“Hmm?” Gary looked up. He rubbed his temples and tried to snap out of it. These frozen times when he became locked in contemplation of his own navel were too much like death, like real death for comfort. “I beg your pardon. I was miles away,” he told her. He needed to do something, something physically real or he was likely to sink into reverie again. “Let’s take a stroll, shall we?”
The mummy pushed her wheelchair along as Gary ambled alongside the fifteen-foot wall that surrounded his new village. “Did you enjoy your breakfast?” Gary asked. He’d made sure the prisoners were given plenty to eat. Tinned foods were commonplace in the emptied city but they were useless to the undead, who lacked the manual dexterity to use a can opener.
“Oh yeah,” the woman said, stroking her belly as if it pained her. “I just love cold clam chowder first thing in the morning. We need access to cooking equipment if you want us to eat. You ever heard of botulism?”
Gary smiled. “Not only that, I’ve seen it. I used to be a doctor. You can’t have a fire because I can’t risk you hurting yourselves.”
“You can’t watch us all the time. If we want to kill ourselves badly enough we’ll do it. We’ll just stop eating or… or we’ll climb on top of this wall and jump off.” The woman wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“You’re right. I can’t stop you.” Gary lead her out into a furrowed patch of earth. The mud of Central Park would grow just about anything—after decades of fertilization and aeration and intense loving care by professional gardeners the soil was rich and dark. A Rows of dusty weeds had already sprouted in the denuded earth now that Gary was present to keep the dead from consuming every living thing they saw. “This area will be your garden. Eventually we hope you’ll be able to produce all your own food. Fresh vegetables, Marisol. You can have fresh vegetables again. Imagine that.”
“Are you deaf? I said we would kill ourselves rather than help you!” The woman thrashed against the cords holding her into the chair. The mummy reached forward to restrain her but Gary shook his head. By rocking back and forth and throwing herself against her straps eventually Marisol managed to overturn her chair, spilling her sidewise across the moist dirt that smudged her face and flattened her hair.
Gary helped her up himself with his hands under her armpits. “I heard you. And I believe that maybe you would take your own life. Others will make their own choices.”
He lead her down a narrow lane between two rows of makeshift brick houses that were still under construction. He showed her the double thickness of the walls and the fiberglass installation stuffed between the two layers. They would be cozy in the winter and cool in the summer, he explained to her. Mostly they would be safe—the perimeter wall would keep the dead out. “How could you not be happy here?” he asked.
“For one thing there’s the smell,” she spat back.
Gary smiled and squatted down on his haunches so he could look her in the face. She still wouldn’t meet his gaze but it didn’t matter. “When I was working at the hospital I watched a lot of people die. Old people whose time was up, young people who barely knew where they were, struck down in accidents. Kids, I saw kids die because they didn’t know any better than to eat Drano or jump out of windows. Just before they went they would always call me over to ask one last favor.”
“Yeah?” she sneered.
“Yes. It was always the same thing. ‘Please, doctor, give me one more hour before I go. Give me one more minute.’ People are easily frightened by death, Marisol, because it is so very long and our lives are so very short. I’m offering your people a chance to have long, full lives. I can’t bring back the world we’ve lost. I can’t give them gourmet dinners or luxury vacations or American Idol. But I can give them a chance to not be afraid all the time. A chance to start over fresh. A chance to have families—big families. That’s a lot more than you offered them in your spider hole.”
“And in exchange for all this? What do you get? My baby? You already ate my fucking husband!” Her hair had fallen across her face and she blew it away, puffing out red cheeks hot with anger.
“Everything has a price. I only need about one meal a month, maybe even less if I’m careful. That’s not a lot to ask.” He thought of Mael and his tribe in Orkney. They had taken turns being human sacrifices. It was something people could accept if you made it a necessity.
“Marisol, I’m going to give you an option right now. It was your pregnancy that inspired all of this generosity I’m feeling so I’ll grant you one wish. You don’t get to pick, though. I can make you the mayor of the last secure human village on earth.”
