Feral King Read online

  Feral King

  Feral Starve Book 1

  Ginger Booth

  Copyright © 2019 Ginger Booth

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Christian Bentulan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Created with Vellum

  On December 8th,

  widespread Ebola broke out in New York City,

  with initial reports in the hundreds.

  Epidemic borders stood ready to cordon off the city,

  counties wrapping to the north and east,

  the northern half of New Jersey,

  plus all of Long Island,

  up to 40 million people.

  The quarantine slammed shut as the dying began.

  The power failed the next day.

  This was clearly a planned event.

  In Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan,

  Cade Snowdon fell ill on December 9th,

  a month shy of his 18th birthday.

  His girlfriend Ava Panic grew sick on the 11th.

  She turned 16 on Dec. 21.

  Their karate team called them Panic

  and Frosty the Snowman.

  1

  December 24, 16 days after widespread

  Ebola broke out in New York City.

  Frosty the Snowman released his hold on his slender girlfriend’s shoulders. His knees buckled to dump him onto a sofa abandoned at the curb. In the freezing sleet, the sopping wet cushions soaked into his pants.

  Yet another fantastic sensation this holiday season.

  When he put it that way, the soggy couch didn’t feel half bad, compared to his nightmare marathon with Ebola. He was desperately grateful to sit and rest a moment. The narrow one-way street loomed inky black. A few windows glowed a dim orange, a smattering of Halloween pumpkins leering down between the anonymous downscale apartments of the dead and dying.

  Considering how he looked, he welcomed the dark. Frosty made the mistake of checking the mirror this morning. His bout of Ebola ended a week ago now, or…. He frowned, attempting the arithmetic, but found calendars and subtraction beyond his mental reach. Thinking was hard. His mind fractured on the image of himself in the mirror, the whites of his eyes crimson with blood, in sockets purplish black, his waxy skin mottled with yellow, his entire body bruised, pummeled from within.

  Yet he grew stronger. Today he climbed five floors to reach Ava’s apartment when he abandoned his own.

  No, she’s Panic. I’m Frosty. Cade Snowdon and Ava Panic died of Ebola. We are new creatures of the night, reborn as something else.

  They rose from their sickbeds today, like greasy moths emerging from blackened cocoons. The apartment building was on fire, their families dead. The little food they had left fit easily in their book bags. Panic fed him. He rested while she packed. Then he helped carry her grandfather’s corpse down to the piles.

  His own mother’s body lay shattered on the ground where she’d thrown herself off the balcony. He didn’t point her out to Panic. His mind skittered away from that image, too.

  Then they walked here, West 13th Street. Panic worried about crossing the broad and sketchy 14th Street. Frosty didn’t give a damn. Their protection was the night, the cold, the unending slip-sliding challenge of half an inch of ice coating the roadway. They were about two thirds of the way to their karate dojo, tonight’s goal, West 23rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenue. The ice cleared the streets of human predators as everyone huddled indoors against the storm.

  Now was the time to make his move. Hell of a Christmas Eve.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the rustle of falling sleet, with a swoosh and a clatter as a breeze kicked up. A scent of cold fresh wildness overlay the reek of sewage, burning buildings and bodies, with a fishy whiff of the island’s surrounding salt water. Rest in the Now. Frosty owned that skill, that Zen focus. That’s why Sensei dubbed his star pupil Frosty the Snowman. The high school senior fought cool and collected, rarely rattled.

  He expected Sensei was dead. But his plan was sound either way.

  Suddenly Panic pivoted, her sneakered feet squeaking into a ready horse stance. She said nothing. Smart girl, Frosty praised, frozen in stillness with his eyes closed. Eyes reflected light and drew attention. Sitting here he was invisible in the night, the wind, the chattering sleet. And he finally heard what got Panic’s hackles up. One set of footsteps, sashaying over the ice? No, two. Good thing he caught a breather first. He was strong and poised, he insisted to himself.

