The Young World Read online

  “This isn’t over,” shouts Cheekbones.

  “Good,” says Wash. “Come on back with some baked beans.”

  After an hour or so, when we’ve made sure the Uptowners are genuinely gone and not using the pig as bait to snipe at us, we drag it in, chasing away the rats.

  CHAPTER 2

  A LOT OF BOOKS YOU READ, the author thinks it’s cool to have an “unreliable narrator.” To keep you guessing and to acknowledge that there are no absolutes, and everything is relative, or whatever. Which I think is kind of lame. So—just so you know—I am going to be a reliable narrator. Like, totally. You can trust me.

  First thing about me, I’m not beautiful. If you’re wondering how to picture me in your head, don’t picture, like, some movie star or something.

  Maybe the girl next door. Except that it’s a little different in New York, because we don’t live in houses; we live all stacked up in apartment buildings. I remember every time I saw a TV show about the suburbs, where people, like, played on their lawns and bicycled around, I thought it was so exotic.

  So—the girl next floor? Whatever. Point is, don’t go nuts. A character actress. The pixieish, wacky best friend, not the one with the legs and the boobs and the perfect teeth.

  I mean, I don’t think I’m a troll, either. It’s just, even with the new end-of-civilization meal plan, I’m not totally happy with my body. Maybe it’s the lack of protein. I probably should not be worrying about this. Life is too short.

  Ha-ha. Life is too short.

  My dad used to say that. I used to call him Dad to annoy him because he wanted me to call him Hal, which isn’t that weird, because it was his real name, but come on, it’s not the sixties, and my calling him Hal wasn’t going to make him any younger. Nope, those girls he wanted to have sex with were still—how to put it?—young enough to be his daughters. Uch.

  Well, you’re dead, Harold, and so is Mom and every other fucking adult. Talk about the ultimate flake-out. And the little kids. All the little kids. Charlie.

  So there’s a few things that I’m bummed at my parents about. The fact that they named me after Madonna—not, like, the mother of Jesus but the one who sang “Vogue.” Dude.

  But am I gonna change it? Nah. Everybody’s changing their name, because they figure, why not? It’s like, “Hi, my name is Katniss.”—“I’m Threeyoncé.”—“Call me Ishmael.” Forget it. I want to keep some things from Before, even if they’re lame.

  Yeah, so, (Ma)Donna’s problem, nutritionally speaking, is that protein is hard to find. Carbs? Sure. You’d be pretty shocked how long that shitty nonorganic bread, that wonder-of-wonders bread, keeps before blue fuzz starts growing on it. Sometimes the rats get to it first. So what do we eat? The rats. Which, kind of, means we’re eating the bread anyway, right? I mean, the rats ate the bread; we ate them.

  And what else do the rats eat? Before we eat them? Well, let’s not get into that.

  We did a whole lot of corpse burning back in the day. Cleansing by fire, Wash called it. Said some dudes called the Zoroastrians used to do it. Yes, I spelled that right. I may not be all SAT-wordy like Wash and Jeff, but no way are they gonna lord it over me, knowing bonus words and shit.

  Cleansing by fire! Those were some good times. Douse a bandanna in Chanel No. 5, put on some sassy pink North Face gloves, and heave-ho! Make a big pile of bodies and try not to use too much gasoline and try not to lose the lunch you didn’t have enough of.

  Not enough hands or time to get rid of all the bodies, though. And they’re still out there, millions of them, slowly turning into mulch, pulsing with maggots. It has been a banner year for carrion eaters.

  Hope I didn’t spoil your appetite. ’Cause when Porky Pig goes down, and those fools from wherever take off, I’m all, barbecue! And as soon as I get relieved from lookout duty (I may act totally slack, but the fact is I’m such a good girl. If only my teachers had known!), I’m down in the Square, nipping at Frank’s heels. He orders a bunch of our peeps to tie up the carcass by the back legs and hoist it on a tree branch, and I’m all, pulled-pork sandwich, please! Pork chop, trotters, snout, whatever, and I am doing a little happy dance, but then—

  Then I see Jefferson, and he sees me, and he does not look happy, and I remember Wash—he was standing up there in front of all those guns like a jackass, and I realize, one-two-three, oh, I get it, that’s why… that’s why Jefferson is looking so bummed. Then I feel like an asshole.

