Gary pried a noodle out of the box and stuffed it between his lips. Maybe he’d suck on it until it got soft, he thought.
Maybe it didn’t have to be so bad, Gary had thought. If you were going to die anyway, die and come back… the worst part was losing your intellect, your brainpower. Everything else he could do without but he couldn’t handle being a mindless corpse wandering the earth forever. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way. The stupidity of the dead had to come from organic brain damage, right, brought on by anoxia. The critical moment came between when you stopped breathing and you woke up again, that was when it must happen, the juncture between thinking rational human and dumb dead animal. If you could keep yourself oxygenated, have yourself ventilated, hooked up to a dialysis machine to keep your blood moving, carrying that critical oxygen to your head, yeah. With everything on battery power in case the grid went down.
His teeth bit down hard, his stomach unwilling to wait for saliva to break the noodle down. He chewed hard, crunching the rigatoni into fragments as hard and sharp as little knives. Put another noodle in his mouth. Another.
One day he’d watched a government helicopter, the first one he’d seen in a week, come down with a noise like a car crash somewhere in the park. For hours he watched the black smoke rise from the site, watched the tips of orange flames dancing above the skyline. Nobody went to the rescue. Nobody went to put out the fire. He knew the time had come. A piece of noodle dug deep into his lower lip, neatly puncturing his skin.
With a start he realized what he was doing and spat the noodle fragments in the dry sink. With probing fingers he dug around inside his lips, feeling a hundred tiny lacerations there. He could have really injured himself—but he’d barely felt anything. The pain had been so distant, just a faint glow on the horizon.
He was going nuts cooped up inside. He needed to get out of his apartment. He needed to find more food. Real food.
Meat.
7
"Epivir. Ziagen. Retrovir." Osman went down the list shaking his head. "These are anti-AIDS drugs."
I nodded but I was barely listening. Yusuf brought the good ship Arawelo around a few points and Manhattan appeared out of the clearing fog. It looked like a cubist mountain range hovering over the water. Like a crumbling fortress. But then it had always looked like that. I expected to see some kind of obvious damage, some scar left by the Epidemic. There was nothing. Only the silence, the perfect quiet on the water told you something bad had happened here.
Osman laughed. "But Mama Halima doesn’t have AIDS. You must be mistaken."
I’d figured that as we approached the city I owed it to Osman to explain why we’d crossed half the planet to reach a haunted city. He and Yusuf—and of course the girl soldiers—were about to risk their lives for my mission. They deserved to know. "These are my orders. Read them however you want." Mama Halima was the only thing standing between Osman’s family and a horde of the undead. If he wanted to think she was beyond the reach of HIV I was ready to let him. I wished I could just ignore the facts myself—Sarah was counting on Halima as well. Somalia was held together by nothing but one woman’s vicious charisma. If Halima died now rival factions would claim her legacy. Tempers would flare, old feuds would come to the foreground. Somalia would tear itself apart. How long could a country in the middle of a civil war resist the dead?
Yusuf brought us up alongside Battery Park, past the Staten Island Ferry docks. All the boats were gone now—most likely they’d been commandeered by refugees. We cruised by a hundred yards out from the docks and headed northeast, up into the East River, passing Governors Island on our right. Brooklyn was a brown shadow to the east.
"This is madness, though. These drugs can be found anywhere. Let me take you somewhere else," Osman suggested, sounding infinitely reasonable.
"I’ve heard that before," I sighed. "By the time they picked me they’d already combed every city in Africa, sent suicide squads into Nairobi and Brazzaville and Jo’burg. I suggested half a dozen more places, refugee camps, UN medical stations they might not have heard of. All of them were overrun or demolished. Then I hit upon this bright idea. I didn’t think it would actually happen." Mama Halima’s agents had presumed you could get AIDS drugs over the counter in any Duane Reade in New York. As far as I knew, though, there was only one place in the world I could be guaranteed of finding everything on the list. The fifth floor of the UN Secretariat Building, in the Medical Offices. And the Secretariat was right on the water, accessible by boat.
Mama Halima’s troops had wasted no time. They had commandeered Osman’s ship, painted a new name on its prow, and we were on our way. If Osman didn’t like the mission—and he didn’t—he was too smart to voice that opinion.
Yusuf poured on a little steam as we turned northward and entered the main channel of the East River. He steered right for the dark solid mass of the Brooklyn Bridge, still wrapped in mist. Osman rubbed at his clean-shaven face and looked like he was about to have a great idea any time now.
"I think I know," he said, finally. "I think I know it now."
I stared at him, expectantly.
"She wants the drugs to give them to other people. People who are infected with AIDS. She is a very generous woman, Mama Halima."
I just shrugged and moved to the bow of the trawler where some of the girls were clustered, pointing out the buildings we passed as if they were tourists looking for the Empire State and the Chrysler Building. I kept my eye on the shore, on the masses of pilings and docks that made up the South Street Seaport. They were abandoned, stripped clean of anything that might float. Here and there I could see people moving on the piers. Dead people, I knew, but in the mist I could pretend. Otherwise I would jump every time one of them moved.
