Wanting to see something he brought them to a building ornamented with the sculpted heads of elephants and giraffes. Cheerfully whimsical in another day the reliefs had become hideous gargoyles now, emblems of bestial violence. Gary ignored the cold feeling the place gave him and touched the weathered brass hand pulls on the doors of the building.
The doors flew open with a force that knocked him back a dozen yards on his shoulder, his dry body gouging a great furrow in the mud. Noseless and Faceless turned to stare at him with a kind of dazed shock they might have seen mirrored in his own face. What could possibly have broken the stillness of the park so violently?
A naked dead man came stomping out of the Elephant House on calves like utility poles. He stood at least ten feet tall, a quaking mound of pallid flesh shot through with black veins. There was no muscle tone on the giant whatsoever, just great rolls of translucent flab and doughy meat. His hands were bloated and nearly useless, human-sized nails sunk deep into the tips of his swollen fingers. His human-sized head sat in the middle of the gelatinous mass of his body like an obscene barnacle. Gary had never seen anything like him before. He gave more than a passing second to the thought that this might be his benefactor, and his doom, but it couldn’t be so. When he plucked the strings of the net that tied together all dead men and women he felt no stirring of intelligence in this beast.
What he did see in his mind’s eye was horrible to look upon—dark energy, far more than seemed possible, a writhing, roiling storm cloud of it that blazed and radiated away from the giant in great gouts and yet never diminished in strength—a black star. There was hatred in there as well, raw red hatred for anyone who dared enter the precincts of the beast’s domain.
The creature before Gary had not begun its existence at that size. He had been a big man in life but neither a body-builder or an athlete. He had merely been one of the first of the walking dead to find his way to the Zoo. He had fought off the weaker dead as they arrived, engaged in epic combats with the stronger ones but always he had prevailed. His current size was due simply to eating greater quantities of more robust meat than anyone else who tried to challenge him.
There were no more elephants in the Elephant House, Gary realized, nor any giraffes, or hippopotami or rhinos or bears. He was looking at what was left of them.
The giant stamped toward Faceless and Gary sent her an urgent command to fall back. She couldn’t move quickly enough and the giant slapped her to the side. Noseless tried to get around behind the thing and the giant kicked out with one leg, throwing him into a brick wall with a meaty thud. The creature wanted Gary next and would brook no delays. It would tear him apart, Gary knew—not for food, since the dead never ate the dead—but for the sheer insult of invading the giant’s space.
Gary could hardly stand up to the giant physically. Instead he raised his hands before him and stroked the threads that connected the two of them in some etheric space. It hurt to touch the frenzied energy of the giant but Gary reached out and pulled hard, drawing deep until he began to siphon that mad heat away from the beast.
The giant couldn’t possibly understand what was happening but he felt it and it must have hurt like hell. He sucked a deep lungful of air, struggling against massive fat deposits to get the oxygen in and then blasted it out in a wail like an air horn. Gary covered his ears, severing his connection to the giant in the process and for a moment the world was silent again. Then the giant turned to the side and started climbing up over a high fence, digging his fingers deep into the metal lattice, pulling himself away from Gary as fast as he could.
Gary felt like slapping his hands together in self-congratulation as the giant hurried off into the muddy forest outside the Zoo. He nearly did—until the benefactor spoke to him, the words conveyed directly into his still-tender brain:
Amaideach stócach! the benefactor howled. The words meant nothing to Gary but they cut through him like a sword of fire. You let it get away! the Benefactor went on, this time in English. It was too much, this communication: it felt like the words were tearing through Gary's mind, as dangerous as bullets. He tumbled to the ground, his body convulsing wildly in the throes of a massive seizure.
When he was able to rise to his feet again he collected Noseless and Faceless (looking a little ragged after the fight with the giant but still mobile) and returned to his uptown course. He had to find his benefactor. He had to know what kind of power could hurt him so badly from such a distance.