  See, when you’re hungry, it’s your stomach thinking. Like, your stomach actually thinking. I heard somewhere that your stomach has as many serotonin receptors as your brain. So we’re like those dinosaurs with two brains. We’re like dinosaurs in other ways, too. For instance, we’re going extinct.

  Charlie’s favorite dinosaur was stegosaurus. He had a stuffed one he called Spike.

  Stop it.

  So I realize that Wash was trying to commit suicide by cop—that’s what they used to call it, when some dumbshit would decide life just wasn’t worth living (this was when life was worth living, mind you) and would come at the cops with his gun blazing and force them to take him out.…

  Or he just really wanted a McRib sandwich and thought, What the hell, it’s worth a shot.

  I’m kind of curious about that, so I go to Wash, who’s standing by the tree where they’re hauling up the pig. He’s securing the rope with a trucker hitch to a bent piece of rebar sunk in the ground.

  Wash always leads by example. The officer corps of the Pocky. (That’s my cute name for the apocalypse. It’s also the name for those yummy Japanese candy sticks.) I inquire after his reasoning, diplomatically.

  “So what the fuck was that, dude?”

  He keeps tying his fancy knot.

  Wash: “What was what?”

  Me: “Uh… I don’t know… lemme see… the part where you stand in front of a bunch of douche bags with guns and dare them to blow your brains out?”

  Wash cinches off the knot and shrugs. Stands up and looks me in the eye finally.

  Me: “People need a leader.” It doesn’t sound quite right, coming out of my mouth. Not the sort of thing I say. But it’s true.

  Wash: “They’re going to have to find a new one soon, anyway.”

  And then he walks off. Which, by the way, you should never do to someone who, you know, you almost did, you know, with. It’s just rude.

  So I’m pretty pissed. But then he turns around and smiles and says, “Oh, you’re invited to my birthday barbecue. Tonight. The theme is…” He thinks.

  Me: “Post-apocalyptic?”

  He laughs.

  Wash: “Pre-apocalyptic. We’ll pretend to tweet each other. We’ll talk about the new iPhone they’re not coming out with. Snapchat.”

  Me: “We’ll ask if we look fat in this. Download ringtones.”

  Wash: “Yeah. It’ll be awesome.”

  And he walks off again. But not so fast! Little brother Jeff is right there in his face, follows him and pushes him. They square off. Wash and Jeff. Now, there were some parents to have. Name their kids Washington and Jefferson. I bet they were all, “Son, it’s time you learned about the Golden Rule,” and sailing weekends and scaling fish or whatever, not asking you where you get your herb ’cause their dealer just got arrested.

  Whatever.

  I can’t hear what they’re arguing about, but it’s a doozy. Wash is trying to hug Jeff, like, “It’s okay,” and Jeff is clearly not okay, and I wouldn’t be, either, I guess. Finally Wash sort of wrestle-hugs Jeff, and I look away, because boys hate it when people see them expressing emotion.

  Compartmentalizing. That’s what Wash called it. You put your feelings here in this compartment, and you put your mind in another compartment. And I said to him, looking up from where my head was resting on his chest, “How big a box is your heart in?” and he looked at me and didn’t say anything, and that’s when I kind of figured this was not going to be love among the ruins for Donna and Wash.

  Frank is chewing peo
ple out, saying, “Where is the tarp and the bucket?” Because he plans to catch all the blood to make blood sausage with the intestine casings, which a couple of years ago would have made me want to hurl but now makes me even hungrier.

  Rrrrrip! goes Frank’s knife down the center of the pig’s stomach, and—plop!—he reaches inside the rib cage with the knife and his whole hand, and he makes a cut, and the whole of the pig’s insides neatly flop out onto the tarp, like this is one of Brainbox’s machines and he’s just pulled out the restraining bolt or something, and “Catch the blood!” goes Frank, and all his helpers are in there catching the blood in buckets. I decide to head for home, not because I’m too grossed out but because I’m too hungry.

  Home isn’t far—25 Washington Square North, a cute little four-story walk-up with a green door. Prime real estate, but it’s a buyer’s market.

