Breathless City Read online

  “It’s been a while, but I don’t always get it,” Natalia’s voice got lower, “Stress makes it go sometimes.”

  “So it could be?”

  Natalia held her forehead in her hand and was looking out into nothing, just thinking.

  “I’m dead,” she said in a flat voice.

  Tension knotted its way through Gavin, sinking heavily into the pit of his stomach. Dead? What was she talking about? “No. You aren’t going to die. That boost should keep most of the effects of the toxins away.”

  Sam swept a curl behind Natalia’s ear with shaky hands.

  “Broke the rules.” Natalia shook her head numbly. “Going to get kicked out. I’m already an exile from the underground. There’s nowhere left to go.”

  5

  When Stella got to Nat’s room, she felt the tension as soon as Sam opened the door for her. Sam let her in automatically before giving her a double take.

  “Where did you get that?” He pointed to the rifles slung across her back.

  “Xander.”

  “Only you could get into a fight with him and still get special treatment,” Sam mumbled.

  He didn’t even know about the hand-grenades and ammo in her pockets.

  Sam dragged his hands across his hair and avoided eye contact.

  What’s going on?

  “Nat!” Stella’s mouth fell open, as tears welled in the corners of her eyes. Natalia was sitting upright. Her skin had regained color from the ashen sickly state she had before.

  Stella had been so worried that Natalia wasn’t going to make it. She’d lost so many friends. Couldn’t take losing Natalia, too.

  Though sitting upright, Natalia was hunched on the sofa with her knees drawn up to her chest. She looked dazed.

  Stella crossed the room and grasped Natalia’s hand in both of hers. “What’s wrong?”

  For a tense moment, no one replied. Then Natalia whispered, “I think I’m pregnant,” before bursting into tears.

  Stella rubbed reassuring circles on her back. “It’s all right. We can fix this.” Stella dropped her voice low. “I know someone in the city who could take care of it.”

  With a little make-up to hide Natalia’s tattoo and enough oxygen pills, Stella would be able to get Natalia into one of the medical facilities in the underground city. It was a simple enough procedure. Her contact shouldn’t give her too much trouble over it.

  “I don’t want to get rid of it,” Natalia said.

  It was as if the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. What did that mean? Was Natalia considering having the baby? Xander would never allow her to stay.

  Stella didn’t miss the quick, irritated look that Sam shot at Gavin, and she winced.

  “So what do you want to do?” Stella had to make sure that she wasn’t misinterpreting Natalia.

  “I want to try to let my baby live.”

  “Even if it means getting kicked out?” Relocation was just the first issue Natalia would have to face.

  Babies were loud. She’d have to find someplace relatively soundproof and secure enough to withstand the horde. If there was such a place.

  “Yes. If I have to leave, I’ll go.” Natalia stared at the space in front of her.

  “All right.” Stella squeezed Natalia’s hands. “Nobody knows yet. You can hide it. There’s still time.”

  Her heart pounded as her throat went dry. Sam and Natalia. Her two closest friends. She was losing both of them. “I have a supply of oxygen pills hidden in my locker. Take it. Maybe use it to trade your way into another gang.”

  None of the others had rules as strict as Xander. But then again, none of the others were as effective at keeping people alive.

  Natalia blinked rapidly, holding back tears. She nodded.

  “We’ll get going, then. I’ll think of something.” Stella rubbed the back of her neck, trying to ease the building tension.

  Natalia grabbed her hand before Stella could move away. “You need to take care of yourself in the city. Be careful.”

  Stella nodded, not trusting herself to say another word.

  Stella didn’t speak to Gavin until they had reached her room on the eighth floor. As soon as the door had shut them in, she questioned him. “What did you say to her?”

  “Just that I’d help her if I could.”

  “Why would you say that?” Stella stepped in front of her desk, staring at the photograph that was the only thing that marked this room as her own.

