Her authority was gone. Her certainty had evaporated the moment those broken teeth broke her skin.
For a long sickening minute nobody fired a weapon and nobody moved, except the dead, who kept stepping closer.
“We need to find a secure CCP,” Ayaan finally said to me, breaking the spell, “and you’re our regional specialist.” So engrossed with what had happened to Ifiyah I didn’t see her come up and I yelped with startlement. “Get us out of here, Dekalb!”
I nodded and stared east on Fourteenth. Only a few of the dead staggered toward us from that direction. “Somebody untie him,” I said, pointing at Gary. “He’s a doctor. A takhtar. We need him.” They did as I said. The dead man claimed he couldn’t run so I detailed two of the girls to carry him. If they disliked this duty they were too well-trained to say so. I picked up Ifiyah myself—I was disturbed to find she weighed only a little more than my seven year old daughter Sarah—and then we were running, tearing down Fourteenth, our weapons clattering against our backs. We dodged around the dead there as they clawed at us. One of the girls got snared by a particularly dextrous corpse but she kicked him in the face and got free again.
Out of breath before we’d covered one avenue block I didn’t let myself slow down until we ran past a building covered in scaffolding and the street opened up into the tree-lined expanse of Union Square. I realized then I had no idea where I was going. We were headed away from the river and the safety of the ship. What kind of shelter could we possibly find from the dead?
I stopped and set Ifiyah down very carefully. Her eyes were wide as she stared up at me. I panted for air, oxygen bludgeoning my lungs as I stared at the storefronts and the trees and the statues all around me.
There was no sound at all.
Chapter Sixteen
I called for a stop and we clustered around the statue of Gandhi. I looked up at the smiling bronze face and issued a silent apology for surrounding him with heavily-armed child soldiers. I could remember when hippy kids would put garlands of flowers around the great pacifist’s neck but all I saw there now were loops of wire.
“They ate the flowers,” Gary pointed out, almost as if he'd heard my thoughts. I looked back down at him.
“Flowers?” I demanded.
“Anything living."
“Why, damnit? Why do they do this?”
Gary shrugged and sat down at the base of the tree. “It’s a compulsion. You can’t fight it for long—the hunger just takes over. I have a theory about it, but it's still pretty vague… I mean, they should have all rotted away by now. Human bodies decompose fast. They should be piles of bone and goo by now but they look pretty healthy to me.”
I glared at him.
“Okay, okay, that was a brain fart. By ‘healthy’ I mean ‘in one piece’. I think when they eat living meat they get some kind of life force or whatever out of it. Some energy that helps hold them together.”
“Horseshit,” I breathed. I looked at the girls to see if they agreed with me but they might have been statues themselves. They had shut down, unable to contemplate just how bad things had gotten. They needed someone to tell them what to do and now, with Commander Ifiyah out of action, they didn’t know where to look.
I was out of ideas. Where were we going to go? Our only escape route was cut off. We could take shelter in one of the buildings—maybe the Barnes and Noble on the north side of the Square. At least then we would have plenty of reading material while we starved to death. I had gotten this far on adrenaline but now…
We didn’t hear the dead coming for us. They made no sound. Through the trees in the park we could hardly see them either but somehow we knew we were being surrounded. Call it battlefield paranoia if you want. Maybe we were developing a sixth sense for the dead. I ordered the girls up the stone steps and into Union Square proper where maybe we could see things a little better. When we got to one of the pavilions over the subway entrances the girls raised their rifles out of sheer habit.
“Wacan… kurta…” Ifiyah said softly. Something about head shots, if I can trust my shoddy Somali vocabulary. She seemed to lack the strength to issue a real order. Her leg was bleeding badly, so I called Gary over and told him to tend to it. He’d been a doctor, once, he'd said. I put a hand over my eyes and scanned the far eastern side of the park, looking for any movement.