  There’s only a couple hundred of us here in the Square. Pretty much everybody has a sweet pad, except Brainbox, who lives in the library. I mean literally lives in the Bobst Library.

  I like it on the north side of the Square—not far from my sniping position, good light. Six bedrooms. Yeah, I moved up in the world.

  I’ve decorated in End-Times Eclectic. A looted Eames chair here, a milk crate there, with a wooden piece or two I saved from the winter bonfires. And let’s not forget the rattraps. Did you know that “yakitori” is an anagram of “ick—I try rat”? Well, not exactly. But you get the idea.

  I check my Impatients on the first floor. Did I mention I’m the tribal doctor? Yeah. My mom was a nurse. She used to take me to the ER when she didn’t have babysitters, which is maybe why I can handle the assorted bumps, bruises, and projecting bones of the Pocky.

  I look at Eddie Hendrix’s knee. The swelling is down. He’ll be up and about in a while, but the pull test tells me that his ACL is gone and that the tibia is going to keep popping out every now and then. At least, that’s what my old Merck Manual says. Back in the day, they could fix it with a bone graft from the patella, even an allograft from a cadaver. Now? An Ace bandage if you’re lucky. Serves him right for risking his life playing a game of hoops outside the walls.

  Duddie is getting better, too. I can’t tell whether it was strep until somebody makes another hospital run, but about 60 percent of us have it just hanging out in our throats in a little streptococcus party, waiting to come out. I wanted him up here to keep him from infecting anybody else. And he’s not bad-looking.

  After the nursey stuff is done, I head up for some reading. I’m working toward my degree in pre-apocalyptic social structures from the University of Donna. Currently, I’m catching up on Us Weekly from 2011.

  My bedroom is my favorite room in the house. Because there is not one motherfucking piece of my past in it. A lot of girls, they’ve plastered their walls with pictures of their family, the stuff they used to do, Disneyland, ponies, friends (yay!), parties, whatever. Fine. Have yourself a big old group grope with your ghosts. I suppose it beats some of the boys’ rooms, full of porn. Top relationship tip, fellas? There is nothing quite like a tacked-up picture of a spread vajayjay over the bed to end a date on just the wrong note.

  Dusk comes on pretty fast, and it’s time to light the candles.

  Some people really resent the lack of electricity, the dearth of modern comforts, appliances, hot showers, all that stuff we used to take for granted.

  I’m one of those people.

  I’m tired of this full-on urban camping experience. I’m not gonna pretend that candlelight is romantic, like, Oh it’s so great to read by. In a way we’ve gained so much. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone. OKAY, I GET IT. I want central heating. I want TV. I want a hair dryer. So sue me.

  The darkness coming in is like death in slow motion. It’s like What Happened, every night.

  But a wonderful smell comes through the window.…

  Pig.

  And I’m down the stairs and out the door, and I’m promising to bring plates back for my Impatients. I’m promising them slaw, country biscuits, pecan pie, all kinds of crap.

  Okay, so Washington Square does look pretty great by firelight. All the lamppost torches are lit. They’re dotted over our ten acres of purgatory, painting everything near them yellow and red. The light—well, it may not be bright, but it breathes oxygen like we do. It’s alive.

  The paths are marked out by solar garden lights from Target. They suck for illumination, but they keep you from tripping over the runner beans. And I skip—I’m actually skipping to the middle of the Square with my doggy bowl. Runners are already heading out to the sniper positions with food for the lookouts. Everybody else is forming an orderly line, and there, spitted on a push-up bar and roasting on a repurposed bench-press stand Brainbox must have rummaged up somewhere, turned by hand over a fire of smashed library chairs, is the piggy.

  We all read Lord of the Flies in what—sixth grade? So we know that you’ve got to cook the pig through or you’ll get sick.

  Frank throws some hefty slabs of belly into a tray. “Cover ’em in salt,” he says. I have seen the future, and it is bacon.

  There’s all these old chairs and couches out in the Square. They get moldy when the rain comes, but they’re dry and comfy now. You can lie back on them and see the stars. With the wind in the right direction, blowing the smoke from the Uptown fires away, you can see the stars like you were out in the country. Look at those stars that don’t care for you.

