The captain rubbed his face and nodded. He yelled at Yusuf to bring the ship in at an empty pier and the girls surged across the deck, shouldering their weapons and checking their actions. Osman and I struggled with a piece of corrugated tin ten feet long and just as wide that served the trawler in the place of a gangplank.
The engines whined and water churned as Yusuf brought us in to a bumping stop. The girls started jumping across even before we had the plank down—Commander Ifiyah at the fore, calling all her kumayo sisters to join her. They roared like lions as they raced to take up their assigned positions in two ranks of twelve on the wooden pier (Mariam was still up on the wheelhouse with her Dragunov). I shouldered my pack, shook Osman’s hand, and picked my way carefully across the plank as if afraid I was going to fall in the water. I felt calm, far calmer than when we’d tried the East River. Ayaan had taught me a trick, to force myself to vomit before the battle so I wouldn’t feel the need afterward. It hadn’t been hard. The smell of death and decay rolling off Manhattan added to my general seasickness and left me feeling queasy ever since we’d spotted the Statue of Liberty.
The sounds of my footsteps on the pier echoed in the stillness. I moved to crouch behind Ayaan, who paid no attention to me whatsoever. She was so focused, so completely at peace in this madness. I lifted my own AK-47 and tried to copy her firing stance but I knew by the way the stock felt on my shoulder that I had it wrong.
“Xaaraan,” she said softly but not to me. The word meant “ritually unclean”, or more literally “improperly butchered meat.” I’d never heard a more apropos description of the men and women who came at us then up the pier. Grotesque twisted faces on top of swollen bloody bodies that bent at unnatural angles—the hands reaching for us with fingers crooked like talons—the broken teeth—the rolling eyes—the silence of them—the silence was the worst. People, real people made noise. These were the dead.
“Diyaar!” Ifiyah screamed and the girls let loose, one rifle after another jumping upward with a cracking noise that left another corpse spinning down to smack the pier. I saw one get caught right in the teeth. Enamel danced in the air. Another with shoulder-length hair clutched at his stomach but kept moving toward us, not running so much as flopping on uncertain feet, flopping toward us with an inexorability that terrified me. A woman in a jeans jacket and high black boots pushed past him and came right for me, the wind ruffling back her hair to show that both of her cheeks had been eaten away. Her exposed jaws snapped in anticipation as she raised her arms to grapple me. A puff of smoke burst from her stomach and she fell back but others pushed to take her place.
“Madaxa!” Ifiyah ordered—shoot for the head. I saw a few of the younger girls shift their stance nervously and raise the barrels of their rifles a hair. They fired again and the dead fell away, dropping to the pier with a thud or spinning down to the water or falling backward into the crowd which just surged around them and came faster. Had they been waiting for us? There were so many—even with the noise we were making I couldn’t imagine us drawing so many of them without warning. Unless maybe New York, the perennially crowded city, just had that many walking dead in it. If so we were doomed. It would be impossible to complete our mission.
“Iminka,” Ifiyah breathed. Now. In my horror I had barely noticed the most horrifying thing of all—that the dead were gaining on us. Only a few meters separated us from their oncoming tide. The girls didn’t panic but I know I did, hyperventilating and coming very close to shitting my pants. As one they adjusted their rifles with a ringing clack and opened up in full automatic.
If I had thought the carnage was bad before, well, I had no idea. I had seen assault rifles fired in full automatic before. In my job as a weapon inspector there had been plenty of times when some local chieftain or hetman wanted to impress me with the sight of his firepower. I’d never seen automatic assault weapons turned against Americans though. It didn’t seem to matter if they were already dead. The line of them in front of me just exploded, their heads pulped, their necks and torsos torn to fibrous shreds. The ones behind them just shook and shook like they were succumbing to violent seizures as the bullets rattled around inside of them.
The noise of twenty-four Kalashnikovs burning on full automatic cannot be described so I won’t try. It shakes you up, literally—the vibration makes your heart feel like its going to stop and the sheer volume of noise can damage your internal organs with prolonged exposure. It went on, and on and on.
