The room was quite small, barely worthy of being called a guest room. It contained a twin bed, a miniscule closet, and a small bureau. A narrow door led to what he presumed was a bathroom. The single strip window there was blacked out like the rest.
“You have to be quiet,” she said after she closed the pocket door behind them. They stood almost cheek-to-cheek at the foot of the bed, which took up almost all the available room. “My son is on a very regular schedule. I can’t have it interrupted, do you understand?”
“A ‘regular schedule’?” Gartrell couldn’t quite believe his ears. “Look ma’am, it’s not like he’s going to be able to get up and watch cartoons tomorrow morning before he goes off to school, you know what I mean?”
Jolie shook her head sharply. “No. You don’t get it. My son is autistic. Variations in his schedule make him act out. Yelling. Screaming. I can’t have that right now. Not when those things might hear him. Do you understand now?”
“Ah…okay.” Gartrell sighed at the revelation, and a small part of him suddenly regretted linking up with this woman, even though she offered him the chance to find at least partial shelter from the storm of dead meat stalking the streets of the Upper East Side. And he was no stranger to autism; one of his brothers had a son who was moderately autistic, and he also exhibited a very limited ability to process new experiences before breaking down and becoming so disorganized he could hardly walk.
“I get what you mean about the autism,” he told Jolie. “Whereabouts on the spectrum is he? Asperger’s, or-”
“Classical autism. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t point, and has difficulty controlling himself and understanding requests.” She paused. “And he wouldn’t understand that we’re all in danger. That’s why I need to pay as close attention to his routine as possible. You understand?”
Gartrell nodded. He understood, and the more he knew about it, the less he liked it.
Hang tough, old dog. These are the cards you’ve been dealt.
“Why didn’t you evacuate?” he asked.
“My husband and I agreed we would wait for him, so we could leave together. I was afraid I might get separated from Jaden if I tried to take him out of the city alone.”
“I take it your husband never made it home.”
“He…he was coming from downtown. He was in the quarantine area in the Financial District. When he tried to leave, he…he couldn’t get out right away, but they were going to try and make it past the police blockades. When he called me last before the cell phones went out, they had made it all the way up to Thirteenth Street. But…” Jolie looked past him and seemed to shrug, her eyes (They are blue, Gartrell thought) distant and haunted. “But he never came. And by the time I got things together enough to try and make a break for it, it was too late. They were already in the streets.” She nodded toward the window behind Gartrell. “They killed the police at the corner barricade. I could hear the fighting and…and the screaming.”
“You should have left with everyone else,” Gartrell said. “Your neighbors, other family…they could have helped with your boy.”
“You don’t understand. We never really knew our neighbors, though the Skinners next door tried to get me to go with them. And our friends…well, they had families of their own to take care of.” Jolie looked up at him after a moment. “What happened to you? Where are the rest of your soldiers?”
“Dead, mostly. Some…the officer I was supporting and some civilians made it to a Coast Guard cutter in the East River. I was cut off.” He waved the question away. “Anyway, it’s not important now. When does your son normally wake up? It’ll be daylight soon.”
“Seven-thirty. Sometimes eight, eight-thirty.”
Gartrell checked his watch. It was 4:18am. “Roger that. All right, you should get some sleep. We’re going to have our hands full with him tomorrow. How do you think he’ll respond to me being here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we’ll have to do the best we can. Will you sleep with him? In his room?”
“Yes.”
“You have to make sure he doesn’t pull the shades off the windows,” Gartrell said. “If those things in the street see him, they’ll know where we are. They’re plenty stupid, but when there’s food on the table, there are enough of them to make a difference in how things will go down. Understand?”
“I know. Like I said, they killed the police manning the barricades on Second Avenue.”
“My team and I were in a fortified high rise building, and they broke into it and took it down. We barely got out. Listen, ninety-nine percent of those stenches out there are as stupid as a bag of rocks-but a few of them are smart enough to figure out things like doors and the like, you understand? They see us in here, from the street or from maybe another building, they’ll try and get to us. And there’s no way to reason with these things. The only thing they understand is that they want to eat-nothing else matters. Nothing. No negotiation, no chance for last-minute mercy, nothing. They see us, we have to boogie, and real, real quick.”
“Where would we go?”
Gartrell sighed and rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I don’t know. I need to figure that one out. You’re sure none of your neighbors are around?”
“No. They all left, like I said. I’ve been all through the building-most of the apartments are locked, but I’ve been in a few that aren’t, and no one’s around. That’s where I got all the stuff on the dining room table.”
“I noticed that. Good, so you’ve already scavenged a lot of stuff. How many apartments are on each floor?”
“Two.”
“Have you been in the apartment next door?”
“No. The Skinners locked up when they left. Why?”
“Because we’ll need a place to fall back to in case this unit gets compromised.”
She looked at him oddly. “Like I said…it’s locked. We can’t ‘fall back’ to it, unless you want to break down the door. And what good would it be then?”
Gartrell waved the question away. “We’ll go over that tomorrow. For now, though…we ought to get some sleep. We might be here for a while, so we should take the opportunity to rest while we can. Can I bunk in here?”
Jolie nodded. “Sure.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“I’ll catch you tomorrow morning, then.”
She left, taking the LED light with her. Gartrell closed the door, then reached behind him and felt around for the bed. It was right behind him, and he slowly lowered himself onto it. The mattress was firm, just how he liked it. He stretched out on it and found it wasn’t lumpy at all-an extra bonus. He stood the AA-12 on its butt stock in the corner, between the bed and the wall, figuring it would be relatively safe from a certain young boy’s inquisitive fingers, at least as long as he was in the room. He flipped on the radio and scrolled through the frequencies. The ones assigned to the former OMEN Team were silent, as he had expected. He tried to raise McDaniels, but he was certain the major was well out of range as the Coast Guard cutter returned to the open Atlantic Ocean. The rest of the open frequencies were mostly silent, devoid of any organized chatter, though a few of them did reveal some garbled transmissions. Gartrell identified himself and tried to make contact, but no one responded to his calls.
Exhaustion hit him suddenly, and Gartrell slowly pulled off the remainders of his gear. His web belt and his MP5 went under the bed, while the radio and knapsack and the contents of his pockets went on the bureau. He would take a full inventory of his meager possessions when the sun came up. But for now, he needed as much sleep as he could get. He stretched out on the bed fully clothed and stared into the blackness, listening to the sounds of the building and the city beyond. The artillery continued exploding in the distance. Gartrell figured the 10th Mountain Division or whoever was launching the attack was going for pure neutralization fire. He hoped the arty would be effective against the zeds, but knowing them as he did, he rather doubted it.