Chapter 4 Luis
Chapter four
Luis
Iwatched Emery run back to her apartment with curiosity. “Did she seem... nice to you?” I asked. Emery had never been friendly to us, not since the shooting. Most of the time, she pretended like we didn’t exist at all. We’ve spoken more since all of this started than we have in the last two years.
“Emery is never nice,” Miguel said, voicing my thoughts.
“Yeah, but Luis is right, there was something different about her,” Nico replied, staring at the closed apartment door.
Miguel shrugged as he collected his chin-length black hair into his signature man bun. Normally, I would mock him for it, but today it didn’t feel right. “Everything is different today. What’s the plan if they don’t lift the lockdown?”
“I’m not sure,” Nico replied, scrubbing his hand down his face, “but Emery and her parents are our priority. I’m all for helping the entire building, but they come first. I think we should take inventory of the food in the building.
Make sure that no one is going without, but also make sure that it will last us.
” He turned to me. “Luis, keep watching all the videos. Those will tell us the state of the city before the news does. They’re going to want to keep everyone calm, which means censoring the truth from the public for as long as possible. ”
“We need to be prepared for things to go south, because I have a feeling things are going to get much worse,” I agreed.
“All the videos I’ve been watching haven’t shown much progress, if any, from the military on getting a handle on this.
They might not get a handle on this at all, and if they can’t, society is done. ”
“If they can’t control it, they will try to contain it,” Miguel said. “We don’t want to be inside that containment zone. Lockdown or not, we might have to leave the building soon and try to get out of the city. We can’t let ourselves get trapped here.”
“We won’t,” Nico said, moving toward the door to look out.
“Maybe we should leave now,” I suggested.
“Not yet,” Nico replied. “We can’t risk running into a group of zombies or the military. Leaving will be our last option.”
I had mixed feelings about leaving, despite suggesting we go now.
I grew up in this building with my grandparents.
I never knew my dad; I’m not sure my mother even knew who he was.
Just some John she fucked for her next bump of coke.
When she gave birth to me, she immediately handed over parental rights to my grandparents and left the hospital.
They never heard from or saw her again. When I was sixteen, Miguel and Nico moved in with us.
Much to my grandparents’ disappointment, we’d always been street kids mixed up in some gang or another before forming our own.
Emery had always lived in the building as well.
We’d always gotten along, and even though he was a little older, Eddie had always been kind to me.
He was kind to all of the kids in the building.
On more than one occasion, he had tried to get us to walk away from the gang life.
Watching him die had been hard on all of us.
And while we didn’t pull the trigger, knowing he would still be alive if it hadn’t been for our involvement in gang wars would stick with us forever.
I didn’t blame Emery for considering us responsible for his death.
Emery hadn’t said more than two words to us until now. Her screams when she saw Eddie still haunted my dreams.
Two Years Ago
“You know,” Emery said as she stopped on the sidewalk with a paper bag from the deli in her basket, “you’re more than capable of fetching your own lunch instead of calling down to the deli to have them hand it to me as I pass by.
I charge people for this.” Her brown curly hair was pulled up into a messy bun, and her brown eyes were twinkling as she climbed off her bicycle.
I immediately trotted down the three steps to the sidewalk and grabbed the bike as she handed the bag of food to Nico.
I carried it up the steps and rolled it into the building for her.
“How else would we ensure you took a midday break?” Miguel asked. “Besides, maybe we just like to see your pretty face.”
Emery rolled her eyes at him before shooting me an appreciative smile for getting her bike inside. “And what would have happened if I hadn’t gone by the deli today?”
“Then someone else, far less good-looking, would have brought it,” Nico replied as he dug through the bag.
“But we know you always go by the deli,” I added as I took my sub from Nico. “You like to swing close to home around midday in case your parents end up needing anything.”
“Or you don’t feel like buying yourself lunch,” Miguel stated.
“You guys think you’re so clever,” Emery retorted. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“Sure we don’t, sweetheart,” Nico responded. “You keep telling yourself that.”
Emery flipped us the bird over her shoulder as she went inside.
I watched through the glass pane in the door as she crossed paths with her brother Eddie on the stairs.
