Grim Reaper: End of Days

by Steve Alten

  Alone and terrified, Heath was more frightened of exposing his wife and son to plague. And so he had isolated himself here with the boat, praying he would survive the night.

  His cell phone rang again. Through feverish eyes, he gazed at the caller ID, making sure it was not his wife. “Speak.”

  “Heath, is that you?”

  “Paolo?”

  “I just spoke with my sister, she’s worried sick.”

  Heath sat up, delirious. “Jennie’s sick?”

  “No, I said she’s worried sick. She says you won’t answer your phone.”

  “Bad day at work.”

  “Bad day? Heath, Manhattan’s been infected by plague; we have to get our families off the island.”

  Heath lay back down, fighting the urge to vomit. “How?”

  “The boat we were working on for Collin. It can take us across the river. Did you fix the leak?”

  “Yeah… no, I don’t know. Paolo, I’m in the boathouse… I’m really sick. I don’t want anyone else exposed to this thing. It’s ripping my insides apart.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Nothing. Just stay away. Tell my family to do the same.”

  “Heath, the plague is spreading everywhere, by dawn no one will be safe. Your family hasn’t been infected yet, they can still be saved. Get the boat ready to motor across the Hudson. Francesca and I will meet Jenni and Collin in Battery Park as soon as we can. I’ll make sure we get them to safety. When we get to Jersey, we’ll find a way to help you.”

  “Too late for me. Take the boat, I’ll finish the repairs and leave. Just do me one favor, Paolo. Tell Jenni I love her. Tell Collin his daddy is very proud of him.”

  “I… will. Hello? Heath, are you still there?”

  Dropping the cell phone, Heath Shelby crawled to the nearest trash can and retched.

  Governor’s Island, New York

  10:14 P.M.

  Rising high above the northwestern shore of Governor’s Island was the circular red sandstone fortification known as Castle William. Built in 1807 to protect New York City, the structure was two hundred feet in diameter, its walls forty feet high and eight feet thick.

  Leigh Nelson followed Captain Zwawa past a large garden in the center of the castle. Entering the tower, they ascended a winding stairwell, emerging on a terrace overlooking New York Harbor. Battery Park and the Manhattan skyline loom a scant half mile across the waterway.

  “Captain, please… I need to call my husband. I need to let him know I’m okay.”

  Jay Zwawa ignored her, his attention focused on the magnificent view of the Financial District, the skyline aglow with lights. “I’m a bit of a history buff. Did you know that, prior to the attacks of 9/11, the worst violence ever experienced in New York happened right here? It was July of 1863, during the Civil War. Rebel agents from the Confederacy incited riots that left two thousand dead and another eight thousand New Yorkers wounded. Governor’s Island was attacked, but the militia drove the insurgents back.”

  “Captain… my phone call?”

  “When we get the vaccine.”

  “I’m cooperating. You asked me to cooperate, and I have. What happens if your men can’t find Shep?”

  “Then your call isn’t going to matter.”

  An aide joined them on the terrace. “Sorry to interrupt, sir. All cell-phone signals are now being jammed. We’re ready to black out the island.”

  “Do it.”

  “Yes, sir.” The aide disappeared down the stairwell.

  Leigh Nelson looked aghast. “You’re shutting down power?”

  “Our objective is to contain three million people. By shutting off the power we darken the city, giving our thermal sensors a better view from above. We also want to encourage the populace to remain indoors.”

  “You’re inducing more panic.”

  “Doctor, we passed panic five hours ago.”

  As they watched, the southern tip of Manhattan seemed to evaporate into the night. The rolling blackout continued through Battery Park and the Financial District… Chinatown and the Lower East Side… Tribeca, Little Italy, and SoHo. Continuing north, the wave of darkness worked its way through midtown and Central Park, blanketing the Upper East and West Side until the entire island of Manhattan — save for the glow of light from the vehicular traffic — was suffocated in velvety black.

  The sound rose from the emptiness as one, reaching across land and sea like screams from a distant roller coaster–

  — the sound of millions of condemned souls, crying out in the darkness for help.

