I was out of ideas. Where were we going to go? Our only escape route was cut off. We could take shelter in one of the buildings—maybe the Barnes and Noble on the north side of the Square. At least then we would have plenty of reading material to distract us while we slowly starved to death. I had gotten this far on adrenaline but now…
We didn’t hear the dead coming for us. They made no sound. Through the trees in the park we could hardly see them either but somehow we knew we were being surrounded. Call it battlefield paranoia if you want. Maybe we were developing a sixth sense for the dead. I ordered the girls up the stone steps and into Union Square proper where maybe we could see things a little better. When we got to one of the pavilions over the subway entrances the girls raised their rifles out of sheer habit.
“Wacan… kurta…” Ifiyah said softly. Something about head shots. She seemed to lack the strength to issue a real order. I looked at her leg and saw it was still bleeding badly. I called Gary over and told him to tend to it. He’d been a doctor, once. A med student, anyway and that would have to be good enough. I put a hand up to shield my eyes from the sun and scanned the far, western side of the park, looking for any movement.
I found it quickly enough. There was plenty to be seen—dozens, maybe fifty corpses converging on us while we just waited for them to show up. But what could we do? We were about to be pinned down. We had a horde of the undead coming up behind us. They weren’t moving much faster than we could walk but they didn’t need to rest and they would eventually catch up. There were a lot less of them in front of us. We would just have to fight our way through.
“Fathia,” I said, summoning the soldier to stand next to me. “There, do you see them? Are they in range? Every shot has to count.”
She nodded and raised her rifle to her eye. Her shot echoed around the park and a branch fell out of a tree in the distance. She took another shot and I could see one of the dead men flinch. He kept coming, though. Ayaan took her turn next but had no better results. I would have given a lot for a pair of binoculars just then.
They came out into the open near the statue of Lafayette. Big guys with bald heads—no, helmets, they were wearing helmets of some kind. Motorcyclists? One of them had either a big stick or a rifle in his hand and for a bad second I considered the possibility of dead men with guns. He dropped it, though, whatever it was, to free his hand so that he could reach for us even if he was a hundred yards away. These things were like meat-seeking missiles, incapable of guile or subterfuge. They just wanted us so badly they could do nothing else but want.
“That one.” I pointed at the foremost and three shots rang out in quick succession. One of them must have connected—I saw sparks leap up from his helmet. He barely flinched, though. With a start I realized what we were looking at. Riot police.
Sure. There had been fairly widespread looting in the early days of the Epidemic. Lots of public panic. Of course they would have called out the riot cops to keep order. And of course some of them would have succumbed. “Try again,” I said, and they both fired at once. The ex-policeman spun around in a circle as the bullets pelted his head. He collapsed to the ground and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Then he slowly got back up.
“The helmet—it must be armored,” Ayaan said. Jesus, she had to be right. Only a head shot could destroy the walking dead and these particular corpses had bulletproof helmets on.
What the hell could we do? The girls kept firing. I knew they were wasting ammunition but what else could we do? They were trying for face shots now but the helmets had visors to protect against that.
“Give the orders,” one of the girls said, looking up at me. “You in commander now. So give the orders.”
I rubbed my cheek furiously as I looked around. There was a Virgin Megastore on the southern side of the park. I remembered going there when I was last in New York and I seemed to recall it only had a couple of entrances. It would take time, though, to get inside and barricade the place. Time we didn’t have if we couldn’t stop these xaaraan. “Shoot for the legs,” I suggested, “if they can’t walk…” But of course riot cops would be wearing body armor too.
The horde of the dead coming up Fourteenth were still getting closer. The former riot cops were maybe fifty yards away.
“Give the orders,” the girl insisted. I stood there as still as a block of stone without a single idea in my head.
18
The dead riot police were only forty yards away. We could see them clearly now—their padded armor, their helmets with their clear plastic visors showing the cyanotic skin underneath. They moved haltingly as if their muscles had stiffened until they had all the pliability of dry wood. Their feet slipped along the ground, looking for equilibrium that seemed in short supply.
