“I told you one time about my contingency plan. About how I used to think about killing them in their sleep.” He continued to build the charges around the cylinders. I did nothing. I remembered quite well what he had said. It had scared me then—it scared me more now because now I knew he meant it. He went on. “There’s no hope for a rescue attempt, Dekalb. It just can’t be done. I ran through a million scenarios in my head and there’s no way the two of us come out alive.”
“You don’t know that,” I demanded.
He blinked and looked away from me. “Dekalb,” he said, “what’s the crew carrying capacity of a Chinook helicopter with the seats taken out?”
My jaw opened and closed spasmodically. “You don’t—” But he did. He knew the answer. So did I. Maybe a hundred people if you’re not going very far. We could only rescue half the survivors, even if we made it that far.
Jack clearly didn’t want to have to choose which ones to leave behind.
“There’s nothing to be gained by us dying like that. Still we can do something for the survivors. We can keep them from being his lunch. Or rather I can.”
He tossed me one of the atropine injector kits. If I was exposed to nerve gas the only thing that could save me—the only thing—was jabbing the enclosed hypodermics into my buttocks or thigh. If I hadn’t been exposed to nerve gas but jabbed myself anyway, the atropine would kill me instead.
“You can get out of here. Go back the way we came. Meet up with Kreutzer and have him take you to the UN. Get the girls off of that rooftop. You can still complete your mission. You just have to let me complete mine.”
Which meant consigning two hundred men, women and children to their deaths.
“Dekalb—I only needed you to come this far because I couldn’t carry all of this gear on my own. Now let me do you a favor. Just turn around and go.”
I didn’t know what to say. I definitely didn’t know what to do. I most certainly had no idea what my next reaction was going to be. If I could have stepped out of my body and spoken with myself I would have advised against it.
It was a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing.
The Iridium cellphone buzzed with a small, unobtrusive sound. It vibrated against the flagstone floor, wobbling and dancing. It slid a few inches across the floor and stopped. It started up again a second later. This was Ayaan’s signal to us, the message that she had drawn Gary’s undead army to her position. Away from us. Jack and I both stared at the phone.
We looked up at the same moment. I had my combat knife in my hand, pointed at his stomach. He had the Glock in his hand, pointed at my heart.
I lunged.
He fired.
15
Jack’s best plan—the one he’d spent days dreaming up, planning for, imagining ways it could be implemented—was to kill every living person in Gary’s fortress. He would build eight bombs, each of them containing enough VX nerve gas to wipe out a city neighborhood. He would strap these bombs to his body. Then he would run through the fortress with a detonator in his hand. Either he would make it outside and into Gary’s farm, where the survivors were held—and perhaps in the process get one last look at Marisol—or he would be stopped by attacking ghouls along the route. Either way he would trigger the detonator. The resulting cloud of poison gas would spread throughout this part of the city. It would take hours to dissipate. Anyone who was exposed to it, even for just a few minutes, would die. There was no immunity to VX. You couldn’t even hold your breath and hope it would go away. Once it got on your skin you were dead. There would be no time to wash it off.
He believed that by using a nerve gas he would insure that the dead would not rise again. VX worked by short-circuiting the entire nervous system, making it impossible for the body to function. Maybe it would have prevented Marisol and the survivors from Times Square from reanimating. We’ll never know.
We tried to kill each other in that last ugly second, with everything we had. I stabbed him with a combat knife, throwing myself on top of him. He used every bit of skill he had with a firearm and tried to shoot me in the heart. Shooting a human is different from shooting a ghoul. When you are shooting a living, and especially a moving, human being then head shots, Jack could have told me, are difficult to make even at point blank range when you’re shooting from the hip with a pistol. Even if you connect you’re firing into the most bony part of the human anatomy, the part most likely to deflect a shot. You might just graze your target’s scalp, which is just going to make them angry. You might hit them in the jaw, which makes for an ugly wound but in the shock of impact most people won’t even feel it. A shot to the chest, however, will at the very least puncture a lung. In terms of stopping power you want to always aim for the torso.