Chapter Eight
We kept to the middle of the street as we approached Port Authority. This must have been the last part of the city to be evacuated. We saw piles of luggage—sometimes just trash bags sealed with masking tape, sometimes great heaps of Prada handbags or Tumi suitcases—stashed on the sidewalk and everywhere there were leaflets tacked up on the walls or skating along the streets like albino manta rays advising people to STAY TOGETHER and KNOW YOUR GROUP NUMBER BY HEART! The bus terminal must have been the only way out of town at the end. I had no great desire to go inside and see what had become of all those panicked refugees. It would be depressing at best, I thought, shocking at worst.
Then we passed by the bulk of the terminal and entered Times Square and I discovered a new definition for the word ‘shocking’.
It will sound ridiculous to some, I know, after all the devastation I’d witnessed, but Times Square was the most horrifying place I saw in this new New York. There were no piles of dead bodies, no signs of looting or panic. There was just one thing wrong with this Times Square.
It was dark.
There were no lights on anywhere, not a single bulb. I turned to Ayaan but she didn’t understand, of course, so I turned around again and stared up at the vast blank faces of the buildings around me. I wanted to explain to her—how there used to be television screens here six stories high, how the neon lights had glowed and shifted and shimmered so brightly the night had been transformed into a luminous blue haze unlike daylight, unlike moonlight, something wholly transcendent and localized. How there had been a law requiring every building to put out a certain amount of light so that even the police station and the subway entrances and the military recruiting center had blasted out illumination like the Vegas strip but how could she understand? She had no point of reference—she had never seen the big advertisements for Samsung and Reuters and Quiksilver and McDonald’s. She would never see them now. With my mouth open I turned in place, so shocked I couldn’t think. The heart of New York City—that was what all the tourist books called Times Square. The heart of New York City had stopped beating. The city like its inhabitants had perished and now existed only in a nightmarish half-state, an unliving undeath. Ayaan had to grab my hand and lead me away.
We passed between the movie theaters and then we saw Madame Tussaud’s on our right. Dozens of wax mannequins had been dragged out into the street, their paint washed off by rain and their half-melted white faces staring up at us in reproach. We could see the big ragged gouges in their throats and torsos where the hungry dead had ravaged them, obviously having mistaken them for real human beings. I was still staring at the broken forms when I heard someone speak. I looked up at Ayaan at the same moment she looked up at me. We had both heard it—which meant it had originated with neither of us.
We heard it again. “Hey, guys! Over here!” Ayaan’s face set in grim planes. In this haunted city another voice could only mean Gary—but he was long dead, now, buried under an avalanche of DVD boxes, we had been there, we had done it. It didn’t sound like Gary anyway. Could there be another like him? If so we were in desperate trouble.
“Living people, man! Survivors! Come on!” The voice was coming from the direction of Broadway. We rushed to the subway entrance and found it barred with iron gates. Standing just inside were three men who were very much alive and breathing. They were covered in sweat as if they’d just run a long distance and they were waving wildly at us.
“Who—” I began but of course who they were was obvious. Survivors�
�New Yorkers, still alive after all this time. Had they been living in the subway since the Epidemic broke out? It seemed impossible yet here they were. They looked malnourished and scruffy but they weren’t dead, they weren’t dead at all.
“You must be here to rescue us, man,” one of them shouted, sounding convinced this was not the case but desperately wanting it to be so. “It’s been so long but we knew you would come!”
Ayaan shook her head at me but I ignored her. The drugs could be damned—these were living people! I peered in through the bars. The men were armed with pistols and shotguns and hunting rifles—civilian weapons. Each of them wore a nametag stuck to his shirt: HELLO MY NAME IS Ray; HELLO MY NAME IS Angel; HELLO MY NAME IS Shailesh. Ray held out one sweaty, desperate palm, pushing his arm through the bars up to his shoulder. He pushed the hand toward me, not to grab me, not to tear me to pieces but to greet me. I shook his hand heartily.
Shailesh asked the first question. “What are those suits for? We’re not infected. We’re clean!”