  Beneath the 158th Street Overpass

  Manhattanville, Manhattan

  10:31 P.M.

  Through the darkness they descended, Patrick and Virgil, one man inoculated against plague yet debilitated by the emptiness in his heart, his older companion debilitated by age yet inoculated by a selfless sense of purpose. The two men held hands to keep from falling down a concrete stairwell illuminated only by the gunman’s flashlight. Each unseen step brought them closer to dankness and disease, each breath rendered putrid by the stench of sewage that rose to greet them from below, the scratching sounds of rodent claws over cement setting their flesh to tingle.

  Three levels became six, eight a dozen, until the stairwell finally ended, depositing them at the opening of an eight-foot-high concrete tunnel, the passage a foot deep in partially frozen mud and sewage. Footprints revealed the hundreds who had come before them.

  The gunman barked orders for them to continue moving. Calf deep in filth, they negotiated the trail, the armed man driving them forward into the darkness.

  Patrick’s temper flared. The former Marine contemplated wheeling about with a vicious backhand of his damaged prosthetic, using the makeshift blade to slice open the gunman’s throat.

  As if reading his mind, Virgil maneuvered Shep in front, separating him from his intended target.

  The passage continued east another hundred yards, releasing them on the banks of the Hudson River. The sleet had let up, the stars made visible in the night sky by the strange absence of city lights.

  Patrick looked to the shoreline where a crowd of people were huddling in small groups. Moving closer, he could distinguish two clearly different sects. The elite were dressed in expensive parkas, their faces concealed behind high-tech gas masks and rebreathers, sized even for the few children among them. Their servants, the majority being foreign, were wearing secondhand outer garments, filtering the night air through cloth painting masks and scarves while they kept vigil over children’s backpacks and overstuffed suitcases. A few were walking dogs on leashes.

  A dozen masked gunmen herded the procession to a small pier. All eyes were on the river, where a massive garbage scow was slowly making its way south down the Hudson.

  The barge docked. Patrick recognized its corporate logo, the vessel owned by the Lucchese family, a crime syndicate operating out of Brooklyn. A skeleton crew tied off the three-thousand-ton flattop. An African-American woman in her early forties climbed down from the pilothouse, dressed in a long black leather coat, matching boots, and dark camouflage pants. A gas mask was strapped to her face. A holstered.44 Magnum at her slender waist.

  She approached Greg “Wonderboy” Mastroianni, a capo in the Lucchese crime family. “I’m Charon. The senator’s aide arranged for us to off-load the suits at Governor’s Island. We need to move. We’ve only got a twenty-minute window before the Coast Guard cutter returns.”

  “Load ’em… after they pony up the admission fee.”

  “You heard the man! Cash, jewels, gold — no one gets on board without paying up front.”

  A well-dressed man in his forties cut in front of an older couple, opening his attaché case. “Here’s $26 million in bearer bonds. That should be more than enough to cover the eleven of us and our two au pairs.”

  Charon used her flashlight to exam the bonds. “Oil companies, huh? Works for me. Okay, old man, you’re next. How many you bringing on board?”


  The frail man with the silver hair and fur-lined aviator hat was in his late seventies. His wife balanced on a walker, assisted by two large bodyguards. “There are eighty or ninety of us. Half the money’s already been transferred, you’ll receive the other half when we arrive safely. My wife just had a hip replacement, make sure you find her someplace comfortable on board.”

  “This look like the Queen Mary to you? She can sit in garbage like everyone else.”

  The frail man’s voice rasped venom. “How dare you! Do you have any idea who I am?”

  Virgil pulled Shep aside. “We need to leave… now.”

  “What about the children? I still have ten vials of vaccine. If I save two for my family, that leaves me with—”

  “Hide the box and say nothing. We’ll cross paths with other souls more worthy of being saved.”