I had no training in knife-fighting. I didn’t know any special moves. I certainly didn’t know how to effectively kill a living human being with a knife. I just jumped and stuck my knife out and hoped for the best.
He missed. It’s possible, I suppose, that he didn’t really want to shoot me, that he was just warning me off. This is Jack we’re talking about, though, so I think that we can safely discard that possibility. It’s much more likely that he couldn’t really see me. All this happened, remember, in the glow of four chemical lights. Glowsticks. I was a shadow coming toward him in a room full of shadows. He missed.
I didn’t.
There was blood—so much blood—on both of us that I didn’t realize what had happened until later when I had a chance to examine myself and didn’t find any smoking holes. I had managed to gut him through several arteries and major veins. His blood didn’t just leak out, it erupted from his belly. The savagery of my cut was such that I lodged the knife inside of him and just left it there. It was like digging into a perfectly-cooked porterhouse with a steak knife. It was like gutting a fish.
I would think about that for a long time afterwards. In that moment I just lay on top of him, breathing hard, totally unaware of what was happening around me, just knowing that I was still alive, pretty sure that wasn’t going to last.
The gunshot was heard throughout the fortress. A dead giveaway.
When the door flew open I didn’t hear it though it must have slammed pretty hard. When the dead hands reached down and grabbed at me I was barely aware of them. I was more conscious of how my weight made me slip out of their grasp time and again. I felt like the original unmovable object. I felt like no force in space or time could move me.
Eventually the dead just grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me out of the pumphouse. They dragged Jack out, too, in the same way. He was still alive. Sort of. His eyes were open and bright. He looked at me without any emotion in his face at all as we were pulled down a long hallway, our pants riding down as our asses were dragged over bumps in the floor, my cheek burning with friction where it touched the flagstones.
Then time started up again and I tried to fight back. I lunged forward, my hands grabbing at the rotten fingers that dug into my ankles. The dead men dropped me and I rolled up to a sitting position before they could kick me to death. They tried, believe me. I managed to get my legs underneath me, to stand up. Then five of them just sort of leaned into me, their shoulders connecting with my chest and back. They slammed me up against a wall with just the weight of their decaying bodies. The smell was horrifying, especially mixed with the oily stink of Jack’s blood all over my shirt.
They didn’t tie my hands—they lacked the coordination to do so. Instead they just pushed me ahead of them with their hands and feet like kids playing kick the can. Every time I turned to attack them they would just thrust me up against a wall again until I settled down.
They had all the time in the world. They weren’t about to get tired. Eventually I just let them herd me on. We came to a place where the corridor opened up into a larger room and then they knocked me down onto my hands and knees. I looked up.
Six dead men stood in a ring along the walls of the chamber. Circular and tall, the room was not as big a
s I might have expected. It was made smaller by the fact that most of its floor had been hollowed out and turned into an enormous basin, a tub. A bathtub. This depression was full of some kind of foul-smelling liquid. I recognized the stench of formalin—it’s a precursor chemical, an ingredient in a number of chemical weapons. I had been trained to know that smell. Something the size of a large cabbage floated on the surface but I couldn’t see it so well—actual daylight was streaming down through the open ceiling and I was blinded by real illumination after spending so long in the tunnel and the pumphouse.
A mummy—an actual Egyptian mummy, with filthy bandages dangling from its limbs—picked up Jack by one foot and wrapped a pair of police handcuffs around his ankle while he hung in mid-air. I made a mental note—mummies were very, very strong. Not that I expected to live long enough to use that information. The other end of the handcuffs was attached to a hook hanging from a chain that stretched away up into the light. The chain was retracted a few feet and Jack was left dangling like a side of beef on a meathook. He wasn’t moving at all. Blood fell from him in a thick rivulet that ran down his left arm and splashed on the floor. I couldn’t look at him. If he was still alive he must be in agony. If he was dead he wouldn’t be for long.
