This Broken City Sky

Kat lay in the warm bed of the dark hotel room she had stayed in for nearly a month. She was in a deep sleep, something that had rarely happened since all hell broke loose on earth. The sound of a snore came from the bed opposite of her didn’t stir her from the sleep, like it normally did. However, there was a raspy intake of air that sounded just beside her ear. She slowly blinked open her eyes, her heart beating hard in her chest as she let her eyes focus in the dark of the room. Gerard lay sleeping, facing her, air quietly moving in and out of his lungs. Then, there was that raspy breath behind her and she reached over to the bedside lamp, clicking it on. She turned over slowly, feeling reluctant to fully face Johnny for some odd reason. A hum of annoyance escaped her when she noticed that he looked completely normal; his mouth open, a small spot of drool on the fluffy white pillow beneath his head.

She quickly leaned over and clicked off the light, settling back into her warm pillow and closing her eyes, trying to get back to sleep. A heavy sigh escaped her as she pulled the blankets up around her neck. Kat lay there for a few quiet minutes, trying her hardest to get back to sleep but failing. Her heart was still pounding in her chest and her hearing had sharpened with the rush of adrenaline. Then, as if taunting her, that breathy, rasp resounded again and she could have sworn she felt the tell-tale cool breath in her ear. She immediately reached over to the lamp and clicked it on again, turning over to see Johnny still sleeping, blemish free. She gave a harsh sigh through her nose and lay back down, angrily pulling the covers back up around her neck. This little game Johnny was playing was keeping her awake and away from precious hours of sleep. She lay there for minutes, keeping the lamp on so that it’d be one less thing she’d have to do to catch Johnny awake and making that ridiculous noise. She glanced to Gerard, who’s nose twitched slightly as he slept, to the digital clock that read “2:59 AM”, and to her handgun just beside it.

The raspy breath sounded in her ear once more and she flipped over, ready to beat Johnny over the head for waking her up from restful sleep. As soon as her head fell back against the pillow, facing Johnny, she was met, nearly nose-to-nose, with a corpse. It was Johnny, or at least looked somewhat like him. His skin had a deathly, grey pallor and his vacant eyes had sunken into his head, leaving dark rings in their wake and his eye sockets protruded grossly. His cheeks, which once had been full and round, were also sunken in. His lips looked like they had been ripped from his face, exposing two rows of rotten looking teeth. Kat let out a blood-curdling scream.

“Kat!” Johnny’s concerned voice brought her from the nightmare and her eyes fluttered open. Her forehead was drenched with sweat and the covers had been thrown onto the floor. Johnny was leaning over her, gently brushing her bangs back from her forehead. He had been woken by his sister’s whimpers and thrashing around in the bed.

“She okay?” Came the groggy voice of Mikey from the opposite side of the room. Johnny didn’t reply, because he honestly didn’t know if she was. She was looking up at him with a shocked expression, tears slowly welling up in her eyes.

“I thought you were tricking me,” Kat finally said in a voice like a croak as she looked up at him before sitting up, tears streaking her face, “but then I turned around and you were one of them.” She let out a shaky breath of air and shook her head, blinking hard and letting out a sob as she collapsed against Johnny, wrapping her arms around him and crying into his shoulder. Johnny merely wrapped his arms around her and let her cry, knowing it must have been a really bad dream if she was crying.

Kat’s crying eventually waned and she allowed Johnny to go back to bed, since it was only four in the morning. However, she knew she wouldn’t be able to get sleep and decided to grab a shower before she went and turned the generator off. It was supposed to be her and Johnny going and turning off the generator, but every time she’d go without him, figuring she should just let him sleep while he can get it. So, she left the room around five to turn off the generator.

“Where’s your sister, Johnny? She turned off the generator off schedule this morning and you were supposed to go with her,” Dylan asked the boy as they sat in the room, wondering where Kat had gone off to after turning off the generator an hour earlier than they had all expected. Johnny merely gave a sigh and looked over at the woman.

“I don’t know,” he said simply, earning a groan from Frank, who had been bellyaching all morning about how he couldn’t get a shower or a cup of coffee. “She’s probably just…getting some fresh air.”

“She does that a lot, does she?” Frank asked testily. Johnny glanced over to him with a dark look, knowing something really shook his sister up the night before.

“Well…if you’d rather deal with her being a bitch to your face…” Johnny started and Frank lifted his hands in defeat.

“Okay, fine. She goes away when she’s going to be a bitch,” he said, shaking his head. Lily glanced around the room before letting out a heavy sigh.

“I’m sure she has a good reason for it,” she said, sending Johnny a small smile and a nod. Mikey shot Johnny a look, knowing vaguely that something had happened last night, but he didn’t know what. Dylan ran her fingers through her hair, a bit irritated that Kat had ran off with the generator key, turned it off early, and had done it all alone.

“Well…she better have not tried to get out of her by herself, with the fucking generator key, leaving us here with your scrawny ass,” Dylan said softly, but with just enough venom in her tone to cause Johnny to look over at her with a cool glare. Lily looked over at her cousin and rolled her eyes, knowing that she could get into moods sometimes.

“I’m almost positive that’s not the case,” she said softly, crossing her arms over her chest. Johnny let out a heavy sigh.

“And if it’s any consolation to you, Dylan, if my sister does run away from us, I can wipe my own ass,” he spat with a sarcastic smile, causing Frank to give the kid a small smirk before he took a drag of his cigarette.