When it was done we were standing before a pile of unmoving bodies. One woman in an I Love New York shirt with the sleeves ripped off struggled out from under the heap and came clawing at us but one of the girls—Fathia—just stepped forward and stabbed her in the head with the bayonet at the end of her rifle. The corpse went down. After that we all listened to the ringing in our ears for a while, we studied the shore end of the pier waiting for another wave but it didn’t come.
”Nadiif,” Ifiyah announced. The pier was clean. The girls visibly relaxed and shouldered their rifles. A few laughed boisterously and kicked at the slaughtered bodies on the wooden pier. Fathia and Ifiyah traded a high-five. All of the girls smiled—except Ayaan.
Her face was as hard as a mask as she reached up and grabbed the muzzle break of my Kalashnikov. I winced, thinking she was intentionally burning herself for some reason—the AK-47 was notorious for overheating after prolonged firing—but then she pulled her hand away and showed me her unblemished palm.
“You did not discharge it,” Ayaan said. The disgust in her face was withering.
It came to me that I hadn’t fired my weapon at all, no. I had been too busy watching the girls. “I’m not a killer,” I protested.
She shook her head bitterly. “If you will not fight, then you are already one of the xaaraan.”
The girls spread out down the pier, Commander Ifiyah taking the van as they swept the shore for any sign of movement. Ayaan ran to her position in the front of the wedge. I turned and looked back at the Arawelo. Osman flashed me an “okay” sign with one hand. “You go after them now, Dekalb,” he said, smiling broadly. “We’ll stay here and guard the ship.”
10
Fanning out across the street the girls threw hand signals at one another. The barrels of their Kalashnikovs swept the street corners, the recessed doorways, the hundreds of cars abandoned on the cobble stones. I had expected—well, I guess I had hoped—that the roads would be clear. We could have commandeered some transport and driven to the hospital.
Not a chance. In the panic of the Epidemic the usual Manhattan gridlock must have turned into a death trap. There were cars everywhere, many of them dented or damaged. They lined every side-street we passed, crowded every intersection. I saw a Hummer 2 up on the sidewalk, its shiny front bumper wedged permanently between a mailbox and the broken wood front of a deserted bistro. On the other side of the street Fathia clambered up on top of a taxi with four flat tires and scanned the road ahead with her rifle at her eye.
“This way,” I told Ifiyah and she gestured for her troops to follow us. I lead her down a short block of Horatio street, past a gas station with shuttered windows. Paper signs had been wrapped around the pumps and secured with duct tape: NO GAS, NO MONEY, NO BATHROOM. GOD BLESS YOU. Around the corner was a storefront psychic (the garish neon tubes visible in the window were dead now) and a little boutique that must have sold women’s clothing. The front window showed three cheerily dressed mannequins and a bunch of billowing green cloth.
Ayaan stopped in front of the window and peered inside.
“Thinking of a new look for summer?” I asked, wanting her to hurry up. It was understandable, of course—Ayaan had probably never seen real women’s fashions before. She had spent most of her life in a uniform and the lure of Western dress must—
“I saw movement in there,” she insisted.
Oh.
The soldiers pressed in, some of them walking backwards with their rifles facing out as others lead them with a hand on their
shoulders. Their discipline was heartening. In another life I might have found it creepy, the way these girls worked together but now it meant I might just survive this ludicrous mission.
Without warning a dead woman pushed through the folds of green in the window and slammed up against the glass from the inside. She was willowy and blonde with thin refined features. Her face was pockmarked only here and there with tiny sores that looked almost like sequins. She wore a flowing maroon sleeveless dress and for a heartbeat we were all transfixed by the sight of her elegance.
Then her thin arms came up and her tiny fists started bashing at the glass. Her face thrust forward and her jaw opened against the window as if she were trying to chew her way through it with her yellow teeth. The black hole of her mouth made a perfect seal on the glass as she hungered for us.
