by Steve Alten
Reaching into his right jacket pocket, he retrieved three small vials of the clear elixir.
Virgil stopped him before he could pass them back. “What about your wife and daughter? Have you forgotten the reason we’re trying to cross Manhattan?”
Manisha’s expression of hope vanished, her mouth quivering. “Your family… where do they live?”
“Battery Park.” Shep grimaced as he searched his jacket pockets again.
“When did you last… I mean, are you certain—”
“Manisha!”
“I am so sorry, forgive me. My husband is right. I cannot take from your family to save mine. You’ve already risked your life—”
“No wait, it’s okay. There were eleven vials to start, I still have six left, two for Bea and my daughter, one for Virgil. Virge, maybe you should take yours now?”
“Hold on to it for me.”
Shep passed the three vials back to Manisha. She trembled as she accepted the gift of life, kissing Patrick’s hand. “Bless you.”
“Just be careful, the drug causes wicked hallucinations. Back in the park… I imagined something hovering over your daughter. I swear, it looked like an angel.”
Dawn raised her head. “You saw her?”
“Saw who?”
Her hands shaking, Manisha hurriedly uncapped the vial. “Dawn, swallow this. It will make you feel better.” She poured the liquid into her daughter’s mouth, fearing the one-armed man’s line of questioning.
“Her? Are you saying what I saw was real? What did I see? Answer me?”
Dawn looked to her mother.
“My name is Manisha Patel, this is my husband, Pankaj. I am a necromancer, a person who communicates with the souls of the dead. The spirit you saw hovering over Dawn, she shares a special bond with our daughter.”
The van lurched again, the impact nearly popping a shock absorber.
Francesca screamed, slapping Paolo on his arm. “What’s wrong with you? She just said she speaks to the dead. Stop running them over!”
“Sorry.” Spotting a break in the wall of cars, he veered across Fifth Avenue, working his way east along 68th Street.
“Manisha, this soul… you called it a she?”
The necromancer nodded at Shep, swallowing the tasteless vaccine. “She has been my spiritual guide ever since we moved to New York. She warned us to leave Manhattan, but we were too late. How is it you were able to see her?”
Shep winced as the van rocked wildly, the pain in his shoulder excruciating. “I don’t know. Like I said, the vaccine causes hallucinations. To be honest, that’s all I thought it was.”
“What you glimpsed,” Virgil interjected, “was the veiled Light of the soul. Remember what I told you back in the hospital, that our five senses lie to us, that they act as curtains that filter out the true reality of existence. In order to be visible, light requires an object to refract upon. Think of deep space. Despite the presence of countless stars, space remains dark. Sunlight only becomes visible when it reflects off an object, like the Earth or the moon. What you saw was this companion soul’s Light reflecting off the girl.”
“Why her?”
“Perhaps the girl possesses something very special, like her mother.”
“And what is that?” Pankaj asks.
Virgil smiled. “Unconditional love for the Creator.”
Manisha gazed up at the old man, tears in her eyes. “Who are you?”
* * *
The high-rise apartment was heavy with the scent of aroma candles. The dying flames flickered within designer glass jars aligned across the granite kitchen table, reflecting off the stainless-steel surface of the Sub-Zero refrigerator. Powerless, the double-sized doors lacked the vacuum to remain sealed.
Forty-four-year-old Steven Mennella moved through the condominium as if he were wearing a lead suit. Steven was an NYPD sergeant, his wife, Veronica, a career nurse who had recently taken a job at the VA Hospital.
Steven grabbed a scented candle from the kitchen and carried it into the master bedroom. Leaving it on his bedside table, he stripped off his uniform, meticulously hanging it up in the walk-in closet. Searching by feel, he removed a recently pressed collared white shirt from a hanger, along with his favorite gray suit. He dressed quickly, then selected from a tie rack the patterned tie his daughter, Susan, had given him on his last birthday. He knotted the silk tie, slipped on his leather belt and matching dress shoes, then did a quick check in the closet mirror.
For a brief moment, he contemplated making the bed.
