Chapter Nineteen
I threw myself backward, knocking Jack against the wall, trying to crack his spine, trying to break his hold on my face. It only made him more determined. Jack had been a lot stronger than me in life. In death he was strong and desperate. He wrapped a forearm around my throat and pulled, trying maybe to break my neck. He succeeded in pinching closed my windpipe.
I swung around wildly, my hands pulling at the legs he had wrapped around my waist. I might as well have tried to bend iron. The little air in my lungs turned to carbon dioxide but I couldn’t exhale and suddenly dark stars were spinning in my vision, sparkles of light like signal fires, one each for the neurons dying in my head as I asphyxiated. I lost it, lost all reason at that point and just panicked. Without a thought in my head I dashed forward, away from the thing on my back, my subconscious mind unable to realize that it was still attached. Jack’s grip on me merely tightened as my feet dug for purchase in the brick floor. Like a mule pulling a plow I tried to pull away from him.
Anoxia distorted my hearing—the sound of my heart beating was a lot louder than the noise of Jack’s vertebrae cracking inside his neck. He let go of me in a sudden and unexpected way and I slumped forward, catching myself on my hands, spit streaming from my mouth as my body heaved for air. Not so much breathing as swallowing oxygen, gulping it down. I tried very hard not to throw up. If I had I would surely have aspirated something and drowned on my own vomit.
My eyes hurt, the tiny blood vessels inside them burst open by the fury of Jack’s assault. I blinked them madly to get some tears going and then turned to sit down and tenderly touch my throat, trying to soothe the burning flesh there. I looked up.
I did a double take when I saw what had saved me. Jack hung from his chain, the links wrapped tight around his throat. Tight enough to be buried in his deliquescent flesh. Somehow while waiting to ambush me he’d gotten mixed up in the chain. It probably hadn’t bothered him—he had no need to breathe—until the constricting pressure had shattered the bones in his neck. His body dangled limply in the coils of the chain like so much cast-off clothing.
His head remained animate. His eyes stared hard at me. His lips moved in anticipation of one more bite of my flesh. I looked away…
…and realized I was bleeding to death. I looked down at my chest and the fresh blood that covered me. I reached up two trembling fingers and felt out the contours of my wound. Jack had bitten me very close to a major artery. He’d taken a chunk out of my body where my shoulder met my neck. I tore a strip off of my shirt and jammed it into the gaping hole—anything to stop the flow of blood.
“Oh man that was too good,” Gary laughed as I clutched the bandage to my neck. “Do you get it now, Dekalb? The human race is over and you living guys came in last place! You can’t compete, man. You don’t even qualify.”
I lurched to my feet, one hand on the rough brick wall to steady myself. I got a pretty bad head rush just standing up. A definite bad sign. I walked over to the tub and stepped down onto the cracked floor.
“You can’t destroy me, asshole. You can shoot me in the head and you can burn me to the ground but it doesn’t matter. I can repair myself—rebuild myself!” Gary’s mutilated head rocked against the bricks as he spoke. “I’m invincible!”
I kicked at his neck until his head came away from his body and rolled away on the floor.
I wasn’t quite done. It took me a while to find the pumphouse again but it was necessary. I needed a bag and I needed to make sure the VX cylinders weren’t going to go off on their own. In the fading light of the glowsticks I peeled the plastic explosives off of the canisters. I disassembled the detonator and broke the parts, scattering them around the room. I buried the cylinders under some loose bricks. There wasn’t much else I could do—you can’t just dump nerve agents into the sewer system or throw them in a landfill but at least this way no wandering dead guy would unleash the chemical weapons by accident.
There was another weapon of mass destruction to consider. I didn’t like it but I would have to take it with me. I emptied out one of the heavy packs that Jack and I had brought to the fortress and stuffed Gary’s head inside. I believed him when he said he could eventually regenerate himself, that he could survive anything. I could crush the head to a fine paste but even that might not be enough—he had after all survived being shot in the brain. By keeping the head with me I knew I would be able to kill him again if he came back. As many times as it took.