He bent close and let her smell his fetid breath. “Or I can eat your face off right now. Don’t answer yet, though, there’s more! I’ll make it painless. You won’t feel a thing. I’ll even make sure you don’t come back. You’ll just be dead.” He grabbed the handholds of her wheelchair and spun her around and around. He was enjoying this. “Dead, dead dead forever and ever and ever and ever and your body will rot away on the ground until the flies come and lay their maggot eggs in your cute little cheeks.”
When he stopped she was breathing hard. Her body shook visibly as if she were very cold and he could smell something stale and sharp rising from her pores. Nothing special, really. Just fear.
“So what’ll it be, hmm?” he asked. “Do I get an early lunch today—or should I start referring to you as Ms. Mayor?”
Her eyes were thin lines of hatred. “You bastard. I want the biggest silkiest sash that says MAYOR on it in rhinestones. I want people to know who sold them out.”
Gary smiled real big so she could see his teeth.
Chapter Five
Kreutzer lead us through a tiny development of yellow clapboard houses and down tree-lined avenues—the old officers’ quarters back when Governors Island was a military base. The Coast Guard logo was everywhere, on monuments and plaques and chain link fences, even on the street signs.
The DHS Agent swore the houses were empty and that he’d checked them out himself. “Honest, there’s not even a stick of furniture in there and no goddamned food at all.”
Unconvinced I sent squads of girls into every building we passed. “There must have been other people here,” I said. “Nobody posts a field agent to a place like this if there’s nothing for him to do.”
“There were more,” Kreutzer said, clutching at his bandaged hand. “There was a garrison. When the Epidemic broke out we needed a hardened location for emergency management ops. We reactivated the base here and staffed it with Operations Directorate irregulars. People used to flying in and out of air fields with little or no notice. Some useless fucking moron in the Pentagon thought you could fight dead fucks with helicopters and law enforcement aircraft.”
I looked around at the trees rattling in the wind, at the yellow houses. “That would take some pretty serious infrastructure.”
Kreutzer tilted his head toward the western part of the island. “Over that way. This is all touristy crap. When the city took over in 2003 they spruced up here and started letting visitors in. They kept the real stuff out of sight.”
I nodded and signaled for the girls to regroup. We headed across a lush green lawn past the star-shaped stone edifice of Fort Jay.
“So like I was saying—me and Morrison, my partner, we got detailed here to run sigint and systems while the Guard guys ran their flyovers. We were Systems Directorate before we got rolled up into Homeland Security. At first I was pissed to get stuck in this latrine while guys I outranked were doing a real man’s job in the city. Then the choppers started turning up missing—whole crews never came back—and I figured maybe I had it okay after all. Finally we got a call from Washington, they needed all our units for a tactical event along the Potomac. Morrison and me stayed behind to keep the site maintained for when they came back.”
Kreutzer had brought us to the side of Liggett Hall, an enormous brick dormitory building that cut the island in half. A line of trees behind the structure hid a chainlink
fence topped with barbed wire. A gate stood open, revealing a dirt pathway to the other side. “I’m guessing they never did,” I said.
“Well two points for you, shithead. They got slaughtered, from what we could hear on the blower. They were useless up in the air and when they put down they got fucked, royally fucked.” Kreutzer stopped before entering the gate. “I don’t know about this. This is a restricted area.”
I pushed past him and entered the real base. A broad central lawn ran most of the way to the far shore, dotted here and there with baseball diamonds. A concrete airstrip had been laid down across this lawn, which was flanked with dilapidated prefab buildings of the kind I associated with American military bases. Time and rust had been unkind to most of the structures but I could see a few hangars that still looked operational as well as an air traffic control tower.
“We held on the best we could. Occasionally one of those dead assholes would climb out of the ventilation tower but we took ‘em down by the numbers. We managed to close off the louvers eventually so that’s not a problem anymore.”