  “What if I give them a few vials to take to the health authorities in New Jersey. Dr. Nelson said—”

  “Open your eyes, Patrick. These are society’s gluttons, they have no desire to save anyone but themselves. Rich and powerful, they’ve lived their entire lives believing the world was left to them alone to control. Corruption veils them from the Light, greed binds them to Satan. Behind those masks are the faces of men who raped the retirement funds of hardworking families even as they pocketed tens of millions of dollars in bonuses. Even now, they attempt to use their ill-gotten fortunes to buy a passage to freedom, oblivious to the reality that their escape from Manhattan could potentially spread the plague to the rest of the world. Take a good look at them, son. See these gluttons for what they really are.”

  Patrick stared at the silver-haired old man, who had foolishly removed his gas mask to argue with the black woman. “Now you listen here. My ancestors were running this country back when yours were still running buck naked in the jungle. And you, my Sicilian friend, who do you think arranged this little excursion out of Manhattan? Your boss works for me, and so does the senator! Without me, you assholes wouldn’t make it a hundred feet past this pier.”

  The Mafia capo shined his flashlight on the old man’s identification, then unfolded a slip of paper and verified the name. “Ah, damn. Let him on.”

  “Get some of your thugs to assist my wife, then get us to Governor’s Island, pronto. My private jet is waiting for us at LaGuardia. I need to be in London in eight hours.”

  The silver-haired man paused, as if sensing a presence. Slowly, he turned to face Patrick—

  — his eyes nocturnal and glowing, like a cat’s. His ears — pointed and bat-like. Thin lips retract to reveal rotting, pointy yellow teeth. The fingers narrow into talons. Though his posture remains decrepit, the frail old man seems wired with an inner strength. A living corpse, more reptilian than human. A creature of the night.

  The servants cleave to him, their bodies encircled by swarms of wasps and hornets. The domestics’ faces are swollen and bleeding from the stings, their mouths sealed permanently with a sewn-on hundred-dollar bill.

  The silver-haired Nosferatu rasps at Shep, each word hissing like a snake. “Yessss? You wisssh sssomething?”

  The black woman, Charon, hovers behind the vampire’s right shoulder. She smiles seductively at Shep, her leather coat having morphed into a pair of giant wings. The gunmen surrounding her have devolved into Neanderthals, their bulging eyes behind the gas masks jaundice yellow.

  Virgil dragged Shep back through the crowd, away from the hungry eyes burning with malice, out of earshot of the whispers cursing him in the darkness. They managed to clear the area without incident, moving south along a deserted shoreline dusted white with sleet and snow.

  Patrick faced into the wind, the frigid air helping to clear the hellish vision from his brain. “The vaccine… the hallucinations seem so real.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Demons and the damned. Bags of flesh without souls.”

  “What I see are people who have no love of God nor respect for other human beings. They may succeed in crossing this river, but the baggage they carry with them is chaos and darkness. They’ll die unrepentant and pay for their sins with a currency measured by the suffering they’ve inflicted upon their fellowman.”

  Virgil and Patrick huddled by the river’s edge, watching as the last group climbed aboard the barge, the rich using their luggage as chairs on the acre of garbage. After a few moments the twin engines throttled to life, the churning propellers gradually moving the flattop away from the pier, pushing the scow on its southerly course toward Governor’s Island.

  The sensation was one of weight, as if the Earth’s gravitational pull had suddenly doubled around him, turning Patrick Shepherd’s blood into liquid lead. In a dream state he turned to his left, his movements slow and surreal, the terror causing his lower intestines to clench.

  The Angel of Death stood by the Hudson’s lapping waves, its black wing-like garment tattered and heavy, the creature exuding an aged musk that permeates Patrick’s lungs. The hood had reduced the profile to a long, thin nose and pointed chin, the flesh spackled over bone. The knobby right hand clutched the scythe by its wooden handle, the blade held upright, the metal tinged a bizarre asparagus green.

  The Grim Reaper watched the barge as it passed… and grinned.

  Hudson River/John F. Kennedy International Airport

  10:47 P.M.

  The Reaper hovered three thousand feet above the Hudson River, its nocturnal eyes piercing the darkness as it hungrily searched for any humans attempting to escape Manhattan.

  Thirty-six feet long, with a sixty-six-foot wingspan, the MQ-9 Reaper was a five-thousand-pound unmanned aerial drone designed to provide its operators with long-range intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Larger and more powerful than the MQ-1 Predator, the Reaper was classified as a Hunter-Killer, its reinforced chassis armed with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided smart weapons, and GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions.

