There was no stimulus to bring me out, not just then. For me there was nothing to do but wait—wait for the dead people outside to rot away. Wait for one of the girls to have a brilliant idea. Wait for all of us to starve to death. I watched the light change, the Empire State changing from a grey eminence to a ruddy obelisk to a stroke of black paint across the starry blue sky as afternoon gave way to evening gave way to night.
In time, I slept, and I dreamed.
20
“Baryo,” the girl, the commander of the girls, moaned, stirring in her sleep. Gary had secured her to a padded office chair with his own belt so that she wouldn’t fall out if she went into convulsions.
He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t—not quite yet. He knew she was dying and he knew what he would see if he turned around and looked at her and he didn’t want to see it. Instead he looked out through the glass at the crowd of the dead there. They pressed up just as tightly against the windows as before but over the last few hours their desperation had slackened a bit. Not that they would be any less hungry, of course—but night, and darkness, seemed to mellow them a little. They didn’t need to sleep. Gary knew that firsthand. He couldn’t sleep, himself—the old remembered feeling, the drooping eyes, the leaden limbs, no. That was over for him, and for them. Yet some kind of ingrained memory of their lives must be telling them that when the sun went down it was time to rest. It would be fascinating to study their behavior firsthand, Gary thought. What an opportunity to do science!
“Daawo,” she said, behind him. He started to glance over his shoulder. Stopped himself in time.
He would have plenty of time to live among the dead and learn their ways. It had become clear to him in the last few hours that the Somalis wouldn’t take him with them when they left. Of course they wouldn’t—he was undead. Unclean in their eyes. Yet some sort of bizarre vestigial hope of rescue had been swelling in him every since he saw their boat out on the Hudson. In the heat of his capture and then the battle that followed he hadn’t been able to think clearly but now, now… there was no escaping it. No matter how much he helped them, sucked up to them, wheedled his way into their hearts, they would never take him away from New York. He would be lucky to get a pat on the back. More likely a bullet to the forehead would be his recompense for all his good service.
“Maxaa? Madaya ayaa i xanuunaya… gaajo.”
Gary wished he understood what she was saying. She was in such distress he couldn’t help it. He turned around and looked. The girl’s face had turned the color of cigarette ash and her eyes were protruding from her head. He bent down and lifted the blanket off her legs. They had swollen up so much he could barely tell where her knees used to be. Not just the injured leg, either. The infection had spread throughout her lower body. She was doomed.
“Canjeero,” she said, plaintive. “Soor. Maya, Hilib. Hilib. Xalaal hilib. Baryo.”
He could feel the heat radiating from her face. No, not heat. Something else. A sort of energy, but not anything truly palpable. Like the vibration you feel when you’re sitting inside a building and a heavy truck rumbles by outside. Or the way your skin crawls when you know someone is walking right behind you but you can’t see them. A phantom sensation, barely liminal but there if you reached for it.
Gary reached.
“Fadlan maya,” the girl moaned, as if she could sense what he was doing. Then, angrier: “Ka tegid!” He didn’t know the words but he could guess the meaning. She wanted to be left alone. Just give me a second, he thought, knowing he could use some work on his bedside manner. Still, he had to know.
He didn’t so much study her with his eyes or nose or ears but with something else—the hairs on the back of his arms, the skin behind his earlobes. Some part of his body was responding to this weird energy she was putting off. It made his toes curl. Energy. Like the vibrations of a tuning fork. It coiled around her and spun off into the air like smoke, like embers exploding out of a bonfire. It warmed his skin where it touched him, irritated him a little in a good way. Like a lover’s breath on the back of his neck. Gary had never had many girlfriends, but he knew what it felt like to be touched. To be caressed. What was happening to him?
To understand a little better he stepped over to where Dekalb and the other, healthy girls were sleeping, wrapped in their colorful woven mats. He stilled himself and tried to make himself as absorbent as possible. The energy was there, in all of them, but it was very different—a compact mass of it, pulsing on a low register, vibrating like a drum. Dekalb had a little more of it—he was bigger than the girls—but the energy contained in the girls felt more vibrant, more exciting somehow.
“Waan xanuunsanahay,” the wounded girl muttered.
Gary returned to her, bent down in a squat before her. Whatever this energy was—and Gary knew, knew with a certainty that it was her life—it was leaking from her. Draining away. She would be dead within the hour, judging by how little of it was left in her. She would go to waste. What a strange thing to think, but there it was. She would die and she would go to waste.
Gary backed off and tore open the plastic wrapping of another slim-jim. Chewed on it pensively. He couldn’t—he shouldn’t look at her anymore, it was giving him bad ideas. He could control himself. It was one of the first things he’d said to Dekalb. He could think for himself. He didn’t have to obey every passing whim.
He pressed one hand against the glass of the windows. The dead outside glanced at his hand for a moment, then went back to pressing their faces against the glass, staring at the people inside. Back to wanting, to needing. He was like them, in so many ways, but he had this one difference. His willpower. His will. He could resist any urge if he tried hard enough.
“Waan xanuunsanahay. Hilib.”
