Quarantine Read online

  Inside the park, a couple of flights of steps down from street level, was a regal-looking building. The green copper sign at the top of the steps was reassuringly intact: “To the Zoo and Cafeteria.” I followed them down, and ran around the side of the building where another sign directed me to “New York State Arsenal, Erected 1848.”

  I tossed my backpack over a tall metal fence, heaved myself up and over it, and landed heavily on the other side. There were several other brick structures behind this imposing building, covered and semi-covered walkways linking them, a big pool in the center. Another door led to the cafeteria.

  “Rachel!” I yelled. “Felicity! Rachel!”

  I looked everywhere, but there was no sign of life. Of course, I hadn’t expected them to be keeping watch by the windows the whole time. They had things to do: routines, both their own and the animals’. But that was the weird thing: there were no sounds at all. Not a single bark or yelp or a scurrying of feet. Too quiet . . . I checked the ground beneath my feet. No footprints. So what the hell was going on? Don’t panic, I thought, the silence all around me deafening.

  If Rach and Felicity didn’t appear I could climb the fence, using the side of the big brick building. I could haul myself over as I’d done before, but right now, with my banged-up knee and my aching head and hand, it seemed too big a task—

  There was movement from around the side of the building. I waited, holding my breath, hopeful and fearful at the same time.

  “Jesse!” Felicity said, a mixture of surprise and delight. She ran to me.

  “Quick!” I yelled, heaving in a breath. “Let me in!”

  “I don’t have keys!”

  “The back gate—tell Rachel to meet me there!”

  I ran from her, past the outbuildings, the café, the parking lot, through the line of trees near East Drive, and skirted the back wall until I came to the steel fence set into the high masonry.

  “Rachel!” I yelled. Again, not as loud this time, “Rach!”

  Then I saw her running towards me.

  “I’m here!” She reached the gate and fumbled with her keys, finally unlocking it. I fell through the gate and she slammed it shut and locked it behind me. “Chasers,” I said, as she helped me to my feet. “Four of them. Come on, quick, we don’t have much time!”

  We crouched hidden in the cafeteria, catching our rapid, steaming breaths.

  “This is crazy,” Felicity said, getting to her feet and pacing the room. “We can’t put our lives on hold. I thought the whole point was to leave the zoo, not lock ourselves in.”

  “They’ll be out there,” I replied. “They were right on me, and they’re getting better at tracking prey.” I didn’t have much of a sightline here but I could see the side gate.

  “Maybe they found a better meal,” Rachel said, attempting a smile.

  Felicity asked, “What did you find, Jesse?”

  I took the can of Coke that Rachel offered me. “Thanks. I found them—the group, down at Chelsea Piers.” I had a sip and put the drink down.

  They looked at me expectantly.

  “And what?” Felicity asked. “Are they—”

  “There are about forty of them,” I said. “And they’ve found a way out—we can get out of Manhattan!”

  “Where?” Felicity asked, animated by the news.

  “Through an access point to a big water tunnel, up near the reservoir in the park here.”

  “And?” Rachel asked. She looked a bit numb, detached.

  It was clear that she could read me, that there was a big part of the puzzle still to place.

  “They’ll be there in”—I checked my watch—“right on three hours.”

  Felicity let out a funny little squeal of excitement and hugged me.

  “Rach?” I said. She was looking off into middle distance, maybe weighing up the pros and cons.

  “Look, I’m sorry it’s worked out this way, having to move so fast, but they’re our best chance of—”

  “There’s still a lot to do,” said Rachel, writing on a pad as she spoke. “We need to be methodical with our time left.” She handed Felicity and me a handwritten list each. “My pack’s ready; do your own, then get onto that.”

  With those instructions, she ran from the room. Just like that. I slipped off my pack and put it next to hers, which was overstuffed with clothes and a few items of food. I went to the window and looked around at the empty zoo grounds. I caught a glimpse of Rachel walking fast with buckets of feed. It reminded me of when I’d first helped her, just a few days ago.

