The dead converged on him. He tried to run again but a dead man picked up one loop of his small intestine and started chewing on it. Paul tripped and fell on his face. With aching slowness the dead dragged him across the street back toward them, reeling him in like a fish on a line. When he was close enough—screaming and kicking but weakened by loss of blood—the undead squatted down over his shaking body and took turns biting chunks out of his face. Eventually he fell silent.
Gary turned to face the other survivor. Noseless and Faceless stared at Gary as he came closer. He looked only at Kev. The survivor’s face was glossy with sweat and his mouth didn’t seem to want to close. “You—you said you would make it painless, remember?”
“As painless as possible,” Gary said, “but, you know, gee.” He held up his arms and looked down at his pockets. “I forgot. I’m fresh out of anaesthetic.” He lunged forward and sank his teeth deep into Kev’s neck, twisting his head around once he got a solid hold on the living man’s jugular to tear his throat out in one bloody piece.
6
We spotted the Intrepid from half a mile away but only I knew what it was until we were practically underneath its dull grey shadow. When Osman had gotten a good look at the decommissioned aircraft carrier he started rubbing his jaw agreeably. “Can we… can we just take it, do you think?” I shook my head but he wouldn’t be dissuaded so easily. “I don’t think your Navy will miss this, Dekalb,” he suggested.
I smiled at him. “It’s half-buried in the riverbed. They had to dredge the Hudson just to get it in here.” I looked up at the historical airplanes tethered to its deck. The military value of such a thing was not lost on me, not after all we’d been through but frankly—this was a new kind of conflict. Fighter jets and naval gunnery just no longer applied.
Just south of the carrier we nosed in to a stop at the Circle Line pier, pier 83 at Forty-Second street. The sight-seeing ferry boats were all gone of course and so were the tourists that used to wait for hours to sail around New York harbor. The dead had come in their place, milling through the crowd control barriers, lining up to be the first ones to get to us.
The girls stood at port arms at the rail while Ayaan and I helped each other into the hazmat suits. It was a two-person operation—you had to be zipped into them—but we couldn’t let anyone else touch us. Any human contact with the exterior of the suits would contaminate us. It would make us smell like lunch. Osman and Yusuf watched us with an impassivity I knew was borne from their belief we were leaving them for good. I ignored them and concentrated on Ayaan. We pulled on gloves and then I poured bleach over our hands. I attached Ayaan’s Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus unit to her mask and put it on her head and she returned the favor with mine. We struggled into the suits and pulled up each others’ airtight zippers and then smoothed down the Velcro stormflaps. I tested my valves and seals and then switched on my internal air before the inside of my suit could get stuffy. We had twelve hours before we would have to change the tanks on the SCBAs, something that could not be done out in the field. Not a lot of time to waste. “Ready?” I asked her. She pulled her sterilized AK-47 over her suited shoulder and adjusted the strap before she nodded yes. Through the wide aperture of her faceshield I could see she looked calm and disciplined. She looked like Ayaan, in other words.
Under Fathia’s command the girls lifted their rifles and fired one short volley into the crowd of xaaraan that awaited us. A few fell—others just spun around and looked disoriented for a moment before returning to their ravening. They fired another round and the dead grew agitated, pushing harder against the crowd barriers until some of them squeezed through and fell into the water. The shooting had the desired effect, which was to draw attention away from us as we quietly debarked. Moving quickly but ever careful not to puncture the suits on splinters Ayaan and I lowered a narrow gangplank to the shore and dashed down its length. Osman and Yusuf were ready and shoved the sheet of particleboard into the water as soon as we touched solid ground. We didn’t stick around but instead made our way hurriedly to the promenade on the far side of the waiting area.
A dead man with gold chains tangled up in the curly hairs on his chest came at us, his arms wide, his legs flailing beneath him as he tried to run. Ayaan readied her weapon but I put one gloved hand on the barrel and shook my head. She hardly needed me to remind her of our agreement—that she should shoot only in dire necessity, for fear of alerting the dead with the noise of her gunshots—but it made me feel better. By steadying her I steadied myself and right then I needed it. I could feel my skin trying to crawl away from the animated corpse as it lumbered ever closer.