He considered leaving, going out into the throng out there—they wouldn’t hurt him, he didn’t think. He was useless to them. Nothing that could concern them. He didn’t know how he could open the door, however, without letting hundreds of them push their way inside before he could get out and close the door behind him.
There was just no way out. He was stuck in here—trapped, with the rest of them.
“Biyo,” the girl begged. “Biyo!”
Maybe, he thought, maybe her cries would wake the others. Maybe Dekalb would wake up and realize he’d forgotten to post a guard. Maybe the girls would wake up and take care of their commander, give her what she needed. Maybe they would put her out of her misery. But they didn’t even stir.
He ate another slim-jim with shaking hands but it wasn’t hunger that had him so agitated, not the kind of hunger that the snack food could quench, anyway.
“Takhtar! Kaalay dhaqsi!” The girl sounded almost lucid. Gary rushed to the far side of the store, to the manager’s office. He found a closet and stepped inside and shut the door behind him. Sitting on the floor with his head between his knees he pressed his hands against his ears.
It would be alright. He could control himself. It would be alright.
21
In my dream I was driving.
Big car, eight cylinders probably. Leather interior, chrome on the wheels. Hell, let’s give it tailfins. A big-voiced throaty roar whenever I stepped on the gas and one of those radios with a luminous needle that rolled back and forth across the airwaves, scratching for hits. My hands on the scalloped steering wheel were huge and strong and brown.
It was night, and I was driving through the desert. Moonlight picked out the brush and the weeds and the rolling hills of sand and the dead. It was dark inside the car except for that luminous needle and the reflections it made in Sarah’s eyes. Inside, in the dark Sarah looked just like Ayaan but it was Sarah. It was Sarah. Outside the dead were running alongside the car, keeping up pretty well even though the car was pushing ninety. I poured on a little more speed and saw Helen smiling at me from the left, her legs pumping madly so she could match velocities with us. Her teeth fell out. Her skin peeled away, she was running so fast and soon she was nothing but bones
but still running. She waved and I nodded back, one big round elbow hanging out my open window. My body rocked as the car just rumbled along.
“Dekalb,” Sarah said, “iga raali noqo, but what’s that?” She was staring at my hand on the wheel.
I switched on the dome light and saw my hands were covered in blood. “Hell, girl, that’s nothing,” I drawled. “Just a little fluid. I—”
I woke before I could finish the thought. I opened my eyes but there was nothing to see—without power Manhattan was as dark at night as the depths of the country. Darker since the skyscrapers blocked out even the starlight. I lay on my side, stiff and uncomfortable and chilled to the bone. Something wet and sticky had pooled under my hand—dew, perhaps.
I sat up slowly with a groan and flexed my knees to try to get some circulation back in my legs. I thought I could hear something moving nearby but I presumed it was just the dead outside, waiting for us to come out and be eaten. Ignoring it I rose to my feet. There had been a bathroom next to the manager’s office and I went there, careful not to step on any of the sleeping girls. It wasn’t easy—my eyes had adjusted to the darkness but there was still barely enough light for me to discern individual shadows in the gloom. I urinated noisily into the dry toilet and then, despite the obvious fact that the water shouldn’t work, I reached out for the lever in the murky darkness and flushed. Strangely enough it worked. Water rushed into the bowl and carried my waste away. I don’t know what kind of water system Manhattan has but it must be a marvel—months after the last living person was around to maintain it, the plumbing in the Virgin megastore was functioning perfectly. Such a small thing, a stupid thing but it made up for so much. Something that still worked. Something from the old world, the old life and it still worked.
Impressed and relieved I went back out onto the floor and wondered if there was any food left in the café’s pantry. I kind of doubted it but I was hungry enough to make a cursory search, at least. Halfway there I heard the noise again, the movement I’d heard immediately after waking. This time I was certain that it was inside the store.
Fear, of course, clears the mind. Adrenaline pumped out from my kidneys and spread through my body in a rush. My back prickled and the skin beneath my earlobes started to sweat. It could have been a rat, or one of the girls stirring in her sleep. It could have been an animated corpse that had somehow found its way into the building at a time when we couldn’t see to defend ourselves.
I took my flashlight out of my pocket and clicked it on.
“Dekalb.” It was Gary, the world’s smartest dead man. I began to turn and point my light in his direction but he said, “no, please, don’t look yet.” I stopped and switched my light off.
I heard him come closer. Maybe he could see in the dark—he wasn’t stumbling around like me. “Dekalb,” he said, “I need your help. I need you to explain to them. They have to understand.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“I can be a great asset to you,” he said. His voice was soothing, almost hypnotic in the darkness. “You need to find those AIDS drugs before you can leave, right? I can walk anywhere in the city and be safe. I can get the drugs you need and bring them to your boat. You can sit on the boat and be safe and just wait for me to come to you.”
“Gary,” I tried, “did you do something—”
“Let’s not go there yet. I have something else—an idea about how you can get out of here in one piece. Right now you’re screwed, right? You can’t walk out that door without getting pulled to pieces. You have no food, no radio. There’s nobody coming to save you. You need this. You need this solution I’ve come up with.”
