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Maria's apartment looked like shit. She had more copies of that shitty record than she'd ever listen to, if she ever wanted to listen to "Baby Can You Dig Your Man?" again, which she didn't. Fucking Larry was probably not even the same guy. And her spatula was gone and breakfast was a fucking mess.
She sat on her couch with her face in her hands. Fuck.
Two pieces of dry toast and a shower later, she was feeling almost human. She grabbed a coffee on her walk to the bus stop, getting in to the clinic at three before nine. "I'm not late," she told Sherry the receptionist, who snorted at her, then broke into a cough.
"Tell that to Dr. B.," Sherry said after grabbing a glass of water and chugging it to calm her coughing fit.
Maria hid her grumble. Dr. B. was kind of an ass. He paid okay, better than the first place she'd worked out of school, but he thought that made him God's Gift to his staff. After ten minutes of handing that man tools while he flirted with the forty year old moms with the big purses, she was ready to go back to school for flower arranging instead. She was scheduled to help him with fillings half the morning and already the crappy feeling she'd had since waking up was back.
Their first two patients canceled. Sick, Sherry told her with a shrug. Dr. B. wasn't looking great either, with a heavier version of Sherry's cough setting in plus a stuffy nose. When the third patient of the morning called to reschedule, Dr. B. decided he felt like hell. "We're closing."
"I can still do cleanings," Maria said, already worried about her rent next month. The last time Dr. B. had taken a vacation, the staff hadn't been paid.
"They expect me," he said, but with his nose stuffed it sounded like "Dey eggspect me," and Maria had to stifle her giggle. He saw the looks on the rest of the staff. "It's my sick day, you'll get paid." He glanced at Sherry, who'd started to smile. "You can stay and answer the phones."
Maria caught what Sherry mouthed at him after he turned his back but Dr. B. didn't.
She caught an early bus home, arriving back to the same mess she'd left this morning when fucking Larry had been here. With a growl, Maria grabbed a black trash bag and started throwing away copies of his stupid fucking record.
She never went back to the clinic again. Dr. B. called out the next day, too, and Sherry did the same. "Just a bad cold," she said when Maria called.
"That's going around. Rest up."
She'd called her best friend Rhonda and her other best friend Cheryl after they got home from work, and complained to each of them in turn about the fucking prick she'd spent the night with, and enjoyed each one sympathizing in turn. Rhonda was home today with a cold. Maria walked to her place and cooked her some soup.
"You don't have to," said Rhonda, sitting on her couch watching Maria crumble up some pasta to stew in the canned soup she was warming on the single burner stove.
"I got nothing better to do. Everyone's sick at work."
"You hang out with me, you're going to catch this cold, too." Rhonda was surrounded by a pile of crumpled tissues, and her nose was red. Maria snorted looking at her, thinking this was a much better mess than what fucking Larry had left. Rhonda was nice. Maria hoped she'd kick this cold soon.
"What do you say, next weekend you, me, and Cheryl all go to Coney Island?"
"What are you, twelve?"
"Sure." With the soup simmering, Maria sat on the other end of the couch and put her feet up on Rhonda's lap. "We'll eat hot dogs and ride roller coasters and pretend we're ten years younger."
Rhonda laughed. "Fine. We'll go to Coney Island next weekend."
It was the next weekend. Rhonda was dead, and Sherry was dead, and the whole world was dead. Maria had heard gunshots outside, not entirely an uncommon sound, but for the last five days, there hadn't been any cops around swinging their weight and yelling at the assholes with guns. The windows on the first floor apartments across the street had all been broken out, and nobody had boarded them up.
And there was a smell. Maria tried to ignore the smell, tried to block her windows, but it crept in from the other apartments after the power flickered and died. No more air conditioning, and everyone was gone.
She'd called her mom, but the phone rang and rang. They hadn't spoken much over the last two years. Maria had the awful feeling they weren't going to speak ever again.
For days, she sat in her apartment, numb, trying to block out the sounds of shouting from outside, and the ever-present odor of decay in the hot summer air. Her place was stifling, leaving her sweating with no breeze and no fan. She ate the last of her refrigerated food and tasted that the milk was going sour. She had cans and boxes and shit, but her stove was electric. She ate a can of potted meat cold, and she knew she had to leave.
Maria hadn't spent much time outside of the city. Her great-aunt had lived upstate, and she remembered a few visits when she'd been a girl. Farm country, wide open spaces, and farm animals. She had a hazy recollection of helping her great-aunt collect warm eggs right out from under the chickens' butts.
It was as good a destination as any.
Rita was her mom's age, maybe a little younger, maybe a little older. Maria almost didn't meet her at all, frightened by the pop-bang of the gunshot so close to her as she was walking. Rita apologized for scaring her but she kept her gun. Maria didn't blame her. There were some scary people walking around the city these days.
Sharing a butterscotch-apple pie that had been frozen before the power outage and hadn't gone off yet, Maria told Rita her plans.
