The City Series (Book 3): Instauration Read online

  Instauration

  The City Series, Book Three

  Sarah Lyons Fleming

  Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Lyons Fleming

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  For Shelby.

  Beholder of beauty, creator of vision boards, opera time counterpart, and best friend extraordinaire. Nee-ha-ha-boo!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Untitled

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Sylvie

  The word of the day is woebegone. We don’t have a calendar, homemade or otherwise, and I can’t bring myself to say it aloud, but too much has been surrendered to give that up, too. Besides, it’s an obvious choice—the word sits heavy on the expressions of everyone in our Quarantine apartment.

  Eric has assured us of Stuyvesant Town’s friendliness, and the people seem pleasant enough, from the ones who examined us for signs of zombiehood to the ones who’ve brought us food. But, after having our lives destroyed by a psychopath a week ago, I’m not thrilled to be at anyone’s mercy.

  Leaving isn’t an option, not without food and a destination, and definitely not now that the mobs of Lexers have woken from their final round of winter freezing. We have running water, a nice apartment that overlooks the sewage-filled East River, and we’ve had plenty of time to contemplate how many people are missing from our reality.

  If Maria were here, maybe I wouldn’t feel so lost. If Grace were here, she’d assure me that people are still essentially good. But Maria lies in a mausoleum in Brooklyn. Grace is unknown, possibly eaten by zombies or shot by people who are not essentially good, along with Eli, Guillermo, and a hundred others—kids, adults, old people, a nun.

  Indy runs her index finger along the windowpane where we look out at the East River. I glance at her profile—the gentle slope of her nose, her prominent cheekbones, the eyelashes that curl up from pretty, dark eyes—and then return to the view. The tide is coming in. Bodies, garbage, and bits and pieces of boats bob to the north. Far across the water, the shorter buildings of Brooklyn call to me. It’s not our part of Brooklyn, but it’s closer to Sunset Park than here.

  “We’ll get there,” she says quietly.

  “Soon,” I agree.

  We’re kidding ourselves. The chances we’ll amass any sort of army, make it across the water, and take back our Safe Zone are slim. Crossing the water alone is a scant possibility. We have no boats, and the other side of the fractured Brooklyn Bridge teems with Lexers. I have to let it go, at least for now, but it’s really fucking hard to let go of murder.

  Eric is on the couch, hand balled on his thigh while he half-listens to Leo’s chatter. I sit beside him and loosen his fingers until they’ve laced themselves through mine.

  “Did they say what time?” I ask.

  “Around lunchtime, since that’s when we came in.”

  It’ll mark seventy-two hours in these apartments, where part of the door has been replaced with a locked metal grill at eye level, through which they feed us and check to see if we’re undead. After three days, they can be sure it won’t happen.

  Jorge holds Jin in the chair across from us. We guess Jin to be between six to eight months old, and, when he’s not sleeping, he’s a gleeful little fellow. Jorge offered to keep him with us, since Elena and May both have young kids in their Quarantine apartment, and Brother David has an apartment full of teenagers.

  Jin blows spit bubbles my way, arms outstretched. “He’s like a cat who likes people who don’t like cats,” I say. “Why else would he want me?”

  “Maybe you remind him of his mom,” Eric says. “Your hair is similar. Hers was about the same length.”

  Eric briefly spoke with Jin’s mother, another casualty of Walt and Kearney’s. I tug at the hair that now barely reaches my shoulders. Long enough for a low ponytail or two pigtails to keep it from wind and Lexer hands. If Jin makes it past babyhood, that’s all we’ll be able to tell him. Sorry, we don’t know your birthday or your mom’s name
or anything about your history, but your mom had hair like Sylvie. I’m sure it’ll be a comfort.

  Jorge lifts himself from the chair. “Take him for a minute, mami?”

  Without waiting for a response, he places Jin in my lap and heads for the bathroom Paul has vacated. I will admit Jin’s cute with his round eyes, little fuzz of black hair, and pink rosebud lips.

  “Hi, baby,” I say, and grip him under his armpits when my words cause a display of pure elation and a frantic tippy toe dance where I almost drop him.

  Paul swoops to lift Jin into his thick arms. “Rossi, you’re terrible at this.”

  “She is, isn’t she?” Indy asks Jin in a singsong voice. “Sylvie’s terrible.”

  Jin shows her his gums, through which two tiny teeth have sprouted. She takes him from Paul, holding him like a baby instead of an atomic bomb. “You’re pretty good at that,” Paul says to her.

  “Eli and I babysat Lucky a lot.” Indy’s smile evaporates. Her big, boisterous laugh is nowhere to be found in recent days. Paul gives her an awkward shoulder pat and drops his hand by his side.

  At the click of the door locks, Leo leaps into my lap. An older woman enters, her short gray-blond ponytail swinging and her blue eyes crinkled at the corners.

  Eric gets to his feet. “Hi, Kate.”

  She hugs him and waves at the rest of us. “Sorry, I was up at Central Park. Had I known you were here, you would’ve been out in twenty-four hours.”

  “It’s fine. Rules are rules.”

  “Rules are annoying.” Kate peers down at me and Leo. “And who’s this?”

  “This is Leo,” I say. “And I’m Sylvie.”

  She glances at Eric, eyebrows raised. “Yes, the Sylvie,” he says. “My girlfriend.”

  “I was afraid to ask,” Kate says. “What if you’d picked up another Sylvie somewhere? I tend to put my foot in my mouth whenever possible. In fact, I did it this morning.”

  “At Central Park?” Eric asks.

  Kate sighs cheerfully, giving the impression she doesn’t regret a word. “They had it coming, but I’m sure Louis wished he’d brought a gag. My Irish temper gets the best of me.”