Leaving the bedroom, he returned to the living room. The apartment was situated on the thirtieth floor, twenty feet above the dense layer of an ominous brown maelstrom. At the moment, the night sky above the balcony was starry and clear, offering a bizarre view of a cloud city — Steven imprisoned in this penthouse nightmare… alone.
Veronica was lying on the U-shaped leather couch. The Veterans Administration nurse’s pale face was no longer pained, her blue eyes fixed in a glassy, red-rimmed open stare. Steven had washed the blood from his wife’s lips and throat, covering the frightening black tennis-ball-sized welt on her slender neck with the wool blanket.
Leaning over, he kissed his deceased partner on her cold lips. “I left the kids a letter, along with instructions… just like we talked about. Wait for me, hon. I’ll only be a minute.”
Steven Mennella blew out the candles. Clearing his throat, he strode toward the open French doors leading out to the balcony. The full moon was low on the horizon, revealing the thick bank of mud-colored clouds gyrating below. A frigid wind greeted him as he gracefully stepped up onto his favorite chaise lounge, balanced himself on the aluminum rail—
— and stepped off the balcony.
Icy crystals formed on his flesh as he plummeted through the noxious man-made chemical cloud, the wind howling in his ears…
* * *
There was no warning. One moment, Paolo was veering around a mailbox—
— the next, the van was struck by a human meteor.
The hood detonated, the impact crushing the engine block and bursting both front tires. Paolo jammed on the brakes, sending the crippled vehicle skidding sideways into a light pole. Antifreeze exploded out of the damaged front end, soaking the windshield, which looked like a burst watermelon across the spiderweb shattered glass.
The horn wailed and died, yielding to the whimpering chorus of hyperventilated breaths. Francesca palpated her strained swollen belly. “What the hell was that?”
“Everyone out of the car.” Shep kicked open the passenger door, ventilating the van with toxic steam from the antifreeze. For a moment, he stared at the remains of Sergeant Steven Mennella, the corpse embedded in the hood, face-up. Then he turned away. “We need to find another vehicle that runs.”
Not waiting for the others, he sloshed down East 68th Street, his legs calf deep in a moving stream of cold water by the time he reached the intersection of Park Avenue. Main must’ve broken. Maybe a fire hydrant?
Then he saw the nightmarish scene and prayed it was the vaccine.
Park Avenue’s six-lane boulevard resembled a scene straight out of Hades. High-rise office buildings and condominiums formed an ominous corridor squeezed beneath a ceiling of roiling brown clouds. Functioning as insulation, the man-made atmosphere had encapsulated the heat from dozens of car fires, the rising temperatures melting the snow that had been piled high along the curbs, transforming one of Manhattan’s major arteries into a river. Contaminated with gasoline, the floodwaters sprouted pockets of flames that burst and receded across the hellish scene.
Whomp.
The distant sound was somehow familiar, causing the hairs on the back of Shep’s neck to stand on end.
Whomp. Whomp…
His eyes locked onto an object as it dropped out of the clouds a block away. He never saw the impact, but he heard it as it struck a parked vehicle, setting off a car alarm.
Another object dropped, then two more. Shep s
wooned, having realized what he was witnessing.
Manhattan was raining its dead.
But not every object was corpse. Plague-infested suicides leapt from candle-lit apartment windows, dancing in free fall before pulverizing the roofs and hoods and trunks of the countless vehicles that clogged Park Avenue, their insides splattering on impact.
Paolo joined Shep, the two men dumbstruck. “Is this an illusion?”
“No.”
The flood became a swiftly moving current as it swept around Park Avenue onto 68th Street, dragging an object with it. The glow from a burning vehicle revealed the body of a small child.
The image triggered a collage of remembered images that staggered Shep. His heart raced, his senses blinking in and out of reality until suddenly he was no longer in Manhattan—
— suddenly he is back in Iraq, standing along the banks of the Shatt-Al-Arab waterway.
It is dusk, the horizon purging sunlight into orange flames, squelching the heat of day into a tolerable climate. David Kantor is with him, the medic assisting an Iraqi physician. Dr. Farid Hassan drags a headless body from out of the shoreline’s weeds.
