He stubbed out his cigarette and sat down on the top step of the fire escape, dragging me onto his lap. He’d been keeping all these fears to himself. No wonder he was always so anxious. If I had those thoughts running through my head, I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep either. I wrapped my arms around his neck and breathed in his smoky scent. “You smell like cooked meat,” I said.
“You hungry again?” he asked with a chuckle.
“A little. I’m a growing boy.”
“I’ll get you some noodles.”
“You will?”
“Yeah, but only if you give me a kiss.”
I answered him with a wet smack of my lips, then pulled back and said, “We’ll be okay, Cipher. We’ll look out for each other, just like we have been.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said, but his eyes looked distant and sad.
THIRTEEN
CIPHER
I didn’t getmuch sleep during our first night in the city. I never did in a place with four walls, not since that fire at The Admiral.
My memories of that night in D.C. were fresh in my mind as I lay there in the dark with Kitten snuggled up against me. I’d woken from a deep sleep choking, eyes burning and unable to see beyond the wall of smoke at my bedside. Running blindly out of my room, I’d found my floormates huddled on either end of the hallway, trying desperately to open the stairwell door, but the exits were locked. Even stranger, no fire alarms were sounding, and the sprinkler systems hadn’t been activated either. We were on the tenth floor of a building without fire escapes, so the only alternative was to jump. I grabbed my bedsheet and used it as a makeshift parachute, aiming for the roof of the building next door, which was a floor or two lower than my window. I made it, just barely, landing on the prosthetic Gizmo had built for me, which was jarring as hell, but it meant that I could walk away from the fall.
I should have rounded up the others and told them to do the same. That I’d let them burn alive in that godforsaken fire haunted me to this day.
By the time I’d made it to ground, the fire trucks were just arriving and moving way too sluggishly in setting up their hoses. It was already too late. The building was an inferno with kids jumping out of windows to their deaths to escape being burned alive.
At the time, Artemis was just a cool chick I’d seen a few times in passing. Gizmo I knew because he’d fashioned my leg in exchange for a steady supply of hot dogs and ramen. Both of them were down there with me. Artemis had snuck out the night before and returned to find the building ablaze. Gizmo had been awake and tinkering when the fire first started and jumped from his room on the second floor. We huddled together under my bed sheet with tears streaming down our faces and when the police asked us who we were, we gave them false names and said we were from the building next door.
We’d lost everything in that fire, including several friends who’d begun to feel like family, and we all shared the same suspicion. Our building had become a fever hotspot and had been placed under quarantine for the past few weeks. There was no room in the hospitals or shelters to house our sick, and they didn’t want a Rabid problem on their hands.
Their solution was to burn us alive. None of us had parents or family who would protest. All of us were refugees and orphans, the unsupervised youth of our nation’s capital.
We fucked around for a few more months in D.C., coming up with a plan. Artemis wanted to go back to Baltimore, where she’d been relocated from originally, and I wanted to try our hand at surviving in the wild. We stayed together in a one-room hostel, taking turns being on watch. Gizmo built things we could trade for weapons and supplies until we had what we needed. Then, we got the fuck out of there.
Within the first few weeks of our travels, we’d met Macon, then Teresa. Macon had heard of a place called Promised Land, and it gave us hope that there might be a community where we could do more than just survive.
I climbed out of bed, careful not to disturb Kitten, and watched the morning light filter in between the narrow gaps of the neighboring buildings. It wasn’t the same as watching the sun rise over a forest of pine or a lake as smooth as glass. It didn’t fill me with gratitude, but with a mounting unease. I hadn’t meant to scare Kitten with my doomsday speech the day before, certainly not on his first day in a new city, but that knot between my shoulders was back. I could defend our tribe against a Rabid attack or raiders, but when it came to the police or U.S. military, we were fucked.
Which meant the sooner we left, the better.
I smoked a cigarette and considered the day’s plan of action. I’d have Kitten tag along with the others while I checked out his brother’s last-known address. It shouldn’t be too hard to locate Santiago in a city of this size, if he’d survived, and I hoped for Kitten’s sake that he had. Family meant everything.
I was at the sink shaving a little while later when Kitten woke up and climbed out of bed. We were sleeping together on the bottom bunk, a tight fit, but I wanted him close. Wearing only his briefs despite the chill of morning, he had his arms wrapped tightly across his chest with his hands tucked into his armpits, shielding his nipples but exposing his smooth flat stomach. The contours of his bottom few ribs showed more prominently whenever he inhaled. Hopefully, here in the city, he’d be able to put on a little more weight.
“You do that with your hunting knife?” he asked, lifting his chin to see under his mop of bed head. “Badass.”
I wasn’ttryingto be a badass, but I didn’t have much facial hair and the edge of my knife did the trick.
“Do me,” he said and hopped up on the counter where there was barely enough room for him to squeeze his ass cheeks between the sink and the wall. We didn’t have a full bathroom, just a sink and a mirror. There were communal toilets and showers down the hall, something I planned to take full advantage of later.
“Tilt your head up,” I said and angled his chin so I could get at the peach fuzz on his upper lip. He assisted me by sucking in his mouth. I turned his face this way and that, scraping away the soft, downy fuzz that lined his jaw. He was so docile and trusting as I scraped along the delicate skin of his throat. I marveled again that he was mine, and I worried, again, that it was for all the wrong reasons, but he’d chosen me as his boyfriend, so I’d do whatever I could not to fuck it up.
By the time I was finished, his face was as smooth as polished wood. Also, he had an erection.
He looked up at me guiltily and said, “What? I can’t help it. You didn’t give me any special attention last night.”
“You fell asleep before I even got into bed.”
