The crowd went wild. Wilson clasped his hands above his head and beamed like a searchlight. “Thank you, thank you,” he shouted over the roar of the crowd. When they finally calmed down he cleared his throat and crossed his arms behind his back. “My fellow Americans,” he said, “it has been a hard month. Yet we must remember that spring has come and with it the promise of a new morning in America.”
I grabbed Shailesh’s arm. He had to forcibly break himself away from looking at Wilson. “Is this serious?” I asked.
He shook his head to try to shut me up but then he sighed and said, “Without strong leadership we’d be doomed.”
“But who is this guy?”
“He was a professor of political economics at Columbia before the, the you-know. Now can I please listen? This is important!”
I let him go and turned back to hear the speech, some of which we’d missed.
“—kept or exceeded all my campaign promises. I am proud to say that we now have enough hot water for everyone to have a shower each week. You asked me for more working fluorescent tubes in the sleeping concourse and with Jack’s help I brought a thousand points of light to our benighted country. We have also added five more volumes to the library, including a Tom Clancy novel I personally recommend.”
I looked at Ayaan, a sarcastic grin on my face but she was as rapt as the rest of them. She’d been raised by demagogues and political indoctrination counselors so I suppose it was no real surprise she was susceptible to this kind of rhetoric. I leaned back against the pillar and studied the zip-a-toned mural, sinking into a reverie for a future that would never be, now. I sat up again, though, when the President got to his round-up of current events.
“We have all heard the rumors. It would appear to be true—there is a boat in the harbor, I have learned it is a diesel-powered fishing trawler repurposed as a troop carrier. Now we don’t want to start using the word ‘rescue’. I know we’re all tired and bored and we want to get out of here but our rescue is not something I’m going to talk about tonight. I will never promise you that you will be rescued until I can guarantee it. I will be leading a fact-finding committee myself to see what our chances of rescue really are. My results will be made public as soon as they are available. I can promise you one thing, though. When we are rescued, we will all go into that new and promised land. We will leave no child behind.
“Good night, America—and God bless!”
The crowd exploded in a roar of excitement as Wilson left the “stage”, his fists pumping in the air as the violin broke into a raucous rendition of “It’s a Grand Old Flag.” Marisol ran to take her husband’s place, her hands clapping in time. When the song ended she called up the violinist and had him play requests. He was a slender teenage boy no older than Ayaan with a bad case of acne and a t-shirt that read WEAPONIZED 2004 WORLD AUTOPSY TOUR. A blurrily menacing nü metal band looked out with scorn from the faded cotton. The requests he got were mostly for songs by Sinatra and Madonna, which he played with feeling.
It was the first music I’d heard since leaving Somalia and I have to admit it stirred me, even bitter, cynical, crusted old Dekalb. I sang along with a couple of the tunes, remembering my youth in the States. I had run away from my home country, I had requested field work the second I got hired by the UN. But America hadn’t been so bad, had it? In my memories it was just fine. There had been a lot of cars that constantly broke down, as I remember, and a lot of hanging out in front of McDonald’s hoping cute girls would walk by even though they never did but it seemed like paradise compared to what was going on over our heads. When the kid broke into an arrangement of April Lavigne’s hit “Complicated” for solo violin, however, I rose from my numbed haunches and headed to the back of the concourse where a set of card tables held refreshments. I helped myself to some punch (watered-down Kool-Aid mixed with bathtub vodka) and a cookie full of clumps of baking soda.
The survivors wouldn’t talk to me. I tried various conversational gambits—complimenting the snacks, asking about the weather, even just introducing myself cold but I guess they didn’t want to hear what their chances of getting out with us were. If they just stared at me they could maintain the illusion that I was a free ticket to safety.
Well, maybe I was. The Arawelo was still out there somewhere in the night. If we could reach it there was a chance. And I thought I might have an idea how to reach it.
I went looking for Jack and found myself in a deserted corridor. Up ahead it ended in a short flight of stairs. I could hear people down there so I went to investigate and found Jack. Marisol, too. He had one hand inside the drawstring of her pants and his mouth was nuzzling her neck.
