I also knew that Ayaan had just gotten me off the hook. She had made those things unimportant. Ignorable. I could finish my mission and barely have to lift a finger. It just meant writing off a couple of hundred human lives.
“I’ve got some ideas but I need every man I can get in on this one. I need you, Dekalb.” He stared at me even as I steadfastly refused to meet his gaze.
Eventually I followed him into the trailer without a word and sank down into one of the comfortable chairs there. Kreutzer lingered in the background, all but rubbing his hands together in nervousness while Jack studied high-res images of Central Park and the things Gary had built there.
“We have to start with a couple of assumptions,” he said, finally, that final word sounding like something with too many legs that had just flown into his mouth. This was a man who thought that hard data was a necessity in buying an electric toothbrush. Staging a suicidal rescue attempt would require notarized affidavits from signal intelligence operatives and a signed letter from the Joint Chiefs of Staff describing in perfect detail exactly what his mission was. He didn’t have that luxury now, of course. “We start by assuming that this is possible. Then we assume that we have the gear and the personnel to pull it off.”
I nodded but still refused to look at his screen.
“We have to assume that he’s still human enough to share some of our limitations. That he can only concentrate on one thing at a time.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “You want to use Ayaan’s sacrifice as a diversion.” It made sense, of course. Gary wanted one thing very badly, and that was revenge. If he was handed it on a silver platter why would he notice us sneaking up behind him with a chainsaw to cut his head off?
I could think of a bunch of reasons why he would notice that. He wasn’t stupid. We had underestimated him before and it had cost us so much. Jack was thinking in the realm of possibilities, though, not in terms of what might happen but what could happen. Even I knew that was dangerous territory.
“We have to assume one other thing. That he didn’t know this was here when he built his fortifications.”
That made me look up. Something Gary had overlooked? Something that would solve all of our problems? Jack was tapping the screen, indicating a featureless rectangular shape just inside the boundaries of the Park. It sat immediately downtown from the 79th Street transverse, formerly a well-paved road and now a ribbon of muddy water. I had no idea what it was.
When Jack told me I had to seriously think about what we were going to do. About how we were going to sneak inside Gary’s fortress and somehow make it back out alive with a couple of hundred living people in tow. It couldn’t be done.
We were going to do it. “How do we start?” I asked.
Chapter Ten
They were walking in the garden between the dormitory buildings, the mummies keeping a discrete distance from the living when something white and fast blurred across Gary’s vision and collided with his temple, making his eyes shiver in their sockets. His brain squirmed in his head as he sent out a dozen commands at once, drawing in clumps of soldiers to cover his blind spot, sending Noseless clambering up the stairs of the broch to get a clear view, rushing Faceless out to where the wall of the enclosure wasn’t quite finished.
It was with his own eyes, however, that he solved the mystery. Looking down, still shaken by the blow, he saw the missile that had struck him so violently. It was a softball, soiled and dented from long use. Looking up again he saw a girl standing stock still a few dozen yards away, her eyes very wide. She wore a catcher’s glove and her nose was running unheeded. Her bright energy thrummed inside her with the adrenaline coursing through her veins.
Gary knelt down before the terrified eight year-old and tried to smile. Considering the state of his teeth maybe that wasn’t the best idea. The girl trembled visibly, waves of fear rippling through her gooseflesh.
“Come here, baby. I’m not going to bite.” Not this one, anyway. She had plenty more years ahead of her as a breeder before she would be culled. If she was a threat he might have to eat her father or something as an object lesson.
At his side he could feel Marisol barely able to control herself. She wanted to hurt him, he knew. Violence had been done to his person and she felt as if she should take it as a sign to begin a violent rebellion against her captivity. He also knew she wasn’t that stupid. The others who stood around him in a wide circle looked ready to run away at the slightest provocation. There would be no mutiny today.
“Did you throw this?” he asked, holding up the softball. It took both of his hands to keep a grip on it. “Did you throw it at me on purpose? Don’t worry, I’m not angry. Did you throw it on purpose?”
