “I heard the explosions; they went on for about half an hour. I wasn't here in 2001, but I assumed it was terrorists again; that they'd come to finish the job, right?”

I shrugged, not knowing what to say. I'd come to my own conclusion that this was surely the work of some kind of nation-state rather than a group of crazy nut jobs, but I reminded myself that Rachel had not seen the scale of the destruction beyond the walls and fences of this zoo.

“When the explosions started, they evacuated the tourists and nonessential staff, and the rest of us went down to the basement. We stayed down there for hours, I didn't want to leave, but my colleagues helped me,” she said, smiling but looking distant as she conjured the memories. “And when we finally did come back up, that's when we saw them, the . . . Chasers?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we saw them, deranged people, chasing people later in the day—on Fifth Avenue, and in the park. Didn't know what to make of it. With a few other staff I kept attending to the animals. My last coworkers left in the afternoon, after they'd tried for hours to contact their families and friends. Landlines, cell phones, TV and radio, all went out around the time of the attack. No one knew what had happened. Said they'd be back with help and security, but, well . . .”

“It's the same everywhere I've tried, too,” I said, recognizing her frustration and resentment at being abandoned like that. “Every type of phone, all the television channels: blank. All the radio stations are either static or make a strange woodpecker sound. I think I heard some music on a car radio once, but I was tired and . . . I might have imagined it.”

T
he thought of Rachel here by herself for twelve days, having little idea what was going on outside these walls, made me shudder. I adjusted the wood in the fire to avoid the burning log spilling out the grate. I was glad when she broke the silence and changed the subject.

“Whereabouts in Australia are you from?” It was nice to hear her ask a question like this. After the afternoon's silent chores, I was afraid that maybe she was too shell-shocked by all this destruction to talk much about anything beyond survival.

“Melbourne,” I replied. “It's way down south—”

“I went there with my family when I was about your age,” she said. She was thoughtful for a moment. “Nice place. Only spent a couple of days in Melbourne, though. We went to Sydney, mostly, and the outback.”

“Where are you from?”

“Amarillo, Texas, originally. Moved to the West Coast when I was in junior high.”

I listened to her talk about her old hometown. I asked her about cowboys and oil, she told me about her family and music, and we talked about being away from home and the things we missed. I liked Radiohead and Muse, she liked Kings of Leon and Green Day. We'd both learned some piano, liked to sing in the shower, and wondered why no one ever really became a real-life superhero.

“Yeah, like that
Kick-Ass
character.”

“Exactly,” she said, dipping a cracker into her steaming soup and savoring it. “Where's our Hit Girl and Big Daddy? Hell, where're our Guardian Angels?”

“Were those the guys who used to go around keeping the peace on New York subways?”

“They're still operating in some places apparently,” she said. “Least, they were . . . Don't you wonder where the military is? Where's our police, our government?”

I finished my story from before, filling her in on my past twelve days and concluding with the day's events on the street, the trucks of soldiers and all that I could remember Starkey telling me.

“And these soldiers, did he tell you where they were going?”

“Wouldn't say,” I replied. “But . . . they weren't like regular soldiers.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were more like . . . renegade soldiers, unofficial or something. Older, like our parents' age. And one of the trucks had a big container in it,” I said, thinking back. “Kind of the size of a big fridge. It had USA-something stenciled on it, and it looked military, too.”

“I guess that makes sense about the roadblocks,” she said. “Maybe they were a small scouting party, an advance unit that's the vanguard of a bigger relief effort or something.”

“Yeah, but the weird thing was, the guy I spoke with said that they found a way
around
the roadblock.”

“Around?”

“Yeah. I remember thinking the way he said it was strange, like they weren't meant to be here.”

“And they didn't tell you what happened?”

I shook my head. “I told you everything he told me.”

Telling her and seeing her reactions was reassuring; it seemed like it all made sense to her, at least a lot more sense than it made for me.

I tried to eat more slowly, and held back a laugh.

“What is it?”

“Not used to eating with company,” I explained. “I—I've cooked and eaten pretty well, but guess I've grown used to just smashing it down fast.”

“That's okay.”

“I just . . . I guess learned to get by as best I could. I kept myself busy—exploring the building, making a sign on the roof, scanning the streets and horizons for hope.”

“It's good to keep busy.”

“Like you've done here. I think that's what got me through. That and luck.”

“We've both been lucky,” she said, pouring a couple of mugs of Coke and passing me one. “This was all up in the top floors of the GE Building at 30 Rock?”

I nodded. “Thanks.” We clinked mugs. Her eyes glowed in the warm light of the fire.

“No other survivors there?”

“No one else I saw,” I said. “You never know though, right? Someone may have locked themselves away in their apartment or office, waiting it out, waiting for help or death, whichever came first.”

“That's what I've assumed is going on out there,” she said. “I just assumed—I thought you would have seen lots of others.”

“It's . . . it's just me. Do you have family here in Manhattan?” I asked quietly, over the steam of the soup.

“No,” she replied. “Most of my family's in southern California. I've been here for three and a half months. I live by myself in Williamsburg—that's just across the East River.”

I crunched my cracker and sipped my soup.

“I couldn't feed them,” she said suddenly.

“Sorry?”

“The polar bears. I didn't have enough for them and everyone else . . . I had to let them out.”

I felt as though she thought I was judging her, her work, her decisions.

“They'll be okay,” I said. “It's winter—they can stick to the snow and head north, head home . . .”

“I actually envy them that,” Rachel said.

“Their strength?”

“In a way, yeah: to be strong enough, equipped with the innate ability to get out there in this harsh environment and find a way home. Hundreds or thousands of years of our species being soft and lazy makes it difficult for us to do much of anything out there.”

The weather rattled against the curtained window. It was good to eat with company, but eating seemed like a chore to Rachel, like she forced herself to have something to keep her energy up—if she faltered, if she failed, all the animals would suffer her fate. She sat cross-legged, her empty cup in her hands, watching the wood burn.

“You happy to sleep there?” she said, pointing to the stack of blankets I sat on.

“Sure,” I said. I made a bed of them, switched off my flashlight, climbed in and took off my damp clothes. She hung my jeans and shirt over a chair by the hearth, taking care as she did so and not saying a word. “Thanks.”

She knelt by the fire, poking at the coals, put a big thick log on and went to her own bed. The lamp went out and I watched the flickering of the orange light from the flames and the shadows they cast on the ceiling. I was warm and cozy in this little room, more so than at any moment I could remember.

“I can stay and help you, if you like?” I said. Rachel was silent, but I knew she was awake and had heard me. “Or . . . if I find Felicity, and we, I mean, if you want to, maybe we can all try to escape Manhattan . . .”

I knew my words were pointless, knew that nothing I could say would persuade this girl to leave her animals alone and defenseless. I'm sure some part of her wanted to be at home, but how could she leave? What would it take?

The silence between us lasted until I was drifting off. I'd thought she was asleep, but when my new friend spoke her voice was clear and alert and showed that she felt and thought more about the situation than I'd allowed.

“It won't make much difference what we do,” she said. “None of it makes much difference. We're stuck here, stuck with what we've got.”