He sank to his knees with the realization of his true nature. The ravaged dead came, drawn by some flickering instinct to gather together, and stood around him until their corrupted faces swam in his vision. They did not frighten him anymore.
He was undead. He was one of them. As their hands reached for him he knew they weren’t attacking him—they no longer possessed the brainpower necessary for aggression. They were reaching for him as a gesture of solidarity. They knew what he was.
Gary was a monster, too.
The dead man with no eyelids stared at him with an openness, an innocence that Gary was astounded he'd never seen before. There was no evil there, no horror. Just simple need. Their faces were no more than inches away from each other. Gary leaned his head forward and touched his forehead to the other’s.
When he had recovered himself he commanded the faceless woman to help him to his feet, and she did. Come, he told them, just as his mysterious benefactor had summoned him. Together the small band of them, Gary and the mindless dead, headed north toward Midtown. It felt so very good, Gary decided, not to be alone anymore.
Gary had life once more, now he also had a purpose. He would find this strange tattooed man and learn what he knew. Gary had so many questions and for some reason he was convinced the benefactor would have some answers. He kept his little band heading resolutely northward, up into Midtown. They would enter the park soon enough. Was that their destination? In a way it didn't matter. In some zen fashion the journey was enough.
When he saw the vision again the man's face was clogged with concern. "You're getting closer but be careful. I think you are about to be attacked."
"Huh?" Gary asked but the other was gone. He turned to look at the noseless man on his right, wondering if the other dead had seen the apparition or if it was just some glitch in Gary's personal nervous system.
The surprised-looking ghoul stared hard at something in the middle distance. Before Gary could speak he slumped lifelessly to the ground. Gary looked down and saw the bullet wound in the back of the dead man's head long before he heard the gunshot.
The next round hit the sidewalk and sent chips of concrete rolling across Gary's feet. He was being shot at. "Not fucking again," he whined.
4
I shaved with an electric razor plugged into a junction box in the ship’s wheelhouse. Every time I turned the shaver on or off I got a little shock but it was safer than trying to use a straight razor on a rocking boat and when I was done I felt infinitely better about myself and the mission’s chances.
Which is not to say, I thought as I rinsed out the shaver with water from the Hudson, that I thought anything would be easy. Just that we might not all die.
When I’d finished I called for my maps of New York. I studied them for a long time, thinking there had to be a better way. There were hospitals all over the city. Most of them were on the East Side, which meant they were impossible to get to due to the raft of human corpses clogging the East River. All of them, I knew, would have been looted during the evacuation.
I still knew one place where we could find the drugs we needed. The UN building. My first choice. It was also impossible to access from the water.
“Osman,” I shouted, standing up, “come look at this.” I showed him my map and indicated our next stop—Forty-Second Street in Midtown. He studied the West Side, reading the names of the buildings.
“‘The Theater District,’” he read aloud. “Dekalb, you want to take in a show?”
I ran a finger along Forty-Second, from west all the way to east. The street ran uninterrupted from the Hudson River all the way to the southern end of the UN complex. “It’s a big street—wide sidewalks, less chance of getting stuck. It was one of the busiest streets in the world, before the Epidemic, so it might even be clear of stalled cars. The authorities would have tried to keep it moving when they evacuated the survivors.”
The captain just stared at me. He didn’t understand, or he didn’t believe I was willing to do this. But until I had those drugs in my possession I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t see my little Sarah again, couldn’t see she was okay with my own eyes. I would do anything for that.
“We can walk from here to the UN in a couple of hours. Get the drugs and walk back. It’ll take less than a day.”
“You are forgetting,” Osman said, “that the dead are risen. In their millions. This was a busy street, once? I tell you it still will be.”
I gritted my teeth. “I have an idea of what we can do about that.” Now that Gary was dead. Now that we could count on the undead all being stupid. Stupid enough. I looked back at the city but not at the buildings or the haunted streets. There. I pointed at a dilapidated extrusion of weathered wood and rusted metal that stuck out into the river. “Our first stop is the Department of Sanitation pier. They’ll have what we need.”
Osman might have been confused by this but he bent over his controls and got the trawler moving. We pulled in alongside a half-full garbage barge, the girls in position at the rail, their rifles sticking out like oars from the side of the ship. On top of the wheelhouse Mariam called down that she saw no sign of movement anywhere on the pier.
“This is where they used to collect the city’s refuse,” I told Ayaan as we secured the trawler to the side of the barge. “Easy enough to get to by water but from the land side it’s a fortress. They didn’t want anyone getting in here and getting sick—talk about potential lawsuits—so it should still be secure.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. We both knew it had been a long time since there had been any authorities in this city. The dead could get anywhere if they were persistent enough. They could have jumped in the water and then climbed up the side of the barge. They could have climbed over the fence from the shore side. The undead aren’t great climbers from what I’ve seen but if there had been something alive on the pier, something they could eat, they would have found a way.
