“Blood oxygen levels good, yes.”
The green phantom kept her alive, but just barely, while men came and went from the room, their hands on her, their eyes everywhere. They attached wires to her, they scraped samples of the scum between her teeth.
“Basal body temperature is being normal.”
Sometimes she could see them moving around her, their faces flat, their hands cold. Sometimes they were only blurs or the flickering of a moth’s wings against her skin.
“You be interested to seeing this,” someone said, their hand on her lower belly, a latex glove in her pubic hair. She felt half a dozen people all around her look up, she could feel them paying attention. She could see Cicatrix across the room, the living woman in soft focus as her nostrils flared, her eyes fixed on Ayaan’s midriff. Her bald head flushed with shame. Something metal and cold touched her, spread her skin open.
“She’s still virgin,” the doctor said.
Ayaan kicked against her bonds but it was useless, her body barely rippled. It must have looked like a muscle spasm. Then time went blue...
...she wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew it was right, blue...
...and needles, there were needles on her skin. Pricking her. She felt a single drop of blood roll down her collarbone, smash apart against the papery collar of her paper gown. She looked down and watched the blood wick through the blue fabric, a spiky blossom as capillary action drew it away from her skin.
“You need to lift head,” someone told her. She listened—it felt like she could only use one sense at a time. Something buzzing, an insect, a horrible nasty wasp right next to her ear, climbing on her throat, dragging its sting through her flesh.
“I can’t... I can’t do this, not with head like this,” the voice said. She couldn’t see who it belonged to.
In front of her the Tsarevich faded into existence. Like a cloud passing in front of the sun. His very pale eyes looked up into hers. His voice... she’d never heard it before... it fit him perfectly. High, clear, a boy’s voice. The voice of a soloist in a boy’s choir. “Is called strappado, some time ago. Now, we call it stress positions. KGB make it perfect. Is very effective.”
“Hand me silver again,” the other voice said. Right behind her head. The wasp stuck its tail into the back of her neck.
“We tie hands, then tie to ceiling. You cannot sit down without tearing arms from sockets. Body won’t let you do that, even when unconscious. You have not sit down three days. Your arms are dying, no blood. All blood goes to feet, which swell, then crack. Used at Guantanamo Bay, and at Kabul. In Belfast and Mosul and Jerusalem. Roman Catholic church invent it for Inquisition, because no blood shed. But KGB make it perfect.”
Ayaan tried to lick her lips but her mouth stuck together as if it were full of glue. Concentrating, squinting her eyes she managed to get a drop of spit onto her soft palate. Our kicks are never so simple, Cicatrix had told her. “Torture,” she creaked. “Do you,” she said, and waited until she had more saliva to loosen her tongue, “come when you see me like this? Does it make you come?”
The Tsarevich smiled at her. The kind of smile a grandmother would keep on living for. “Is not for me, is for you. Such talent you have. Such talent I never waste. I have use for you, even now. Is sad, must hurt so much, is very sad, but also, is necessary. Must break down ignorance and fear. You see?”
You mean, she thought, lacking the energy to keep talking, you mean you have to wear down my psychological barriers. Ayaan knew exactly what they were doing to her. Even in her reduced state she could still think, if slowly. They were torturing her in preparation for brainwashing. No matter how much resistance she put up, they would just push her farther. No matter how long it took, they could wait for her to come around.
“Fuck, get mop! She wets self,” the rough voice said.
The Tsarevich frowned. “Kidneys shut down after three days. Is permanent, if you don’t sit down.” He took a handkerchief out of the sleeve of his armor and mopped at the front of her pants.
“What,” Ayaan stammered, “what do you really look like?”
His eyes sparkled. “You find out, and soon,” he told her. “Very soon now. You come stand at my side.” He put a hand over his mouth, catching himself in a faux pas. “I mean to say, sit, at my side, yes?”
The smile lit up his face and the cloud moved away from the sun.
Stay alive, she thought. Stay alive for Sarah. She needs you.
