Where the hell was Ayaan? I swiveled at the waist and saw her fumbling with her rifle. She couldn’t seem to bring it to bear, the bulky suit’s shoulders being too thick to let her bring it up to her eye. She could probably shoot from the hip but if she did she’d be as likely to hit me as my attacker. I was on my own until she could figure it out.
My breath made plumes of condensation on the inside of my faceshield, limiting my visibility as I twisted and tore at the undead man clutching my midriff. He held me in a grip of iron as I pried at his arms with my gloved hands. Every time I thought I had a good grip on him a layer of his dead skin would slough off and my hands would slide free. His teeth had failed to puncture the Tyvek of my suit—it was pretty tough stuff—but I knew eventually he would go for my bare hand with his teeth and then it would be over. Even if I got away after being bitten I would be prey for any number of secondary infections. I could still remember the panic in Ifiyah’s glassy eyes as her leg swelled up and her heart began to race.
Desperation forced my fingers deep into the dead man’s armpit and finally I had some leverage. The bones in my hands felt like they would snap as I clawed him away from me, finally breaking his grapple. I lifted one clumsy leg and kicked him off me, his fingers flickering in the air like scuttling claws. He landed on his back and immediately rolled to all fours again, clearly intent on coming for me once more. Then the top of his head exploded in a powdery puff of vaporized grey matter.
I turned, my lungs heaving, and saw Ayaan. She had managed to unzip her suit down to the waist, freeing her arms so she could use her AK-47 freely. As I stood there staring she lifted the weapon again and fired two quick shots, eliminating the pair of dead men that had been coming up right behind me.
Hurriedly we shed ourselves of the now-useless suits. There were more of the dead coming, a loose crowd of them from the west moving as fast as the undead could. The one in front was missing both arms but his jaw worked hungrily as he advanced on us. There were too many of them to fight off—we had to run.
I grabbed Ayaan’s arm and we ran north onto Broadway but they were there as well, the weakened kind, the kind we had seen licking mold off of stucco walls. Their clothes dangled from their emaciated frames, their withered necks and sparse hair horrible to see. They looked far less pathetic now that we were unprotected. From the south came a dead woman with long black hair in a full bridal gown with a train, her hands covered in blood-stained gloves, her veil back to show us the long sharp teeth exposed by her withered lips. We would have to take our chances, I decided, we would have to gun down the bride and hope there were no more of the dead behind her. I didn’t relish meeting the rest of the wedding party.
Ayaan had her rifle up and was merely waiting for my order to shoot when a blur of orange light shot past our feet and straight into the biggest pack of undead with a yowling noise. It was a cat—a tabby, a mangy, half-starved rabid-looking cat. A living cat.
On reflection I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a live animal. Not so much as a stray dog or even a squirrel loose in the streets of New York. This couldn’t be a coincidence but to me it was a startling mystery.
The cat’s effect on the undead was electric. Ignoring us completely they turned as one to reach for the running feline, their hands stretching down to grab at its patchwork fur. It dodged left, feinted right and the dead fell over each other—literally—trying to get a handful of the orange streak.
Whether they were successful or not I didn’t find out till later. As I stood there mesmerized by the sight Shailesh, one of the survivors from the subway station, came up behind me and grabbed my arm. I shrieked like a child. “Come on already,” he said, “we don’t have a lot of bait to spare, you know?”
“Bait?” I asked. Sure. The cat. The survivors must have let it loose specifically to distract the undead long enough for Ayaan and myself to get inside. Following hard on the heels of our guide we bolted past the steel gate at the entrance to the station—I heard it clang shut behind us—and down a flight of murky stairs. In the gloom I saw litter boxes everywhere and a few angry-looking cats and dogs sleeping in ungainly heaps. A single incandescent bulb lit up the turnstiles. We clambered over them since Shailesh assured us they had frozen in place when the trains stopped running.