Five of the girls jumped down onto the barge and then across its stern to the pier beyond. They watched each other, one moving forward while the others covered her back. I followed behind, as always, a little creeped out but not too worried. Most of the pier was open to the air, a zone of filthy cranes and winches and massive dented steel dumpsters. Rusted metal everywhere. I told the girls to be careful—it was unlikely that they’d had the proper tetanus boosters. They acknowledged me but they were too young to worry about such things. At the shore end of the pier we found a pre-fabricated shed with a padlocked door. SAFETY EQUIPMENT had been stenciled next to the door in dripping silver spray paint. Just what I was looking for.
I found a piece of metal rebar about as long as my arm and fitted it through the loop of the cheap padlock. A couple of heaves and it gave, sending vibrations rattling up my arm as pieces of the lock went flying. They glittered in the sunlight at my feet.
Inside a stripe of sunlight lay draped across the floor. Dust motes twirled in the air. I spotted a desk with a small reading lamp, strewn with half-completed forms. An emergency eyewash station and a big first aid kit. Fathia grabbed that and carried it back to the boat. We might just need it before this was over. At the far end of the shed stood a row of three freshly-painted lockers. I pulled on the latch of the nearest one and the girls started screaming. Leyla lifted her rifle and fired half a dozen rounds into the human shape that came tumbling out of the locker.
“Stop!” I shouted, knowing it was too late. I picked up the bright yellow suit—the empty suit—off the ground and poked a finger through the bullet hole in its faceshield. LEVEL A/FULL ENCAPSULATION, I read from a tag attached to the HazMat suit’s zipper. LIQUIDPROOF AND VAPORPROOF, it assured me. Well, not anymore.
“I’m going to open another locker. Don’t shoot this time, okay?” I asked. The girls nodded in chorus. They looked terrified, as if the next locker might reveal some magical bird that would flap out and peck at their eyes. Instead it held a duplicate of the first suit, as did the third locker. I tossed one to Ayaan
and she just stared at me. “Now there are only two suits. Guess who just got volunteered for this mission?” I asked her.
Cruel, I know. She hadn’t exactly been the soul of warmth to me, though. She was also one of the few girls I trusted to not panic when we walked right into a crowd of the undead protected by only three layers of industrial grade Tyvek. Tyvek, of course, being a very high-tech kind of paper.
“Normally,” I explained to her, “these suits keep out contaminants. This time they’ll hold in our smell. The dead won’t attack something that smells like plastic and looks like a Teletubby.”
“You think this, or you know it?” she asked, holding the bulky yellow suit at arm’s length.
“I’m counting on it.” That was the best I could offer.
We took the suits back to the boat and had Osman steam north for Forty-Second street. There was plenty to do. We had to sterilize the outsides of the suits, read instruction manuals and then run drills on how to put on and use the SCBA air recirculator units, teach each other how to put on the suits (a two-person job) without contaminating the surface. We had to practice talking to each other through the mylar faceshields and even how to walk so we didn’t trip over the baggy legs of the suits.
I had been through a crash course in how to use a Level B suit back when I was investigating weaponized nuclear facilities in Libya. There had been an eight hour seminar with PowerPoint presentations and a thirty-question quiz at the end. I had paid attention because a breach in that suit might have meant being exposed to carcinogens. This time the smallest tear in the suit would surely mean being surrounded and devoured by the hungry dead.
I made sure we went through all of our drills twice.
5
Gary stepped aside and the next shot missed him completely. He glanced at his companions—at the noseless man and the faceless woman and gestured for them to spread out and find cover. They communicated their inability to do so—they lacked the brainpower to identify what was covered and what wasn’t—so he wasted another second telling them mentally to duck down behind abandoned cars. The violence of the moment had sharpened him somehow, thrown everything into high contrast.
“Kev—I’m reloading—get this one!” a living human shouted. Gary swiveled to track the voice and saw a big guy with short curly black hair standing under an awning. The living man worked nervously at the action of a long-barreled hunting rifle that looked like a stick in his enormous hands. He wore a rumpled tan shirt and a nametag that read HELLO MY NAME IS Paul. There were at least two of them, Gary inferred, this Paul and another one named Kev. Gary stepped closer to the shooter and sent instructions to his companions to spread out and try to flank the assailants.
Something buzzed past Gary’s eyes. A mosquito, possibly, but when he followed its trajectory it ended in a crater in a plate glass window no wider than his pinky nail. Not a bullet, Gary decided, but some kind of projectile nonetheless.
He realized for the first time that he himself was completely exposed. He stepped into the shadow of a building and scanned the street for possibilities. He couldn’t run—his legs felt like pieces of dead wood every time he tried. He couldn’t shoot back. Even if he’d possessed a gun his hands shook too much for that. He would have to try to flank these survivors and cut them off. Reaching out along the wavelength of the dead Gary had his companions move farther up and down the street. He had to remind them to keep their heads down. He picked up an empty soda can from the street and threw it as hard as he could in the direction of the unseen shooter.