Jack’s Glock 9 mm went into my pocket. It wasn’t much but it was a weapon and obscenely enough its presence made me feel safe. That was something I needed. My injuries made me feel like any second I might just collapse.
By the time I was ready to leave the fortress my breathing had become labored and my vision was shot. When I staggered out into the daylight I was momentarily blinded. What I finally saw cheered me up a lot. An orange and white blur hovering in the air. Coast Guard colors—that would be Kreutzer. Oh, thank God. He had come. I had half expected him to take the Chinook to Canada Something yellow hung beneath the helicopter but I couldn’t quite focus enough to make it out.
By the time I reached the lawn between the houses Marisol already had the survivors lining up to get onboard the chopper. Rotorwash from the Chinook cleared the blur out of my eyes and I saw the look on her face. It was one of total disbelief—and hope. I’d never seen her look like that before.
I ran to the hole in the wall and saw thousands of dead men just outside, impatient in their lust for food, being held back by six mummies. Just six. The Egyptians had their arms linked where they stood side by side in the gap, their backs to me. The collective weight of hundreds of dead men and women pressed against them but they held fast, kicking back those who tried to climb between their legs. I saw the female mummy, the one I’d spoken to, headbutt a dead boy and send him flying.
Out there in the midst of the dead, though—one of them stood head and shoulders above the rest. Literally. There was a giant there making his way toward the line of mummies. He batted the other ghouls away from him like flies as he approached. Whether the mummies could stand against his onslaught was still an open question.
Enough—I didn’t have any time left to worry. That line would hold. It had to. I turned around and saw the helicopter with clear vision as it made its descent. The yellow blur beneath it turned out to be a school bus attached to the Chinook’s undercarriage by three steel cables. Kreutzer put the bus down gently—well, it rocked badly as its tires popped one by one, but at least it didn’t turn over—and then dropped in for a landing twenty feet to the right, the cables draped along the ground. He popped the ramp at the rear of the chopper and living people stormed onboard, Marisol screaming at them to keep the line orderly and neat. “Women and children first!” she screamed, “and no fucking shoving!” Other people clambered into the bus through the back emergency door. The line of survivors waiting to get seats never seemed to end but without really thinking about what I was doing I found myself bringing up the tail of the line, calling out to Marisol to see if she’d done a head count.
“That’s all of them,” she screamed back over the noise of the helicopter. “Every last one!”
(I would speak with Kreutzer later about how he knew to go and fetch the bus, that there wasn’t going to be enough room in the helicopter for everybody. “I was in the systems motherfucking directorate of the USCG, you know?” he swore at me, as if that should explain everything. “The computer techs. We’re good at math!” He had figured out how many people could fit in an empty Chinook and decided that we would come up short. I never really liked the guy but I have to admit that was some excellent thinking on his part.)
I watched Marisol climb into the back of the helicopter and then I clambered into the bus, using the front entrance. There was barely room for me to stand on the steps. A truly nice couple of survivors offered to give up their space for me in the aisle but I declined. As the bus lifted into the air, its metal frame crea
king alarmingly and its suspension falling apart and dropping from the undercarriage as if the floor might give way at any minute I wanted to be able to look outside.
I wanted one last look at the city, that’s all. I barely glanced at the mob of dead people below us as the mummies gave way and they surged into the fortress, two million hands raising to try to grab at us as we flew away. That wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted the water towers. I wanted the fire escapes and the overgrown rooftop gardens and the dovecotes and the ventilation hoods like spinning chef’s toques. I wanted the buildings, the great square solidity of them, their countless empty cubical rooms where no one would ever go again and I wanted the streets too, the streets clogged with cars with abandoned taxis sprouting everywhere like bright fungi. I wanted one long, meaningful look at New York City. My hometown.
It would be my last chance to get a good look, I knew.