  “Because it’s a baby.” The way Gavin’s voice strained over the last word reminded her that she was dealing with someone who was different. He didn’t know any better.

  “I’m not saying that killing babies is the right thing to do. I’m just saying that instead of letting one person die, you’ve talked her into letting three people die.” Stella shook her head, as if the motion would be able to dislodge the image of Sam and Natalia with a screaming newborn. A pack of the infected tearing into them like so many vultures.

  “Then they shouldn’t be kicked out. Babies don’t have to mean the death of their parents,” Gavin argued.

  “I did the same thing to my mother. I was loud. I cried. And she died for it,” Stella said with her back to him, wondering why she was even telling him this.

  Stella never talked about her mother.

  She stared at the photograph of her mother and father holding her. She’d never know the woman she resembled so much.

  “I meant what I said,” Gavin told her. “I want to help.”

  The raw honesty in his voice drained the rest of her anger away.

  “Just try to get some sleep, Gavin,” she murmured. “We leave at first light.” She placed a blanket on the couch. It was too small for him, but she couldn’t leave him with Sam anymore like she had originally planned. Her room would have to do.

  Like many nights before a scavenging trip, Stella couldn’t sleep. Stella peered out her window, just able to make out the silhouette of a pack of infected as they roamed the night, hunting for their nocturnal prey. Stella looked back to where Gavin tossed and turned on her couch and sighed.

  When did it get so hard to have friends? She’d stopped making new friends long ago. It was too hard when she lost them.

  Boar brush in hand, Stella inspected the equipment and scrubbed out the barrel. When the equipment was in order, she traced imaginary lines into the table in the best approximations of the layout of the city. She planned out the safest routes.

  Gavin’s initiation had turned into a battle of wills between her and Xander. This wasn’t the first time he’d raised the stakes, pressuring Stella to give in.

  Xander probably expected her to back down in the morning. Or maybe Sam was right, and he’d try to force Gavin to partner up with one of his goons, who would just take him far enough away and shoot him in the back.

  But Xander wouldn’t act until the sun was fully up. Stella and Gavin would be far away by then.

  She couldn’t stand by and do nothing. What was the point of soldiering on if she had to lose everyone she cared about to do it? She couldn’t keep losing people.

  In the morning, she placed a hand on Gavin’s shoulder. “Hey, wake up.” The first red sun rays pierced through the blinds of her window, bathing his face in strips of light. She waited to see his eyes open, clear gray and confused as they looked around before they settled on her.

  “Morning,” Stella greeted him, holding back a smile as he held her gaze.

  She stepped to the supplies laid out on her desk, listening to Gavin getting out of bed and following her. Wordlessly, she handed him a pistol and a drawstring bag. It was filled with all the survival necessities: sunscreen, basic first aid, freeze-dried rations, a canteen, a switchblade, and the ever-useful duct tape. Stella hoisted her own bag across her shoulder, pausing a moment to look at her parents’ picture before slipping that in with the rest of her supplies. She never left her parents behind for long.

  The hotel was quiet as the two of them walked down
the corridors and stairwell. Before she knew it, she was at the entrance, her hand poised over the lock, about to step into danger once again. She felt a pounding in her heart that echoed in the ticking pressure within her lungs as her oxygen pill matched the demands of her body. She closed her eyes for a moment, relishing this one last measure of calm before stepping outside.

  Her leather shoes sank noiselessly into the sand. Behind her, she heard the light crunch of Gavin’s boots. The sun hung low, just breaking the world out of the shadows, and the night-hunting infected would be turning to their shelter. Assuming they had caught something in the dark.

  A rat scuttled by the hotel foundation. It disappeared in a flash of pale fur and a dirt-streaked tail, slipping away between the cracks. Rats would stay hidden if they could smell an infected near.

  The tension in her shoulders eased.

  “You ready?” Stella asked Gavin, with a half-smile that she was sure didn’t reach her eyes. “Just stay close.”