  Felicity put an arm around me. I spoke quietly. “What’s with her?”

  “She doesn’t mean it,” Felicity said, “being mean, I mean. She’s been worried about you, and been itching to leave here, should you show up like this.”

  “Has she been okay, since the snow leopards?”

  “No,” Felicity said, setting a pot of water onto the wood fire to make us all a hot drink. “That was it for her, the final straw. She’s been . . . she’s been really angry, until you showed just now.” She paused, then went about packing her backpack. “So Caleb was right: there was a group at Chelsea Piers.”

  “Yep. Over forty of them, like I said: men, women, teens and kids, most fit and healthy.”

  “What are they like?”

  “Mix of locals and tourists, from L.A. to Russia to Brazil, but they’re all there and working together,” I said, taking over the making of some coffee. The heat of the fire was bright against my frozen face. “It was good to see a scene like that, seemed almost—”

  “Normal?”

  I frowned remembering what Paige had said. Normal is a cycle on a washing machine. But I guessed they were normal if you could describe people with divisions and prejudices as normal. Humans attacking one another, that was probably normal, too. It didn’t get us anywhere, though. I stood by the window. I decided to tell Felicity the truth, whatever her reaction might be.

  “They’re a unit now—well, they were when I met them, too, but they were divided over leaving.”

  “Because they had a comfortable setup?”

  “Pretty much; that and the dangers of the unknown and wanting to wait for help.”

  “Jesse,” she said, zipping up her pack. She came over, stood close to me by the window, rested her head on my shoulder and hugged her arms around me. “You really think this group has what it takes to get out, to survive?”

  We watched Rachel walk out through the court, past the central pool of the sea lions and towards the building that housed the Tropical Zone. I liked that she looked so measured, so methodical. Time to go help. I filled the thermos.

  “What choice have we got?” I said. “It’s them and now or never.”

  “There’s always choice, you’ve told me that.”

  I put on my pack and slung it with Rachel’s over my shoulder.

  “I’m not so sure about that anymore.”

  We walked downstairs.

  “And you’re having second thoughts?”

  “No, it’s just hitting me now, the finality of it: I’m leaving.”

  22

  There were two entry points into the arsenal building: the doors that faced the fenced zoo grounds, which we used all the time, and a set of doors facing Fifth Avenue, which I’d barricaded a few days ago after an attempted break-in from Chasers. I considered dismantling the stacked barricade and building a slide-down brace like Caleb’s setup, using timber from old doorjambs to slot across the doors and brace into position. Instead I added more furniture to the stockade. Wind whistled in behind the big bookcase that was pressed against the broken glass of the doors, but it’d do—much better than it was before.

  After that, I carted water to the animals from the empty polar-bear pool. I checked off my list, making sure I didn’t miss any of the little critters. I found Felicity and Rachel feeding the penguins.

  “We’ll have to let all the animals loose,” Rachel said.

  “You can’t be seri—
” I began, but the look on her face silenced me.

  Felicity shook her head, as if to say, Don’t go there. We’ve been through it all already. You’re not helping.

  Rachel shrugged. “Surely you factored that into your plan, Jesse? I mean, it’s not as if we can take them with us—what, like a circus procession?”

  “No, but I thought—” I stopped. What did I think? I knew that so long as the animals were alive, Rachel’s link to the zoo would be intact. Of course she couldn’t leave them here caged. Perhaps I hadn’t really accounted for what this part of Rachel’s journey would cost. I guess that had been one of my big mistakes all along: not thinking about the journey. It wasn’t like stepping-stones, easily moving from one stage to the next. This was hopscotch, and the stakes were life or death. Each step changed you, changed how you saw the future. That was how my whole notion of home had collapsed. It had changed so much it was unrecognizable.

  Rachel could see that I was stumped. But she didn’t have it in her to be angry at me for long. Perhaps she was just too tired.