He said something to her as he poked her in the side with a single finger that made her laugh heartily before they continued on their separate ways.
“What’s for lunch today, guys?” Eddie asked as he stepped outside.
“D’Marco’s Deli,” I replied before taking a huge bite of my sub.
“Good choice.” Eddie looked into the paper bag. “Anyone gonna eat that potato salad?”
“Take it,” Nico urged. “I never eat mine, and no matter how many times I tell them to keep it, they still send it.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Eddie replied as he pulled the small container and a plastic fork from the bag.
He popped the lid off and tossed it back into the bag before scooping a big bite of potato salad into his mouth.
I always liked Eddie. He never treated us any differently because of who we were and what we did.
“So, did you guys hear about the two monkeys that got out of the Brooklyn Zoo last week?”
I started laughing. “I saw a video where they raided a hotdog cart. The guy was screaming at them, and they couldn’t have cared less.
” I reached for my phone to pull up the video when I heard the sound of chirping tires.
Immediately, my guard went up, and my head snapped in the direction of the sound.
I saw a car speeding toward us with its windows down.
Time seemed to slow as I saw the glint of metal poke through the window.
“Gun! Everybody down!” Nico yelled.
I hit the ground and crawled behind the stone wall of the stoop as the street erupted in chaos.
The gunmen opened fire, and bullets slammed into the stone around me.
What felt like hours only lasted seconds, and as I looked around to assess the damage, my heart fell out of my chest. Eddie lay face down on the concrete, a pool of blood growing alarmingly larger around him, with the plastic fork still clutched in his hand.
As I moved toward him, the building door opened.
“Eddie!” Emery screamed. She fell to his side, rolling him over to try and help him, but with the amount of blood staining the pavement, I knew it was too late.
Emery’s parents also came outside, and the combination of the family’s grief nearly brought me to my knees.
Not even the ambulance could drown out the sounds of their wails.
Nico quickly gathered our weapons and any contraband we had on us and brought them inside before the police arrived.
Luckily, there were plenty of witnesses around who were able to corroborate our statements, and soon the street began to clear.
Even though Eddie was already gone, the paramedics allowed her parents to go with the body to the hospital, leaving Emery standing on the sidewalk watching the ambulance quietly disappear down the street.
“Em, I’m so sorry about Eddie,” Miguel said, reaching out a comforting hand.
Emery jerked away from him like he’d burned her, and as she turned to look at us, I knew the look in her eyes would haunt me for the rest of my life. Gone was the playful sparkle. In its place was raw hatred.
“You did this. This is all your fault. If it weren’t for you, Eddie would still be alive!” Tears streamed down her face, and the utter brokenness in her voice shattered a piece of my soul.
“Emery,” Nico said as he tried to pull her into his arms.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” Emery screamed. “Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t even look at me ever again.”
When Nico reached for her again, Emery slapped him across the face.
If it had been anyone else, Nico may have reacted differently.
But it wasn’t anyone else, it was Emery, and we had long since come to terms with our feelings for her.
There wasn’t anything we wouldn’t do for her, anything she could do to provoke our anger.
“You got my brother killed, and I will never fucking forgive you,” Emery whispered before pushing past us and running up the steps to her apartment.
We watched her go silently. My brain was still trying to process the sudden change from earlier. It wasn’t all that long ago that she’d run inside with a playful gesture, and now, we’d probably never see that side of her again.
“Find out who that was,” Nico said solemnly. “They’ve seen their last sunrise.”
“On it,” Miguel and I replied equally as solemnly.
We’d found the guys who had rolled up on us and taken them out.
It was the least we could do, and not just because we didn’t want other gangs to think we were weak, but because we strived to protect our own, and killing Eddie was beyond unacceptable.
It hadn’t been hard to track them down since they’d been bragging about taking out one of us.
They honestly had no clue who they had fucked with, but by the time we were done with them, they did.
It was a bittersweet victory because it didn’t bring us any closer to making things right with Emery.
I shook myself out of the past. There was no point in dwelling there, especially since so much about our lives no longer mattered. “I’ll go check on everyone’s food situation.”