She saw me and for a second the look in her eyes was one of simple defiance. Why not? She seemed to ask and in truth I could hardly fault her. Death was always near us. More to the point it was none of my business. She seemed to recall herself after a second, though, and she pushed Jack angrily away. “You fucking asshole, get off of me!” she screamed. “You know I’m married!”
She dashed past us. I watched Jack carefully, wondering if he would be angry at me for discovering them. Instead he merely turned around, very slowly, and opened his eyes. “What can I do for you, Dekalb?” he asked. Before I could answer we heard a squeal, maybe a scream—the white tiles of the station played hell with acoustics—and we raced back to the concourse.
The cat had returned. The mangy tabby that Shailesh had released as bait so that Ayaan and I could come inside. It must have found its way through the dead on its own and then returned via some hidden entrance too small to need to be guarded. It looked confused and very bedraggled as it walked across the open floor of the concourse, its tail cautiously flicking back and forth.
A girl with braces and thick glasses bent down and patted her knees. “Come here, baby,” she cooed, and the cat turned to face her. In an instant it was on her, its vicious teeth sinking deep in her arms as she tried to protect herself. We could all see now the hole in the cat’s side, a ragged wound through which its ribs were clearly visible.
Jack rushed for the girl as the rest of the crowd fell back in terror, nearly trampling each other as they tried to get away. Jack flicked a combat knife out of his boot and impaled the cat through the head. Then he turned to the girl. He grabbed one of her arms roughly and yanked it upward. It was covered in small bites, pinpricks of blood and cat saliva. “Come on,” Jack said. His voice was neither cruel nor kind—just empty. He had nothing left in the way of emotions to give her. He lead her away via one of the concourse’s many passages.
After that the air in the concourse felt like something solid and foul-tasting. Like the place had been poured full of rubber cement. Any of the feeling of festivity was gone—which was apparently Marisol’s cue to take the stage once more.
“Famous movie scenes!” she shouted. The words had a brittle quality but they got the attention of the crowd. “Famous movie scenes! Who’s got one?”
Perhaps numbed by horror the survivors just looked at one another, trying to think of something. Anything. Finally it was Ayaan who stood up. She looked like she might die of embarrassment and her command of English declined sharply with her stage frighty but she managed to pipe out: “May we have the famous scene of Ms. Sandra Bullock and Mr. Keanu Reeves in the ‘Speed’?”
Marisol nodded eagerly and called Ayaan up to act it out with her. “There’s a bomb on the bus!” Ayaan shouted, smiling a little. “I need to know, Ma’am, if you can drive this bus!”
So that’s what they needed Marisol for. I left them to it and turned to follow Jack out of the concourse.
15
Gary knelt down in the denuded mud of Riverside Park and looked across the river at the 79th street Boat Basin. A few sailboats still rode at anchor there, their masts splintered and their hulls sagging lifelessly in the water. A speedboat smoldered away in their midst, acrid smoke leaking from its engine compartment to drift across the nigh air to Gary’s twitching nose. One vessel, a b
ig racing sailboat with its boom tied down looked like it was still seaworthy. A pair of huge wheels stood at its stern, lashed to the deck. A single electric light blared from its bow every few seconds. Someone had raised an upside-down American flag to the top of its mast.
Mael had been certain there were survivors in the Basin. It looked like they wouldn’t be hard to find.
Gary kicked off his shoes and leapt into the Hudson, Noseless and Faceless following close behind. They sank to the bottom like rocks while Gary bobbed up and down like a cork in the water. He realized he was holding his breath. He let it go—he didn’t need it—and drifted down to the bottom. The water was cold, very cold if he could feel it through his thick skin but it didn’t bother him. It was dark, too, murky and dismal so that he could barely see a few feet in front of his face. It would be easy to get lost down there. What little moonlight penetrated the surface shifted and shimmered so much it was more or less useless. He could make out currents of silt flowing past him and he could see the soft outlines of centuries worth of dumped junk—old cars, fifty-gallon drums that had rusted open, piles on piles of black plastic trash bags sealed off with metal crimps. A mat of slimy algae covered everything, fronds of it drifting in the river’s flow. Every step that Gary took required real effort but he didn’t tire. His feet sank into the mud of the riverbed but he pressed on, looking for the sailboat’s anchor.