Perhaps too quickly the girl’s head swiveled right and left in negation. Gary smiled again.
“Playing ball is fun but we have to be careful,” he said. “Maybe you remember how there used to be doctors and hospitals but they’re gone now. If one of us gets hurt or sick there’s nobody to look after them. Do you—”
He stopped in mid-thought. His death-numbed senses had picked up something, something distant and faint, a kind of rumbling that he felt more than heard. Like an over-loaded tractor trailer rumbling by on a highway blocks away. Gary queried the taibhsears hanging from the broch’s walls and his own scouts out in the park. There was a generalized sense of agitation from the crowd of dead outside but no real information to be had.
A living man came out of the crowd and hurried the little girl away. Her education would have to wait until Gary knew what was going on.
“What was that?” Marisol demanded. The living around them shook their heads in confusion. Gary wasn’t just losing it, then. There had definitely been a sound. He touched Noseless’s mind and had him study the dead trees of Central Park, the tombstone tenements beyond. There—a puff of brown and grey smoke rolling over some trees on the western edge of the park. Over by the American Museum of Natural History, almost directly across the park from the Met where Mael had reanimated. Gary reached across the eididh and sent a wave of his dead soldiers moving in that direction. Those closest to the museum were engulfed in a wave of dust that dissipated quickly. They staggered onto the museum grounds and tripped over fallen pieces of stone and brick. That wasn’t altogether surprising—the dead had demolished a good half of the Natural History Museum in their quest for bricks with which to build Mael’s tower. Maybe the rest of the building was just collapsing.
A honking, shrilling blare rolled across the park. The dead nearest the Natural History Museum covered their ears in defense against the noise. The sound rose and fell and flared out into a high-pitched shriek that made Gary’s skull hurt. When it finally stopped he ordered his dead to get closer, to surround the museum. That had been a man-made sound. Feedback on a speaker system, perhaps.
Or from a bullhorn. “Hello! Mr. Asshole Xaaraan!”
That word wasn’t English but it sounded familiar. Oh yes, of course. One of the Somali girls had used it to describe him. She’d had a bayonet impaling his chest at the time.
“Hello, dead man, are you out there!”
There was still dust in the air near the Natural History Museum. It vibrated every time the girl spoke. Gary possessed the throats of his army.
“Yesssss,” he made them hiss with rotten vocal chords. “I’mmmmm heeerrreee.”
A figured appeared on the roof of the Natural History Museum, on top of the glass-walled Hayden Planetarium. Noseless could just make her out with his cloudy eyes—plaid skirt, blazer, headscarf. The girl soldier raised the bullhorn to her mouth again and her words blasted across Central Park, bouncing off the hardened mud, ricocheting off the twisted iron streetlamps. “You said you would take me as your payment for the drugs. I have come.”
Ayaan—it was Ayaan, the bitch who shot him. Gary felt his dessicated salivary glands swell with excitement. He hadn’t really expected Dekalb to accept his offer. He urged his dead scouts forward, into the broken province
of the museum. Inside in the shadowy space hot dust roiled in great clouds that reduced visibility. Piles of broken rubble clogged the corridors and broad exhibit spaces. Ayaan must have demolished all the stairwells—there was no way up to the roof anymore, as far as Gary could tell. The only part of the museum that hadn’t been damaged was the planetarium itself, a metal clad sphere suspended inside a self-contained structure of tempered glass. There was no way inside the glass cube without going through the main body of the museum, and the glass was shatterproof.
Gary pulled his troops out of the ruined building and had them swarm around the sides. They reached up across the glass but could find no handholds, nothing at all to help them climb up. Ayaan had picked an incredibly defensible location to make her last stand. There was no way up—but she was also cut off from escape.
“Here I am!” she said, her words chased by rubbery echoes. “Come and get me!”
Clearly she didn’t intend to go down easy. Alright, Gary thought. Alright. This might be fun. He urged his army forward, the great surging mass of them. They moved silently like a wind passing through tall grass but their footfalls made the ground shake. Gary thrilled with the power he commanded, only to have his ego shaken a moment later.