Beyond the turnstiles we were met by an earnest-looking survivor wearing a pair of faded but immaculately clean jeans and wire-framed glasses. He held a black combat shotgun in his hands, the barrel pointed away from us. The weapon moved in his hands as we approached him, his hands subconsciously keeping it at a safe elevation. It all happened in such a reflexive way I knew he had to have Armed Forces training. No one else would be that disciplined with a firearm. There was a sticker on his white buttoned-down shirt, one of the increasingly familiar HELLO MY NAME IS labels but the white space below had been left blank.
He turned to Shailesh. “Are we secure?” he asked.
Shailesh laughed. “Dude, it’s the first rule of staying alive. They go for the fastest moving object they can see. The faster it goes the more excited they get! You should have seen them, Jack. It was like a Jim Carey movie out there.”
Jack didn’t raise his voice but what he said next made Shailesh break eye contact. “I asked if we were secure or not,” he repeated.
Our guide nodded obediently. “Yeah. Listen,” Shailesh said to me, “Jack will take you inside. I have to, you know, watch the gate. Welcome to the Republic, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, not fully understanding. “Thanks.”
Jack looked at me for a moment and I knew he was sizing me up. He gave Ayaan the same inspection but said nothing to either of us except, “This way.”
11
One of the mummies—a Ptolemy and a cousin of Cleopatra, according to Mael—ran his partially unwrapped hands over the glass of a display case and then started beating on it with his palms. Mael hobbled toward him but couldn’t stop him from shattering the glass. It cascaded down his bandaged legs in a torrent of tiny green cubes. Long shards of it stuck into his arms and his hands but he ignored them as he bent to retrieve a clay jar from the exhibit. Hieroglyphs covered its surface and the stopper was carved wood in the shape of a falcon’s head. Mael tried to pull the mummy away from the jagged glass but the undead Egyptian refused to be lead. He was far too intent on cradling the jar against his chest.
It was the first time Gary had seen a dead man motivated by anything but hunger. “What’s in that jar that’s so important?” he asked.
A spectral smile twitched across Mael’s leathery lips. His intestines.
Gary could only grimace in revulsion.
They don’t understand this place, Gary. So much has changed and so quickly. They think they’re in hell and they cling to the things they know and understand.
“I imagine the same could be said of you.” It was a taunt but a half-hearted one.
Perhaps. I am a little better off than them. I have access to the eididh. It’s how I learned your language and everything else I know about Manhattan. That flickering smile again.
“I’ve only been able to see the energy, the life force. You can get information out of the network?”
Oh, yes. Our memories go there when we drop, lad. Our personalities. What our elderly friends here would call the ba. It is the storehouse of our hopes and our fears. Indra’s net. The akashic record. The collected notions of the human race. You and I can read anything there, if we open ourselves to the possibility.
“You and me. Because we can still think. You need to make a conscious effort to reach into the network and the others, the, the dead out there, they can’t make that leap, not with what they’ve got for brains.”
Aye.
“But there’s a difference between you and me, as well. I can feel it. You—your energy, it’s more compact. Like a living person almost but dark like mine. I can’t explain it so well.”
You’re doing fine. The mummies and me, now, we don’t share your hunger. Our b
odies are incorruptible, in the old palaver. We don’t rot. That twitchy smile again. Then there’s the fact that you chose this. You did it to yourself.
“I can’t be the only one, though. You found me from a distance, you must know if there are others like us.”
Mael nodded. A few. Mostly of my sort but you were not the only one to abuse yourself like this. There’s a boy in a place called Russia. Very promising. Struck down by a speeding vehicle. He suffered for years with machines pumping his heart for him but his parents wouldn’t let the doctors pull the plug. They could not know, of course, what they were creating. Another one is here in your country. In California, she calls it. A yoga teacher hiding out in an oxygen bar. I have no idea what that means. She had the same brilliant idea you did, but it didn’t work as well for her. Woke up with a bad headache and found she’d lost her multiplication tables and plenty more besides. Such as her name.