I nodded absently, too busy cataloging the island’s assets. The hangars were full of unarmed cargo helicopters. There were a few Coast Guard cutters bobbing in the water but they were useless to us. Gary wasn’t about to just come down to the water and let us blow his head off with a .50 caliber machine gun. I spotted a few things that might come in handy, including a fully equipped armory replete with M4s and small arms and made a mental checklist to go over with Jack when he arrived. If he arrived.
We made camp on the lawn. At first I was tempted to sleep in one of the yellow officer’s houses or even in one of the barracks buildings but when night fell they became infinitely creepy. There’s something about being inside a windowless room with no electricity that truly bugs my modern soul. The girls didn’t mind camping rough at all—it was what they were used to back home. They kept Kreutzer under guard all night but mostly left him alone. We made a big campfire and ate bread and thin porridge—our staple foods.
“There’s not a bean or a fucking carrot left on this dunghill,” Kreutzer informed us as he tore into the flat loaves of canjeero the girls grudgingly offered him. “That’s what happened to Morrison.”
“I was wondering when we’d get to that,” I said.
Kreutzer nodded. “Morrison got hungry faster than I did. He was a big guy, liked to lift weights when he was off duty and he needed more calories I guess. He took a Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat and headed over to Staten Island to resupply. That was two weeks ago. I don’t expect to see him again.”
“And what about you? You were just going to starve here?”
Kreutzer scooped a fingerful of porridge out of a pot and stuffed it in his mouth. “I’d rather not eat than get eaten. I could have left any time I wanted but where would I go? Until I saw you over at the ferry slip I thought I was going to fucking die here.” He handed the pot back to Fathia. “Thanks,” he said.
I woke to the sound of water slapping the side of a cutter and a fresh breeze that lifted my eyelashes and played with them. I was grinning, stupidly grinning because I felt so good. Then I sat up and remembered everything. Pulling my pants on I started looking around for a latrine when I heard a buzzing sound coming from the water.
It was Jack.
I don’t know where he got a jet-ski in New York but he was wave-running hard for the coast. I ran down to the water and waved my arms and whistled and finally he saw me and cut in to meet me. I held a hand down and helped him climb up onto the boardwalk. He took off his life vest and unzipped the tote bag he’d used to keep his weapons and gear dry and then finally he said hello. “He took them to Central Park. I couldn’t get very close—the wind was blowing toward them and they would have smelled me, but I saw them enter the Park. There’s something going on there, something huge and I have no idea what it is. I can’t just go in there guns blazing and hope to rescue anybody. That’s what I’m going to do, though.”
I nodded sagely. I badly needed to urinate but I also wanted to show him something, something that just might solve his problem. I lead him around the back of a hangar and let him see the thirty-foot trailer crowned with radar dishes and the four coffins—slang for the storage crates of the UAVs.
“Good,” he said, and started prying open the coffins.
“Jack,” I asked, because the question had been bothering me, “why did you send us here? How did you know Governors Island was deserted?”
He stared at me. “I didn’t. For all I knew this place was crawling with the dead. I just knew you could handle yourself regardless.”
“We could have been headed into a trap!” I cried.
Jack looked to one side and then the other. “Looks like you did fine. Now help me with this crate.”
Chapter Six
The controls for the Predator RQ-1A Unmanned Aerial Vehicle were simple enough. They’d been designed for the average 21st Century soldier and were a near replica of the gamepad for the Sony Playstation. You used one thumbstick for the throttle and the other to steer while vehicle systems were mapped to the face and shoulder buttons—raising the landing gear, moving the nose-mounted cameras and so on. Child’s play, I figured. I had studied the weapon system back in the old days, back when I had a life and a career. I felt confident and alert as my little plane leapt into the air off Governors Island and streaked toward Manhattan.