From behind ventilation hoods and elevator shaft heads the rest of Ayaan’s company emerged, a dozen, two dozen girls with heavy packs on their backs and assault rifles in their hands. Some of them held large cardboard boxes. These girls ran to the edge of the planetarium roof and upturned their loads over the heads of the encroaching ghoul army.
The boxes had been full of live hand grenades. They fell like fruit from an orchard in a thunderstorm, tumbling through fifty feet of air to bounce around the feet of Gary’s soldiers. They went off in rhythmic fountains of pale smoke that hid the army from Noseless’s view and made Gary wince as he felt the distant pain of each dead man to be blown apart.
“Goddamnit,” Gary howled. He headed back to the broch, calling the mummies to follow him. It looked like Dekalb still had some surprises for him after all.
Chapter Eleven
Six hours earlier:
Osman handed me a limp kif cigarette and a pack of matches before he jumped back onto the Arawelo and started belching orders at Yusuf. “It will calm your nerves,” he told me. I guess I looked like a ghost—people had been telling me all morning how pale I was. I didn’t think Osman’s weak hashish was going to help so I shoved the joint in my pocket after waving him my gratitude.
The boat pulled away from the Coast Guard dock with a rattling of pistons and a blast of hot exhaust from its diesels. Osman brought it around slowly, backing and filling with a series of slow-motion turns. The girls on the deck held to the rails or to lashed-down boxes of armaments and looked wistfully over the green grass of Governors Island. I had hoped not to see Ayaan before she left but there she was on top of the wheelhouse like a homecoming queen on a particularly rusty parade float. She looked down at me and I looked up at her. Our eyes met for perhaps the last time and we seemed to communicate on some non-verbal level, some wavelength of respect I couldn’t really define. Finally she shot me a smile that made me queasy and then she turned to face the harbor.
I headed back toward the aircraft hangars at a jog—timing was a big part of Jack’s plan and I wouldn’t be the one to screw it up. The big tubular Chinook helicopter—a CH-47SD, the newest and fanciest cargo helicopter the Armed Forces have—sat on the lawn waiting for me. I dashed up the rear loading ramp and hit the switch to close it behind me, then jogged forward through the cabin, cavernous now that we’d torn out all the seats and rattling like the inside of a concrete mixer. Kreutzer already had the Super-D’s tandem rotors spun up to speed and he was ready to get airborne. He had protested of course when we asked him to fly us out to Central Park but Jack had certain powers of persuasion. Namely he told Kreutzer that if he didn’t volunteer for the job we would just leave him on Governors Island to starve. When Jack says something like that people tend to assume he’s not bluffing.
As soon as I reached the cockpit Kreutzer took us straight up a hundred feet and then pushed forward so hard I toppled backward and landed on my ass. He looked down at me from his pilot’s seat as if he might start laughing.
“How many flight hours do you have on this thing?” I shouted over the roar of the engines.
Kreutzer snarled back, “More than you, asshole.” Fair enough.
Carefully I climbed up into the navigator’s seat. Jack, in the co-pilot’s seat, handed me a stick of gum to help pop my ears.
We streaked across the harbor and into Brooklyn airspace, keeping low and moving fast. We were taking the first of many dumb risks this mission would require. While we were certain that Brooklyn was swarming with the dead and that some of them would see us we could only hope that Gary’s ability to use the dead as spies didn’t extend to that kind of range… or, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be paying attention to the outlying boroughs.
The position of my seat kept me from seeing down to street level so I was thankfully spared the sight of any surprised-looking dead who might have spotted us. All I saw was the occasional building flashing by right outside my window—the courthouse, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank clock tower, the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters. As we passed into Queens Kreutzer brought us up another hundred feet and banked toward the river. “Last chance,” he said.
