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My apartment was a full floor of the building, but that’s because no one else wants to live on a ground floor unit. There were plenty of other people who lived in the building, just not low enough for the dead to look in the windows easily. Me? I liked the closer distance to the soil, and there wasn’t any chance that anyone could be buried in the foundation of the building when I lived down there. Yes, that really was something I worried about. Walking dead inside the building could be awkward, at the least.
So, I bought the units next to mine when they came open. Eventually, I owned the whole floor and was little-by-little undertaking a reconstruction that meshed them all. For now, some of the floor was living space, some was work-out space, and one far end unit was basically an intact apartment. I half-planned for my mother moving in there some day. Sooner or later, even the indominable Mama Lauren would grow too old to live on her own in the Outs. Probably.
I was back to attacking my poor practice dummies when Christy stopped by my place midday on the third day. I only knew Christy was there because I saw her on the monitors. My music was loud enough to wake the neighbors a block over if not for my extra insulation and sound-proofing.
Christy Zehr was smarter than ninety-eight percent of the people you’ll meet in life, and pretty as the fairy tale princess you wanted to hate but couldn’t because she’d just given you a dusty page with the antidote to a witch’s spell. She was a towering Black woman who researched freelance and hustled pool, and if I needed to have an alibi, she’d already have called me up and offered it before I’d realized I needed it. Like Jesse and Sera, she was someone I trusted wholly. Unlike Jesse and Sera, she wasn’t a meddler. Jesse was subtle at it, but he was always attuned to me. Sera wasn’t subtle. Christy was somewhere between them, but until I asked a question, she wasn’t usually intrusive.
Christy looked me up and down when I opened the thick door that separated my living space from the stairwell. “What’s wrong?”
We went inside, and I flicked the row of locks on the door. “With me?”
She looked around. My gym was filled with weapons and training dummies. I’d been whaling on the dummies the last couple of days every time I thought about the “Eli situation”—which meant I’d worked out a lot. I was sweaty and gross and no closer to clarity than when I’d started thinking about Eli’s claims that I was being unfair to him.
“You seem off.” Christy followed me into the gym portion of my home.
“Everything okay?”
“Maybe?” I was dripping in sweat, magic zinging around my work-out space like hopped up fireflies. These two units had been stripped to the concrete. I’d covered part of it with wood, but I’d left some of it at crude concrete. Carpet was shit for workouts, and the smell of sweat collected in the fiber.
She looked at me, the magic strobe show, and shook her head. “I’ll listen.”
“Am I wrong—?”
“Often,” she interjected as she plopped down on the floor, toed off her shoes, and made a “continue” gesture.
“About dead things. Am I wrong about doubting that dead things ought to be out and about like they’re you or me?” I grabbed my water-bottle, which was filled with diluted vodka to hydrate my body and organs. I needed both in excess lately.
Christy looked up at me and said, “I like tigers. Beautiful but deadly things.”
“Very different. Corpses aren’t pretty, Chris.”
She waved my objection away. “Work with me.”
I nodded.
“Iliketigers,” she stressed. “If I could, I’d have a predator as my pet. Let it eat my enemies. Probably get a dumb-assed collar and nice cage for it. Buy it good steak.”
“Okay.”
“But if the cage door opens and it eats me, people wouldn’t be shocked. Damn stupid if I forgot what it was.”
“Still with you,” I said.
“T-Cell Houses are cages.” Christy rolled her shoulders. “We call them hospitals, but they are prisons fordraugr.”
I frowned and punched one of the dummies that was suspended from my ceiling like a fluffy windchime.
“You don’t go into the cages and kill,” she said.
She made sense, but it wasn’t the same. Not really. “I wouldn’t kill a tiger, though. And they don’ttalk.”
“What if a tiger gets a taste for human instead of filet?” she asked. “Prowling New Orleans . . .”
“Fair.”
“If tigers had been trying to eat you your whole life, you’d want to kill them even in cages, but you don’t killevery draugr. You think of yourself as a killer, but you only kill thedraugrthat attack.” Christy shrugged. “That reminds me: Jesse said he needed to talk to you about a blood bag hanging around at the shop.”
And that was the thing that the people in their posh houses didn’t get; when you live outside the fences and answer your own door or even just have a job without a secretary, the dead can reach you.Ifthey stayed in their little T-Cell cages andifthey agreed to a bagged lunch diet forever, maybe they’d be sort of okay, but Christy had a good point. If the tiger got out of the zoo, it would eat you and your kid because even fresh filets weren’t enough. Tigers hunt, and we’re all just filet with feet.