“They keep the dead from smelling us,” I explained hurriedly. “I’m Dekalb and this is Ayaan—we’ve been here for a couple of days now but you’re the first survivors we’ve seen. How many of you are there?”
Ray answered: “Near on two hundred. Everybody who was here when the Guard’s last barricade broke. Listen, you didn’t see any survivors at all? We’ve got two guys out there looking for supplies. Paul and Kev—are you sure you didn’t see them? They’ve been gone way too long.”
I looked to Ayaan as if she might have seen something I didn’t but of course we all knew what must have happened to the foragers. “We have a ship on the Hudson,” I told them. “We’ll need to find a way to get you all safely to the river but after that you’ll be safe. Who’s in charge? We’ll need to start organizing how we do this.” I planned on running this like a classic UN refugee operation—the first step was to look for the existing social order. Not only would the local boss know how to keep order among his or her people, they’d be offended if you didn’t recognize their authority no matter how temporary it might be. I never thought I would be applying this kind of group psychology to Americans (who would be unused to direct civil authority) but the principles had to be the same.
“That’d be el Presidente,” Angel said with a sneer. He clearly had some kind of contempt for the local authority. It softened though when he realized that escape might be close at hand. “Sure, man, I’ll talk to him, I’ll get this moving. You want to come in, maybe have a bite? We haven’t got so much but it’s yours.”
I shook my head but the gesture would be hard to interpret through the faceshield so I raised my hands in negation. “Don’t open the gate. No need to endanger yourselves. We’re going to head back to the ship now but we’ll be back in a couple of hours. Alright?”
The three men looked at me with such open and honest trust on their faces that I had to turn away or choke up. Ayaan cleared her throat as we moved away from the subway, trying to get my attention. I knew what she was going to say but I didn’t want to hear it.
“Dekalb. The Arawelo is cramped even now, with only twenty-seven of us. It is not possible to take two hundred refugees onboard.” She kept her voice low so the survivors wouldn’t hear us arguing.
I followed suit. “So we’ll make multiple trips… or, I don’t know, maybe Osman will get his wish—maybe we’ll find some way to get the Intrepid free. God damn it, Ayaan! We can’t just abandon them.”
“Dekalb,” she said, much louder, and I turned to shush her but she had a different topic of discussion in mind. The side door of a dumpster had slid open and a naked dead man had wriggled out. Moving on all fours he came right up to us, his nose wriggling.
“He must smell the survivors,” I hissed at Ayaan. “Stay perfectly still.”
The dead man crawled closer and pulled himself stiffly up to his feet. In life he had suffered from male pattern baldness. He had tiny, beady eyes. He wavered before me for a long uncomfortable minute before bending forward at the waist and craning his neck out to give me a big snuffling sniff. He seemed to find my right hand fascinating.
It was only natural to look down and see what had excited him so. That was when I noticed the sheen of dampness on my palm. Sweat, on the outside of my glove.
Two more dead men slithered out of the dumpster. From down the street I saw movement—lots of movement.
“You shook the living one’s hand! You’re contaminated!” Ayaan screamed, her rifle strap getting tangled as she tried to get to the weapon. I looked from her back to the dead man as his talon-like fingers slashed down at me. They slid harmlessly off the Tyvek suit—I could feel the four hard points of contact (one for each of his fingernails) glance along my ribs—and then they caught on the seal of my glove.
At this point I tried to get away. Instead I got my legs tangled up in the baggy fabric of the hazmat suit and nearly fell down. The dead man gave a quick tug and my glove came off altogether, exposing my bare hand to the air.
My vaporproof integrity been compromised.
Chapter Nine
Long mylar banners flapped wildly between the columns of the façade, their promotional messages bleached to illegibility by the sun. Snapping, snarling as the wind tore at them they were the only moving thing in sight. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stood high and alone in the mud of the Park, its massive doors wide open.
