Vera was where Carly had left her, sitting near one of the windows drawing in her coloring book. At seven, the girl reminded Carly of their mother, including her blonde hair and blue eyes, while Carly got stuck with their father’s ginger traits and brown eyes. They were both thin girls, but that wasn’t really a choice. Mom’s disability social security checks paid for the rent and kept the lights on, but not much else. Carly had to supply the rest.
Don’t need the lights on now, Mom.
Ted couldn’t be more different from them. He was twenty-five, with short brown hair that complemented his eyes. He was also big. She remembered thinking, He’s a giant, when he grabbed her arm and dragged her into the building. There was real terror when she saw him looming over her for the first time, but then she saw his eyes and she knew he wasn’t going to hurt them. She hadn’t known how she knew, she just did.
“I saw a police car,” Ted said as she came out of the stairwell. He was excited and managed to spill some of his Mountain Dew when he looked up. “I couldn’t tell if they were cops from the window. Did you see them?”
“I couldn’t tell if they were wearing uniforms,” she said.
“Did they see you?”
“No.”
She saw the disappointment on his face. Ted was easy to read, mostly because he didn’t try to hide his emotions. Or didn’t know how to.
“I thought about trying to wave them down,” she added, “but we don’t know who they are, and I don’t want to risk it in case they weren’t, you know, like you.”
Ted flushed a bit. “That’s probably smart. At least now we know there are other people out there. I was starting to think it’s just us.”
Carly nodded. There was something reassuring about knowing that others had survived last night, too. When she woke up this morning and saw nothing, just an empty street and an equally empty city around her, she felt a kind of depression she didn’t think was possible.
Ted was already playing with his portable radio again. “Anything?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“You think you’ll eventually get something?”
“Probably not.”
“But that’s not going to stop you from trying, huh?”
“I’m stubborn that way, I guess.”
“Or maybe you’re just optimistic,” she smiled.
“What’s that?”
“Optimistic?”
“Uh huh.”
“It means you think positively. You know, if there’s a glass of water that’s only half full, you think, ‘Hey, it’s half full!’ While others would think, ‘Damn, it’s half empty.’ They call that being optimistic.”
“Oh. I guess I am, then.”
“Keep trying.”
He nodded, but she could tell he was already thinking about something else. He tended to drift off like that.
She walked over and sat down next to Vera. She was coloring in a picture of Dora the Explorer, the character on her favorite TV show. Carly wasn’t sure what she would tell Vera when she eventually started asking questions about last night. Vera had seen it begin — the killings, the screaming, the debilitating fear as they fled down the street — but Carly hid everything from her after Ted rescued them. Or hid as much as she could, anyway. She couldn’t shut out the screaming no matter how hard she tried.
To her surprise, Vera hadn’t asked about it when they woke up this morning. Maybe she just knew, or maybe she didn’t know how to ask. Vera could be enigmatic like that sometimes.
“How’s it hanging?” Carly asked, ruffling the girl’s hair.
The girl didn’t look up from her coloring book. “It’s hanging.”
“We’ll get you some more coloring books later. Maybe tomorrow Ted and I will try to find some in the CVS store across the street.”
“Cool,” the girl said.
“You eaten yet?”
Vera picked up a small bag of peanuts that Ted had procured from one of the vending machines in the lobby. There were also soda cans and bottled water nearby. If nothing else, they had plenty of food and drinks. Eventually she would have to find something less sugary for Vera. And toothbrushes. She hadn’t brushed her teeth since yesterday morning, and Carly could feel it along every inch of her mouth.
She leaned against the window and took some of Vera’s peanuts. They crunched loudly in her mouth. Her thoughts drifted back to her mother, who was probably dead or turned into one of those things, hiding in some building with covered windows like the ones around them. Mom did the best she could. All three of them did. A part of Carly felt guilty that she wasn’t more affected by the idea of her mother no longer being with them.
Some daughter you turned out to be…
She looked back at Vera and found it easy to forget about her guilt. Vera had always been her responsibility, even before last night. It was just more obvious now.
“Your hair’s growing long,” Carly said. “We should cut it.”
“No,” Vera said, her nose firmly planted in her coloring books.
“A little.”
“No.”
“A smidgeon?”
“Maybe.”
Carly smiled. She added scissors to her list.
Until then, she looked around their sanctuary. The fourth floor was one big classroom, with old chair/desk combos that looked like they had been raided from one of those old-timey schools from the ’50s or ’60s. There was a chalkboard on the far wall and bulletin boards covered with citizenship information and brochures about further English studying and offers of private tutoring in English, Vietnamese, Spanish, and a dozen other languages.
Ted walked nosily over and sat down across from her and Vera. His face was slightly contorted.
“What’s up?” she asked, though she already knew.
“Should we follow them?” he said hesitantly. “The cop car, I mean? I know you said we can’t be sure if we can trust them, but we’re going to have to trust someone sooner or later, don’t we? It can’t just be the three of us, can it?”
“Why not? It’s worked out so far.”
“So far, yeah.” He struggled for the right words. “But for how long, though?”
“Even if we did go looking for them, we wouldn’t know where to look. I can’t hear the siren anymore. Can you?”
“No. But where were they headed the last time you saw them?”
“Down Richmond.”
“Did you see them turn?”
“They kept going down Richmond until I couldn’t see their lights anymore.”
“So maybe they stopped somewhere up the road.” He paused, thought about it further, then shrugged. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, I don’t know. I think we’re due some luck, don’t you?”
“We got our luck,” she said. “We found you.”
He flushed again. She smiled. He was cute when he did that.
Gentle giant.
“Do you really want to find them?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m fine with just the three of us, but what’s that saying? About numbers?”
“Strength in numbers.”
“Yeah. If they are cops, then they might have guns. Guys who know how to use guns would be a really big help in this situation, don’t you think?”
“You have a gun and you know how to use it.”
“Yeah, but there’s just me, and I only have six bullets in this one gun. And come on, it’s not like I’m really trained to shoot. They had me do a one-day course before I got this job. I think I shot for, like, thirty minutes before they handed me some papers. I’m not a pro or anything.”