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18
How Should I Put This?
He kissed me back, and one of the other refugees made a halfhearted cat call. It embarrassed me but not enough to let go of him right away. When I did, I pushed him back as quickly as I’d pulled him forward, and then I said, “That is the most competent, reasonable, useful thing and best damn lie anyone’s done for me in ages. ”
Nick looked surprised, but from which part of the last thirty seconds I couldn’t tell. “Is that all it takes to get your attention?” he asked. “A minimal display of competency?”
“It’s harder to come by than you might expect. And that wasn’t just competent, it was thoughtful. A veritable double play, my dear fellow. Help me up and we’ll call it a triple. ”
He did, lifting me out of the chair again by my wrists.
I felt better, if not good. I felt ready to walk again, and maybe even take a few stairs if I was feeling bold. I was gradually shedding that shaky, low-sugar fragility that made me all weepy and needy, or so I liked to think.
One of the guys standing by the window tried to chide us. “I don’t think we’re supposed to leave the skybox areas,” he whined.
“Bathroom,” I told him.
/> “There’s one up here. ”
“I don’t like that one. ” And once we got outside, I pulled away from Nick and said, “I really do need a bathroom. Let me take a quick spit bath. Hang on. Plumbing. ”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you later. ”
Downstairs and down the hall there was a stadium-sized unit with a long row of stall doors, all of them empty. The sinks were big and battered for such a new stadium, but they were more or less clean, so I more or less stripped and rinsed out my clothes again, except for my jeans. My jeans were almost dry and there was no way in hell I was going to douse them again until I really had to.
At the risk of achieving a nuclear ‘fro, I held my head under the faucet and rubbed pink bathroom soap into my scalp, because it smelled better than I did.
I wrung out what I could and wrapped my head in nasty brown paper towels to squeeze out some of the rest. I wadded them up and threw them away under the counter.
I slapped the round metal knob of the hand dryer, flipped the nozzle up, and draped my wet shirt across it. And while the heat took the edge off the dampness, I washed my face a couple of times.
Nick kicked the door. “Hurry up in there. Are we going to kill some zombies today, or are you going to take a spa break?”
“Shut up. I’m coming. ”
On the floor beside the trash can there was a hair elastic that could’ve belonged to anybody on earth before it wound up on the bathroom tiles. I didn’t give a damn. I picked it up and twisted it around my fingers, then pulled my hair up into a high, raggedy ponytail. The scarf I’d been using was too disgusting to wear anymore. Somebody else’s discarded hair twisty was actually a step up.
I yanked my shirt back over my head. It felt clean and hot instead of cool and dirty. I pushed the door open with my foot and said to Nick, “Let’s go do this thing. ”
“You sound positively human again. ”
“I’m feeling positively human again. Not superhuman, but human. I think I can walk unassisted. Where are we going?”
“Down,” he said, taking the lead. “I’ve been told we’ll need a manager’s key to get down to the storage levels from the elevators, but there’s a service stairway back behind the food places on the first floor that’ll get us in without one. ”
Every sound echoed against the cement floors and the super-high ceilings that stopped several stories above us. The place was busy but not crowded with emergency workers and cops; but then, the place was just too big to be crowded. Several times we were stopped and asked what we were doing outside of the sky-box area, but Nick just repeated his story about hunting supplies for the Red Cross and they let him go. A little bit of celebrity in this city goes a long way. I suppose they thought that if it turned out he was lying, at least they’d know where to find him later on.
We tried not to sneak because sneaking called attention to our presence. But we made a general effort to avoid the busier places, because why take extra chances? It was tricky, and it took us a few minutes more than I would’ve liked, but it worked out. We found ourselves alone together, staring at a scratched metal door that said, “Employees only. ”
“Is this it?”
“It’d better be,” he said, and he pushed the lever latch to move the door aside.
The stairwell was packed with moldy shadows and it smelled like old meat. We took the stairs quickly because it was nasty in there and we didn’t like it. The floor was shiny with something gross, and the handrails were covered with old paint that flecked off under our palms.
Our feet tapped way too loud in the narrow space, but there was a door at the bottom so we opened it. I caught it before it closed, just in case, and kicked a little wooden wedge in its way so it couldn’t shut and keep us there.