Gary nodded. Russia. California. Without a car, without planes he would have to walk to them and they were so far away. “They might as well be on the moon. It’s funny. A couple of days ago I thought I was the only one and that was okay. Then you contacted me. It’s like I only got so lonely when I knew I wasn’t alone.” He reached into the broken display case and picked up a jewel in the shape of a jackal-headed god. It was beautiful—worked by loving hands. A made thing. All that was over now. Nobody left to create beautiful things. Nobody left to appreciate them, either. There were survivors but all they cared about was not getting killed. He supposed he couldn’t blame them. He put the jewel back in its case. “What happened to us, Mael? What caused the Epidemic?”
The Druid scratched his chin. Thinking hard, the gesture said. Mael was a master of body language, even with just one arm. I know what you think it was. A disease same as the grippe or the pox. It’s not, though. The old ones, the fathers, what you would call gods, they brought this on us as retribution. It’s a judgment.
“For what?”
Take your pick, lad. For what you’ve done to the earth, I might say, but then I’m just an old tree-hugger from way back. For what you did to each other, maybe. I know that sort of thing won’t sit easy with you. In your world things just happen, eh? Accidental, like. Random. In my time we thought otherwise. For us everything happened for a reason.
Walk with me, Gary. I have but a little time to converse with you. There’s dark work that needs doing. Fighting. Slaughtering, before this is through.
“Huh?” Gary demanded. It was all he could think to say.
We’ll get to that in proper time. Let me show you something first.
Mael lead him back through the Egyptian wing of the Met. The liberated mummies had taken it over and Gary saw for the first time how morbid the place was. An inside-out graveyard where the dead were put on display for schoolchildren. Gary saw a mummy trying on jewelry in one room, the turquoise and gold necklaces glinting against the stained linen at her throat. In another room a truly ancient mummy who was little more than rags and bones was trying to pry open a massive sarcophagus with his splayed fingers. It looked like he was trying to return to the tomb.
Mael stopped at a room partitioned off by a folding screen. The exhibit beyond was only half finished: clearly the curators had been working on it when they abandoned the museum during the Epidemic. The walls had been painted a sky blue and in white italic script above a row of empty display cases was written MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD. The bodies in this room were truly dead. SIBERIAN ICE MUMMIES were little more than incomplete skeletons with clumps of hair attached to their broken skulls; MOUNTAIN MUMMIES OF PERU showed hollow darkness through their sunken orbits, their brains having long since rotted away. At the back of the room sat a long low case that had been shattered from the inside. Gary crunched glass underfoot as he approached it. A CELTIC BOG MUMMY FROM SCOTLAND, he read. This must have been Mael’s sepulcher.
“The mummy in this case,” Gary read from a plaque on the wall, “lived in the time of the Romans. Most likely he was sacrificed by his own people. From the artifacts found with him archaeologists believe he must have been a priest or a king.”
A little of both, actually. Also a musician and an astronomer and a healer, when the need arose. Yes, Gary, I too was a physician in my day. You would probably consider my methods crude but I did more good than ill on the whole.
Gary squatted down to study the display. There was a recreation of how Mael would have looked in life—pretty much exactly like the apparitions that had appeared to him downtown. They’d gotten the tattoos wrong—they made them look more tribal, more modern. Next to this was a picture of Stonehenge, which the museum assured Gary was not built by Druids but which they had used to predict solar eclipses. “How did you die?” he asked.
Now there’s a tale to tell. Mael sat down on a display case full of partially preserved skulls and ruminated for a while before continuing. We took turns, is how. The burnt bannock cake came to me in my twenty-third year. That’s how we chose the anointed ones, drawing bits of cake out of a bag. The summer had been too cool for the corn and my people were in danger of starvation. So they took me to the oaks above Mòin Boglach and hanged me until I gurgled for breath. When they cut me down and I plunged into the black water below the peat I had a prayer to Teuagh on my lips. The father of tribes, we called him. Oh, lord, please make the grains to grow. Something of the sort. Down under the water he was waiting for me. He told me how disappointed he was. He told me what I had to do. Then I woke up here.