I looked back down at the cabbage-sized thing in the pool. It opened up a pair of very bloodshot eyes. It smiled at me. It was Gary’s head. “Hi,” he said.
I looked to my left and my right. The dead had stepped back away from me—as if they were presenting a meal to their master. I pitched myself forward, my hands like claws, intending to dig out Gary’s eyes or something. Just hurt him, anyway I could. I had come a long way from the peace-loving civil servant he’d met in Union Square. He was about to find out just how far.
Gary stood up in his bathtub with a noise like breakers on the beach and reached out one hand to slap me to the floor. My breath exploded out of my lungs and spots swam before my eyes. I looked up and saw the hand that brought me down. It was like one of those over-sized foam hands you get at sporting events. It was enormous, the individual fingers as thick as saplings. Gary was naked, his body a rippling mass of fat and dead veins. Corpse-flavored gelatin stuffed into lumpy sausage casings that threatened to split open at any moment.
He was seven and a half feet tall. He was six feet wide. He must have weighed a thousand pounds. His head hadn’t grown at all. It looked tiny, a wart growing out of his shoulders, his neck submerged under rolls of fat. He glanced down at himself.
“Between meal snacks,” he explained.
16
The infamous Jack hung from the galleries, his motionless body twisting now this way, now that. The blood that had spurted from his arteries was barely trickling out now. In his mind’s eye Gary could see the golden energy of his life, once fierce and self-contained, turning to wisps of wan smoke, his body barely warmer than the air around him.
A drop of blood fell from his dangling left hand and struck the flagstones with a soft spattering sound.
“So… I win,” Gary said, not really sure what that meant. He sloshed backward into the welcoming embrace of his bath. His weight had become an issue of late—his bones complained when he stood up and forced them to accommodate all that extra fat tissue. It felt far better to just lie back in the formalin and let his natural buoyancy hold him up. “It’s over.” It had been fifteen minutes since the last rocket-propelled grenade struck the broch. Ayaan must be out of ammunition. Dekalb and Jack were accounted for. The prisoners, according to Noseless, were scared but calm. In the entirety of New York City no one remained to challenge him. “I win,” he said again. He wanted to hear it, though. He wanted Dekalb to believe it, too.
Another drop of blood fell. Drip.
Dekalb’s jaw shook as he opened his mouth to speak. He visibly forced the words out. “I suppose you do. So just finish me already. Eat me now and put me out of my misery.”
Gary grinned and rested his hands across his swollen belly. “No,” he said.
“…no?”
“No.” Gary nodded at Jack where the Army Ranger had turned as pale as a sheet. Drip. Drip. “He’s about to die. When he does he’ll come back—as one of mine. Then I’m going to let him eat you.” Gary smiled happily. “It’ll be awesome.”
Drip.
Dekalb’s stomach quaked, the muscles under his blood-soaked shirt moving violently as his chest heaved with fear. He would be having trouble controlling his bowels, Gary thought. He might shit himself. That would be amusing. This was the man who wouldn’t so much as speak up when Ayaan had shot Gary in the head. He was going to suffer a lot.
Dekalb ran his hands down his front, trying to smooth away the shaking maybe or perhaps he was trying to wipe the sweat off his palms. He pushed his hands across his pockets and seemed to find something there. His wallet? His house keys? Something safe, comfortable, reassuring. Some false hope. His eyes were slits, though, hurt, lost and impotent. “You… you don’t have to do that. You didn’t have to do any of this—Gary, there’s still a chance. You can turn this around. Save the day.”
“Oh, really?” Gary sneered.
“Yeah.” Dekalb sat down cross-legged on the lip of Gary’s tub and rubbed at his face. “You could… you control the dead. You could march them all into the ocean if you wanted. You could save us. You could save the human race.”
drip.