I found it quickly enough. There was plenty to be seen—dozens, maybe fifty corpses converging on us while we just waited for them to show up. But what could we do? We were pinned down. We had a horde of the undead coming up behind us—not moving much faster than we could walk but they didn’t need to rest and they would eventually catch up. There were a lot less of them in front of us. We would just have to fight our way through.
“Fathia,” I said, summoning the soldier to stand next to me. “There, do you see them? Are they in range? Every shot has to count.”
She nodded and raised her rifle to her eye. A shot echoed around the park and a branch fell out of a tree in the distance. She took another shot and I could see one of the dead men flinch. He kept coming, though. Ayaan took her turn next but had no better results. I would have given a lot for a pair of binoculars just then.
They came out into the open near the statue of Lafayette. Big guys with bald heads—no, helmets, they were wearing helmets of some kind. Motorcyclists? One of them had either a big stick or a rifle in his hand and for a bad second I considered the possibility of dead men with guns. He dropped it, though, whatever it was, to free his hand so that he could reach for us even if he was a hundred yards away. These things were like meat-seeking missiles, incapable of guile or subterfuge. They just wanted us so badly they could do nothing else but want. That had been Ifiyah's bad mistake. She had known they weren't terribly bright but she'd thought they were like animals, that they could learn to leave you alone if you butchered enough of them. She couldn't seem to look at something that had once been human and understand that now it was an unthinking machine. She was too young, I guess. Maybe she'd never met a junkie. Then she might have understood better.
“That one.” I pointed at the foremost and three shots rang out in quick succession. One of the shots must have connected—we could see sparks leap up from the helmet. He barely flinched, though. Then I realized what we were looking at. Riot police.
Sure. There had been widespread looting in the early days of the Epidemic. Lots of public panic. Of course they would have called out the riot cops to keep order. And of course some of them would have succumbed to chaos on the scale of the Epidemic. “Try again,” I said, and they both fired at once. The ex-policeman spun around in a circle as the bullets pelted his head. He collapsed to the ground and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Then he slowly got back up.
“The helmet—it must be made of Kevlar,” Ayaan said. Jesus, she had to be right. Only a head shot could destroy the walking dead and these particular corpses had bulletproof helmets on.
What the hell could we do? The girls kept firing. I knew they were wasting ammunition but what else could we do? They were trying for face shots now but the helmets had visors to protect against that.
“Give the orders,” one of the girls said, looking up at me. “You in commander now. So give the orders.”
I rubbed my cheek furiously as I looked around. There was a Virgin Megastore on the southern side of the park. I remembered going there when I was last in New York and I seemed to recall it only had a couple of entrances. It would take time, though, to get inside and barricade the place. Time we didn’t have if we couldn’t stop these xaaraan. “Shoot for the legs,” I suggested, “if they can’t walk…” But of course riot cops would be wearing body armor too.
The horde of the dead coming up Fourteenth were still getting closer. The former riot cops were maybe fifty yards away.
“Give the orders,” the girl insisted. I stood there as still as a block of stone without a thought in my head.
Chapter Seventeen
The dead riot p
olice were only forty yards away. We could see them clearly now—their padded armor, their helmets with their clear plastic visors showing the cyanotic skin underneath. They moved haltingly as if their muscles had stiffened to pliability of dry wood. Their feet slipped along the ground, looking for equilibrium that seemed in short supply.
“They won’t stop,” Gary told me. “They won’t ever stop.”
I hardly needed the information. Ifiyah, the wounded commander of the child soldiers who surrounded me had made the mistake of treating the walking dead like any other enemy force. She had tried to rout them with sustained gunfire from a defensible point. She had thought they would stop, if you gave them a good enough reason. For that mistake she'd been bitten by one of the dead and now she could barely maintain consciousness. Which somehow meant that I was in charge, even if I'd never fired a gun before in my life.