This would all be over in a couple of hours, I told myself. Get in, get the drugs, get out. Then I could go back and see Sarah again. Start my life over somehow, I guess. Survival was the first order of the day. Then we could start thinking about how to fix things. The hardest and the longest part would be rebuilding.
My abdomen kept hitching up, like I was sucking in my gut but I couldn’t relax the muscles.
The girls started chattering excitedly and I followed their eyes as they leaned out over the bow. It was nothing, just a yellow buoy. Someone had painted something on it black, a crude design I knew I recognized. Oh. Yeah. The international biohazard symbol. Osman came up behind me and grabbed my bicep. He saw it too and yelled back for Yusuf to ease up on the throttle.
"It’s nothing," I told him. "Just a warning. We already know this place is dangerous."
He shook his head but didn’t say anything. I supposed he knew more about maritime signage than I did. He pointed at a shadow out on the water and told Yusuf to stop the propellers altogether.
"It’s nothing," I said again. Maybe I was susceptible to denial myself. The trawler rolled north, quiet now, so quiet we could hear the water slapping against the hull. The shadow on the water started to resolve itself. It formed a line across the estuary, a dark smudge edged with tiny white breakers. There was some kind of big building on a pier that stuck way out and beyond that the water just changed texture. We drew steadily closer on momentum alone until Osman had to order the engines thrown into reverse. We were getting too close if it was some kind of obstruction. The smudge took shape as we coasted, turning into piles, heaps of something dumped in the water, lots of little things dumped in heaps.
Bodies.
I couldn’t see them very well. I didn’t want to. Osman pushed a pair of binoculars at me and I took a look anyway. The East River was clogged with human corpses. My mouth was dry but I forced myself to swallow and look again. On the forehead of each corpse (I checked a dozen or so to make sure) was a puckered red wound. Not a bullet wound. More like something you would make with an icepick.
They had known—the authorities in New York had know what was happening to their dead. They must have known and they tried to stop it or at least slow it down.
You destroy the brain and the corpse stays down, that was the lesson we’d all learned at so much cost. In Somalia they burned the bodies afterward and buried the remains in pits but here, in a city of millions, there just wouldn’t have been anywhere to put them. The authorities must have just dumped the bodies in the river hoping the current would wash them away but there had been too many dead for even the sea to accept.
Thousands of bodies. Tens of thousands and it hadn’t been enough, the work couldn’t be done fast enough maybe. It would have been arduous, nasty work. I could feel it in my arms, as if I’d done it myself. Punching through bone and grey matter with a spike, over and over again. And it would have been dangerous, too, a body you went to dispose of could sit up and grab for your arm, your face and next thing you knew you would be on the pile yourself. Who had done it? The National Guard? The firemen?
"Dekalb," Osman said softly. "Dekalb. We can’t go through. There’s no way through."
I stared north past the raft of corpses. It stretched as far as I could see, well past the Brooklyn Bridge. He was right. I couldn’t quite see the UN from there but it was so close. My chest started to heave, with sobbing tears maybe, or maybe I wanted to throw up, I couldn’t tell. The drugs, my only chance to see Sarah again, were right there but they might as well be a million miles away.
Yusuf got the Arawelo turned around and headed back toward the bay while Osman and I tried to figure out what to do next. You could go up, up the Hudson and around, through the Harlem River, circumnavigating Manhattan, and then back down the East River. Osman threw away that plan immediately. “The Harlem River,” he said, pointing at a narrow ribbon of blue on his charts, “it is too shallow. Too much danger of running on the ground.”
“It’s the best chance we have,” I said, my arms tight around my stomach as I stared at the maps.
“I am sorry,” he said, “but this is not possible. Maybe there is something else. Some other place, a hospital. Or a drug store.”
I stared and stared at the maps. I knew this place. I knew it better than anyone else on the boat. Why couldn’t I think of anything?
8
Back in the freezer section of the little bodega, back in the dark Gary finally found what he’d been looking for behind smooth clear glass. He took the box of hamburger patties up to the front and laid them out on the plastic counter by the display of disposable lighters and the lotto machine. They’d been cool to the touch in the freezer—completely thawed out and with a little fuzzy white mold on top but still good, he thought. They looked good to him, anyway. He was starving. He contemplated different ways to cook them until he got up the nerve to just bite into one raw and take his chances.
His mouth flooded with saliva and he forced himself to chew, to savor the meat even though his eyes were watering up. The tension in his stomach, the crawling hunger, began to subside and he leaned on the counter with both hands. It had taken him all of the morning to find any scrap of meat at all. He’d wandered far afield from his apartment, north into the West Village. But at every butcher’s shop and grocery store he’d found only empty walk-in freezers and vacant meat hooks swaying on their chains. Clearly he wasn’t the first one to be drawn to where the meat used to be. For the last hour he’d been combing all the little neighborhood convenience stores and the back pantries of shoebox-sized diners and this was all he’d found. Judging by the way his stomach was relaxing and his hands had stopped shaking the walk had been worth it.