Gary drew his head under the preserving fluid for a moment. Felt it fill his mouth, his nose, the labyrinth of his sinus cavity. He reared upward again and let the liquid drip out of his face before he went on. “The human race. The living, you mean—the people who hate me. Who can’t stand to look at me. Why is that, Dekalb? Why do I disgust you so much? Give me an honest answer to that, at least.”
The enemy at least thought before answering. “Because you’re just like us. You can talk, you can think—the restless dead out there, your army, we can look at them and think they’re just monsters. They don’t know what they’re doing. But you chose this.”
“I chose it,” Gary repeated. He hadn’t considered that—he’d always seen himself as a victim of circumstance. Pushed along by events until he ended up on top of them.
“You’re human—you might as well be human. And you eat other humans. There’s nothing complex about it. It’s the oldest taboo in the book. You’re a cannibal.”
Gary’s stomach roiled at the thought. A dozen defenses for his actions sprung to his mind but he abandoned them at once—they were false. Dekalb was right, he had chosen to be who he was. It changed nothing. Anger clawed its way out of Gary’s chest and into his mouth. He felt like spitting. “You still don’t get it, Dekalb. I’m not the villain here. I’m not a fucking monster. People have been trying to kill me almost since the day I was reborn—Ayaan and her girl scout troop from hell. Marisol, and because of Marisol, Jack over there. You came here to kill me today. There were others you don’t even know about—one guy I thought was my friend, or at least my teacher. He tried to kill me, yeah. But why? Because I’m unclean, unnatural? Because I’m evil? I’m not any of those things. I’m just hungry,” Gary roared. “I have a right to exist, a right to stay alive as long as I can and that means I have to eat. That means I have a right to eat.”
drip.
“You can judge me all you want but here we are. I win. I’m going to live forever—and you’re going to die.”
drip.
Jack’s body began to convulse, the muscles staging a final protest. He quivered on his line, his shoulder smacking against the wall and sending him spinning. His mouth opened and a liquid cry of horror came out, a raw, wet animal sound that trailed off into a rattle. Partly the symphony of the damned and partly the wail of a newborn baby.
Vomit flowed out of his nose and mouth. His chest gave one last spasmodic heave and then he just stopped. His systems shut down. He died.
“You have about a minute before he reanimates,” Gary suggested, both of them staring at the brand new corpse. “Any last requests?”
Dekalb laughed, a bitter explosive sound. He reached into his pocket and grabbed something there. Gary stirred but relaxed when he saw what Dekalb had found—a hand-rolled cigarette and a pack of matches.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Gary giggled.
“If I’m going to start now I’d better hurry.” He tucked the cigarette between his lips and opened the matchbook. “Osman—you never met him—gave this to me before I left Governors Island. He said it would relax me. Maybe it’ll make it less painful to be eaten alive. But that would ruin your fun, wouldn’t it?”
Gary lifted one dripping arm in a dismissive gesture. “I’m not a complete asshole. Go for it. A last act of mercy.”
“Thanks.” Dekalb tore one of the paper matches free and put the head against the striking strip on the matchbook cover. “By the way, somebody owes you an apology.”
“Oh?”
Dekalb nodded, his absurd joint bobbing in his mouth. “Yeah. Your teachers in med school. They forgot to tell you that formalin is highly flammable.” The match struck and lit with a tiny hiss. Dekalb snapped it away from himself in a fluttering arc that dropped it right into Gary’s bathtub.
17
The flammable liquid ignited all at once with a great FFFHWOOMPing noise as all the air in the room was sucked into the conflagration. A fireball of incredible light and heat shot upward through the open ceiling while everything in the room tried to catch fire at once. I raised my arms to protect my face as fire roared out at me even as I tried to catch my breath. My feet left the floor and everything turned over on me and I could feel the hair on my forearms curl and singe. I lowered my arms and found myself on my back.
Painfully I sat up until I could see Gary again. He had become a pillar of molten flame. His enormous overstuffed body shook convulsively as burning fat seeped from his broken skin and dribbled down his limbs like candle wax.
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