David inspects the remains. “Looks like more of al-Zarqawi’s work. Dr. Hassan?”
“I would agree.”
Patrick Shepherd, two months into his first tour of duty, responds with a belch of acid reflux. “What I wouldn’t give to line those bastards up one at a time.”
The Iraqi physician exchanges a knowing look with the American medic. “Dr. Kantor tells me this is your first time in Iraq, yes?”
“Yeah.” Shep searches the weeds for more dead.
“He says you played professional baseball. My son, Ali, he also loved sports. A natural athlete, my son.”
“Hook us up. I’ll teach him how to throw a slider.”
“Ali died four years ago. He was only eight years old.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“But these are just polite words. Are you really sorry? How can you possibly feel the sadness in my heart?”
A cramp-like stitch grips Patrick’s chest. He winces in pain, yet neither David nor Dr. Hassan seem to notice.
In the distance, a small boat approached. A lone figure stood in the bow, its cloaked outline silhouetted by the setting sun.
“If you were truly sorry, Sergeant, you would be home playing baseball, telling your many American fans that the war is wrong. Instead, you are in Iraq, carrying an assault rifle, pretending to be Rambo. Why are you in Iraq carrying an assault rifle, Sergeant Shepherd?”
An internal switch flips, his blood again running cold. “In case you didn’t get the memo, we were attacked.”
“And who attacked you? The September 11 hijackers were Saudis. Why aren’t you in Saudi Arabia, killing Saudi children?”
“American soldiers don’t murder children. I mean, with all due respect, no one ever means to hurt a child. Help me out here, Dr. Kantor.”
“Sorry, rook, it’s time you opened your eyes. There is no Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny’s dead, and everything you think you learned about war from Hollywood and Uncle Sam is bullshit. You think Cheney and Rumsfeld give a rat’s ass about WMDs or Iraqi freedom? Newsflash, Shep: This invasion was strictly about money and power. Our job is to control the populace so Washington can control the oil and make a bunch of rich people a whole lot richer. And those billions allocated for reconstruction? The money’s being spent on military bases, lining the pockets of private contractors like Haliburton and Brown and Root. Bechtel was given the contract to control the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and they’re reaping a fortune while the locals are left with water that’s no longer potable. Money and power, kid, and the real casualties of war are the children. Of course, I doubt that story will ever air on the nightly news.”
“Again with the children? Sir, with all due respect… what are you talking about?”
“Half a million dead children, to be precise.” The Iraqi physician’s dark eyes fill with rage. “When you invaded our country back in ’91, your military purposely targeted our civil works, a calculated yet immoral act that violated the Geneva Convention. You destroyed the dams we used for irrigation. You destroyed our pumping stations. You destroyed our water-purification plants and sewage-treatment facilities. My little boy was not killed by a bullet or explosive, Sergeant Shepherd. My son died from diphtheria. The drugs I would have used to treat Ali’s inflamed heart were banned from entering my country, thanks to American and British sanctions imposed by the United Nations.”
The flatboat moved closer. Shep could make out a hooded figure standing in the stern. Paddling slowly.
“We are not a backward nation, Sergeant. Before the first American invasion, Iraq possessed one of the best health-care systems in the world. Now we are fraught with cholera and typhoid, diarrhea and influenza, Hepatitis A, measles, diphtheria, meningitis, and the list goes on and on. Five hundred thousand children have perished since 1991. Hundreds more continue to die every day because we no longer have access to safe drinking water. Human waste is rampant, leading to infectious diseases.”
Shep spots the body, submerged in weeds…
“—one in eight Iraqi children now dies before its fifth birthday, one in four is chronically malnourished.”
He lifts the seven-year-old girl’s drowned corpse to his chest, his body convulsing as he recognizes her face—
“So please, do not tell me you are sorry for my son’s death. You have no idea what it feels like to lose a child.”
— Bright Eyes.
“Patrick, watch out!”
