Reapers (5 page)

"We're so happy to hear that. Please sign in here and I'll be back with your key."

The woman went into a back room. Lucy entered her name and a fake address on another clipboard. The woman clicked back to the desk, passed her a map, and set down a key with a sharp metal clink.

"Room 707," she said. "Very pleasant neighborhood."

"That's just great," Lucy said. "Listen, I'm here to visit a friend, but the silly goose didn't give me her address. Suppose you could look it up for me?"

"Information retrieval?" The young woman tipped back her nose. "There's just a small filing fee."

Lucy laughed. She'd been wondering when they'd start to sink their teeth into her. "Don't suppose you take dollars."

The receptionist smiled regretfully. "We prefer hard goods."

"You accept tobacco?" she said.

"Tobacco?"

"You know, Joe Camel. Cowboy's breakfast." She reached for her bag and retrieved one of her smallest baggies.

The receptionist took it hesitantly, as if it might be alive. She pried open the plastic zipper, inhaled, and poked at the ragged shreds. "Did you grow this yourself?"

"Sure did."

A sharp look entered the woman's eye. "Just so you know, all businesses on the isle of Manhattan must be registered with the Office of Commerce. Third floor."

Lucy's fingers played over the handle of her umbrella. "I'm just here to find my friend."

"And we wish you all the best. But during your stay, you may find that Manhattan has more opportunities than you're used to elsewhere. Should your goals expand, please be sure to register with the appropriate office."

"Will do. Until then, you got an address for me?"

The woman smiled brightly and palmed the baggie. "Let me find those files."

She disappeared into the back room again. She was gone long enough for Lucy to have a good look around, but other than the electric lights, there wasn't much to see. Once, footsteps echoed further inside the building. The receptionist brought back a handwritten address.

Lucy thanked her and walked into the October light, which had the nostalgic yellow color of an old movie. She smiled at the soldier watching over her bike. A strange feeling settled on her shoulders. At this rate, she'd find Tilly and be on her way by sunset. And somehow, that was disappointing.

She squished the feeling down and biked uptown, threading west. At Tilly's street, Lucy slowed, owling at the addresses. Ten minutes after leaving City Hall, she stopped in front of a brick walkup and leaned her bike across a brass pole supporting a battered canvas strung over the stoop. The glass in the front door was greasy and the door behind it was protected by a buzzer but when Lucy tried the handle it opened without resistance.

She braced her umbrella across the crook of her arm and gazed up the winding staircase. It was perfectly silent and smelled like water that can't quite dry up. The stairs bent under her feet with creaks that wouldn't quit no matter how lightly she stepped.

At the fifth landing, she stepped onto the grimy carpet and headed for 511, rapping her knuckles against the door in a jaunty little beat.

Several seconds went by. She knocked again. "Hey, Tilly! Guess who!"

She tried a third time, pounding the door with the meat of her fist. Across the open space of the stairwell, a door squealed open. Lucy whirled, finger on the trigger of her umbrella.

A Hispanic woman stared across the dim space; skylights let some sunlight down the stairwell, giving everything a twilight cast. "Who are you?"

"Friend of Tilly's," Lucy called. "She out chasing boys again?"

The woman gazed blankly, then shook her head. "She doesn't live here any more."

"Yeah? City Hall says different."

"I haven't seen her since the spring."

Lucy frowned, umbrella sagging. "Don't suppose she left a forwarding address."

The woman shrugged. "I didn't hear nothing. One day she wasn't here."

"Funny, that was my last experience with ol' Tilly, too."

She left the woman with her address in case Tilly came back, then clumped down the stairs to the street, shoulders swaying. She supposed she ought to be upset. Ten minutes ago, it was looking like a done deal. Now she was alone in a strange city without a whole lot of food and with a six-month gap since anyone had seen hide or hair of Tilly.

But the weight was gone from her shoulders. She felt good. Back on the hunt.

She headed for her government-assigned home, pedaling past a whole slew of coffee shops and bars and tattoo parlors and Chinese restaurants. The roads were clear except at one intersection where an apartment building had burned down and collapsed in the street like a drunken old fool. She circled around and found her new home on the corner of Third Avenue. It was fifteen floors high and built of modern windows and clean concrete. Lucy liked it.