“They won’t stop,” Gary told me. “They won’t ever stop.”
I hardly needed the information. Ifiyah, the wounded commander of the child soldiers who surrounded me had made the mistake of treating the walking dead like any other enemy force. She had tried to rout them with sustained gunfire from a defensible point. She had thought you could kill them all. But there just weren’t enough bullets.
Ayaan fired again and split open a cop’s boot. He stumbled and nearly fell but it didn’t take him down. The one vulnerable part of his body—his head—was covered by a helmet that the relatively slow round of an AK-47 couldn’t penetrate.
I knew that better than anyone. It might as well have been one of the problems I’d had to solve back when I was getting my training from the UN. At seven hundred and ten meters per second, roughly twice the speed of sound at sea level on a sunny day the bullets could impose a great deal of force on those helmets but it would be dispersed by the mesh of Kevlar ballistic fibers lining the inside. The kind of thing a UN weapon inspector would be expected to know. Whether the target was alive or undead had not been one of the variables we’d ever needed to take into account.
At the east side of the park—our exposed flank, as it were—I heard a shout and looked over to see one of the girls waving at me. I’d sent her there to scout the opposition and the signal meant that we had a horde—a veritable army of the undead—crossing Sixth Avenue, no more than two avenue blocks away from our position. At their standard walking speed of three miles per hour (standard living human walking speed is four miles per hour but the dead tend to dawdle) that gave us at most ten minutes before we were overrun. Maybe—maybe—we could fight off the ex-riot cops when we engaged them at close quarters but doing so would take time, time we didn’t have.
I had nothing to fall back on at that point except my training and so I kept doing the numbers in my head. It didn’t matter how pointless my calculations might be.
The ex-police were only thirty yards away when I finally snapped out of it. The girls kept shooting—pointlessly. They weren’t prepared for this, not mentally. They were still fighting a guerilla war. Guerilla tactics assume your opponent will make logical choices in response to your actions. The dead knew nothing of logic. I had to do something crazy, truly insane.
The girls had dumped their excess weaponry in a heap at the base of the statue of Gandhi—an irony I ignored for the moment. I’m not sure what if anything I was thinking except that I had better arm myself. The AK-47 I’d been issued back on the boat had a bent barrel, the result of my desperate use of the weapon as a pry bar back in the hospital. I needed a new weapon if I was going to fight.
I had never fired a gun before with the intent of harming anyone. I knew their specs and schematics and statistics by heart but I’d never fired so much as a pistol in a combat situation. I wasn’t even looking at the weapon I picked up. I knew in an abstract way that it was a Russian made anti-armor piece, an RPG-7V. I knew that I’d read its user manual before. I knew how to load a grenade in the front end of the barrel and how to rest the tube on my shoulder. I knew enough to take the lens cap off the sighting mechanism and how to close one eye and look through the sight with the other. I line
d up the crosshairs with the helmet of the nearest undead cop. Then I lowered my aim until I was shooting at his feet. I pulled the trigger. I knew how to do that, even if I’d never fired that particular weapon before.
The dead men were twenty yards away.
A three-foot cone of sparks and fire jumped out the back of the tube. Fathia leapt back screaming—the exhaust had scorched her cheek. The grenade leapt away from me. There was no recoil at all. I let the now-empty tube fall away from my eye and watched the rocket-propelled grenade disappear at the tip of a column of white smoke. It moved so slowly, seeming to hang in the air. I watched fins pop out of its tail, saw it visibly stabilize itself in midair and correct its tumbling spin. I saw it touch the ground right in front of the leading dead man.
The briefest flash of searing white light got swallowed up instantly by a puff of grey mist that swelled up into an angry squid of billowing smoke. Debris was everywhere, falling from the sky—broken chips of concrete, divots of grass, a severed hand. A lot less noise than I would have predicted. A hot breeze washed over us, ruffling the girls’ headscarves, making me blink away grit and dust.