  “Whatcha doing, little bitch?” a guy challenged her. “Shit, she’s just a kid.”

  Black, lilt of the Caribbean, slightly taller than me, Frosty judged. Out of range. Come closer.

  “You want some of what I got, little lady, huh?” The second man was nearer, the accent Puerto Rican, in Frosty’s estimation. Frosty slit his eyes, hiding behind his eyelashes, to check for weapons. He didn’t see any. The guy clutched his own crotch in an attempt to brag. Fool.

  “Leave me alone!” Panic barked at men who accosted a lone girl on the deserted street.

  “Oh, she’s feisty! I like –”

  Close enough. Frosty exploded out of the couch. In a single unbroken motion, he stove in the man’s windpipe with a front kick. As his target went down, the black belt followed up with a hard hand-chop to his temple.

  Meanwhile Panic, also a black belt, caught the other one with a surprise straight kick to the crotch, followed by an uppercut to the nose. As the second man went down, Frosty jumped onto his chest, then off to deliver a hard kick to his ribs.

  “Good job. Go,” he told Panic, clutching her mittened hand in his own. And they were off across the skating rink of West 13th again, wraiths vanishing between abandoned cars in the night.

  “Rest.” Ava levered Frosty to the mats on the dojo floor. “I’ll hunt for blankets.”

  He was too exhausted to object. They both were.

  Frosty got a lot sicker with Ebola than Ava. Cytokine storms. The disease caused the victim’s own immune system to kill him. The danger increased with an adult’s stronger immune defenses. At nearly 18, Frosty’s body was nearly mature, more so than her own. Though only just turned 16, she did a project on Ebola at her oh-so-prestigious high school, Brooklyn Tech.

  She hastily closed the telescoping steel shop shutters, and locked them in.

  Ava doubted Sensei, their teacher, was still alive. Frosty’s argument for coming here was that with no way to communicate, their friends on the black belt team would gravitate here. Or at least, any of them whose families were dead. Several owned keys to the place, senior student instructors like Frosty. But the dojo seemed deserted.

  Ava returned to shimmy his backpack off. Sharp breaths betrayed the discomfort she caused him. Judging by the bruised lymph nodes on his neck, his underarms and groin must be very tender. She’d mostly recovered by now. She’d only lingered in her apartment so long waiting for her beloved Deda to die – her grandfather.

  Frosty hadn’t mentioned his mother. Ava didn’t ask.

  He tried to kick off his shoes, which didn’t belong on the dojo mats. High-top sneaker hiking boots, scuffing them off wouldn’t work. Ava knelt and untied them, and set them to drip under the shopfront windows. She was relieved to find he wore silk long underwear and double socks under his soaked flannel dorm pants. With lymph nodes still inflamed, jeans like hers would have been agony.

  Well, he wouldn’t freez
e to death. The dojo was warmer than outside, above freezing. But he needed blankets.

  Frosty was right. The place was unmolested. She pulled a solar-charged study lamp from her backpack. Aside from that one fight, they’d barely seen a soul on the slick streets. She’d never hurt someone so badly before in a fight. But her conscience raised not a blip – they intended to hurt her.

  She dared show a light tonight, but sparingly and not by the windows. Arms outstretched and feet cautiously testing her route across the spongy open floor, she felt her way to the back. Outside the office, rear left, she found the water dispensers, two 5-gallon jugs on spigot stands. She refilled her bottle and drank deep, then topped it up again. Casting around with a foot, she found a spare jug on the floor, full. Sensei sometimes kept more in the changing room.

  That was convenient. But water wasn’t the prize she sought. Water fell fresh and clean from the sky right now.

  She opened the office door and hazarded her light. Bingo! Sensei sold giant plastic jars of protein powder for muscle-building. She didn’t count, but at least a dozen 2-lb. tubs stood on a high shelf behind his desk, plus one open by the drip coffee maker. She greedily mixed up a full coffee carafe, and downed a cup. Chocolate malt. Heaven!