Fathia raised her rifle but I shook my head. “That’s tempered glass—shatterproof. She’ll never get through it. If you shoot now the noise might draw others, though.”
The soldier looked to her commander. Ifiyah nodded once and we moved on, leaving the dead woman behind us. After we turned the block we couldn’t even hear the muffled thuds of her fists on the window.
In the broader expanse of Greenwich Avenue we found a water truck still dripping from a splatter of gunshot holes. Tied to its hitch an incredibly long streamer of yellow police tape flapped in the breeze. I grabbed a handful and read QUARANTINE AREA: TRESPASSERS WILL BE MET WITH LETHAL FORCE before letting it flutter away. We made a left on Twelfth and the girls spread out rapidly. We had arrived. Ifiyah called for her troops to establish fire zones and to designate a CCP—a Casualty Collection Point—where they would meet up if they got separated. I lead Ayaan up to the closed Emergency Room doors of St. Vincent and peered inside.
“It’s dark in there,” I said. Well, of course it was. Did I expect the power to be on six weeks after the end of the world? “I don’t like it.”
“It is not for you to decide,” Ayaan said but there was less anger in her voice than usual. She slipped her thin fingers into the crack between the two automatic doors and tugged. They moved an inch and then slipped back. Looking over at Ifiyah she held up three fingers and we were quickly joined by a trio of sixteen year olds. Between the five of us we pried the doors open wide enough for me to fit through.
Ayaan handed me a flashlight from her dambiil bag and checked her own by switching it on and off rapidly. The three girls who had joined us ran through the same procedure. I glanced at Ifiyah for authorization to begin and then stepped inside. The lobby of the emergency room was a mess of overturned chairs and blank-screened television sets but at least a little light came in the glass doors and cut through the gloom.
The admissions desk was half buried under a slurry of glossy pamphlets about heart disease and second hand smoke. I stepped on them being careful not to slip and found a photocopied directory taped to the wall. “This way,” I said, pointing at a pair of swinging doors leading off the main lobby. The HIV clinic was deep inside the building. It might take us ten minutes to get there in the dark and just as long to get back. Ifiyah had given us ninety minutes to complete the mission and exfiltrate back to the boat.
I only had to do this once, I told myself. Just once and then I can go see Sarah. The thought of my seven year old daughter languishing in a Somalian religious school made my heart rattle in my suddenly airless chest.
I kicked open the double doors and flashed my light down pitch darkness of the corridor beyond. The cone of illumination caught a couple hospital beds pushed up against the wall. A heap of stained linen on the floor. Two rows of doors, dozens of them, that could be hiding anything.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said. Ayaan pursed her lips as if rankled at being given an order by a civilian. She lifted her rifle to her shoulder, though, and stepped into the hallway.
11
Gary shook his head hard and slowly rose to his feet. Looking across at Hoboken he saw nothing but empty buildings and quiet streets. The geysers of poisonous gas he’d seen erupt there were gone. The had never been there. Just a hallucination.
He flexed his hands, observed himself for a second. Everything intact and in working order. In fact he felt better than ever—the buzzing had left his head and his hands didn’t shake like they had before. Most importantly his hunger was gone. Not entirely—he could feel it looming at the horizon of his awareness, knew it would come back stronger than ever soon enough but for now at least his stomach felt at peace.
He turned around slowly, uncertain how long this newfound sense of health might last or how fragile it might be. Behind him he saw that nothing else had changed—New York was the same as ever. Just as quiet. He saw a body lying beside the bodega where he’d fought with the trucker cap and decided to investigate.
What he found didn’t answer any questions. Trucker Cap was dead. Not undead, not walking dead—just dead, lying there decomposing in the sun. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The dead kept coming until you destroyed their brains—everyone knew that, the Vice President had announced as much on live television. Gary could find no damage to the guy’s head, no signs of trauma at all but for some reason he had just stopped. Fallen down and stopped, permanently by the look of it.