He was devouring his second burger patty when he heard a noise behind him and he turned around to find he wasn’t alone. A big guy in a trucker cap and sideburns had stumbled into the store and knocked over a rack of slim-jims. It was the first of the walking dead that Gary had ever seen up close. The intruder’s head rolled on his thick neck and drool slid from his slack lower lip as he stared at Gary with eyes that couldn’t quite seem to focus. He had the same dead veins and bluish pallor Gary had seen in his bathroom mirror but this guy’s face was slack and loose, the skin hanging in folds at his jowls and neck. He was missing a big chunk out of his left thigh. His jeans were caked with clotted blood and as he slouched forward the leg bent underneath him all wrong, threatening to tumble him right into Gary’s chest.
Slowly, painfully, Trucker Cap got his leg back underneath him and lurched across the counter. Without a word the dead man lurched forward and his hands went out, grabbing at the remaining burgers. Before Gary could stop him the big guy shoved one of the patties into his mouth and started reaching for another, the last of the four. Gary said “Hey, come on, that’s mine” and grabbed the back of the guy’s flannel shirt to pull him away from the food but it was like trying to move a refrigerator. He tried to grab the guy’s arm and got swatted backward, knocking him into a display of clattering cans of Starkist tuna. Slowly the big guy turned to face Gary with those dull glassy eyes. Gary looked down and saw he still had part of the hamburger patty in his left hand.
The big guy’s jaw stretched wider as if he would swallow Gary like a snake swallowing an egg. Still no sound came out of him, no sound at all. He took a wobbling step forward on his bad leg, nearly fell. Corrected himself. His hands came up in fists.
“No,” Gary said, scrabbling to get to his feet but slipping in the spill of cans, “get away from me.” The big guy kept coming. “Don’t you dare!” Gary shrieked, sounding absurd even to his own ears but it just came out. “Stop!”
The big guy stopped in mid-stride. The expression on his face changed from hungry anger to just plain confusion. He looked around for a minute and Gary could feel the guy’s cold form looming over him, a dead shadow in the air ready to come down like a ton of bricks, to smash him, to pummel him into mush.
He just stood there, coming no closer.
“Fuck off and die!” Gary screamed, terrified.
Without a sound the big guy turned on his good heel and walked out of the bodega. He didn’t look back.
Gary watched him go then pulled himself back up to his feet. He was feeling shaky again. Almost nauseous. He finished the patty in his hand but it didn’t help as much as his first one had. The fight with the big guy had taken something out of him. He ran a hand through his hair, looked back at the freezer section. It was empty now. He bent down and gathered up all the slim-jims the big guy had knocked over. Those were meat too, he thought. Maybe they would help.
As he shambled out of the bodega the ringing in his ears came back with no warning and louder than ever. He knew he had to move, to get away from the area before the big guy came back for more but he could barely stand upright. He clutched his head as the world reeled around him and leaned against the cool plate glass of the store window. A burst of white noise shot through his head like an icy jet of water and he staggered out into the street—what the hell was happening? He felt his legs moving under him, felt himself propelled through space but he couldn’t see anything, couldn’t make his eyes focus.
What was going on? His medical training was useless in describing what was happening to him. Aneurysm? Ischemic event? His brain felt like it was drying out and shrinking—was this all he got for his hard work, half a day’s worth of intellect? Was he going to lose it now?
He felt something hard and metallic collide with his thighs and he forced himself to stop moving. He reached down and felt a railing, a metal railing that he clutched to as he sank down to his knees. With great effort he forced his eyes open and knelt there staring, staring with a desperate intensity at the Hudson River in front of him. If he had taken another three steps he would have fallen in.
Everything was so vivid, clearer than it had ever been in life. Gary looked up at New Jersey across the water, at the hills there and saw the ground shake. He clutched hard at the railing as the earth rolled beneath him and cracks ran through the rock, cracks spouting noxious black fumes that filled the whole world with their smoke.
Behind him at the bodega the big guy’s trucker hat rolled off his head as he collapsed to the pavement. His hands spasm
ed as the spark of animation flowed out of him and his eyes fluttered closed.
9
“That one is too active,” Ayaan said, scanning the wharf with her binoculars. The dead man in question wore nothing but a pair of tight jeans that overflowed with his bloated flesh. He clutched to a wooden piling with one arm while the other snatched at the air. His hungry face followed the boat as we steamed past.
On top of the wheelhouse Mariam called down for her Dragunov and one of the other girls passed it up. Mariam steadied herself against the Arawelo’s radar dome and peered through the scope of the sniper rifle. I put my fingers in my ears a moment before she fired. The dead man on the pier spun around in a cloud of exploding brain matter and fell into the water.
Sixteen years old and Mariam was already an expert sniper. When did the girl soldiers have time to train? I suppose there hadn’t been anything else to do in Somalia. No cable tv, no shopping malls.
Osman cleared his throat and I looked back at the map. “Here,” I said, pointing at a blue letter H on the map, just a few blocks in from the Hudson. I looked up at the line of buildings on the shore and pointed at a spot between two of them. “St. Vincent Medical Center. They have—or rather, they had—an HIV care center.” I shrugged. “It’s dangerous. We’ll be out of sight of the ship for at least an hour. But it’s the best option, if we can’t get to the UN.”
Three Zombie Novels Page 3