She was less impressed that the locks on the front doors were busted, but at least she had to use her key to get into her room on the seventh floor. Light speared through the blinds, outlining a bed and a desk and an itty bitty kitchen. None of the lights worked. Neither did the stove. She threw open the blinds and cracked the window to flush out the must, then sat at the desk and got out Tilly's letter.

The envelope it had arrived in was as battered as an old mutt. The organized postal service had collapsed during the same two-week span as everything else. These days, letters got passed along via a complicated system of trades resembling a pyramid scheme. Inhabited towns and and major crossroads (inhabited or not) often had a secure box set up on the outskirts—a mailbox, a safe, a fridge. Anything that would keep the weather off the papers inside. Which weren't letters, but job listings for letter carriage: "Letter for delivery to Savannah," say. When people passed through town, or prepared to leave it for a trip, they checked the box's listings, and if their trip would take them closer to the intended recipient, they'd claim the listing, which would include a note about how to get in touch with the sender, a process which, to protect the sender's safety, resembled the directions of a treasure map: go to the church, walk fifty paces east, and fire your gun three times into the air. Or light a fire in the trash can by the McDonald's. That sort of thing.

Anything that would alert the sender to the fact he had a carrier. The two would then meet and haggle out a price, which varied depending on how far the carrier was taking it, the urgency of the letter, whether the two parties knew each other, and so on. If the carrier wasn't intending to bring it all the way to the recipient, he would arrange to bear it as far as he could, then either sell it to a speculator (who would expect to be paid more on delivery) or just leave it in a box, where another carrier would eventually find it and continue its journey.

Fraud was a problem, naturally, and the entire system was so belabored people rarely bothered with letters at all. But that meant the few they did send were so important that the carrier could expect to receive a handsome reward from the recipient as well. Combine that with the professional mailmen who'd cropped up—survivalist nomads who'd discovered they could make a tidy income in luxuries just by adding a few detours to their constant travels—and the process more or less worked.

But that explained why it had taken Tilly's letter five months to wend the thousand miles between New York and Daytona, and why it had been brought to Lucy smudged with half a dozen different sets of fingerprints, its corners blunted from travel. On seeing the return address, Lucy's heart had pounded, but she'd kept her cool so as not to excite the carrier's greed and paid him off with a thick sheaf of tobacco.

Inside the dirty envelope, the pages were crisply folded and Lucy imagined she could catch a whiff of Tilly's strawberry perfume on them. The letter was seven double-sided pages long, and judging by the ring-shaped stains on the fifth and sixth pages, Tilly had needed a cup of coffee to complete it, but through a modern-day miracle, the girl had managed to compose several thousand words without letting slip one god damn detail Lucy might use to track her down. Most of it was dedicated to rehashing the fun they'd had as kids. Tilly also made three different attempts to apologize for her abrupt departure and ensure Lucy that everything was fine and there was no need to worry. In the end, there was a single useful tidbit:

"I am in New York now & it is not nearly as dirty as they say & I have met many wonderful people."

In her new apartment, Lucy gritted her teeth, finished rereading Tilly's concluding platitudes and looping signature, then folded up the letter and stared out at the empty street.

Well, she was a long ways from beat. She'd already made a friend. She biked back down to City Hall, saluted the guard, and jogged inside.

"I'm back," she told the receptionist. "I wonder if perhaps you pulled the wrong file? My friend appears to have moved."

The woman behind the walnut desk gave her a skeptical look and took Tilly's address from Lucy's hands. "Let me check."

Five minutes later, she returned with her professionally regretful smile and a shake of the head. "I'm sorry, this is our most recent record."

"I see." Lucy leaned her elbows on the desk. "Listen, you know a soldier named Phil? Hangs out on the bridge way up north?"

"Phil Abruzzi?" Her face darkened in a way that made Lucy smile inside; the two of them had done the deed, perhaps even shared a full-on relationship. She tucked that factoid away for later use. The receptionist flipped her hair over her shoulder. "I know him."

