Brighid's Flame Read Online Free Page B

gathered. Hoodied and ball-capped figures formed a bucket brigade of supplies.
    Fifth Avenue proved to be equally crowded, with room for only a single line of vehicles moving north. They crawled at a turtle’s pace, in a long, winding line. Whole families piled up on the sidewalks on either side, without even shanties for shelter. The lucky ones possessed a dingy tent or two among them, sections of sidewalk clearly delineating village boundaries. Folding card tables offered gathering centers for these little communities. She caught sight of a few late sleepers in lawn chairs, makeshift tarps swagged like festival bunting in long, uneven, mismatched lines.
    She remembered, in school, seeing footage of New Delhi, or possibly Dubai. This was like that. Fleets of pedestrians, jumbled along with bicycles and vendors and more people. Halfway to their destination, Tara bought a round of coffee and pretzels from two separate vendors, leaning precariously out of the window to do so. The noise and stink were atrocious.
    Pretzels were contraband at the Tower. She couldn’t decide which was more glorious: the pretzel itself or the spice of forbidden gains.
    They finally reached Central Park, the tall gates and barbed wire giving it a certain penal quality that still gave her bad dreams. The security perimeter, shanties, and acres of salvage left an oily, metallic tang on her tongue. It leaked into her throat, filled her nasal passages. Her eyes began to burn and water.
    The van turned in at East 97th and trundled along until they could pull onto the gravel road that led them to the North Meadow Recreation Center. While the East Meadow had been given over to great, heaping piles of salvage and recyclables, sorted and towering, the much larger North Meadow was purely residential. What had once been baseball fields had developed into little tented hamlets with the dirt lines of the diamonds marking streets. Across 97th lay the Onassis Reservoir, where people gathered, and bathed, and—on the far end—lived in shanties if they could collect the materials, or trade for them. She recalled the difference of community between the tents and the Shanties—tented communities tended toward cooperation and a certain grim determination to see better days. The tents were for families and as normal a life as could be had. The Shanties had all but given up on those days, and fierce competition over resources reigned supreme.
    Tara and Stephen had shared a shanty. So had the several dozen students they’d led from the aptly named Hell’s Kitchen, through a newly war-torn city years before the biosphere had been implemented. The corporate government’s contract with Dreamtech had also built, and paid for, the gates and private security surrounding Central Park.
    The gates had gone up not long after the Children’s Shanties, as they’d been called. Small, inexpertly constructed hovels leaning against one another for lacking support, with the nearest bathrooms blocks away. They’d schooled themselves as best they could, because there’d been no one else. Tara and Stephen had worked to make sure there was enough to eat, and adequate shelter. And when more children came, they’d built more shanties, clumsy models of those built by adults.
    Well-meaning adults had attempted to put them in homes, for their own good. Tara and Stephen had known about homes. They had refused, and gone about the business of surviving. Three years later, Gwen had found them.
    The van stopped, and the freight truck behind it. Across the road, the old Tennis Center turned lively market began to empty of shoppers and tradesmen. Tara hopped out, finishing off her pretzel and scalding black coffee. The trucks shook as their back doors shot up, and their ramps were lowered to the ground. The crowds converged eagerly, some there to help unload while others hurried to the Wreck, as Parkies called the Center. The rec center had never been