Noseless appeared through the gloom just to Gary’s right. The dead man looked more at home under the water than he had on land, a white pulpy thing with floating hair and billowed-out clothes. Silver bubbles leaked from his shirt. Gary watched with approval as his companion grabbed a fish out of the dark water and sank his teeth deep into its flank. Clouds of blood blossomed around him, temporarily hiding Noseless from view.
The dead man was coming along nicely. After the day’s bounty the walking corpse who had once been unable to feed himself was now acting of his own volition again. Faceless was making slower progress but at least she had managed to clean herself of the insect fauna that had been nesting in her collarbones.
They had all fed well under Mael’s scheme. Gary had found he had a real talent for killing. He exulted in it.
Their first mission had been an elderly woman cowering in a brownstone up in Harlem. She had sequestered herself on the second floor, filling up the stairs with broken furniture and bundles of old magazines tied up in twine. The hard part had been climbing over all that refuse. When they reached the top they found her in her bathroom, crouching behind a wicker hamper. Gary had expected moral qualms to rear themselves as she pleaded for her life but in fact she had trembled so badly that she couldn’t speak. There had been no difficulty at all as Gary moved in for the kill, no hesitation on his part, just cold mechanics until the hunger had taken over and he could not have resisted if he tried.
They had moved on when it was done, stopping at the 125th street train station. The terminal and its elevated platforms had been deserted but next door sat a building that had been boarded up and abandoned since as long as Gary could remember, the burnt-out shell of a red brick office building ornamented with elaborate coats of arms. A banner offering used laptop computers for sale hung limply from its side. From the platforms he could see sunlight leaking through the building’s gaping windows and trees growing from the spars of the broken roof. He could also see a twisting curl of white smoke coming from the top of the building—smoke that disappeared almost as soon as he spotted it. Someone up there had a fire going and must have quickly extinguished it.
The building’s street level entrances had been barricaded for decades but the three of them made short work of the plywood covering a low window, their shoulders smashing into the obstruction in concerted force. Inside triangular patches of light showed through from the sky three stories above. The interior of the building had imploded leaving a three-dimensional maze of collapsed lathing and dangling floor beams. They climbed upward, ever upward, moving from plank to plank with their hands, falling back as the boards gave way, making progress when they didn’t. With the patience of the dead they kept trying and they kept making progress. Whoever had taken refuge on the roof could have thrown down debris or shot them from above at any time but as they reached the top floor they met with no resistance whatsoever.
Someone had thoughtfully left a stepladder under the hole in the roof. They climbed up through torn tarpaper and emerged into the bright light of day. Gary saw a makeshift lean-to mounted on the last stable corner of the roof. The embers of a campfire burned nearby, complete with a spitted rat waiting to be roasted. He heard something crumble and the patter of stone chips hitting the street below and turned to see a living man perched on the edge of the rood, one step away from oblivion. He looked like one of the homeless, his face smudged with dirt, his clothes colorless and torn.
Gary took a step in the man’s direction and he leapt. Better that, he must have thought, than what Gary intended for him. From his perspective that was probably accurate thinking. Noseless and Faceless scampered back down to the street to get to him before he could rise again. Gary took his time. It wasn’t meat he wanted anymore, it was the life force, the golden energy of the living that could make him strong.