“Watch out for sudden updrafts,” Kreutzer said. “They can be a real bitch.” He had the second seat in the cramped, overheated trailer. As systems specialist he had to keep the aircraft’s avionics and telemetry streams coming in clear and legible. He faced three big monitors where he could display and manipulate his “product.”
The Standard Oil Building came up on my right and I slewed over a little to avoid its spire and then something went wrong. The Predator kept trying to flip itself over, its right wingtip popping up again every time I tried to bring it down. I poured on a little more throttle to try to break free of what I thought was mild turbulence and suddenly a wall of wind slapped the vehicle across the nose, sucking it down into a superfast spiraling descent that could more rightly be called “falling out of the sky”.
The UAV smacked Broadway at an angle and skipped like a stone across the roofs of several parked cars, finally skittering to a halt in the middle of Bowling Green on its back. The camera showed us a shaky view of the Charging Bull statue and a partially cloudy sky.
Kreutzer’s face curled into a look of infinite smugness as he showed me what I’d done wrong. On his product screen he show me the last few seconds of the Predator’s flight as a PowerPoint slideshow. I saw the spire on the Standard Oil Building and the column of air beyond where Morris Street butted up against Broadway. Then he maximized the infrared view of the same scene and showed me a false color vortex spinning madly at the corner of the two streets—wind shear generated by the difference in temperature between the sunny and shaded sides of the buildings.
“Okay. Lesson learned,” I said. My heart was still racing a little from the excitement of piloting the Predator. When Jack came in to find out what was going on I let Kreutzer explain. They both turned and stared at me when I shrieked.
A dead man with no skin on the top of his head had come to investigate the Predator where it lay in Bowling Green. His inverted nose wrinkled as he sniffed the downed plane’s optics. I had become so immersed in flying the UAV that I’d forgotten it was half a mile away and the walking corpse couldn’t get me through the screen.
I switched off the view and rubbed my hands together. “Let’s get another one assembled,” I said. “I’m ready to go again.”
An hour later Ayaan’s crew had Vehicle Two ready to go. It had a wingspan of fifty feet and its nose instrument package looked like the head of one of the aliens Sigourney Weaver used to fight in the movies. I ran through my pre-flight and initialized the optics. I hit the throttle hard—we were using a shorter-than-regulation airstrip—and let the Predator race do
wn the lawn, the view on my screen bouncing as it picked up speed. At just the right time I yanked back on the yoke and the nose jerked up into the air. The UAV surged up into the sky and easily cleared the top of Liggett Hall. I remembered to retract the landing gear and we were on our way.
I brought the UAV up to cruising speed and let it fly itself, mostly, only banking a bit to bring it in over Castle Clinton in Battery Park. I kept my altitude low, balancing the possibility of one or two undead spies hearing the propeller against flying high and letting millions of them see it. That meant flying between buildings—something the Predator was built to do, although it was also supposed to have a highly trained pilot at the controls. When faced with the brick wall of Lower Manhattan I aimed for a narrow funnel at the top of the Battery where Bowling Green opened up the wide canyon of Broadway.
“Easy this time—don’t try to force her.” Kreutzer leaned toward me and I could smell his breath as I neared the vortex that had brought me down before. This time I just let go of the throttle at the crucial moment and the Predator shot through, yanked along by the edge of the wind shear instead of trying to punch through it. I was leveling out over the abandoned cars of Broadway when the Iridium cell phone started chirping.
“What do I do?” I asked, “what do I do?” Jack rushed into the trailer and booted up a secondary pilot’s terminal. He knew only one person had the phone number. He took control of the vehicle and I rushed outside into the sunlight and the green grass and answered the call.
“You’re spying on me now?” Gary asked.
I was stunned. “What are you talking about?”
The dead man laughed in my ear. “I see all, Dekalb. Every walking corpse in Manhattan can be my eyes or my ears. I assume it was you who just dropped an airplane on my perfectly good island. You’re getting some bright ideas, aren’t you? You’re planning to come up here and rescue the prisoners. It won’t work.”
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