Out in the street, things still looked like a third world country. People wandering around in rags, looking for food and water, garbage piled high down alleys and away from places people were eating and sleeping, rats running to and from the piles of it, mud caking the streets, the sun beating down mercilessly on it all. The motherfuckers with the machines hadn’t even come close to where we were yet; they could still be found working away at all the places with the real money, making them presentable for the kinds of people who lived there. We were in a luxury condo, sure, but this part of Brooklyn still had just enough people who nobody cared about for them to be here yet. So it still looked like it had shortly after Bernice.

I went down the block to the first Allen Brewster’s. I rummaged the fuck through the place and found absolutely nothing useful. There was another store just like it down the block, but that had been picked over, too. I went into four chain pharmacies, all of which were within ten blocks of the building. Nobody had anything I could use.

“Fuck, motherfuck, goddamn,” I whispered to myself. I crouched down and tried not to think of my stupid fucking body and what it was putting me through. I wished for the millionth time that I could have had a surgery and had all these organs and crap removed from me. But that had never been an option for me, not living on the streets, not without any access to medical care even when I was sick as fuck. One day, things were going to be different. But today they were not, and I had to deal with that.

Okay. Deep breath. I was going to have to go back to the building and find out what the women there did when they were in this situation. I was going to have to talk to Makyala.