He was right about that. “Tell me,” I said.
“Not until you speak to the girls on my behalf. You have to keep them away from me, Dekalb. That’s what you do, right? You used to work for the UN. You mediate disputes. You have to mediate for me, you have to help me, come on. Just say you will.”
I might as well have just eaten twenty snow cones. My belly was full of ice. “I’m going to turn my light on, Gary,” I started.
He moved so quickly he could have snapped my neck if he wanted to. Instead he merely grabbed my hand and forced me to drop my flashlight. I could feel his body very close to mine, smell the decay of his flesh—and something else, something fresher but no less gruesome. “You help me, Dekalb. Damn you, you’re going to help me,” he whispered in my face and I smelled salami. “She was going to die anyway.”
CLISH-CLACK! The sound of the selector lever on an AK-47 being switched from SAFE to SINGLE FIRE. It was Ayaan. “Dekalb, what is this? Why are you making so much noise?” Her light speared through the darkness and showed me Gary’s face. There was blood on his chin, red, wet blood.
Unh-uh. No, I thought, that wasn’t in the plan, no, I didn’t plan for this.
“I can get the drugs for you, Dekalb. I can get you out of here!”
I could feel Ayaan staring at the back of my head. Waiting for an order. In a second she would make a decision for herself and lift her flashlight to point it in the corner, where we’d left Ifiyah unconscious in an office chair.
I could feel Gary’s body convulsing in dread, only inches away. “You can’t do it without me! Dekalb!”
The cone of light drifted up and over. The three of us must all have seen the trail of blood on the floor. I remembered the pool of sticky liquid I’d woken up in and my throat squirmed. I had blood on my hands in my dream.
“Dekalb! Save me!”
As revealed by the flashlight Ifiyah’s body had undergone a sea change. Her jacket and shirt had been removed. As had most of her torso. I could see yellow ribs glinting in the dim light. I couldn’t see her face or her left arm—they might have been lost in the shadows. They might have been.
“Ayaan,” I said, softly, “let’s think about our next move here before—”
I heard the bullet snap through the air, as loud as thunder. I heard it splinter Gary’s skull. I felt something dry and powdery splatter across my face and chest as Gary’s body slumped away from me, spinning down to collapse on its side.
I tried to breathe but breath wouldn’t come. Then with a spasm it burst from my throat. A kind of whimper.
I reached down and picked up my own flashlight. Switched it on and pointed it at him.
The smartest dead man in the world had a finger-wide hole in his right temple. There was no blood but something grey oozed from the wound—brains, I would imagine. His body flexed and twisted spasmodically for a while. Then it stopped.
Part 2
1
fingers digging, twisting, pressing open wound smell of cinnamon laughing dark dark dark cold hungry fingers digging, grabbing, tearing—
Gary was losing. Dying. His spark, his animating force was draining out of him, out of the hole in his head.
start again
(There was someone else there. Someone strong and so determined, so determined not to let Gary give up. There was someone else there.)
Falling, free and weightless for just a moment in the darkness, even the yellow cones of the flashlights lost to him now in this comfortable quiet blindness he tumbled as he fell, tossed from the railing, ejected from paradise into the depths of the megastore. Colliding, his back striking the soft rubber handrail of an escalator but at this speed everything was hard, so hard and brittle and he could feel his vertebrae snapping, T6, then T7, T8 all gone, pulverized as his body folded like a spring-loaded pocketknife across the handrail, never walk again ha ha ha.
In the darkness, the darkness of blindness, there was this shape, see, this white tree shape like something burned into Gary’s retinas, the flash, the muzzle flash of an assault rifle the last thing he saw the last thing he would ever see, it looked kind of like a tree, maybe the branches were the veins in his eyes lit up as they exploded from the hydrostatic shock of the gunshot, maybe they weren’t branches, though, maybe—
Gary slid to the floor in an ungai
nly pile.
fingers fingers fingers in the pie, dig around, wiggle it around
Oozing out of him this unlife, this half light was flickering away.
Start again.
White and fat, fleshy almost the tree rose out of fertile ground to stretch bright leaves smeared across the sky, its fat fleshy trunk pulsing with life but no, shattered, the tree had been shattered by lightning or by rain, just a trunk now, Gary could see it, its limbs broken and scattered around its base, just a trunk sticking up out of the ground, fractured, a big knot right in the middle of the stump like a surprised mouth open in an eternal O as if frozen in the moment of surprise, the moment when the coyote has not yet realized he’s standing on air, the tree is just a stump.
All of this splattered across his vision. The only thing he could see. His muscles—his body, this rubbery doll kept moving underneath him. Spasms dragged his head across the floor, just die already, he could feel the bullet in his head so hot so hot and solid as it floated in the liquid, in the jelly of his brains. That was it, of course, the end, finito. The dead die but twice and this is it, this is, of course, it. Bullet to the head. The end.
(Not the end. The someone—the benefactor—who was there in the darkness—the strong one—the determined one said this is not the end said you still have a chance but you have to take it.)
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