The smoke cleared and I saw a three foot crater in the ground surrounded by mangled bodies, limbs torn away, exposed bones pointing accusingly up at the air. A couple of the former cops were still moving, twitching mostly but still hauling themselves toward us with fingers that bent all wrong. More of them lay motionless on the Square, victims of shrapnel and hydrostatic shock.
“Xariif,” Ayaan muttered. It meant “clever” and it was the nicest thing she’d ever said to me.
I slung the empty tube, still dribbling smoke from both ends, over my shoulder and waved for our scout to come join us. Time was still very much an issue. Once we had regrouped I lead the girls in a desperate run down Fourteenth Street to the east—toward the Virgin Megastore there. The main entrance, a triangular shaped lobby of glass doors was locked up tight but that was a good thing. A second entrance near the store’s café opened when I yanked on the chrome handle of the door. I ushered the girls inside, telling them to fan out and secure the place. Gary brought up the end of the line. I held my arm across the opening before he could go in. We were spooked, tired, and still in a lot of danger. It wasn’t going to do much for morale if the girls had to watch Ifiyah die. I wanted to talk to Gary about what could be done and what our options might be.
“She’s going to die,” I tried, but he was ready for me.
“Let me look at her. Maybe I can save her.”
We both knew the likelihood of that. Nobody ever survived being bitten by the undead. The mouth of the dead woman who attacked Ifiyah would have been swimming with microbes—gangrene, septicemia, typhus would have been injected right into her wound. Add in shock and the massive loss of blood and Ifiyah barely stood more of a chance inside with us than outside with the dead.
Still. She was alive, for now. I may have just fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a crowd but it hadn’t completely changed who I was. If there was a chance for Ifiyah to make it I had to give her that much.
I sighed but I held the door open for him. He mumbled thanks as he stepped into the gloomy megastore. I followed right on his heels and pulled the door shut behind me.
19
We spread out to cover the first floor of the megastore, moving quietly through the rows of display racks, pointing rifles behind counters and into closets. The store was comprised of two floors, a main level fronted with plate glass where we could look out across the Square and a basement full of DVDs. The afternoon daylight lit up the main floor pretty well but the lower level was lost in darkness. I sent Ayaan and a squad of girls down there with flashlights to scope it out. They returned in a few minutes looking scared but with nothing to report. Good.
The first order of business was to secure the café door. We found the keys to the store in a manager’s office and locked it, then pushed tables and chairs up against it to form a barricade. Some of the girls did likewise with the front doors. By this point the dead had already arrived. They pressed up against the windows. They shoved and jostled each other trying to walk through the glass. They beat their hands against it, crushed their faces up against it. For a bad ten minutes or so I thought the glass might break just from the pressure of their bodies. It held. They were terrible to look at—their faces covered in white and pink sores, their hands cut and broken as they impotently pummeled the glass. I told the girls to move away from the windows, into the shadowy back of the store, just for morale’s sake.
We got Ifiyah propped up in the manager’s leather chair and Gary used a first aid kit from the café to bandage her wound. The skin around the bite looked bloodless and swollen. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope. Commander Ifiyah could still talk at that point and Fathia, her bayonet expert, held her hand and asked her a series of quiet questions I didn’t fully understand.
“See tahay?” Fathia asked.
“Waan xanuunsanahay,” was the reply. “Biyo?”
Fathia handed her commander a canteen and the wounded girl drank greedily, spilling water all down the front of her blazer. I turned away and saw Ayaan coming toward me down the display aisles. “Dekalb. We are safe for now, yes? Some of the girls would like to pray. It has been too long already.”
I nodded, surprised she would even ask. It seemed that in the power vacuum left by Ifiyah’s debilitation I had become the absolute authority of the team. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I didn’t think I really wanted that kind of responsibility though as a Westerner it was a relief to not have anyone else barking orders at me.
More than half of the girls wanted to pray. They laid down handwoven derin mats on the floor of the megastore and pointed them toward the east, my best guess for the direction of Mecca. They chanted in Arabic while I watched the other girls—the less devout ones I suppose. Mostly they stared out the windows at the dead outside. Were they wondering what we were going to do next? I know I was.