My body was already burning with fever, my forehead slick with sweat though chills kept running down my back like ice cubes falling. My head was light, my tongue coated.
I was dying.
Chapter Twenty
Dear Sarah:
I guess I’m not coming back to you.
I guess I’ll never see you again. The thought is too big to deal with right now.
I may not have enough time left to finish this letter.
Yesterday Ayaan hugged me on the roof of the Natural History Museum but I could feel the hesitation in her embrace. She could see in my eyes what was going to happen.
No matter, I told her. We were almost done.
My fever had abated. It came and went in waves and I was feeling pretty lucid. I had developed a new symptom, a kind of queasy rumbling in my guts but I could keep that to myself.
In the last minutes of the siege, just before Jack shot at me and Gary realized that he was being set up, the Museum of Natural History had been attacked by a million corpses with their bare hands. Many, many of them had been crushed as they put their shoulders to the metal frame of the building, their weight added to the pile. I didn’t bother to look over the side and thus see what trampled ghouls looked like. The dead had wreaked so much damage on the planetarium that the roof we stood on slanted to one side and Kreutzer could barely keep the Chinook from rolling over the edge. We wasted no time getting the girls onboard and getting out of there, even abandoning some of the heavier weapons and supplies. We were airborne in five minutes and headed straight for the United Nations complex on the far side of the city.
“Gary’s dead.” I said, filling in Ayaan on what had happened in her absence, shouting over the Chinook’s engines. I left out most of the grisly details. “I still don’t know if the mummies were leading me into Gary’s trap or if they were being sincere. Either way they saved the day. We took the survivors back to Governors Island—Marisol’s going to build something there, something safe and meaningful.” Ayaan nodded, not terribly interested in my story, and stared out one of the porthole-like windows. I wrapped my hand through a nylon loop sewn into the ceiling of the cabin to steady myself and moved closer so I didn’t have to yell. “So I’m sorry.”
“Why is that?” she asked. Her thoughts were elsewhere.
“You didn’t get to martyr yourself.”
That got a bright little grin out of her. “There are many ways to serve Allah,” she said. I’d like to remember Ayaan that way. The light from the porthole blasting across her shoulder. Sitting with her hands in her lap, one knee bouncing up and down in anticipation. When Ayaan got truly excited she couldn’t sit still. She thought it a weakness but to me it meant so much. It meant she was human, not a monster.
We set down in the North Garden of the UN, a patch of green just off First Avenue that had been closed to the public since September Eleventh. The girls deployed from the Chinook’s rear ramp in standard battle order but it looked like Gary had been true to his word, which surprised me a little. There weren’t even any undead pigeons to bother us. I lead the girls to the white security tent at the visitor’s entrance, past the “Non-Violence” sculpture which takes the form of an enormous pistol with its barrel tied in a knot. They didn’t know what to make of it. A world without guns to them is a world that can’t protect itself. Before the Epidemic began I used to fight that attitude. Now I can’t help but praise it.
Oh God—there’s a pain, shit! Motherfucker! A pain in my head and I—
Sorry—I’m back. Sweaty, bruised and half blind in the dimness of a bunker under the security tent I got the emergency generators going and the whole complex came to life, a random pattern of lights appearing on the surface of the Secretariat building, the fountain out front spitting out a ten foot plume of greenish scum. Thank God there was still fuel in the reservoir. I had dreaded the idea of searching for the drugs in pitch darkness the way I had done at St. Vincent’s.
Inside the General Assembly building I stopped and had to take a breath. It was strange to be back in a place where I used to have an office—that life was removed from me not only in space and time but also by a psychological breadth I don’t think I could measure. The soaring Jet Age architecture of the lobby with its terraced balconies and—how pointlessly heartbreaking now—its model of Sputnik hanging by wires from the ceiling spoke of not just a different era but a different kind of humanity, one that had actually thought we could all get along, that the world could be as one.