Ayaan fired again and split open a cop’s boot. He stumbled and nearly fell but it didn’t take him down. The one vulnerable part of his body—his head—was covered by a helmet that the relatively slow round of an AK-47 couldn’t penetrate.
I knew that better than anyone. It might as well have been one of the problems I’d had to solve back when I was getting my training from the UN. At seven hundred and ten meters per second, roughly twice the speed of sound at sea level on a sunny day the bullets could impose a great deal of force on those helmets but it would be dispersed by the mesh of Kevlar ballistic fibers lining the helmet. The kind of thing a UN weapon inspector would be expected to know. Whether the target was alive or undead had not been one of the variables we’d ever needed to take into account.
At the west side of the park—our exposed flank, as it were—I heard a shout and looked over to see one of the girls waving at me. I’d sent her there to scout the opposition and the signal meant that we had a horde—a veritable army of the undead—crossing Sixth Avenue, no more than two avenue blocks away from our position. At their standard walking speed of three miles per hour (standard living human walking speed is four miles per hour but the dead tend to drag their feet) that gave us at most ten minutes before we were overrun. Maybe—maybe—we could fight off the ex-riot cops when we engaged them at close quarters but doing so would take time, time we didn’t have.
I had nothing to fall back on at that point except my training and so I kept doing the numbers in my head. It didn’t matter how pointless my calculations might be.
The ex-police were only thirty yards away when I finally snapped out of it. The girls kept shooting—pointlessly. They weren’t prepared for this, not mentally. They were still fighting a guerilla war. Guerilla tactics require an opponent capable of rational decisions. These were animals: no, animals can learn from their mistakes. Only machines persist in the face of their own certain destruction. These were machines we were facing, not people.
I need that, that rationalization, if I was going to shoot them.
The girls had dumped their excess weaponry in a heap at the base of the statue of Gandhi—an irony I ignored for the moment. I’m not sure what if anything I was thinking except that I had better arm myself. The AK-47 I’d been issued back on the boat had a bent barrel, the result of my desperate use of the weapon as a pry bar back in the hospital. I needed a new weapon if I was going to fight.
I had never fired a gun before with the intent of harming anyone. I knew their specs and schematics and statistics by heart but I’d never fired so much as a pistol in a combat situation. I wasn’t even looking at the weapon I picked up. I knew in an abstract way that it was a Russian made anti-armor piece, an RPG-7V. I knew that I’d read its user manual before. I knew how to load a grenade in the front end of the barrel and how to hold its wooden heat guard on my shoulder. I knew which hand to put on which of its two grips. I knew enough to take the lens cap off the sighting mechanism and how to close one eye and look through the sight with the other. I lined up the crosshairs with the helmet of the nearest undead cop and pulled the trigger. I knew how to do that, even if I’d never intended to do so as long as I lived.
The dead men were twenty yards away.
A three-foot cone of sparks and fire jumped out the back of the tube and the grenade leapt away from me. There was no recoil at all. I let the now-empty tube fall away from my eye and watched the rocket-propelled grenade disappear at the tip of a column of white smoke. It moved so slowly, seeming to hang in the air. I watched fins pop out of its tail, saw it visibly stabilize itself in midair and correct its tumbling spin. I saw it touch the ground right in front of the leading dead man.
The briefest flash of searing white light got swallowed up instantly by a puff of grey mist that swelled up into an angry sphere of billowing smoke. Debris was everywhere, falling from the sky—broken chips of concrete, divots of grass, a severed hand that smacked dryly on my shoe. A lot less noise than I would have predicted. A hot breeze washed over us, ruffling the girls’ headscarves, making me blink away grit and dust. Everything went grey for a second as the expanding shockwave of smoke rolled over us.
The smoke cleared and I saw a three foot crater in the ground surrounded by mangled bodies, limbs torn away, exposed bones pointing accusingly up at the air. A couple of the former cops were still moving, twitching mostly but still hauling themselves toward us with fingers that bent all wrong. More of them lay motionless on the Square, victims of shrapnel and hydrostatic shock.
