The tree was just a stump. Still. Pulsing with life. Goddamn well throbbing with it.
He still had a little control. A trembling frail energy that was his, his to use even as it frittered away. Feeling weightless, lighter than air, his hand went up to his temple and found the wound, the entry hole. Dampness on his fingers.
God. Disgusting. The hole was wide enough to stick a finger inside.
the sound a mop makes when it hits the floor
…but that was a memory, not a real sound. Gary probed again with his finger and heard the same sound. Almost like pressing a key on a piano. He pressed again and this time… this time he felt something real. Hard metal that resisted his finger.
The bullet.
sucking life from somewhere, jesus you could see it move as it throbbed as the fluids flowed as the life moved under the fleshy white bark, inside the wet fibrous wood just a stump but taking life from somewhere
Almost over now. Why keep striving, when there was no hope?
START AGAIN.
(the benefactor insisted.)
maybe they weren’t branches maybe they were roots
Thought became mercurial, slippery as a fish in a stream as your fingers reach for it, silver and bright under the splashing water, silvery and hard in your head reaching for it, going to take two fingers have to open up just a little wider come on say ah, aaahhh very good, you are easily the most well-behaved little boy it has ever been my pleasure to perform open brain surgery on tee hee two fingers in, does it hurt? Does it hurt? Nothing hurts right now, man, I am comfortably numb like the song goes and now I’ve got two fingers in but the visuals, man, like this tree, this TREE—
Its roots go down forever. Up above in the sunlight there may be golden apples, tight little bundles of life force the color of… of… just such a lovely color nothing you could see with your eyes, though. None of the seven colors they teach you about in school. Was it two dozen? Dekalb and the girls, sure, two dozen of them waiting, hunkering down in the dark so afraid and cold and hungry and alone but they didn’t know, they couldn’t know just how beautifully alive they were. Up there in the sunlight, metaphorical of course because certainly it’s still night up there it must be pitch dark in the megastore but in this metaphorical space, this place you’ve fled to because you’ve passed out—yeah, good one, dead man fainting—passed out because you’re literally trying to dig a bullet out of your head with your fingers, in this metaphorical space Dekalb etc. are up there, up there in a summer day compared to what’s down here, down deep deep sixed eighty-sixed down in davy jones’ locker, down among the dead men, the dead men, the dead men
YES.
(nodding, the benefactor agreed.)
because they, the dead men, were there too, if only dimly perceptible. Down underneath in the soil in the dirt where the roots dug endlessly like blind worms searching, scratching, like fingers digging for the bullet because oh, yes, just because you passed out Gary doesn’t mean you stopped trying to grab for that brass ring, that lead sinker in the muddle, stop that, in the middle of your gelatin head.
But, Gary thought, I digress. I was speaking of the dead men who feed the tree. Stinking little buggers, stinking of the life force because it was positively dripping from them, fuming up like steam off their backs as it evaporated away not the golden shiny life of Dekalb and friends, no, this was the shadow of that energy—lacking dimension, cold instead of hot, dark, dark purple instead of bright—but it was still energy of a kind. Enough to feed the tree. Enough to feed anybody if you could tap it and yes, Gary could. Gary could. Because unlike the discrete packets of energy inside of Dekalb’s Angels, those ripe bursting fruits of life force, the dead men were all connected, interconnected, tied together in a web of fuming darkness. There were what, six, seven billion people before the Epidemic but now there was only one dead man, in a sense. The thing, the Epidemic, the disaster that brought the dead back joined them together, made them as one, like a cloud of locusts so thick they darken the sky like clouds, an infinite number of tiny droplets of water but where does one end and one begin there is no answer it’s a zen koan there is only one of us with many bodies and I am its will. I am its commander.
YES.
(there is a connection, the benefactor said, a web that joins us.)
Remember Trucker Cap? Remember him, because Gary sure did remember how Trucker Cap had attacked him and Gary had told him to stop and he did. And Gary had told him to fuck off and die and lo and behold so it had come to pass because Gary, alone among the dead, could still think. He could still reach out. He alone had the willpower. He was connected to them all, he was one of them, but he alone could exploit that.