  The “Reapers” had arrived at JFK International aboard a C-130 Hercules transport plane, accompanied by a dozen technicians, four two-man flight-control teams, a mobile trailer containing two advanced cockpit ground-control stations, and Major Rosemarie Leipply, a former drone operator and the unit’s commanding officer.

  It took two people to fly a Reaper aerial drone — a pilot using real-time imagery provided by infrared sensors and a sensor operator who controlled the aircraft’s cameras, sensors, and laser-guided munitions. Major Leipply’s trainees were neither commandoes nor pilots, they were the future of military combat: Generation Xers — video-game wizards whose reflexes and hand-eye coordination made them exceptional candidates for operating remotely controlled drones, their lack of flying experience actually an asset.

  Leipply’s star pupil was Kyle Hanley, his military bio typical among her crew. Poor grades in school. Anger issues. Impregnated his girlfriend at seventeen. Stole a car. Enlisted in the Army as an alternative to a jail sentence. Lasted two weeks before going AWOL. Sent to military prison, where he demonstrated superior reflexes in a video game called World of Warcraft — bringing him to the attention of Major Rosemarie Leipply.

  Kyle was stationed on Reaper-1 as the drone’s sensor operator. Before him was an array of monitors featuring night-vision and thermal scanners, the latter able to distinguish a warm-blooded human from the icy waters of the Hudson. Kyle called out instructions over his headset to his pilot, Brent Foehl, a three-hundred-pound behemoth wearing an old Brian Dawkins Philadelphia Eagles football jersey. “Two more jet skis. Zooming in on Camera One. We’ve got two passengers each. Descend to three hundred feet.”

  “Roger that. Descending to three hundred feet, coming about on course one-eight-zero… that should put you right in their path.”

  “Munitions locked and loaded.”

  “Targets are splitting up.”

  “I see ’em. We’ll take ’em north to south.”

  “Roger that. Range: fifty meters. Reducing speed to forty knots. Hit ’em, baby. L
et ’em feel the rain.”

  The hail of white bullets across the dark screen cut a lethal broadside swath through the first Jet Ski, instantly killing forty-eight-year-old South Carolina native Cindy Grace and her husband, Sam before homing in on their in-laws. A sudden blast of white light momentarily blotted out Kyle’s thermal imager as the second jet ski’s gas tank exploded.

  “Four more in the hole.” Kyle leaned over and high-fived his pilot.

  “Enough!” Major Leipply felt her insides quaking, her undigested rations threatening their return. “Those bogeys are not monsters on a video game or enemy combatants, they are human beings. American citizens!”

  “We had to make a game of it, Major,” retorted Brent Foehl. “You think we could do this if we actually thought about what we were doing?”

  “We’ll try to keep it on the down-low,” Kyle promised, bowing his head.

  “That would help, thank you.” She glanced at the digital clock posted above their station. “Finish your shift, I’ll check on your relief.”

  Kyle waited until Major Leipply left. “Those bogeys are not monsters on a video game… blow me, Major Hypocrite. Funny how you never had a problem with it when we were picking off locals in Pakistan.”

  “Amen, brother. Eddie baby, what’s the score?”

  Sensor operator Ed White leaned out from his station on Reaper-2. “Six minutes, assholes. We’re still up by fourteen kills.”

  “Don’t start spending your winnings yet, hotshot.” Brent launched Reaper-1 into a steep climb before following the Hudson to the south. “Coming to course two-seven-zero. Let’s see if anything’s brewing down by the remains of the G.W.”

  Kyle leaned over to whisper to his pilot. “Yo, man, the Hudson’s a no-fly zone until 2300 hours.”

  “So says you. I was told anyone escaping Manhattan could infect the rest of the world with plague. No one’s going near the Harlem River for at least another half hour, and I ain’t losin’ this bet. I don’t care if it’s a rowboat, a scuba diver, or a bunch of whores on a dinghy… as far as I’m concerned, if it leaves, it bleeds.”