Gary noticed for the first time that the rope around Mael’s neck wasn’t for decoration. It was a noose. “Jesus,” Gary breathed. “That’s horrible.”
Mael came alive with anger as he responded, his head shaking so violently Gary worried it might fall off. It was glorious! I was the soul of my island in that moment, Gary, I was the hopes of my tribe made agonized flesh. I was born for that dying. It was magical.
Gary reached out and put a hand on Mael’s arm. “I’m truly sorry—but you wasted your death. Teuagh, whoever that was. He couldn’t make the crops grow.”
Mael stood up hurriedly and hobbled out of the room. Maybe so, maybe so. Luckily for me then that’s not how the tale ended.
My world was a few score houses and a scrap of planted field. Beyond that lay only the forest—the place where the nasties roamed in the night. We had none of your technological advances but we knew things you’ve forgotten. Aye, true things—valuable things. We knew our place in the landscape. We knew what it meant to be part of something larger than ourselves.
When I woke here I was blind. Parts of me were missing. I didn’t understand the language of my captors nor why they would shut me up in a tiny glass coffin. I only knew my sacrifice had failed—they don’t work, you know, if you survive. The father of tribes had other plans for me but I did not comprehend them at first. It took me far too long before I opened myself to the eididh and finally understood. I had served one purpose in life. I would serve another in death.
I had become the nasty in the night.
Which brings us up to date, my boy, and to the time when I turn things around and ask you a question. I’ve work to do and only one hand of my own. I could use you, son. You’d be a great help.
“Work? What kind?”
Ah, well. I’m going to butcher all the survivors. The Druid’s voice had taken on a melancholy weariness Gary could barely stand to have echoing in his head. This was not a task that he wanted, definitely not anything he’d asked for. It was a duty. Gary got all that from the Druid’s tone of voice. I spoke to you about judgment, well. I am the instrument of that judgment. I’m here to make it happen.
“Jesus. You’re talking about genocide.”
He shrugged. I’m talking about what we are. I’m talking about why we were brought back with brains in our head—to finish what’s begun. Now, lad.
Are you in or out?
12
Jack lead us down a long hallway lit only sporadically by light streaming down from gratings se
t into the ceiling. On the other side of those grates were thousands of undead and the light in the tunnel constantly changed as they wandered the sidewalks above us, their shadows occluding the sun. For someone who lived here, like Jack, the walk might not have been so unnerving. After a minute of it there was icy sweat pooling in the small of my back. I felt a little better about it whenever Ayaan would spot a dead man walking overhead and lift her rifle in a spasmodic reflex. Once one of the dead dropped to the ground and stared in at us through the grating, his fingernails scratching at the metal. I could feel the wiry tension in Ayaan’s body even though I was standing three feet away. It was all she could do not to fire off a shot, even though it would most likely ricochet off the grate and hit one of us.
We were rats in a cage. The dead had us trapped.
Finally just when I thought I couldn’t take any more the hallway ended in a wide aperture. Beyond was open space and some light. As we came around the corner I could hardly believe my eyes. The concourse of the subway station looked almost the same as I remembered it—almost. The white pillars made of girders were there, still holding up the low ceiling. The walls were still lined with advertising posters behind thin plastic scratched with endless graffiti.
There were still too many people in the low space but they weren’t moving. Normally this station would have been crowded with great surging tides of humanity moving from one platform to another. Now the people sat on the floor in groups of five or six on a blanket or lounged against the walls, refusing to meet our gaze. Their clothes were brilliantly colored or expertly cut or lined with thousands of dollars worth of fur but their faces were sunken and pale. Their eyes showed nothing but the exhausted boredom that comes from living in fear. I’d seen that look everywhere in Africa.
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