One girl—one of the youngest, her name was Leyla, I think—wandered along the merchandise racks, one hand holding the strap of her AK-47, the other flipping through the various CDs on display. Her lower lip curled down or up as she read the titles. When she found one that really appealed to her she would bend at the waist as if desperately trying to contain the urge to jump up and down. Watching her made me think of Sarah. Leyla might be a good deal older and much more dangerous but she still possessed the thrumming spirit, the barely-controlled energy I had come to adore in my daughter.
God, Sarah had never been so far away as then.
“There’s nothing more that I can do for her,” Gary told me, peeling off a pair of latex gloves. I looked over at Ifiyah and saw that she was sleeping or at least passed out. Ragged strips of cloth had been tied tight around her leg until her foot turned purple. A tourniquet. Even if she survived she was probably going to lose the leg.
Gary sat down on the floor and peeled open a piece of beef jerky. Chewing idly on it he stared at me until I began to feel the silence between us turn into something that had to be tamed. It was Gary who spoke first, though. “Why did you come to New York?” he asked. “Did you have family here?”
I shook my head. “A long time ago, yeah. But my parents died before... this. My Mom died in a plane crash and my Dad couldn’t live without him. He just faded away. It’s funny—at my Mom’s funeral I remember thinking how badly I wanted her to come back.” I glanced toward the windows. “I guess you should be careful what you wish for, huh?”
“Christ, you’re so hardcore,” Gary said, rolling his eyes. “Relax a little.”
I nodded and squatted down next to him. I realized I was hungry and gratefully took one of his plastic-wrapped food-like snacks. “Sorry. I guess I’m scared. No, we came to Manhattan looking for medical supplies. The President-for-Life of Somaliland has AIDS but anti-retrovirals just aren’t available in Africa right now.”
“What’s in it for you?”
I took Sarah’s pictur
e from my wallet but I didn’t let him touch it, not with those dead hands. I showed it to him and then stared at it for a while myself. “She and I get full citizenship in one of the last safe places on Earth.” In the picture Sarah, aged five at the time, petted the nose of a camel that had been unaccountably docile at the time. The picture didn’t show what came next—the camel’s wet sneeze, little Sarah’s shrieks as she ran all over a camp full of nomads who smiled and clapped their hands for her and offered her pieces of fruit. That had been a good day. I always tended to think of Africa as one long horror story—an occupational hazard, I guess—but there had been so many good days.
“I’d like to rest a while, if you don’t mind,” I told him. I wasn’t tired so much as so introspective it was becoming different to focus on anyone else. He obliged by scuttling off to a dusty corner of the store where he could chew on his slim-jims in peace.
For my part I turned to look out the window—not at the dead people there, I was barely aware of them but instead at the Empire State Building, clearly visible above the trees at the north end of Union Square. The iconic skyscraper seemed to just hover there, detached from the world. I wondered what if anything you would find in its uppermost stories now. A hell of a walk, since the elevator wouldn’t be running, but worth it maybe. What kind of safety, what manner of serenity might still exist up there? I’d visited the observation deck plenty of times when I was a kid and I knew you could see the entire city from up there but in my musing nothing was visible but long icy sweeps of cloud, a veil between me and the filth on the surface.
I’m told this kind of detachment is common among veteran soldiers. In the aftermath of a perilous fight the mind shuts down its faculties one by one and drifts—perhaps endlessly reliving the moment when a squadmate caught a bullet, perhaps trying to remember all the details of the chaos once it was past, perhaps just—as mine was doing here—wandering without thought or feeling at all. There’s even a name for this phenomenon, the “Thousand Yard Stare”, this kind of temporary mindlessness. Modern medicine sometimes refers to it as “Combat Stress Reaction.” It’s a lot less zen then it sounds like. More like the opposite of mindless enlightenment. It’s like being trapped inside your own worst memory. Usually a victim snaps right out of it as soon as a new task or duty presents itself. Sometimes soldiers never come out of it and sometimes they drift in and out of it for the rest of their lives—that’s called “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” which everyone knows about.
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