Flames flared up as a pool of gasoline ignited. Shep staggered back, clutching his face.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded at Paolo, pulling his hands away. His blood ran cold. The flatboat from his daydream was moving slowly down Park Avenue.
A lone figure stood in the wood boat, the Grim Reaper using the stick end of his scythe to guide his craft along the flooded thoroughfare.
Shep backed away as the current swept the craft down Park Avenue and onto 68th Street. The Angel of Death turned its wretched face to him as he passed. The supernal creature nodded, beckoning him to follow.
Shep slogged through the flooded street after him.
The flatboat spun out of the current and over the submerged curb, coming to rest along the sidewalk leading up to the darkened entrance of a neoclassical limestone structure. Nearly a century old, the four-story building, located on the northwest corner of East 68th Street, had large arched windows that wrapped around the first floor and octagonal windows on the upper floor, all situated below a cornice and balustrade roofline.
An engraved sign reads: council of foreign relations.
The floodwaters were washing down the curbside gutter, which inhaled everything the rapids drew into its orifice. Including the remains of the dead.
The Grim Reaper stared at Shep. The two orbital cavities within its skull were filling with dozens of fluttering eyeballs, the unnerving image resembling a honeycomb overflowing with bees. The Death Merchant waved the olive green blade of his scythe at the sewer.
The flooded crevice widened into a massive sinkhole. Tainted water swirled down the oval gullet as if it were a drain, the aperture twenty feet across and still growing. Pools of gasoline ignited, illuminating the subterranean depths below in a fiery orange radiance.
The Reaper pointed a bony index finger at the void, silently commanding Shep to peer into the abyss.
Patrick refused.
The Angel of Death raised its scythe, pile driving the blunt end of the staff against the flooded sidewalk. The resounding tremor unleashed a ring of foot-high waves that cascaded down 68th Street.
Shep glanced around. Paolo, Francesca, Virgil, and the Patels stood rigid as statues, as if they now existed in an alternative dimension from his own. It’s just the vaccine… it’s just another hallucination.
He moved to the edge of the breach. Knee deep in water, he braced his quadriceps
muscles against the tug of the icy current as he looked down.
“Oh, God… no. No!”
Patrick Shepherd was peering straight into Hell.
Battery Park City
5:27 A.M.
Stone Street was a narrow avenue in Battery Park, its road paved with ancient cobblestone, the ground level of its buildings serving as storefronts to many popular eateries. Seventeen hours earlier, locals and tourists had been ordering lunch at Adrienne’s Pizzeria and buying desserts at Financier’s Pastries. Five hours later, they were crowding the Stone Street Tavern, the pub one of many public refuges for out-of-towners with no place to go to escape the mandatory curfew.
By 7 P.M., the free-flowing alcohol had transformed Stone Street into a raucous block party. Music blared from battery-powered CD players. A doomsday “anything-goes attitude” had paired women off with men they had just met, converting the backseats of parked vehicles into temporary bedrooms.
Families with young children abandoned Stone Street, initiating a pilgrimage up Broadway to Trinity Church.
By 10 P.M., the music had stopped playing. By ten thirty, the inebriated turned violent.
Fights broke out. Windows were smashed, businesses vandalized. Women who had consented to sex hours earlier were gang-raped. There was no police, no law. Only violence.
By midnight, Scythe had delivered its own version of justice to the debauchery.
Five and a half hours have passed since the calendar date changed to the dreaded twenty-first of December, the winter solstice transforming Stone Street into a fourteenth-century European village.
There were no lights, just the orange glow of embers smoldering from steel trash cans. A ceiling of mud-colored clouds churned surreally overhead. The cobblestone streets and alleyways were littered with the dead and dying. Melting snow had drenched their remains. Thawed blood flowed again from their nostrils and mouths — drawing rats.
Rats outnumbered the dead and dying sixty to one. High on fleas infected with Scythe, the vermin converged upon the fallen in cannibalistic packs, their sharp teeth and claws gnawing and stripping away husks of flesh, each meal contested, igniting another blood-frothed frenzy.