“I’ve got better things to do,” Gary said out loud. Afraid to go in. Noseless and Faceless made no reply to his assertion. “I need to find the girl who shot me. I’m hungry, too.” He didn’t turn away, though. Too many questions stacked up in his head.
Gary lead Noseless and Faceless up the long flight of steps to the doors and peered in for a moment, wondering if he really wanted to do this. The massive lobby soared upwards to three filthy skylights that provided a trace of illumination. Enough to see that the place was empty. Gary stepped into the cool dead air of the Museum and stared up at its arched and vaulted ceiling, at the grand staircase that lead upward from the far end of the lobby, at the gates that lead to the various exhibit rooms. This was hardly his first visit but without crowds of living tourists and patrons, without the squealing of bored children or the weary shouting of tour guides it seemed that every step he took made the entire stone edifice of the museum reverberate like a tomb.
He had more than a sneaking suspicion of where he should look for the Benefactor, though it didn’t make any sense. He turned to his right and headed through an abandoned security cordon. Noseless and Faceless followed behind, their feet shuffling on the flagstones. They passed through a long corridor lined with tomb paintings showing scenes of Egyptian daily life and then into a dark chamber lined with glass display cases.
One of the first things they came to was a case holding a mummy wrapped tight in linen bandages like an enormous cocoon. A golden mask stared up at them from the depths of the dark glass, its facial features composed in an expression of perfect serenity as it stared through Gary and into eternity. The enormous eyes seemed pools filled with placid understanding and a pleased acceptance of immortality. This couldn’t be the Benefactor, Gary was sure of it. He placed a hand on the glass.
The mask came crashing up into the top of the case, the pale limbless body thrashing below, the pupal form of something horrible.
Gary jumped back. This was impossible. Yet here it was, the mummy convulsing in its glass cage. Gary reached out across the frequency of death and felt the barest shadow of dark heat there—rage and anguish were the only things keeping the mummy going and even those were in short supply. Soon enough this creature was going to exhaust itself and succumb to entropy. Yet it was patently impossible for it to have any kind of afterlife at all. God! It wouldn’t stop thrashing! The gold mask had dented and flattened from the forceful beating against the glass, smearing and distorting the features.
Gary might be undead himself but he couldn’t look at the thing in the case. It forced him every time it ben
t in the middle or smashed its face against the glass to imagine what its existence must be like: blind, bound, hungry—forever, not knowing how you got where you are, wondering if you were even alive or dead—it would be hell. He turned to Faceless and tried to explain to her. “No, no, this isn’t right—they used to dig out the brains with a, with a spoon or something when they mummified people!”
What you say is truth, the Benefactor said. As far as it goes.
Gary looked up in a panic. The words made his teeth hurt: as intimate as his own thoughts, as loud as sirens. “What do you mean?” he demanded.
They took the brains, yes—but only in some of the dynasties. Before the 18th dynasty the practice was unknown. After the Greeks conquered Egypt they outlawed excerebration altogether.
“How do you know that?” Gary spun around, trying to find where the Benefactor might be but it was impossible—the voice could be coming from anywhere.
I know many things, Gary. I have seen into your heart. I know things you’ve forgotten and things you’ll never dream of. Come to me, Gary, and I will teach you everything. Come quickly—we haven’t much time left.
Gary edged around the display case, not wanting to get near the undead thing in its grisly chrysalis in case it finally broke the glass. Not wanting to be near it at all. He lead Faceless and Noseless deeper into the Egyptian exhibit, through poorly-lit rooms full of hulking sarcophagi and broken statues and scarab jewelry and stained cerements. Every time he turned around he found more mummies thumping against their enclosures—everywhere he went he saw scarabs and white eyes staring at him from the walls. In one tiny alcove a blackened mummy surrounded by the skeletal horns of long-dead antelopes smeared itself across the glass—in another a wooden coffin intricately painted and inlaid with gold shook itself until splinters fell from it like dry rain. The sense of anger and fear and horror he read off the convulsing bodies made him cringe and press his hands against his temples, unable to bear their thwarted torment.
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