I frowned in confusion—then looked out the canopy at the ground below. We were even with the UN complex, the Secretariat building as white and shiny as a tombstone where it towered over the corpse-choked East River. My brain did a reversal of perspectives and I realized what he was saying. We could just fly over there right now and get the drugs and leave. I could call Ayaan and abort this suicide mission. I didn’t see any pigeons—maybe Gary had actually kept his word and cleared the way for us.
So close. It was right there. Right there!
Jack put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He wasn’t threatening me, or even reminding me of my responsibilities. Just emotional support, from a guy who I would have thought incapable of such. I turned to nod at him and sank back into my crewseat.
It wasn’t long before Kreutzer had us hovering over the Queensboro bridge where it crossed Roosevelt Island. As close as we dared to get to Manhattan in our noisy conveyance. I got up from my seat and looked down through the nose windows. I could see the dead far below, crowding around the bridge pylons, their heads craning upwards and their hands reaching for us.
“I don’t know if either of you has accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior,” Kreutzer said, turning sideways in his seat, “but now might be the time.”
We ignored him and headed aft to the cabin. Jack and I took turns sealing one another into hazmat suits, just like the ones Ayaan and I used when we first came to Times Square a few days—or a lifetime—back. These were Coast Guard issue, meant for use during toxic spill cleanups, so they were thicker and more unwieldy but I had tested mine out and knew I could still walk in it. When we were suited up Jack ran me through the basics of fast-roping. He fitted me with a nylon harness that looped over my thighs then attached a descender—an aluminum figure eight—to my crotch with carabiners. When he was done he opened a hatch in the belly of the Chinook with a burst of white light and hooked up a winch for our lines. One end of the line went through my descender in a complicated loop. Jack attached a safety line to the back of my harness and I was good to go. “See you downstairs,” I said, trying to sound tough. Jack didn’t respond so I held my breath and stepped out through the hatch.
They call it fast-roping because “falling like a rock” doesn’t have the same military jargon feel. I could slow myself down if I didn’t mind burning my gloves—the friction from the ropes got intense—but I spent most of the descent in free fall, just like Jack had taught me. Falling objects all descend at the same speed—Galileo proved it—but when you’re carrying a fifty pound pack it sure feels like you’re dropping even faster. I slowed as
I neared the ground, grabbing hard at my line until my gloves literally began to smoke and then flexed my knees just as I touched the concrete roadbed, rolling away from the impact so I didn’t break my ankles.
In a second I was up and holding the rope while Jack followed me down. We unclipped the various lines and harnesses and waved at Kreutzer, but he was already slipping sideways in a wide turn that would take him well out of sight of Manhattan. In a few seconds he was hidden behind a row of buildings and the world was suddenly silent, only my breath and the creaking of my suit to keep me company. Jack had expressly forbidden speaking during this part of the mission, just in case. All it would take was one dead man to notice us and we would fail, and our lives would be forfeit.
The bridge rose away from us on either side, a tendril of concrete flanked by high iron towers. To the east lay Manhattan, the Upper East Side and then Central Park. We had a long walk ahead of us. We got started without a word.
Chapter Twelve
Our walk through the Upper East Side made my bones ache and sweat pool in the small of my back but we weren’t spotted, which was the main thing. The streets were deserted—presumably Gary had pulled all of the dead away from this area to join the ranks of his army. That didn’t mean we took a lot of chances. We moved through the streets of Manhattan using a cover strategy that Jack called “bounding overwatch,” which meant I would hide in a shadowy doorway, my eyes scanning a street corner while Jack crossed the open space as fast as he could. Then he would take up position behind some kind of cover and I would do what he had just done, though far more clumsily.
We saw a number of buildings that had been pulled down by brute force—presumably for the bricks that built Gary’s tower. Hands and feet stuck out of the resulting rubble piles. Clearly Gary hadn’t worried much about job site safety when he sent his troops out for building materials. We only saw one active dead man, which was just enough to give me heart palpitations. If Gary had been using his eyes at that moment we would have been screwed—and there was no way we would know, not until we got to the Park and found Gary waiting for us. Thinking about it made me want to panic, so I tried not thinking about it. Which didn’t work.
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