'They had pudding in these tiny plastic cups. You would peel back the foil on top and the pudding was in there already made,' a fortyish man with grey hair and squinting eyes said. He mimed the action of pulling back on a piece of foil, his fingertip and thumb pressed very close together, and a light bloomed in his face that didn't come from the bonfire. 'There was always a little dollop of pudding on the foil, that was the best part, it tasted the best anyway.'
A younger woman in a shapeless sweater poked at the fire with a long branch. There wasn't much firewood on Governors Island but an enormous amount lay just four hundred yards away in Brooklyn. A boat went over every day to retrieve great bundles of sticks and logs from the trees that choked the old city streets. It had been a dangerous occupation once, the survivors told Sarah, but in recent months it was rare to even spot a ghoul, much less be attacked by one. The city had largely emptied out. 'Then you could just throw the cup away, right? I kind of remember that,' the woman said. She stared into the fire. 'You didn't have to wash it out.'
'Yeah,' the squinting man agreed, nodding happily. 'They had coffee you could just pour boiling water on, and it was ready. They had orange juice that came frozen in a tube and you just let it melt in some water and you could drink it.'
One of the children, a skinny girl of maybe fourteen years, laughed heartily. 'Why freeze it in the first place if you were just going to let it melt?'
The old man smiled and laughed but without the girl's abandon. 'Sure.'
'Where did they go?' Sarah asked. She drew a lot of blank stares. 'Where did the ghouls go?'
The old man shrugged. 'West. Jersey, I guess. It's not like they migrated or something. They just started wandering away, one by one, maybe looking for food. Over the bridges, the GWB is still standing.'
Sarah hugged herself. The night had come on colder than she expected and her hooded sweatshirt, so perfect for desert evenings, couldn't keep out the damp of the Island. 'But why to the west, why did they go into New Jersey?'
'Well,' the old man said, 'if they went east they'd get stuck on the L.I.E.'
That elicited more than a few snorting laughs from the older survivors. Sarah had no idea what it meant, or why he had spelled out 'lie'. She stood up and watched the fire for a second. She didn't want to leave its warmth but the clustered survivors sitting in a circle around the blaze were confusing her more than anything else. All they wanted to talk about was what they'd lost, what the world used to have in it. For Sarah, who knew nothing except apocalypse, such talk was just wasted breath.
One of the younger men, a big guy with muscles, jumped up when she turned away from the bonfire. 'Where are you headed?' he asked, not necessarily unfriendly. She definitely got the sense he'd been tasked with keeping an eye on her, though.
'I need to urinate,' she announced. The younger survivors tittered. Her guard nodded meaningfully, as if she'd passed a test.
Everything on Governors Island, she ruminated as she headed into the shadows between two Victorian houses, felt like a test. Osman and Marisol had gone off to catch up on old times, leaving her in the company of people she didn't know. She'd been fed, welcomed effusively, cheered and toasted. She'd been welcomed to sit by the fire, brought into the conversation, given their full attention whenever she spoke. Yet as much as they seemed to want to make her feel welcome they never stopped looking at her, studying her. There were plenty of black women on the Island, so it wasn't that. She supposed it might be that in such an insular community any newcomer was a thing of fascination, a nine day's wonder. And surely, anyone who had survived the last twelve years had reason enough not to trust strangers.
Yet the feeling Sarah got from the Islanders wasn't so much mistrust as it was furtiveness. They weren't concerned with what she would do, so much as they acted as if they had a secret they were afraid she would learn.