“You will to be mine,” he told her, patting her feet.
She knew better than to antagonize him. It would only get her another day on the strap. Still. She was still Ayaan, at least for the time being. “That’s what the Least said,” she told the Tsarevich. “And look at him now.”
Chapter Two
Hell Gate, the neck of water between Manhattan and the northern extent of Long Island, stretched out before them as placid as a sheet of glass. “This was impassible before,” Osman said. His haunted eyes told her this journey was dredging up old memories he’d long since sealed away in the back dark corners of his mind. She felt a bizarre communion with the old man, a place where their two very different lives had finally touched. She wondered if that was what growing up felt like.
“There were bodies. Thousands of them.” He moved to the bow and stared ahead through Ayaan’s old field glasses. The diesels chugged along just fine without him at the wheel. “And the birds. The pigeons, the seagulls—they were a carpet of white feathers.” He lowed the binoculars and looked back at her where she sat atop the wheelhouse. “A city’s worth of bodies. A raft of them.”
They were gone, the bodies he described. Gone for years probably. They had taken the long way round to Governors Island, a paranoid excursion that took most of a day as they headed back out to sea and then rounded the extensive coastline of Long Island, then coming down through the Sound and the East River. Osman had been convinced the bodies would still be in the way but Sarah was terrified that the Tsarevich might be watching them, that he had some way of knowing where they went and that he could follow them to their destination. Only by wasting a day’s good sailing could she relax and feel she had shaken off that hypothetical pursuit.
The city passed her by on the right like a series of eroded cliffs. Dramatic, startling sometimes in their size, the buildings didn’t connect with anything she’d ever seen before. The tree branches emerging from the windows, the fallen piles of concrete and steel looked like natural features. Even the occasional spill of glass where an entire skyscraper’s facade had collapsed down into the street might have been an outcropping of some glittering crystalline mineral. As they passed what her chart told her was called Roosevelt Island Osman rushed back to his controls to steer them around a twist of metal that slumped across the river like an elephant’s trunk drawing up water. It took her a while to realize it must be what was left of a bridge. Rust and metal fatigue had claimed most of it, leaving broken legs sticking up into a blue sky, rising hundreds of feet up into the air.
Osman pointed out the United Nations Secretariat building to her as they drifted past. The lower General Assembly building was almost complete screened from view by vibrant green foliage. Her father had worked there once, Sarah knew, but she couldn’t imagine it, not really. No more than she could imagine the state funerals of the pharaohs interred in the Pyramids.
The tallest spires stood in lower Manhattan, structures Sarah’s brain could only interpret as distant mountains. She could barely stand to look at the empty buildings, at their uppermost broken windows. Some of them she actually recognized from her children’s books—the Empire State building, its crowning needle broken off near the base. The Chrysler building, with long streamers of plant life draping from its triangular portholes, its famous gargoyles leering out of leafy bowers. She had an easier time watching the piers and warehouses of Brooklyn slide by on her left. They passed under the Brooklyn Bridge without serious incident, its Gothic pylons standing proud and un
scathed, its endless stretches of cabling tangled but unbroken, but its roadway having fallen away completely to form dozens of new, ephemeral islands in the water below, concrete crags that proved a hazard to navigation. The river opened up, turned into a broad and quiet bay. Osman kept them close to Manhattan, to the long piers of the Lower East Side, then brought them around, out of the Buttermilk Channel and over toward the ferry dock of Governors Island.
Two broad slips, much larger than the tug required, formed the dock and were topped by elevated equipment shacks that Sarah’s militarily-trained mind identified immediately as perfect guard towers. Beyond lay a paved walkway that lead between two low buildings on the island’s shore. To the east stood a squat octagonal tower pierced with ventilation ducts and giant fans, its base surrounded by yellow and rusting construction equipment. On the other side of the dock, nearly around the corner of the island she could see a round structure that might have been a fort or a prison. These imposing structures, however, could not hide what lay in the island’s interior—pleasant Victorian houses in a park full of well-tended trees and what looked like a sprawling, immaculately-maintained garden.