He sucked dark energy from the crowd that surrounded the megastore, sucked it out from a distance and felt it surge up through his arm, thrilling into his fingers and yes and yes and yes there it was god fucking damn you there he had it eureka he had it and he pulled, so much power in his hand he had to make a conscious act of will to keep from yanking the fucking thing out and then it was in his hand wet and hot and he clutched it, squeezed it, the goddamn bullet was out of his head. It was out of his head. The damage was done, brain tissue torn up like a wet wad of toilet paper skin bone and muscle pierced vertebrae broken, shattered but you know what? None of it mattered.
The tree pulsed with life as it would forever. Fucking forever man I’m going to live forever and you cannot stop me, Gary thought, he wanted to scream it at fucking Ayaan and fucking Dekalb you cannot stop me I am billions strong.
He dropped the bullet and it made a sound like a tiny bell ringing. From above he heard a tense whisper. “What was that?”
He heard it. He could hear again.
When dawn came and with it the light, he could see again. He was standing, standing in the shadows, looking at an Olsen Twins DVD in his hand and he could read the smallest text on the back of the jewel case. He could see. He could stand and walk. Life (of a sort, the dark sort) pulsed through him so furiously, so strongly he was surprised he wasn’t glowing.
YES.
(yes, the benefactor said. yes.)
2
The gunshot woke the girls, of course. Ayaan rushed to throw her blazer over Ifiyah’s ravaged form so the others wouldn’t see what Gary had done to her. Together she and I lifted Gary’s lifeless body and threw it over the edge, threw it down into the darkness of the lower level. The girls would have torn him to pieces for what he did to Ifiyah, and I couldn’t stomach that. As it was the girls had a million questions. I tried to explain as calmly as I could that she was gone, and Gary too. There was some wailing and crying and a few of the girls offered up prayers for Ifiyah. None of us slept after that.
Whatever Gary had done to Ifiyah, she didn’t reanimate. Either he ate her brain or… hell. I didn’t understand how the Epidemic worked. All I knew was that she didn’t get up again.
In the first light of day I heard a tiny sound, a tinny sound like a bell ringing somewhere. “What was that?” I whispered, thinking of the bells that rang when you walked into a bodega in this city. This was the Virgin Megastore, though, and the doors were locked up tight—we checked. The sound was not repeated.
I couldn’t relax, couldn’t get comfortable, though fatigue softened my head and made my thoughts slow and cold as glaciers moving through an ice age, growing a few inches a year it felt like. I stood and watched the dead outside pressing up against the windows and didn’t have the mental energy to plan or consider options. I barely noticed when one of the dead men slumped to the ground and others surged in to take his place.
A woman with a long open wound on her arm and an Yves-St.-Laurent bag still dangling from the crook of her elbow slapped the glass with a greasy palm and then fell, her body held up for a moment by the crowd behind her. She slid down the glass, her flabby cheek rippling where it pressed up against the window until she landed on the sidewalk outside. A teenage boy in a white t-shirt climbed on top of her but then he too collapsed.
>
Here and there others fell—singly at first, then in great clumps that rolled backwards like waves receding from a shoreline. I grabbed my rifle, thinking this must be some trick. But that had been Ifiyah’s mistake, of course, to think the dead were capable of subterfuge. As far as I could tell they just were with no art or thought required. As they fell away from the megastore sunlight streaked in through the windows and lit up the faces of the girls.
“They dhimasha, commander,” Fathia said, as if she were giving me a report from the front. They are dying, is what I think she meant to say.
I could see that for myself. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of dead people who had mobbed the megastore trying to get at us only a few were still standing and they were clutching their heads and wandering aimlessly around Union Square. They seemed less interested in us than in whatever had claimed their fellows. Almost certainly that was giving them too much credit but that’s what it looked like.
Leadership, I was told once by a Regional Field Head for the Disarmament Project in Sudan, has less to do with making the best decision than making a decision. “Get your things, we’re leaving,” I told the girls.