Gary picked up the hat and turned it around in his hands. Then he dropped it with a start and scrabbled backwards on all fours away from the corpse. He had forgotten—he was one of the dead, himself. Whatever had done this to the big guy might still be around—and he would be vulnerable to it as well. What if a sniper waited on the rooftops? What if the apocalypse was finally over and the dead had stopped coming back to life? What if some new and pernicious virus had adapted to attach the dead?
No. It couldn’t be a virus—a virus needed living cells to replicate itself. A bacterium might have done it or even more likely some kind of fungal infection, sure, a fungus spread by airborne spores—
But spores that just happened along at the exact second of Gary’s dark epiphany? It made no sense. Gary had told the guy to fuck off and die. To think that some fungus that just happened to counteract the effects of the Epidemic had wafted by at that exact moment was ludicrous. Yet something had struck down Trucker Cap, though, something had happened right after Gary told him to—
Gary might have contemplated this more if he hadn’t heard gunfire. Guns—which meant a survivor was near. The dead lacked the muscular coordination to use firearms. Some desperate lone survivor must have been making his last stand somewhere to the north. Up in the meatpacking district by the sound of it. It wouldn’t last. Gary should just ignore it, go home to his apartment and start making plans for the future, now that he actually had one again.
He’d never been able to resist his own curiosity, though. It was what got him into med school in the first place, his desire to know what made things tick.
Despite his best interests he found himself running northward toward the noise of the shots. They stopped abruptly when he was halfway there but he’d figured out by then they were coming from near the river, maybe on one of the piers.
Advancing carefully he nearly got himself shot. A black girl in a schoolgirl uniform and a scarf around her head was pointing a rifle right in his direction. He slid down behind an abandoned car and screwed his eyes shut, his arms clutched around his knees, trying hard to make himself small and insignificant. She’d looked pretty serious about her weapon. Like a soldier or a policeman or something. Absurd… but this was a day for absurdities, it seemed.
There were others with her. A whole team of them, it sounded like. Their weapons jangled as they moved. He heard one of them talking—a hard, cold voice with an accent to it. She must be from Brooklyn. “I saw movement in there,” she said.
No. No no no no no.
“If you shoot now the noise might draw others,” another of them said—a man.
Thank you, whoever you are, Gary thought.
He waited in desperate stillness for a long while, long after he heard them
moving off. It sounded like they were headed over toward Gary’s old work. So much for curiosity. He would definitely leave them alone. When he was certain they were all out of sight he got up and moved as fast as he could toward the river—away from them. He tried to run but the best he could pull off was a loping walk. When he got to the river though he found another surprise.
A ship stood out in the Hudson, maybe a hundred yards off the embankment. Just an old tub with visible rust on its hull and a jury-rigged wooden superstructure. The ship’s registration on its nose was illegible, written in an alphabet Gary didn’t recognize—a little like Hebrew, maybe, and a lot like Medieval calligraphy. He peered closer and saw people onboard. Two black men leaning on the rail, studying the wharves while a girl in that same costume of school uniform and head wrap stood on top of the wooden structure with an exceedingly long rifle in her hands.
He knew enough to keep his head down this time.
There were… survivors, he thought. Organized survivors with a way to get out of Manhattan. He had no idea what they were doing in New York but their presence meant at least one inescapable, dreadful thing. His decision to transform himself into one of the walking dead, to become this unliving creature had been based on the fact that New York was done, extinct, over. That there was no hope for the human race.
It looked like if he’d waited a couple of more days he might have been rescued.
12
I took a step forward and my hip connected with something hard and square that shot away from me. I heard Ayaan’s rifle swing around with a clatter and I brought my light up fast but the thing I’d collided with in the dark was just a rolling cabinet. A plastic cart full of medical supplies. The halls were full of them. It drifted for a few more feet and then stopped in the middle of the hall. Sheepishly I pushed it out of the way. I could sense the girls behind me—Ayaan and her three squadmates—uncoil as they came down from a tense alert.
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