  Overcome by the blessed relief of the sugar high, Ava took a couple minutes to regain her senses. She left the light in the office while she brought a mug to Frosty. He moaned objection when she lifted his shoulders onto her knees. But one sip persuaded him. Like herself, he lost himself in the sensory nirvana of drinking the protein shake.

  Frosty said Cade was dead. His mental state worried her. But then, she’d just laid her grandfather to rot on a heap today. The only thing keeping her equilibrium was probably hard labor, first down the stairs with a corpse, then half-carrying Cade – Frosty – all this way over ice in the pitch dark. Her muscles twitched. Her skin itched raw on her thighs from her chafing cold wet jeans.

  But she had goals. She wouldn’t stop yet.

  She set the carafe and cups by his shoes. “I’ll leave this with you,” she murmured. He’d already fallen asleep. His breathing sounded easier. He wasn’t recovered enough for today’s exertions. She hoped he’d sleep for 12 hours or so.

  The office had other bodybuilder snacks tucked here and there, including a half carton of energy bars and cans of tuna. Sensei also kept a fire extinguisher and first aid supplies. Ava approved. But for now, she rifled his desk drawers and found a set of keys. Those she pocketed.

  Moving on to the first bathroom, she used the facilities, and briefly tested the faucet. Yes, they had water pressure here on the ground floor. It was perfectly good drinking water, too. Good. They called New York’s supply the champagne of waters, organically purified by forested watersheds upstate and carried here by aqueducts. Any pumps were probably offline. No telling how long the mains would keep flowing. Her family’s apartment was on the 16th floor. Her water failed with the power a couple weeks ago, when Ebola broke out and the metro area quarantine clamped down.

  Past the two bathrooms was the large windowless dressing room. She shone her lamp without fear back here. She and Frosty, like most of the regulars, had their own labeled bins on shelves to stow their uniform gi.

  Sensei provided no lockers. He expelled anyone who broke his honor code. The steel supply cabinet was locked, though. She’d helped Sensei stock it one quiet Saturday over the summer. Ava found the right key. Printer paper, ink cartridges, pens. Emergency blankets! She took several of the silvery packets and slipped them into her coat pocket.

  But Sensei also kept a pile of comforters somewhere. They watched movies on them when they held kids’ slumber parties at the dojo, or drop cloths for a picnic on the mats. Sensei’s marketing ploys were endless. He haunted the martial arts forums, collecting ideas to eke that extra bit of income from his students and their parents. Just a month ago Ava worked a sleepover with her middle school students, freeing moms for their Black Friday shopping. Ava hoped he didn’t stow the blankets upstairs in his apartment.

  Bingo! A large brown box crammed into the corner, under the steel shelving, yielded a stack of fleece stadium blankets and comforters.

  Further inventory could wait. She draped three blankets over Frosty and tucked another folded beneath his head. She pulled off his wet pants and spread them to dry. He was safe for the night.

  Ava shifted back from her knees onto her butt to contemplate climbing under the blankets with him. Then she bounced up to spare the light, and perched on a locker room bench.

  She was tired, but it was only about 10 p.m by now. The protein shake granted her a second wind. In the dark dojo, Frosty beside her, she feared she’d be tossing and turning, thinking of Deda’s –

  Don’t. Just don’t go there. Ava was in no mood to cry. She’d cried enough today. Finally she was moving and doing, no longer held hostage in the apartment by that implacable illness.

  Sensei’s place was on the 5th floor, apartment 5E. They were invited to a Christmas party there tonight in fact. Ava wasn’t sure her new keys included his apartment – either set, since she still carried Frosty’s key fob. But she could kick in the door. Sensei always said she kicked like a horse for her size.

  On second thought, that might inspire a neighbor to fetch a gun.

  Need allies. That’s why they came here, after all, to seek allies.