“Before anymore of you have anything else to say, I’m going to go find her,” Gerard said, pinching the bridge of his nose as he stood from the bed, grabbed his hammer, and left without another word. Honestly, he was becoming tired of the one room he had found himself contained to. He knew they’d eventually run out of food, the generator would break, or infected would eventually get inside. He also knew exactly when Kat would be, and if she wasn’t there, he’d be surprised.

He made his way up to the eleventh floor and to the suite that was open as grey light filtered into the hotel. Gerard took a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and picked one out of it, placing it between his lips. He fished his lighter out of a front pocket and quickly lit the cigarette as he stepped into the suite. Sure enough, he saw that someone had brewed coffee, using the French Press, and that they had also dug through the cabinet of alcoholic beverages and put a little of Bailey’s Irish Cream into their cup. He then looked to the balcony to see Kat reclined one of the lounge chairs, a cigarette in one hand, her coffee cup in the other. Gerard quietly crept to the balcony door and pushed it open.

Kat’s eyes darted open and she glanced over to the door, sighing heavily when she noticed it was Gerard at the door. His brow furrowed as she lifted the coffee cup to her lips and took a sip of the now lukewarm drink. It was cold outside, cold enough to turn their breath to steam in front of them. Gerard stepped further away from the door and watched Kat as she turned her eyes back to the grey, cloudy sky.

“The others are wondering where you are,” he said softly, taking a seat on the lounge chair beside her. She raised a brow and looked over at him with an unreadable look. She was silent for a while before speaking finally.

“They honestly think I would leave without Johnny?” She asked in a low voice before putting her cigarette to her lips and taking a drag. Gerard didn’t say anything; he merely stared back at her. She expelled the smoke from her mouth and looked away shaking her head. “All I’ve got is a handgun with 15 fucking rounds.” She cut her eyes at nothing in particular, her mouth curling into a sneer as she spat, “I’m fucking smarter than running away…and they know that.”

Gerard looked away and scratched the back of his neck, not knowing what to say to her. He took a drag of his own cigarette before looking up at the sky. It was overcast, which meant that the solar powered generator wouldn’t be fed the energy it needed to run. Kat glanced over at him, watching as the wind pushed his hair over his face and as he exhaled smoke through his thin pink lips.

“Feel free to fix yourself some coffee. There’s Bailey’s there too if you wanted to add a little treat to it,” Kat said before taking a sip of her coffee.

Gerard gave her a look before standing and walking to the kitchen, beginning to fix himself a cup of coffee. He took a glance to the Bailey’s that sat just beside the sugar and let out a sigh, screwing the lid back onto the bottle and walking back to the balcony. Kat was now standing at the railing, looking down at the street below her as she took a drag of her cigarette. Gerard walked back outside and to beside Kat. She had her bottom lip stuck between her teeth as she looked down at the hoards that gathered outside the hotel. He could tell she was thinking about something from the expression on her face.

“We’re going to have to leave here…eventually,” she said softly, glancing over to him from the corner of her eyes before returning her gaze to the undead on the street.

“I know,” Gerard said through a sigh before he took a sip of his coffee. Kat returned her eyes to him and she remained quiet for a few moments.

“There’s got to be someplace we can go. Someplace that’s safer than here,” she said before biting her bottom lip again and shaking her head. She looked away and let out a bitter laugh. “With as big as our country’s military is, there has to be some sort of stronghold somewhere set up by them.”

“Question is, how would we find out where it is…if one exists?” He asked, glancing over her profile as she shrugged, shaking her head against as she took a sip of her coffee. Once she swallowed the now cold beverage, she pursed her lips together.

“I don’t want to die in this place…but I don’t want to die out there either,” she said in a soft voice, nodding toward the faint outline of the Manhattan skyline on the horizon. Gerard looked out to the city and took a drag of his cigarette.

“Dying is inevitable. It’s just a matter of when and where,” he said darkly. Kat looked over at him for a moment and he could see just how tired the woman was.

“Yeah, but not like this…I wanted to die of old age or doing something excitingly stupid,” she said, shaking her head, “not from this fucking apocalypse.” She drew in a deep breath of air, her nose tinged red from the brisk, cool wind that blew past them. “Call me optimistic or call me stupid. There has to be other survivors out there. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to believe we’re the only ones to make it this far.” Gerard looked over at her and shook his head.

“Well…call me the pessimist, but there’s still the fact that we don’t know where there are survivors, if there are any, and how we’re going to get past all of those fucking walkers down there,” he said, motioning to the street below them with the hand that held his coffee. “And what are we going to do when we get out there? Walk all the fucking way there? I’d rather just stay here and die of starvation, if that’s the case.” Kat just stared at him with a face so void of emotion it scared Gerard, but then he noticed her eyes were brimming with tears.

“So you’d give up?” She asked in a pitifully weak voice. “You’d lay down and just die, like that?” Gerard merely stared back at her before she looked away, shaking her head as she bit her bottom lip hard.

“No,” he said simply, causing her to look back at him from the corners of her eyes, “not at all. We’d just need to be sure of everything before we try to do anything.” He went quiet for a moment as Kat brought her coffee cup to her lips and took a sip. “And before you say anything, I’m sure you were going to make sure of that anyway,” he added with a crooked grin, one that Kat returned.