“Xariif,” Ayaan muttered. It meant “clever” and it was the nicest thing she’d ever said to me.
I slung the empty tube, still dribbling smoke from both ends, over my shoulder and waved for our scout to come join us. Time was still very much an issue. Once we had regrouped I lead the girls in a desperate run down Fourteenth Street to the east—toward the Virgin Megastore there. The main entrance, a triangular shaped lobby of glass doors was locked up tight but that was a good thing since it would help keep out the dead. A second entrance near the store’s café opened when I yanked on the chrome handle of the door. I ushered the girls inside, telling them to fan out and secure the place. Gary brought up the end of the line. I held my arm across the opening before he could go in. We were spooked, tired, and still in a lot of danger. It wasn’t going to do much for morale if the girls had to watch Ifiyah die. I wanted to talk to him about what could be done and what our options might be.
“She doesn't have a chance, does she?” I tried, but he was ready for me.
“Let me look at her. Maybe I can save her.”
We both knew the likelihood of that. Nobody ever survived being bitten by the undead. The mouth of the dead woman who attacked Ifiyah would have been swimming with microbes—gangrene, septicemia, typhus would have been injected right into her wound. Add in shock and the massive loss of blood and Ifiyah barely stood more of a chance inside with us than outside with the dead.
Still. She was alive, for now. I may have just fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a crowd but it hadn’t completely changed who I was. If there was a chance for Ifiyah to make it I had to give her that much.
I sighed but I held the door open for him. He mumbled thanks as he stepped into the gloomy megastore. I followed right on his heels and pulled the door shut behind me.
Chapter Eighteen
We spread out to cover the first floor of the megastore, moving quietly through the rows of display racks, pointing rifles behind counters and into closets. The afternoon daylight lit up the main floor pretty well but the lower level was lost in darkness. I sent Ayaan and a squad of girls down there with flashlights to scope it out. They returned in a few minutes looking scared but with nothing to report. Good.
The first order of business was to secure the café door. We found the keys to the store in a manager’s office and locked it, then pushed tables and chairs up against it to form a barricade. Some of the girls did likewise with the front doors. By this point the dead had already arrived. They pressed up against the windows and for a bad ten minutes or so I thought the glass might break just from the pressure of their
bodies but it held. They were terrible to look at—their faces bloated or congested with dead blood, their vacant eyes rolling wildly, their hands cut and broken as they impotently pummeled the glass. I told the girls to move away from the windows, into the shadowy back of the store, just for morale’s sake.
We got Ifiyah propped up in the manager’s leather chair and the undead guy, Gary, used a first aid kit from the café to bandage her wound. The skin around the bite looked bloody and swollen. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope. Commander Ifiyah could still talk at that point and Fathia, her bayonet expert, held her hand and asked her a series of quiet questions I didn’t fully understand.
“See tahay?” Fathia asked.
“Waan xanuunsanahay,” was the reply. “Biyo?”
Fathia handed her commander a canteen and the wounded girl drank greedily, spilling water all down the front of her blazer. I turned away and saw Ayaan coming toward me down the display aisles. “Dekalb. We are safe for now, yes? Some of the girls would like to pray. It has been too long.”
I nodded, surprised she would even ask. It seemed that in the power vacuum left by Ifiyah’s debilitation, as the only adult present I had become the absolute authority of the team. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I didn’t think I really wanted that kind of responsibility though as a Westerner it was a relief to not have anyone else barking orders at me.
The girls laid down handwoven derin mats on the floor of the megastore and pointed them toward the east, my best guess for the direction of Mecca. I listened to them chanting sonorously in Arabic while I watched the other girls—the less devout ones I suppose. Mostly they stared out the windows at the dead outside. Were they wondering what we were going to do next? I know I was.
Monster Island: A Zombie Novel Page 6