Four hours later he stood on the bottom of the Hudson with his hands on the anchor chain of the sailboat. He wouldn’t let these survivors get away, he promised himself. He began to climb, hand over hand, his minions following. When his head burst through the surface once more he reached up and dragged himself onto the wooden deck of the boat, water streaming from him in gouts. He rose to his feet and felt himself swaying as the current rocked the vessel. A cabin sat in the middle of the deck, its hatch recessed into the wood. That was their destination. Before Gary could cross half the distance to the door, however, it opened and a living human leaned out. He held what looked like a toy pistol in his hand, bright orange with a barrel wide enough to shoot golf balls.
The gun made a loud fizzling noise and smoke leapt across the deck. Faceless looked down at her stomach where a dull metal cylinder hissed and spat. With a burst of red light like a firework it exploded, knocking her backward into the water.
“A flare gun?” Gary asked aloud. “No shit, a flare gun? What’s next? A starter’s pistol?”
“Jesus,” the living man said. He wore a blue fleece with the collar up around his neck. “You can… you can talk.” He put the flare gun down on the deck and raised his hands in supplication. “I am so sorry! I thought you were one of those dead things!”
I am, Gary thought, and prepared to pounce on the idiot but before he could get into position the sailor ran up onto the deck and leaned on the railing, staring down at the turbulent water. “Jesus Christ, what have I done! I’m so sorry—I have a life preserver here somewhere. Can she swim?”
Gary looked down into the water. He could see Faceless under the surface, illuminated by the sparkling flare, twirling as she drifted toward the bottom, struggling to pull the incendiary out of her midriff. “She’ll be fine,” Gary said, as much menace as he could get dripping from his voice. “You, on the other hand…”
“Oh. You are dead.” The sailor’s face went blank. “But you can talk. Listen. Come belowdecks. We’ll, we’ll discuss this like rational people. Please.”
Gary felt like laughing but he just nodded. He went down into the belly of the ship, leaving Noseless to help Faceless get back onboard when she could. Gary ducked his head to get through a low galley and followed his guide into a cramped cabin at the fore of the boat. “You want some coffee?” the sailor asked, pouring himself a mug from a tiny electric coffee maker. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. I’m Phil, by the way, Phil Chambers from, from Albany originally. Things were bad there. We came down the river hoping to find a safe place… Saugerties was on fire and now, New York City, this is it, I mean there’s no place else to go but out into the Atlantic. This is the end of the line.”
“Yes,” Gary said. It would only take a moment to kill this man. On
e quick bite on the throat. A deep laceration on the carotid artery.
Chambers pulled some charts out of a pigeonhole and spread them across a table. He stared hard into his mug as if he had discovered an insect inside. He didn’t seem able to drink. “Please don’t do this,” he said. “My kids are in the stern. They’ve got nobody else. Oh, Jesus, no. No, you won’t take my kids too. Please.”
Gary stepped closer until he could feel the man’s body heat. Chambers was shaking and he stank of bad sweat. Gary grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head.
“I’m begging you, guy, I’m begging. I’m begging.”
Real tears rolled down the man’s cheek. Gary could taste them on his neck when he bit into the yielding flesh.
He’d thought it would be difficult when they pleaded for their lives. He had dreaded the moment when the old woman started blubbering.
It turned out to make no difference at all.
16
Jack looked at me over his shoulder as I approached. He had the girl—the one who had called the cat and been bitten by an undead feline for her trouble—behind a locked steel gate at the bottom of a stairwell. She looked more sullen then afraid. “Hold on, Dekalb,” Jack said. “I’ve got to see to her first.”
I nodded and sat down on a crate. We were at the last safe barrier on the number 7 train Platform, according to a sign written in sharpie and taped to the wall. The tunnels themselves couldn’t be closed off so the survivors had simply sealed off all the platforms, sticking to the concourses and their connecting passageways where they could be assured of their safety. Shailesh had told me that they had never actually seen one of the undead down on the tracks but that Jack refused to take the chance.
The girl—her nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS Carly—had been put out on the platform to see if she died or not. If she didn’t, she could come back in. If she did Jack would put a bullet in her head. Either way he would be spending the night sitting next to her. He did what he could, passing a first aid kit through the bars. She dabbed mercurochrome on her arms until they turned bright orange.
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