  Seeing Gavin nod, Stella led them to the remaining patches of asphalt that made up the road into the city.

  Sam’s words echoed in Stella’s head. Can’t you take him back now instead of risking his life in New York? Now that they were actually on their way, Sam’s words began to sound better and better.

  “Where is the oxygen factory?” Stella asked Gavin.

  “Deep under the ocean,” Gavin replied. “Where the infected can’t get to it.”

  “How far?”

  “Fifteen minutes by submarine to the city, at forty knots. Multiply by one-point-fifteen, divide by four…” Gavin’s index finger pointed at the numbers he could see in his mind. “So that’s eleven-point-five miles away.”

  “Could you swim that?” Stella sized up the broad muscles across his shoulders and back, thinking that he, if anyone, had a shot of swimming down into the black waters with just the right oxygen pill and some diving gear.

  “If I didn’t get eaten along the way.”

  Stella didn’t have to ask what would try to eat him. She had seen enough of the way the toxins had impacted the surviving wildlife, seen enough of the overgrown and lethal combinations of mutations on land. If the same was happening under the ocean waves, it was something she didn’t want to ever encounter.

  “New York it is, then,” Stella muttered resignedly.

  “You never told me why you don’t live underground with the other survivors,” Gavin said, reminding her that, yes, if she really didn’t want to take Gavin into New York, there was still one more option.

  The thought of Gavin in the tunnels… They’d stand more of a chance against the infected in New York than the administrators in the city. At least she could understand the motivations of the infected; hunger she understood very well.

  She couldn’t blame anything as simple as survival as the reason the administrators did what they did.

  “I’ve never lived underground, and I wouldn’t live there if I had any other choice,” Stella said, muting her feelings.

  “But wouldn’t you be safer underground? We send supplies; you wouldn’t have to go searching for food like this.”

  “The people underground are powerless. Here, at least I have a gun.” Seeing Gavin’s confused look, she explained further. “Everything is monitored by the administrators. Yes, the administrators provide everything. Food. Pills. Clothes. But one mistake and they take everything away.”

  “That’s not the way it is supposed to work,” Gavin said.

  “Natalia was our most recent one. When she worked as a nurse underground, too many of her patients survived, even the ones who weren’t supposed to. The administration started cutting down her food rations. She could either help poison the administration’s targets or starve to death. So she chose the desert.”

  “Couldn’t that just have been a mistake?” Gavin asked. To Stella, he sounded just like a citizen who believed in systems, believed that life was fair—until it happened to them.

  “Sam was an electrical technician. After a power failure at the administrators’ lounge, the electricians on duty had their pills cut for a week. We were there for supplies, and he just joined the raid. Escaped with us. Those are just the two people you know. Everyone in the gang has a story.” Stella knew every last one of those stories. If Gavin had to be convinced, she could let him know all about the corruption underground, from what went on in the entertainment district to the people denied oxygen pills until they began to sicken.

  “What about you? You said you never lived underground. Did the city screw up your life, too?”

  “Yes. It did.” Stella hadn’t meant for her words to sound so bleak. This time she couldn’t hide the trace of her rage.

  Gavin didn’t ask any more questions.

  They followed the road, where they could see the cracked pieces of asphalt sticking out from beneath sand. They passed the ruins of cars, some still filled with sun-melted bodies that had been left to cook behind the glass since the time of infection. According to a road sign, with its high-carbon-steel pole bent at a low angle, they were traveling on I-95.

  Here, along the side of the road, vegetation grew in dark patches. These plants had an adverse reaction to the toxins, and the animals—or people—that ate them regularly would build up a lethal concentration of poisons in their systems.

  Gavin looked at everything as if he were cataloging details for later use. “What makes New York so dangerous?” he finally asked.

  “The freezers.”

  Gavin did a double take, raising his eyebrows.