He put out one hand and grabbed at my sleeve and I thought it was over, that I had made some kind of critical error. Maybe the dead could sense the life force Gary had spoken of, maybe they could see right through the suits. I braced myself for what surely came next—the grapple, the bite, the sensation of having my flesh torn away from my bones. I closed my eyes and tried to think about Sarah, about her safety.
The dead man pushed me aside and stumbled between myself and Ayaan. We had just been in the way of his true goal—the girls on the Arawelo. I listened for a minute or two to the heavy cyclic respiration of my SCBA, just glad to still be alive. Whatever special senses the dead might have they couldn’t see through the suits. My plan actually had a chance of working.
“Dekalb,” Ayaan said, her voice blurred by the layers of plastic between us, “we are breathing borrowed air.” I nodded and together we set off.
We crossed the West Side Highway, weaving carefully in between the abandoned cars so as not to tear the suits and then the buildings of Forty-Second street closed around us like the walls of a maze. I had hoped the street would be clear of vehicles and for once I’d been right, with one exception: a military Armored Personnel Carrier stood at an angle in the middle of the street. It had smashed into a newsstand, spilling glossy copies of Maxim and Time Out New York everywhere, their pages ruffled by a mild breeze. I wanted to check to see if the APC was drivable but Ayaan suggested, quite rightly, that if her rifle made too much noise then the sound of a big diesel engine roaring to life would be completely unacceptable.
We moved cautiously around the open back of the vehicle, probably both of us remembering the armored riot cops in Union Square. No former National Guardsmen came out at us but it didn’t take us long to find them. Three of them still dressed in their Interceptor body armor and their ballistic helmets were squabbling over a trash can halfway down the block. It must have been ransacked weeks ago but still they fought over its contents. One of them grabbed an armful of trash and sat down hard on the curb, busily sniffing and licking the dry yellow newsprint and shiny Styrofoam. Another dug out an old soda can. The red paint on its side had worn off over time leaving it featureless and silver. He stuck his finger deep inside the can perhaps trying to scoop out one last droplet of sugar water but the finger got stuck. He shook his hand violently trying to get it loose but it just wouldn’t come off.
It sounds almost humorous now that I describe it but at the time, well, you just don’t laugh at the dead. It’s not a matter of respect so much as fear. After your first few encounters with animated corpses you never stop taking them seriously. They were too dangerous and too horrible to make light of.
Unless, of course, they could talk. The thought made me wince. I’d made a bad mistake in trusting Gary. I didn’t stick around to even look at the Guardsmen. We walked on past the playhouses of Theater Row, past their colorful blandishments for entertainments that hardly made sense any more. Beneath the marquees the dead scrabbled and hunted for food. We saw an elderly woman with blue hair and a colorful scarf around her neck lying face down on the sidewalk. Her bony arms were stuffed down inside a sewer grating snatching up spiders out of the darkness below. Every dumpster rattled with the dead people inside rummaging for one last morsel of food.
Most pathetic of all were the weak ones. For one reason or other they couldn’t com
pete for the small supply of food available. Some lacked limbs or were too small or too scrawny to strive with the others. Many had been children. They were recognizable by the mottled pulpy skin on their faces, by the receding lips that had dried up and left their teeth permanently bared in broken grimaces. They did what they could to keep themselves fed but this never amounted to much. We saw a girl Ayaan’s age scraping at the green lichen growing on a brick wall. Others gnawed desultorily at the bark of dead trees or chewed clumps of dry grass until green paste leaked from their grinding jaws. It was only a matter of time, I knew, before even the strongest of the dead would be reduced to these measures. There was a limited supply of food in the city, no matter how broadly you interpreted the term. They didn’t eat each other for whatever unknown reason so this was what remained to them.
This was the future, then. The rest of history in a new paraphrase: a human face chewing on a leather boot, forever. I kept my head down and Ayaan did the same. Neither of us stopped to reflect further as we trudged eastward breathing canned air and listening to the creaking of our suits.