They snapped to it. Prayer mats were rolled up, weapons were checked and thrown over shoulders. Fathia and Leyla, the youngest girl, moved to collect Ifiyah’s body but I shook my head. We were going to move fast and couldn’t afford to be slowed down by carrying the dead commander.
I unlocked the door but Ayaan was the first one out, her weapon swinging wildly as she tried to cover each of the stragglers in turn. They didn’t react to her presence at all. I shuffled the rest of the girls out the door and then took up the rear. I caught myself about to yell out an order—the noise might have broken the dead out of their spell—and instead jogged forward to tap Ayaan’s shoulder. I pointed in the direction of the river.
It was all she needed. She threw three quick hand signals at the girls and we broke into a run, not so much a sprint (we were each carrying twenty pounds of gear at the least) as a loping jog but there was urgency there, believe me. At first we had to leap over piles of bodies (or just step on them in a couple of places) but beyond the periphery of the Square the sidewalks were clear. Sixth avenue passed. Seventh. I slowed momentarily outside of Western Beef, wondering if this was where our luck ended but the dead had deserted the place. Every walking corpse in the Village must have been there at the megastore because we saw only a handful on our way back to the Hudson. Once we were past Sixth Avenue the spell wore off—they came at us as determined as ever, but just as slowly, too.
As we ran past their rotten clutching hands I felt a certain real relief that we were back on familiar ground again. Whatever had slain the dead in Union Square had to be big and powerful and I didn’t relish finding out what it wanted from me.
The thought that it might be benevolent, this unseen force that claimed the dead for its own, never even occurred to me. There was nothing truly good or clean left in this world. Anything that seemed that way had to come with strings attached.
At the river we stopped on the dock and waved our arms. The Arawelo stood out in the water about a hundred yards with no one visible on deck but we were too out of breath to think the worst. After a minute or two Mariam came up on deck, her blazer off and Osman’s fishing hat perched low over her eyes. She made some frantic gesture toward the hatches and the two sailors emerged from below decks, looking as if they’d been caught at something naughty.
I didn’t give a damn what they’d been up to. They brought the boat in to the dock and threw us lines so we could tie it up. In a minute we were on board and we cast off again.
I guess leaving the megastore in such a hurry really had been the right decision, because we all made it back. The girls looked at me with something new in their eyes. I wasn’t about to go so far as to call it respect.
When I finally sat down I found I was ravenous. I called for canjeero, a flat Somali bread that was our staple food on the boat. Osman rubbed his head and squinted at me for a while before he decided what he was going to say.
“You in charge now, Dekalb? You’re the weyn nin?” He glanced around at the girls. “Ifiyah didn’t come back, I see.”
I made no comment. Osman and I had possessed a sort of easy camaraderie on the voyage to New York. Two grown men on a ship full of children—it would have been hard not to bond. Now I was changed, though, in some subtle but very real way. I had fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a crowd of my enemies. I had ordered soldiers to shoot to kill. I had lead the girls to safety—and I had also let one of the dead eat their commanding officer.
“At least tell me you got the drugs and we can go home!” He raised both hands in the air, surrendering to his disbelief. My silence left him high and dry and slowly he lowered his arms. We both knew we couldn’t return to Somalia without the medical supplies. We had failed to find them and in the process we lost four of our number. I shook my head.
“Well that is just fucked up, sir, yes, sir!” Osman said and flipped me a one-finger salute. I suppose there are limits to the respect that comes with leadership.
3
Fine blue tattoos covered him from head to toe. A rope tied tight around his neck and an armband made of fur were his only clothing but he stood there unashamed and looked down at Gary with a kind of haughty pride. A particularly stuck-up teacher staring down at his best pupil from the top of the escalators.
"Come to me," he said again, and then he was gone. In his place was an image of a temple or a library or something. Lots of steps leading up to a facade of columns. Gary knew the place but its name wouldn't come to him.