  She returned to the office and penned a sign: Water Tigers Here. The water tiger was Sensei’s emblem, emblazoned on their black competition outfits. She reconsidered whether her sign was clear enough, yet unlikely to attract unwanted visitors. She added another line: Survivors. She unlocked the steel shutters just enough to wipe a spot fairly dry. She duct taped the notice at thigh height. She locked up again, and came to another full stop in the middle of the dark mats.

  Sensei.

  She hated to think he might be dying alone upstairs. But she couldn’t bear saying goodbye to another father figure tonight. She wished she could say goodbye to her real father, or better hello. But that would never happen. She didn’t want to imagine what the corpse heaps looked like near Mount Sinai, the vast hospital where her parents worked as nurses.

  It was only a couple weeks since she’d last seen her parents, seen Sensei. But illness and horror distorted time. Normal life seemed an eternity ago.

  If Sensei is alive, we’re not on our own.

  With Frosty so weak, and out for the count, the thought was unbearably enticing. A mature, trusted adult to lead them through this crisis. She imagined how Sensei would answer the door, pull her into a hug. Then he’d take charge, stomp downstairs to carry Frosty up to bed. In her imagination, Sensei had a way to heat cups of cocoa, make a plate of bacon and eggs. He’d lead them in prayer for their dead parents. He’d model for them just how the hell you’re supposed to act at a time like this.

  Solemn, dignified. Grateful for your parents’ guidance all these years. Resolve to make them proud of you as they look down from Heaven. Because they left strong and honorable kids behind, who would rally and succeed, no matter what life threw at them.

  Her phantom hero propelled her to the hallway door to try keys. Yes, one of them worked.

  She swallowed in misgiving. Frosty wouldn’t approve. Frosty would tell her to get some sleep, wait til daylight, then they’d go together.

  But what if a Christmas miracle was possible?

  2

  December 24, E-day plus 16.

  Flashlight in hand, Ava slipped into the public hall and locked the dojo behind her. She started for the stairs, seeking Sensei and salvation.

  A knock on the street door made her freeze. She’d shown a light, looking for the staircase. There wasn’t much point hiding now. She took a deep breath and aimed the light at the door.

  Jeremy! He was one of her middle school students, a wiry dark-haired Italian kid, the dojo’s star competitor in his age group. She hurried to the door to let him in, and hugged him to her breast. The preteen sobbed in relief, the way she’d
just imagined she would in Sensei’s strong arms.

  “My parents, my sister –” Jeremy sobbed harder.

  Ava quickly unlocked the dojo and towed him inside. “Shh, Jeremy,” she crooned huskily. “Don’t. Don’t talk about them or we’ll both cry.” Too late. Tears squeezed from her eyes. He couldn’t see that in the dark, though.

  “You’re alone?” The boy nodded against her breast. “Not anymore. You’re with us. Frosty’s asleep.”

  The thin small shoulders straightened under her arms. “Frosty’s here?” Jeremy said in wonder, or perhaps hero worship.

  Ava’s students never idolized her the way they did Frosty. “Yeah. Have you eaten?”

  “Yeah, I –” Jeremy stopped himself. “Yeah, I’m OK.”

  Ava suspected that meant the boy had more than a little food squirreled away.

  “I saw you,” Jeremy continued. “We live across the street. I didn’t know it was you, though. But then you put out the sign. I had to try.”

  “You’re brave,” Ava assured him. “I was about to try Sensei’s apartment. Not so clever.”

  “Not alone,” Jeremy agreed. “But I’ll go with you. I wanted to try for days. I didn’t dare. There are gangs on the streets. And I couldn’t remember the apartment number. But then I saw you out on the ice. That was smart! No one’s out there. And it’s not so hard to walk on ice.”

  Not hard for Jeremy, at any rate. The kid was a dexterous little monkey. He was even shorter than Ava, and thickly bundled for winter. A fall wouldn’t hurt him a bit.

  Having someone younger than her to look out for grounded Ava. She sighed. “No, let’s wait for tomorrow. Frosty would get mad if we went up without him.”