  “We have to let them go, let them fend for themselves,” she said. “It’s what happens in nature.” She looked around her, aware of the irony that you couldn’t describe the world around us as natural anymore. Felicity went over to her, tried to offer reassurance, but Rachel shrugged away the gesture. “It’s okay.” I think she meant that the animals here, like us, were about to take the next step into the unknown.

  I was silent. I watched Rachel as she looked around the grounds. As if in acknowledgment of their fate, the animals began to gently bleat and groan and mew. For a moment, she and Felicity exchanged some low murmuring words—private, comforting.

  I could tell that Felicity had been a sounding board for her, that Rachel hadn’t had to torture herself with thoughts of guilt and regret in my absence. The girls seemed to be getting on well still, but I wouldn’t push it by asking about it. Whatever way they’d found to endure the last few days was their own success, their own business, and separate from what the three of us had been through. Maybe it wasn’t my place to intrude on that, or to try to share it.

  I didn’t want to be left out completely, so I said, “So, how do we do this?”

  Rachel smiled. “You remember your crash course in looking after animals from before? You know where everyone is, what their temperaments are like.”

  I nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Okay. The best thing to do is open all their enclosures and prop the doors tight so they don’t close,” she said, “and then—stand back. Don’t confuse them. Don’t try to influence them. Just let them do their thing.”

  “Simple, hey?” I said.

  Felicity smiled weakly, as if she knew what Rachel’s response would be.

  I should have expected Rachel’s frown. “Not really. Not simple at all. Letting go is never simple.”

  I knew the truth of that.

  Rachel turned to me, put a hand on my shoulder—different from the way Paige would have done it, but still good. Nice. “You can’t help him, Jesse.”

  “I guess.”

  “He’s lost, Jesse. There’s nothing you can do.”

  I nodded. Knew I had to believe that, but I wanted otherwise, wanted hope. In the end, I knew he was as helpless as these animals.

  “I’m serious.” She grabbed hold of me, not out of anger but to make a point of me listening to her. “You’ll screw yourself up if you think otherwise, okay?”

  “I know,” I replied, as she let me go and touched my face. “I know. It’s just I didn’t think it’d be this hard saying good-bye to this city . . .”

  We stood out on the back step of the building facing the frozen zoo grounds.

  Felicity said, “My brother, in the air force—”

  “Yeah. He’s a medic, right?”

  “Yep. When he went to Iraq, it was the hardest good-bye I ever had. But you know what, it turned out okay—we all got through it, together. What’s meant to happen will happen. Just go with it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Felicity nodded. “Some of these guys will be okay. They’ve got instincts. They’re adaptable.” She was talking to Rachel now, back to their private shared moment. “Are you sure you can do this?”

  “Yeah—” Rachel pulled the two of us into a hug. “I’m at peace with leaving them, and it’s probably a good thing that I don’t have time to think it through, or else I might hesitate too long . . .”

  “Come on,” Felicity said, as we set about our solemn task—almost as solemn as the snow-leopard funeral. “We’ll do this and leave them to it.”

  That moment said so much about what we’d experienced together as friends. It was as hard for me to leave Caleb behind as it was for Rachel to turn her back on her animals. Well, add that to the issues I’d need to talk to a shrink about someday—and that was something I still looked forward to, if that day ever came. Imagine it—sitting in a doctor’s office, talking about these problems I currently faced. It’d mean I was on the other side of this, yeah? That’d be a great day. A perfect day.

  23

  Afterwards, I went upstairs and sat on the edge of my makeshift bed. I looked at my well-used map of Manhattan, marked up with all the little places where I thought Caleb may be, along with routes that I’d been on highlighted. So much walking, I could see now, although mostly around Midtown and up to here.

  I ejected the clip from the Glock and checked how many rounds I had: eight. I hoped that would be enough. Felicity made a pot of porridge over the fire. I knew we had to eat, because who knew when our next meal would be? We had no idea how long it would take to get through the tunnel, assuming we made it that far into Central Park.