7
By the time Gary reached Central Park it had become a shambles. A sea of mud broken here and there by a pool of stagnant water slick with the rainbow sheen of chemical pollution. Shards of bone, inedible even by the loose standards of the undead had gathered in these ditch-like depressions in the earth. No grass anywhere—the dead would have devoured it by the handful. Countless broken and sagging trees raised dark supplicant limbs to an overcast sky, pulpy and white where the bark had been gnawed right off the wood. Without the root systems of living plants to hold it together the very earth under Central Park had rebelled, surging forward as mud every time it rained. The broad traverses had turned to rivers full of murky, billowing water. The fences that had divided the park into discrete zones of leisure had been overcome by the sweeping power of the water and mud and now lay twisted like long lines of barbed wire rusting in the sun. Here and there a streetlamp poked out of the dirt at a skewed angle like the gravestones in an old abandoned cemetery. The paved or graveled paths that had once woven in and out of pleasant glades had disappeared completely. A tidal wave of mud had swept out into Sixth Avenue. It had clotted in the gutters and left broad streaks of brown in elaborately ramified fan shapes down the street, carrying away cars to smash them up against buildings a block away in clumps of filthy broken metal and shivered glass.
He lead Noseless and Faceless into the Park’s brown expanse and felt his feet sinking a full inch down into the soft soil. Within minutes of clambering across that dull plain Gary felt completely lost. He could see the tall buildings of the city around him in every direction except to the north, the rude geometry of the empty city like abstract mountain ranges pinning him in. He felt alone but not unwatched. The mysterious benefactor waited for him somewhere beyond the next hummock of earth.
Since he’d eaten he was thinking more clearly. He’d shaken off the half-trance that had lain over him like a shroud ever since he recovered his strength at the bottom of the Virgin megastore and now he had time to ponder just where he was headed.
Someone, some anonymous creature had come to him in his moment of greatest peril and taught him how to open himself up to something bigger than himself, how to connect with the nervous systems of countless dead men and women. From that connection he had drawn the strength to keep himself animate even after being shot in the head. In exchange for this knowledge the unknown benefactor had summoned Gary to his presence and without a thought Gary had set off to comply. Now that he could think a little more clearly, however, he wondered what he was marching toward. It couldn’t be a living person—no one living could have access to the network of death, Gary was sure of it, and anyway why would anyone living want to help a monster like Gary to survive?
Yet if the benefactor was dead then what could he possible want from Gary? Even if the other had somehow maintained his intellect as Gary had, he would still share the biology and psychology of all the dead. The dead only had one desire, the need for sustenance. It seemed absurd but Gary was convinced that he was walking to the place where he would be eaten. Fast food delivery, right to your door.
If it was true, if he had been spared only to be turned into a meal for some dead man even smarter than himself, Gary still couldn’t stop. He kept yanking his feet out of the mire and taking another step. Behind him Noseless and Faceless kept pace without a word of complaint or question.
The sun had moved higher in the sky by the time they saw the first break in the monotony of the park’s muddy expanse. The Zoo came up on their right, its buildings still standing though they were half buried in thick silt. Grateful for any break in the visual cipher of what the Park had become Gary waved his companions on and hurried into the low maze of the Zoo’s sunken exhibits.
There were no animals in the cages, of course—the dead would have made short work of them. Here and there a scrap of fur had caught in the mesh of a habitat or the elaborate filigree on a wrought iron fence but that was all. Similarly the explanatory plaques and interactive displays were buried or carried away by some long past torrent of mud. Only the barriers remained visible, a collection of untenanted cages that cut the afternoon light into long strips. Gary lead his companions down long curving lanes between what had once been enclosures for baboons and red pandas and now were merely channels of mud.
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, stained by blowing rain and rust that ran down from the animals’ eyes like tears of blood. 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 back, 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 stumping 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 flab and doughy meat. His hands were bloated and nearly useless, human-sized nails sunk deep into the tips of his swollen fingers. His normal-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 life 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 his own massive fat deposits to get the air 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 an abandoned cage, 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 across the flat plain of mud outside the Zoo. He nearly did—until something gripped his aching brain like a vise. The benefactor, perhaps wondering why he had made this detour from his instructed path.
Amaideach stócach! the benefactor howled. The voice was Gary’s own, the same voice he heard uttering his own thoughts but so much louder, so much more distorted that it couldn’t be his own thought. Someone else—the benefactor—was shouting into his mind’s ear. The words meant nothing to Gary but they cut through him like a sword of fire and struck him down to the ground where he lay deep in a bad seizure for quite some time.
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 no intention of defying the benefactor again.
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