"Mind if I leave him a note?" She thickened her Southern Belle accent to the consistency of cold honey and was rewarded with a knife-sharp glare that made her want to laugh out loud. "He was right nice to me this morning and I could sure use his help."

The receptionist was a professional, however, and accepted Lucy's note with a curt nod. Lucy smiled and walked out.

To get a feel for the island, and to scout for a market or some such where she might barter for food, Lucy looped east all the way to the river before heading back toward her building. Neighborhoods changed in a flash, trendy little gentrifications one second, heroin addicts' havens the next. Pre-plague, anyway. These days, they were probably just empty.

A highway fronted the river. On the other side of the road, an Asian fellow with an accent as husky as the bicycle-man's stood behind a stall dickering with a white lady. Behind him, a mess of fishing lines trailed into the gray water. Once the woman left, he happily traded Lucy four fish as long as her hand for a couple of rolled cigarettes. When Lucy's stomach growled, he offered to cook them free of charge. She flopped in the grass. The smell of fried fish mingled with the heavy scent of the river. After a few, he called her over for chow. It was delicious.

She attached no particular significance to her makeshift meal, but it turned out to be fate. Full-bellied, she biked west at a more than leisurely pace. As she crossed First Avenue, moving so slowly her bike wobbled side to side, the sinking sun playing peek-a-boo behind the downtown towers, Lucy caught the scent of roasting coffee.

She braked, tires skidding on the asphalt. You didn't see much in the way of coffee these days. Except she had, hardly an hour earlier, stained onto the pages of Tilly's letter.

4

Ellie thumbed the latch on her holster, wide-eyed in the darkness, and drew her pistol. Inside the treeline, leaves crackled again.

She'd lived in this place long enough to know animals always sounded bigger at night. You'd swear you had a black bear thrashing around your yard and a minute later a raccoon would pad into the open and make you feel like an idiot. But to her ear, the footsteps in the woods didn't sound like a raccoon. They sounded human.

More than likely, it was Dee and Quinn, quiet and raptly breathless after an energetic—paddle in the canoe, she forced herself to conclude. The steps neared. She pulled closer to the trunk of the pine, smelling its earthy bark and sugary sap. Sixty yards down the treeline, a silhouette slipped into the open field.

Too dark to see much. Male shape. Too tall to be Quinn and too straight-spined to be George. Ellie breathed shallowly, maneuvering more of the tree between herself and the stranger. Crickets peeped in the night. The figure strode to the piebald wheat field, plucked a single head of grain, and gazed toward the dark farmhouse.

It wasn't Ellie's nature to confront. Not right away. It was in her nature to collect data,
then
act. So she watched in perfect stillness, unwilling to risk the glint of light on the lenses of her binoculars. After a moment, the man turned and retreated into the woods. She got out her binoculars and spotted his shadow among the black boles of the pines but it was too dark to make out more than she had already seen.

She waited there for a long while, crouched in the cool dirt between the trees and the field, binocs in one hand, pistol resting lightly on her thigh. Her legs grew stiff. The screech owl sounded up from the hill again. Finally, she stood, brushed off her jeans, worked the feeling back into her feet, and walked home. By the time she locked the door behind her, it was past one in the morning.

A knock woke her from a late sleep. She jolted up, scrabbling for the pistol on the nightstand. The knock sounded a second time as she tugged on her jeans. She jogged to the door, gun in hand, and cracked it open.

"Mrs. Colson," Quinn grinned from the porch.

She leaned to the right, putting the pistol out of sight behind the jamb. "What's up, Quinn?"

"My dad said you'd let us use your spare tractor?"

She wasn't too sure about the kid's psychoemotional status, but she couldn't question Quinn's physical health. He wasn't overly tall, but his shoulders were wide and sturdy enough to cut wood on. Annoyingly, she felt suddenly bedraggled and frumpy.

"I'll grab the keys."

She shut the door on him and put the pistol away and dragged a comb through her hair. Feeling halfway civilized, she found the keys, got on her shoes, and rejoined Quinn outside. They crossed the weedy lawn toward the barn.