A noise like a tree being hit by lightning made Sarah jump. A gun shot—it sounded like a sniper round, maybe, or just a high-powered rifle bullet. The sound bounced off the water, magnified, resonated for what felt like minutes. She slid down from the wheelhouse and dropped below the gunwale. At the throttle Osman just laughed.
“Just a shot across the bows.” He pulled on the cord that sounded the tug’s fog horn and Sarah stuffed her fingertips in her ears. “It’s an old tradition, baby girl, nothing to be afraid of.” He picked up the microphone of the tug’s radio set and hailed the island in English.
Slowly, carefully, Sarah uncurled herself and rose to peer over the side. The windows of the elevated equipment shacks were open to the breeze. She saw the barrels of rifles and even one machine gun poking out. Surely that was more than what was needed to repel the occasional ghoul, drawn by the scent of human flesh to dog-paddle across the bay. Maybe Governors Island had had living visitors before. Borderline personality types. Pirates.
Osman couldn’t get anyone on the radio. He took a megaphone from one of the tug’s lockers and handed over the wheel. With shaking hands she kept them on course, the diesels powered down until they were barely ticking over.
“Ahoy over there, friends,” Osman shouted through the megaphone. “Don’t you remember me? I’d think a face this handsome would stick with you. Where’s my Marisol? Last time I saw her she was out to here with a baby. Where’s Kreutzer, that old asshole? There must be some of you that remember my old boat, the Arawelo. You all sailed on her, after all.”
He set down the megaphone and shrugged. “If that doesn’t convince them we’re friends, they were destined to shoot us anyways,” he told Sarah. He took the wheel back from her and steered them into one of the ferry slips. The tug sat lower in the water than the ferries had by a considerable margin. Inside the slip they were penned in by high walls lined in shock-absorbing plastic. They couldn’t see up onto the island at all. If anyone wanted to kill them it would be like shooting fish in a plastic tub.
When they bounced to a halt against the slip walls he ran forward and threw a line up onto the dock. Unseen hands took it, tied it off, made it secure. A ladder appeared over the edge and dipped down to smack the tug’s deck. Osman went up first, unarmed. Sarah came after with her Makarov in her pocket, loaded and ready. When Osman left Governors Island the last time he had been a hero and the island’s inhabitants had waved at him as he steamed out to sea. Now he was coming back almost anonymously and he might be attacked the second he was over the side. Anything could have happened in the interval. Anyone could have come along, slain the original survivors, and taken the island for themselves. It was that kind of world. It had been for twelve years.
At the top of the ladder five men with assault rifles waited for them. Only one man had his weapon ready and aimed at them, but that was more than enough. They were lead without a word into one of the buildings that fronted the shoreline, a low, modernist structure of concrete and glass, some of which had been boarded over. The honor guard lead them into a dim room lit only by the sunlight streaming in through high windows. A woman with a boy at her side stood at the far side of the room. She had a pistol in her hand. So did the boy, who might be twelve years old or eight—he was a scrawny little child and the lighting was terrible.
The woman stepped forward, into a patch of light. She was beautiful, astoundingly so, with just a hint of age in her face. Her caramel-colored skin was flawless and her hair, tied back in an explosive ponytail, glimmered in the half-light. She had a broad sash across a homespun black sweater. It read MAYOR, picked out in crystals and sequins.
She should have been a movie star. She had been, if Sarah remembered Marisol’s story correctly. She’d already had some success in z-grade genre films, there had already been some buzz about her, whisperings of a career to come, of a lifestyle never to be matched again. There weren’t any more movies, though, nor any Hollywood parties or private yachts or any Greek billionaires with ten carat diamond engagement rings. She’d had to settle.