  “What’s in Central Park?” Paul asks.

  “A Safe Zone,” she replies. “But you don’t need to hear about it now. Let’s bust you out of here.”

  We haven’t seen the others of our group since we started lockdown, though we called to each other through our grates. After Kate releases them into the hall with much fanfare, Indy hugs Lucky, who requested he be quarantined with friends rather than boring grownups.

  “You didn’t turn into zombies,” I say to Micah.

  He pushes his dark hair from his face, looking younger than his twenty-two years and tired enough to be eighty. “No, but we had some great games of charades. I bet you’re sorry you missed it.”

  “Of course I am.” I smile at Rissa and April. “How are you ladies?”

  “You know,” Rissa says, and plays with her brown hair. She lost her mother, then her brother, in quick succession. April lost her family over a year ago, but she looks as shell-shocked as her friend. The brown roots of her bleached hair are oily, and her usual thick black eyeliner has been replaced by pink-rimmed eyes.

  We follow Kate down several flights of stairs and into a landscaped courtyard with a playground. The sunlight is garish after days indoors, though it provides no warmth in the cool March wind off the river, and the twenty of us huddle together with our negligible belongings—a few BOBs, a plastic bag of candles, two rifles, a decent number of pistols, and more than a little apprehension.

  May hugs Chen and Emily closer to her side. Chen is her son; Emily belongs to Susan, who is missing, presumed dead. Elena clutches her two young kids’ hands. First her husband died, then Guillermo, and I know her only well enough to know she’s sweet and quiet and she’s killed one lone zombie in the past year.

  Kate waves over a lean, muscular man. “Louis,” she says, pronouncing his name Lou-ee, “this is the gang from Sunset Park.”

  “Good to see you, Eric.” He shakes Eric’s hand, beaming, then turns his smile on the rest of us. “Welcome to Stuyvesant Town.” I place his accent as possibly Congolese, though it’s only a hint of one. So far, he and Kate seem as welcoming as Eric promised.

  “Thank you,” Brother David says.

  He wears his brown monk’s habit, though it’s seen better days, and he stands beside Lincoln. I’d almost forgotten about Lincoln, the ten-year-old with a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and no family as of eleven days ago.

  I imagine being ten years old and overlooked, which isn’t a stretch considering my childhood, and I’m grateful when Brother David squeezes Lincoln’s shoulder to tell me he hasn’t forgotten.

  “How many do you have here?” Jorge asks.

  “With you guys, we’re nearing five hundred,” Kate replies.

  Our jaws drop. Last year, they had three hundred, and that was before they lost people. I’ve been anxious about our official entry into Stuyvesant Town, but now dread knots up my shoulders. It’s a lot of people with whom to work and live.

  “That’s why we were at Central Park,” Kate says. “We don’t know how much longer we can sustain all these people.”

  Eric’s grip on my hand tightens. “We don’t want to put you out.”

  “Not another word of that,” Kate admonishes. “We have rabbits and chickens. The gardens are being expanded. We have plans. The only thing to worry about is where you’ll live.”

  Louis examines the paper in his hand. “They put them in Twenty, split up the same as in Quarantine. There are two five-bedrooms, along with some threes. They’re in the last building we repaired. You won’t have many people around.”

  Kate notices how I perk up at those words. “I think we have a taker. It was the no people that sold you, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “I hear you,” she says, “loud and clear.”

  2

  As we take the courtyard steps down to the street, Kate explains that Stuyvesant Town was a collection of thirty-five brick buildings, themselves split into over eighty addresses, all set into a sixty-acre rectangle of city blocks. They’ve walled off and gated the entire area, though parts of it, like the section reserved for Quarantine, have been blocked off from the central area by inner gates.

  The New York City street grid doesn’t extend into the rectangle that is StuyTown, as she calls it. Four semicircular streets, called loops, like the one on which we walk now, allow partial access. The rest of the interior must be walked on footpaths that weave through the complex. At one end of this loop, Avenue C and the East River are accessed by the gate we entered three days ago after we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge.

  We follow Louis and Kate along the sidewalk, past buildings with bricked-over lower windows. The open areas between buildings are filled in with tall concrete and brick walls that remind me of Annunciation Monastery. Kearney cared for the nuns and children there, but I’m thinking the days of Kearney protecting defenseless humans have ended, since he and Walt murdered not only our families, but also their own. I hope that, as a result of the bullets I put in him, the days of Kearney doing anything have ended.

  “You made some changes,” Eric says to Kate and Louis.

  “We did,” Kate says. “No one’s getting through these suckers.” Louis tsks, and she winks. “He thinks I jinxed it. Let me rephrase: No one’s getting through these suckers by force.”

  We stop at an iron gate set into a brick wall, behind which more brick buildings rise. It’s opened by an older man with wispy gray hair and wire-framed glasses who looks us over with friendly curiosity. “The King and Queen have returned,” he says in a British accent, with a slight bow at Kate and Louis. “Dare I ask if they’ve brought us anything?”

  “We’ve brought you nothing, good sir,” Kate says, putting on a similar accent. “Central Park has all the soil in the kingdom, and they’re not shari
ng it with us.”

  He mashes his lips. “I knew the bastards wouldn’t do it.” His accent is gone, replaced by New York Jewish Grandpa.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Louis says. “These are the new people from Quarantine. We’re taking them to their apartments.”

  “I’m Artie,” the man says. “Welcome. Where are you staying?”

  “We’re putting them in Twenty.”

  “Ah, the weirdo building. It’s where I live. Building Eighteen, which is attached to yours. First floor. You need anything, come and see me.”