  Stella explained, “There are still working freezers in the city. It’s one of the few places for miles that still has viable food, even if the infected aren’t too skilled at getting at it. Still attracts them from all around.”

  “So how are we going to survive?” Gavin asked softly.

  Stella slowed her brisk pace, considering. For all the raw power in his muscular physique, there was vulnerability in his words. Others who came out here, out in the open, out in the heat, seemed stripped down to a primal essence. Nothing left in them but the cruel instinct to live. His quiet concern was incomparable.

  Waiting for her reply, Gavin’s posture was stiff. He rubbed the back of his neck as he scanned their surroundings for unfamiliar danger. Stella closed the distance between the two of them, tracing a hand up to his shoulder, comforting him.

  Her stomach was tense, and she couldn’t shake the image of the hordes of New York. But she was done with standing back and doing nothing.

  “To make it, you’ve got to know their habits.”

  “Tell me, please,” Gavin said with a hint of a smile.

  “Don’t underestimate their blindness. If they can hear you, they know exactly where you are. If you stand still, they can sniff you out. That’s the first mistake people make.”

  “What do you do if one finds you?”

  “Outsmart it. If that doesn’t work, shoot its brains out and hide,” Stella said with a grim relish, pulling out her handgun and miming the kill: aim, fire, and the jerk of feedback at the end of it.

  Their path was clear all the way to the bridge. The sand yielded to smooth concrete. They rounded a corner, passing a sign that announced that the GWB Southwalk was open between the hours of 6 a.m. to midnight, and then there it was.

  Criss-crossed steel towers dominated the view. Silence fell over them as they neared the colossal architecture—the barrel cables and their protection shields. The remnants of a time before oxygen pills.

  They walked over level concrete, the spray of the Hudson River misting over them. Except for the low rail separating them from the water below, the walkway looked like a typical sidewalk. Once Stella began to move, she felt the unsettling sensation of being suspended in space without solid ground beneath her. The railing did little to shield her view of the air beneath them, or, a fair distance below that, of the water sandwiched between rocky cliffs.

  Stella closed her eyes against the vertigo, focusing on their path.
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  “There’s the city,” Stella said in a low voice. Gavin held on to the rail, looking out across the expanse of the George Washington to the rise of the buildings in the distance. All they could see were the skyscrapers, calm and still. From the bridge, they wouldn’t be able to see all of those openings—all the cracked windows, the doors, the alleyways. There were thousands of places for the infected to hide in every direction. Stella shifted the mesh bag on her shoulder, hearing the reassuring clink of ammunition and grenades.

  Gavin tensed beside her, staring into the mirror that reflected what was coming along around the bend. He reached for the gun holster, his fingers hovering over the metal.

  Stella brushed her hand over his, feeling the rough texture and stopping him. She removed her hand, lifting one finger to her lips for silence. She had seen it, too.

  Silently, she slipped ahead in quick, light steps. She rested her hand on a weather-beaten sign hanging on by corroded screws, testing its hold.

  An infected stepped around the corner into view. The tattered remains of its shirt did little to cover a female body, burnt by the sun’s glare and ripped apart internally by the spread of toxins. Long curly hairs remained on the head in patches, screening half of the blind face of the infected from view. Stella could see, even under the strands of hair, the movement of nostrils as they flared wide and the thing took in their scent. She waited for its tell, the moment between walking and hunting. She saw it in the twitch of stiff hands a second before the creature charged their way.

  Stella grasped the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline sign with the message “You’re not alone,” ripped it clear off the rail, and slammed it into the skull of the infected. Its head whipped back. Carried by the momentum, its body toppled over the rail. Stella leaned over the metal bars to view the descent, watching the threat become smaller and smaller until it slammed into the black water below.

  Gavin joined her side, staring at the ripples in the water, all that was left of the encounter. He smiled at her tentatively, but his eyes were tight with tension. She understood his worry. Even here, far from the city and early in the day, they were already running into the infected.