“Osman,” she said, her face melting into joy as she recognized the pilot. “Oh my God, it’s you, Jesus fuck, it’s really you. Wow, that’s a whole lot of bad memories to have to relive at once.” She rushed forward to kiss him all over her face. “Here, here, I want you to meet Jackie,” she said, and ushered her boy over with wild hand gestures. Happiness split the woman’s face, made wrinkles appear in her brow and around her mouth. She was nearly jumping up and down. “Jesus shit! How have you been? What are you doing these days? Who’s your friend? Is this your daughter?” Marisol asked.
Osman laughed. “No, no. This is Sarah. Dekalb’s daughter.”
“Dekalb.” Marisol said. “Dekalb’s daughter.” Emotions erased themselves from her face.
Silence rushed into the room like a cold flood.
“Oh. Hi,” Marisol said.
Chapter Three
“They had pudding in these tiny plastic cups. You would peel back the foil on top and the pudding was in there already made,” a fortyish man with grey hair and squinting eyes said. He mimed the action of pulling back on a piece of foil, his fingertip and thumb pressed very close together, and a light bloomed in his face that didn’t come from the bonfire. “There was always a little dollop of pudding on the foil, that was the best part, it tasted the best anyway.”
A younger woman in a shapeless sweater poked at the fire with a long branch. There wasn’t much firewood on Governors Island but an enormous amount lay just four hundred yards away in Brooklyn. A boat went over every day to retrieve great bundles of sticks and logs from the trees that choked the old city streets. It had been a dangerous occupation once, the survivors told Sarah, but in recent months it was rare to even spot a ghoul, much less be attacked by one. The city had largely emptied out. “Then you could just throw the cup away, right? I kind of remember that,” the woman said. She stared into the fire. “You didn’t have to wash it out.”
“Yeah,” the squinting man agreed, nodding happily. “They had coffee you could just pour boiling water on, and it was ready. They had orange juice that came frozen in a tube and you just let it melt in some water and you could drink it.”
One of the children, a skinny girl of maybe fourteen years, laughed heartily. “Why freeze it in the first place if you were just going to let it melt?”
The old man smiled and laughed but without the girl’s abandon. “Sure.”
“Where did they go?” Sarah asked. She drew a lot of blank stares. “Where did the ghouls go?”
The old man shrugged. “West. Jersey, I guess. It’s not like they migrated or something. They just started wandering away, one by one, maybe looking for food. Over the bridges, the GWB is still standing.”
Sarah hugged herself. The night had come on colder than she expected and her hooded sw
eatshirt, so perfect for desert evenings, couldn’t keep out the damp of the Island. “But why to the west, why did they go into New Jersey?”
“Well,” the old man said, “if they went east they’d get stuck on the L.I.E.”
That elicited more than a few snorting laughs from the older survivors. Sarah had no idea what it meant, or why he had spelled out “lie”. She stood up and watched the fire for a second. She didn’t want to leave its warmth but the clustered survivors sitting in a circle around the blaze were confusing her more than anything else. All they wanted to talk about was what they’d lost, what the world used to have in it. For Sarah, who knew nothing except apocalypse, such talk was just wasted breath.
One of the younger men, a big guy with muscles, jumped up when she turned away from the bonfire. “Where are you headed?” he asked, not necessarily unfriendly. She definitely got the sense he’d been tasked with keeping an eye on her, though.
“I need to urinate,” she announced. The younger survivors tittered. Her guard nodded meaningfully, as if she’d passed a test.
Everything on Governors Island, she ruminated as she headed into the shadows between two Victorian houses, felt like a test. Osman and Marisol had gone off to catch up on old times, leaving her in the company of people she didn’t know. She’d been fed, welcomed effusively, cheered and toasted. She’d been welcomed to sit by the fire, brought into the conversation, given their full attention whenever she spoke. Yet as much as they seemed to want to make her feel welcome they never stopped looking at her, studying her. There were plenty of black women on the Island, so it wasn’t that. She supposed it might be that in such an insular community any newcomer was a thing of fascination, a nine day’s wonder. And surely, anyone who had survived the last twelve years had reason enough not to trust strangers.
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