  The small second-story room in the arsenal building was a warm and cozy squeeze. Just a few days ago, when I’d met Rachel and she’d been all alone here, it’d been empty, with only the barest of necessities stacked on a table and shelf, a few neat stacks and tubs of wood for the fire, a few buckets of fresh water. Now there were clothes aplenty, food for a few weeks, three beds and bedding, and all those little things that we seemed to add along the way: books, lamps, games, trinkets, iPods—all that looted stuff added to all that we were leaving behind.

  “Is the generator still in the vet rooms?” I asked as I zipped up my backpack.

  “Of course,” Rachel said, putting a bucket of water to heat on the fire. “Why?”

  “I can run it till we leave, charge up all our—”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Rachel said. The last of her tasks done, she took off her jacket and sweater. Her socks looked soaked through, her jeans and T-shirt were caked in mud, and her face and hair slick with sweat and grime. There was no doubt that she and Felicity had been working hard to keep things ticking over these past days. “We’ve got a few flashlights charged. They’ll do.”

  “Okay,” I said, settling another small split log on the coals. I felt sick and numb, waiting like this, like lining up on the starting blocks. To get our last bits together, to make our way through the park . . . the apprehension, the anticipation, swirled in my stomach like a swarm of butterflies. “Hey, what’s the collective noun for butterflies?”

  Rachel smiled. “You know, I’m not sure. A swarm?”

  “A flight?” I said.

  “A flutter,” Felicity said. “Or . . . a kaleidoscope.”

  “That’s cool,” Rachel said, taking the bucket off the fire. She soaped up with a washcloth and started washing herself. “What made you ask that?”

  “Nothin’ . . . just a few nerves.”

  She nodded.

  “I know what you’d call a group of wankers,” I said. “A handful.”

  “HARR!” Rachel erupted in laughter as I’d never heard her before.

  “Genius,” Felicity said, stirring the porridge. “One of my friends who worked on Wall Street used to always joke about ‘recessionitis’—like bronchitis that’s chronic, but it can take months and years to go away.”

 
“Nice,” Rachel said, drying off and changing into fresh clothes. “My dad used to joke that he needed ‘approval from corporate,’ i.e. my mom, to buy anything.”

  The girls laughed. I stared out into the dull gray zoo grounds.

  “Jesse?” Rachel looked up at me as Felicity passed her a steaming bowl of porridge. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I said, a little too quickly.

  I watched the fire crackle and spit. I had a memory of my parents in that image, of a night when we’d slept in a place in the country, down by the coast, in tents. I’d left my tent flap open and saw my dad put a log on the fire and then he sat there, with my mom, an arm around her shoulder; I watched them sit there until I fell asleep. That’s my favorite memory of my mom and dad being together.

  Outside, the afternoon sky was turning dark and light snow began its drift upon us. “Come on,” Rachel said. “We’ve got twenty minutes, let’s get moving.”

  Rachel put on layers of thermal clothing while Felicity poured us coffees. Warmed by the hot drinks, we checked our provisions for the last time. Then we shouldered our packs. “The reservoir will be full of Chasers,” I warned. “No hesitating out there: just run, don’t stop, don’t look back.”

  “Yes, I know it, but they’re the easy-to-deal-with kind,” Felicity said.

  “What about the ones coming towards us now?” said Rachel.

  For an instant, I thought she was teasing. But the jokes were over for the day. I went to the window and looked out at the zoo grounds. Initially, all was peaceful. I was about to laugh it off when we heard noises. I hadn’t reached the rear doors when the familiar Chaser appeared, followed by others, approaching the side gates.

  I ran towards the veterinary rooms. Inside, I grabbed a gas can from next to the generator and shook it. Only about a third full, but it would have to do. I locked the rear door behind me, came out through the open storeroom, and unscrewed the cap on the gas can. Through the windows I saw the Chasers had got into the arsenal building and were now banging at the back door.