  There’s a guitar going—Jack Toomey, thank God, not Jo, who only plays Beatles songs. Some beers scrounged from somewhere. ’Cause the grown-ups are away, you know. Other kids are smoking weed from the rooftop patches. Up there it grows like—well, like a weed. Wash banned hard drugs and hard liquor, which makes sense. Gotta stay frosty, or people will jump you and cut your throat.

  Brainbox spares some of his precious gas for one of his precious generators. He calls them Jennies. We gave each one a name—Jenny Jones, Jenny Craig, J-Lo, Jenny Agutter, who was in some movie about Australia Jeff likes. So tonight Jennie Honda Garth is showing us a Blu-ray movie projected onto a bed cloth strung between two trees.

  It’s our tribal favorite, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Which is confusing, because it’s basically episode one, but whatever.

  A lot of girls don’t get Star Wars, or all they know about it is they want to be Princess Leia on Halloween, the part where she looks all hoochie mama in the golden bikini. Me, when I was little I wanted to be Han Solo. Dude was a certified badass. And a drug smuggler. I mean, those hidden compartments on the Millennium Falcon weren’t for pirated lightsabers.

  I ask Jefferson who he’d be, and he says, “Luke, of course.” Of course.

  Me: “I think you’re more the C-3PO type.” He blushes.

  Jefferson and I have been engaged in friendly trench warfare since we were in kindergarten. I make fun of him for being too proper. He’s, like, the Guy Who Talks in Complete Sentences. He gives me shit for swearing too much and saying like all the time.

  Which, yeah? But here’s the thing. Everybody thinks that like is just a sort of junk word, empty calories or whatever? But my theory is that it’s totally unfairly maligned.

  Look at metaphors and similes. They’re, like, the press darlings of language. Can’t write poetry without ’em. And what’s a metaphor? It’s just saying that one thing is like another. In fact, you could say that whenever people talk, they’re just making comparisons. This is good, this is bad, subject-verb-predicate. That’s why like is such a useful word. It means that what you’re saying isn’t exactly the deal. It’s sort of the deal. It’s a linguistically humble means of comparing. It’s an acknowledgment that the world is not black and white, and people understand one another only approximately. Know what I’m saying?

  Anyway, Brainbox says he’d like to be R2-D2. Which, yeah. A robot who nobody can understand except C-3PO? Yeah.

  Jefferson: “Actually, I’m of the opinion that R2-D2 is the real hero of the movie.”
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br />   Me: “How’s that?”

  Jefferson: “Well, he’s transporting the Death Star plans, right? He ejects from the rebel blockade runner, then he makes sure he gets bought by Luke, then he escapes and finds Obi-Wan. He fixes the hyperdrive. In the end, he gets shot up by Darth Vader, but he still survives. Really he’s the most self-actualized character in the entire story.”

  Me: “You are so Threepio.”

  Jefferson keeps sighing and tsk-tsking at the movie for some reason, and he throws a rock at the screen when the green guy tries to shoot Han Solo in the bar. The galaxy far, far away ripples. I don’t even ask.

  Instead my mind wanders back to a place I don’t want it to go. Like an addict looking for a fix.

  It’s two years ago, and the Sickness has just hit.

  Mom has been working nonstop at the hospital, trying to stem the flow of patients. But Charlie has got it now, and she’s at home. She’s barely able to care for herself—she’s got It. It seems like every adult in the city has It. The TV is always on, chattering away like a lunatic in the living room. It says that the Sickness is spreading all over the US, and the first case has been reported in Europe.

  Mom is throwing up someplace. Charlie’s fever is spiking incredibly high.

  “Am I gonna die?” Charlie asks me, his voice on the edge of tears.

  “No, honey, you’re not going to die.” I’m mopping his forehead as I’m lying to him. I don’t know why I’m alive and unaffected while he’s sick. “Do you want some more water?”

  “No,” he says in his little voice. “I want you to snuggle with me. Will you snuggle with me until I feel comfy?”

  I nod, and more tears come. I lie down on his bed and hug him to me.

  “I’m afraid to go to sleep. I’m afraid I’ll never wake up again.”

  So am I. But I say, “You’ll be fine, honey. You’ll get better. Go to sleep now. Get some rest.” And I hold him as he falls asleep for the last time.

  CHAPTER 3