Of course the UN of my experience had been riddled with corruption and class snobbery but it still managed to do some good. It fed some of the hungry, tried to keep the lid on genocide. It at least felt guilty when it failed in Rwanda. All that was gone now. We were back to the state of nature, red in tooth and claw.
We passed the personalized stamp shop on our way to the Secretariat building, a place where tourists used to be able to get their picture put on a sheet of legal, usable stamps. I barely gave it a glance but Fathia called out a sharp warning and suddenly the cold air of the lobby exploded with noise and light. I dove behind a Bauhaus-style bench and when I looked up saw what had happened. The shop’s camera was set up to display a video picture of everyone who walked past as an enticement to the public. When the girls walked past they had seen their own images reversed on the screen, seeming to move toward them. Naturally they had assumed the worst: active ghouls. The video monitor was a heap of sparking shards by the time they were done.
Sarah—will you even remember television when you’re grown? I would have let you watch more American sitcoms if I knew it wasn’t going to become a habit.
My hand is shaking almost spastically and I’m not sure you’ll be able to read my handwriting. I know you’ll never see this anyway. I’m writing for myself, not my far-flung daughter. Pretending this is a letter to you helps me keep you in my mind’s eye, that’s all. It gives me a reason to keep going.
Please. Let me live long enough to finish this letter.
Anyway. There isn’t much more to tell.
On the fifth floor of the Secretariat building we found the drugs exactly where I’d thought they would be. There was a complete dispensary up there as well as a miniature surgical theater and a fully functional doctor’s office. The pills we needed were lined up carefully on a shelf in a low row of plastic jug after plastic jug. Epivir. Ziagen. Retrovir. There were so many the girls had to take them out fire brigade style. One by one they filed into the elevators and out of the building. Fathia took the last four jugs in her arms and turned to address Ayaan, who hadn’t lifted a finger.
“Kaalay!”
“Dhaqso.”
“Deg-deg!” Fathia implored and then she too was gone. Ayaan and I were alone.
I could hear my labored breath in the cramped dispensary. “I hope it won’t sound condescending if I tell you how proud I am of—” I stopped as she unlimbered her weapon.
One of her eyes was open quite wide. The other one was hidden behind the leaf sights of her AK-47. The barrel was lined up with my forehead. I could see every tiny dent and shiny scratch on
the muzzle. I watched it wobble back and forth as she switched the rifle from SAFE to SINGLE SHOT.
“Please put that away,” I said. I’d kind of been expecting this.
“Be a man, Dekalb. Order me to shoot. You know it is the only way.”
I shook my head. “There are drugs here—antibiotics—that might help me. Even just sterile bandages and iodine could make a difference. You have to give me a chance.”
“Give me the order!” she shouted.
I couldn’t let it happen like that. I couldn’t bear it, to go out like that. Like one of them. Her weapon should be used for putting down the undead, not for taking a human life.
No, that wasn’t it. I’ll be honest. I just didn’t want to die. Gary had told Marisol once about his days as a doctor, about the dying people he’d seen who would beg and plead for just one more minute of life. I understood those people in a way I could not understand Ayaan or Mael and their willingness to sacrifice everything for what they believed in. The only thing I believed in at that moment with that rifle pointed at me was myself.
My generation was like that, Sarah. Selfish and scared. We convinced ourselves that the world was kind of safe and it made us make bad choices. I’m not so worried about you anymore, or your generation. You will be warriors, strong and fierce.
I reached up and touched the barrel with one finger. She roared at me, literally roared at me like a lion, summoning up the courage to kill me regardless of my wishes. I held the barrel in my hand and I swung it away from me.
"Promise me you'll look after my daughter," I commanded her.
When I looked at her eyes again she was weeping. She left without another word.
I didn’t follow her, of course. I wouldn’t be going back to Somalia. I wasn’t going anywhere. It was too late for antibiotics, too late for anything. Still. I wasn’t ready to just give up. I sat down on the floor and rubbed my face with my hands and thought about what had happened, and what was going to happen, for a long time.
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