Climbing the escalator took a couple of tries. Gary’s brain continued to heal itself but his motor control was the slowest in coming back. Lucidity had returned like walking into air conditioning on a scorcher of a day but the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other was still mostly beyond him. The seizures that racked his body and left his brain fizzing like a well-shaken seltzer bottle didn’t help either. He would progress a few yards only to find himself lying on the floor with no explanation how he’d gotten there, his hands clenched like claws and his ankles twisted beneath him.
In time he reached the ground floor of the megastore, taking the last few steps on his hands and knees. He rose shakily and lurched for the door only to be stricken by the sight of what lay outside.
Bodies—hundreds of bodies—in an advanced state of decay, clogging up the sidewalks and slumped at random over the abandoned cars. Putrefying flesh lay in heaps under the mid-morning sun, not all of it recognizably human anymore.
Jesus, Gary thought. Had he really done all this damage himself?
These weren’t like the undead he’d seen before. These were just… rotting meat, yellow bones pointing out of deliquescing flesh with the consistency of runny cheese.
Something stirred in the Square to the north and he dodged behind a Jeep, not wanting to get shot in the head again. He needn’t have worried, though. It was one of the dead. A dead woman in a print dress stained with old blood and darker fluids. She came closer, waddling as if she couldn’t bend at the knees and he saw she was badly damaged. Most of the skin was gone from her face and a clump of maggots perched in the hollow of her clavicles like a writhing scarf. Good god, how could she let that happen? Disgusting as they might be the maggots were alive. They could have given her the energy to repair her body. Instead they were feeding on her.
Others appeared behind her, mostly men. They too had seen better days. The walking dead of New York tended to have a few wounds on their bodies, sure, and maybe their skin tone was a shade paler and bluer than necessary—Gary thought furthermore of the dead veins that lined his own face—but never had they let themselves go this badly. One of these newcomers had no nose at all, just a dark inverted V in the middle of his face. Another had lost his eyelids so he seemed to be constantly staring in horrified wonder.
Gary reached out across the network of death that connecte
d him to these shambling messes. The same connection that had let him draw their energy, that had given him the strength to dig the bullet out of his brain. The mental effort made his brain wriggle in his head and a searing white pain flashed down his back but the contact was made. He could feel the dark energy fuming out of these wretches and he understood a little of what must have happened. In his desperation he had sucked the energy out of the crowd around the megastore to save his own skin and in the process had accelerated the decay of his victims. In the new order of things the dead ate the living in a vain attempt to prop up their own sagging existence, to fuel their unlife. Gary had undone all that striving and hard work and now the rotting piles of corpses outside looked like they had been dead all along, dead and decomposing since the Epidemic began. There was no cheating death, Gary realized, only delaying it—and when it finally caught up it did so with a vengeance.
The noseless one reached out and touched Gary’s face with an unfeeling hand. The fingers draped lifelessly across his cheek. Gary didn’t flinch. How could he? There was no malice in the gesture. It had all the emotional resonance of a muscular twitch.
Most of the undead had lost the battle with death when Gary stole their essence. Those few strong enough to survive were left with only the barest tatters of energy remaining. Hence the broken and rigid undead he saw before him. Perhaps worse than their physical condition was their mental state. He had stolen from them the remnant of intellect that kept them hunting for food. Their hunger remained—he could feel it yawning inside of them, burning more fiercely than ever—but he had stolen from them the knowledge, no matter how vestigial, of how to slake it. He had taken what little mind they had so now they no longer remembered how to eat. They could only wander aimlessly as their bodies fell to pieces.
Gary felt no guilt. It had been necessary. He had been dying for a second and final time and only their stolen energy had been able to keep his consciousness going. Why, then, did he identify so strongly with them, why did he feel so much empathy? He was tied to them, he realized. He was one of them. He was part of the network of death. His ability to reach out and steal their energy defined him. There was no real line of division, no watershed between himself and these near-lifeless hulks that wobbled without purpose up and down Fourteenth street. If he missed a few meals, if he didn’t keep feeding himself he would become just like them.
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