"You could come upstate with me." She took a big bite and wished she had some milk or some ice cream to go with the sticky-sweet pie. There were cows upstate. Maria wasn't sure what was involved in milking one. She'd figure it out. Her great-aunt had made ice cream, she remembered, in a big hand-cranked churn.
Something in the way Rita's eyes sparkled said she could read Maria's mind. Rita was all sparkle, from the diamonds on her fingers to the way she glittered when she walked. Her clothes were worth more than Maria's rent. That didn't matter any more. Maria was still wrapping her head around the notion that she could walk downtown to Macy's and pick any dress she wanted, matching shoes, nice purse, and as many diamonds as she could shove into her ears or on her wrists and neck, and nobody would stop her like nobody had stopped them from breaking the window to this empty café.
"I used to travel," Rita said. "I never had to walk there."
"Me either."
She missed Rhonda and Cheryl. She missed her mom. Rita needed Maria to do all the planning for this trip. Her travel had always been arranged by some travel agent, or her late husband. Maria just about knew how to get herself to Philly for a concert.
She chewed her last bite of pie and wondered how this was ever going to work.
Turns out, what she needed for it to work was someone who knew how to work. They met Alice while searching for supplies for their trip. Beef jerky, Maria thought vaguely. Cans and a damn can opener. Alice was browsing the same darkened aisles in the grocery store, her eyes ringed with that same lingering puffiness Maria knew were around her own. She stopped to cry every so often. Rita did, too. No wonder everyone did.
Alice hadn't left the city much but she had grown up scrimping for everything. She knew which shoes were going to last the longest, giving Rita a withering look when she saw the woman's sandals. She knew which food would keep the best, cold or warm. She was the one who decided they'd go over the GW instead of risk getting stuck inside the Lincoln Tunnel with no way to get out the other side.
"I need your bags a minute," Alice said when they were halfway over the bridge. She looked through Maria's knapsack and nodded, then through Rita's. Before Rita could stop her, she swiped four or five pill bottles out of there and threw them overarm into the river. Rita shouted and grabbed at her. She fumbled at the gun she'd been taking to wearing at her hip like another stylish bag.
Alice stood there, blankly, waiting. Maria's mom would have done the same, knowing Maria could shout all she wanted but she wasn't getting that new skirt.
"I need my medicine," Rita said hoarsely.
"You can get more in Hackensack," said Alice. She dropped Rita's knapsack to the ground. Then she shouldered her own and walked away.
"Bitch."
"Walk or don't," said Alice, continuing to walk. Maria looked between them. She'd known Rita longer, by a whole two days, and she hated the seething expression on her new friend's face. She'd also seen junkies coming down after they lost their fixes, and if Rita was going to take her withdrawal out on the two of them, Maria wanted to get that gun away from her sooner rather than later.
"I'm going," Maria said, and followed Alice. "Come with us if you want."
Rita shouted at them both. About ten minutes later, Maria heard her quick steps catching up. She was still pissed. But she wasn't staying behind.
Hackensack didn't smell as bad as the city but it didn't smell much better. Alice browsed a Safeway for more supplies and said they were stopping here for the night. Her feet were too tired to go on. They found a hotel not far from the highway and each took her own room. Not many dead bodies here to worry about; people had died in their homes or in their cars along I-80 trying to escape the city.
Maria had never stayed in as nice a place as this. She slipped under good sheets and fell asleep almost instantly.
Later, she'd realize that was the first time she had the dreams.
They always started the same. First, a man she didn't know, his face darkened and hidden, reaching toward her like a lover. His laugh was low and gross, reminding her of the worst guys she'd picked up from bars. He was the kind of guy who'd make fucking Larry look like a goddamn gentleman. Maria hated this part of the dream, hated the way her skin crawled as she felt his eyes on her.
Then the good dream kicked in. She'd hear music, like some old-timey song plucked on a banjo. Her vague desire to go upstate returned fiercely in this part of the dream, with a farm and cows and everything tugging at her. She could smell the corn, and the blue sky went on for miles around her.
In the morning, the three of them found oatmeal packets in the hotel kitchen, and a gas stove Alice managed to light with a match. Coffee poured over the drip wasn't great but it was the best coffee she'd had in days. As she blew on hers, she said, "Either of you ever visit Nebraska?"
Rita shook her head. "Definitely not."
Alice watched Maria over the rim of her coffee mug, the logo of the hotel in faded print on the side. "Never been. I hear it's nice."
The hotel lobby had maps. Maria grabbed a few, and looked at the roads. Nebraska was a long way away, but Buffalo wasn't exactly close.
"80 would take us all the way there."
"Nebraska?" Rita asked, staring between the two of them as Alice joined Maria at the maps. "You've got to be joking."
Maria heard banjo music in her ear's memory. It sounded a lot sweeter than fucking Larry's record had. "You got somewhere better to go?"
It wouldn't be easy. Rita seemed ready to go back to the city at any moment. Alice wasn't exactly the survivalist type. Maria hadn't been camping since she was Girl Scout, and this looked like she'd be doing a lot of camping beside cars with a lot of dead people in them.
But she didn't have anywhere better to be either.
Alice said, "Bring the maps."