It had the desired effect. The shooter—his nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS Kev—came dashing out from behind a mailbox as if he’d been stung by a bee. “Paul!” he shouted. “We have to get out of here!”
Paul lifted his rifle and pointed it in Gary’s direction but didn’t shoot. “He’s over there somewhere. Do you see him?”
“Forget him! They’re everywhere!” Kev rushed to the side of a derelict limousine and yanked open the door. He clambered inside the vehicle until Gary could see nothing but the long, thin barrel of a rifle sticking out. The weapon looked like a toy.
It couldn’t possibly be a bee bee gun, could it? Gary suppressed the urge to laugh. He had a little protection there in the shadows but Paul looked ready to shoot anything that moved. The survivor wasn’t about to run—which meant Gary had worked his way into a stalemate.
He pushed his consciousness outward, tapped into the nervous systems of his fellow dead. Not just his two traveling companions. He needed reinforcements. Luckily he didn’t have to expand his consciousness very far. He could feel a group of the dead just a few blocks away, clustered around the twisted remains of a burnt-out hot dog stand. It was harder to maintain contact with these—unlike the faceless woman or the noseless man this new group had eaten recently and were therefore stronger—but he knew how to get their attention. Food, he whispered to them, food here. Come here for food.
Paul fired his rifle and a window near Gary’s head collapsed in fragments. Gary thought the big guy must be firing blind but he couldn’t be sure. The reinforcements were still minutes away—too far to be of any help, probably. He would have to take a chance and strike out on his own.
Faceless stood up from where she’d been hiding. Paul pivoted with a grace none of the undead could match and put a bullet right in the middle of the faceless woman’s chest. She ducked down again at Gary’s order, damaged but not fatally, and Paul put a hand to his eyes, trying to see what had happened. He must be wondering if he’d got her or not.
Gary didn’t plan on letting him find out. He moved as fast as he could, keeping low and dodging behind cars so that when Paul looked back in his direction again Gary was nowhere to be seen.
Kev poked his head out of the limousine but Noseless was already there. Gary sent the order and Noseless slammed the car door shut, knocking Kev backwards into the vehicle. It would only take a moment for the survivor to open the door again but in that second Gary moved even closer to Paul.
“Jesus,” Paul said, staring as the limousine rocked on its sagging tires. “What the fuck are you doing in there, Kev? We’ve got dead guys out here, remember?”
The limousine’s back windshield erupted in shards of tinted glass. The bee bee gun emerged and then the survivor started crawling out behind it. “This is fucked up,” Kev screamed, “they’re organized or something!”
Gary had one more surprise left for them. He had been getting closer all the time the two of them were yelling back and forth. Now he stood up directly in front of Paul, close enough to see the survivor’s dark lips moving in an unspoken curse. The hunting rifle came up and Gary grabbed the barrel. Even as Paul fired he yanked it downwards so it exploded against his sternum. Pain, real pain vibrated through Gary’s body and his shirt caught on fire where the rifle had discharged but he didn’t even wince.
Perfectly calm, Gary pulled the rifle out of Paul’s hands and threw it behind him into the street. He called out for his companions and Noseless and Faceless responded, advancing on Kev. The bee bee gun snapped a couple of times and Noseless rocked on his feet as the tiny projectiles bounced off his forehead but soon the two undead had the smaller survivor pinned. They made no move to bite him, merely twisting his arms behind his back. Gary expressed his approval and he could feel Faceless trying to smile, the exposed musculature of her face splitting in an obscene rictus.
“So are you finished now, or what?” Gary asked Paul. “Maybe we can do this the easy way. I used to be a doctor—”
Paul’s face darkened with many, many questions. The first one to came out was, “You were a doctor?”
Gary laughed. “I know, I know. I used to fight to save lives and now I take them away. It’s so fucking ironic I could just rip your head off.” The survivor went pale and Gary realized he must have breached some unspoken rule of tact normally observed between predators and their prey. “I promise I’ll make this as painless as possible,” he said. He turned to glance at Faceless and
Noseless. “Was he actually trying to kill us with bee bees?”
Kev answered for himself. “If I got you in the eye you wouldn’t be laughing! Paul—you’ve gotta help me, man! Get these things off of me!”
Paul licked his lips. His eyes were very bright. “Let me get this straight. You’re planning on eating both of us, right?”
“Yeah,” Gary admitted, wondering where this was going.
“And nothing that I can possibly do at this point is going to change your mind.”
Gary shrugged. “You did try to kill us. It seems fair, you know?”
“Sure,” Paul said. “Well in that case—hey, what’s that?”
Gary followed Paul’s pointing finger, only to have the big survivor put one hand in his face and push him over on his ass. Gary went sprawling and by the time he’d recovered he could only see Paul’s back tearing down the street, his feet flashing wildly as he ran.
Gary hadn’t felt so humiliated since dodgeball in middle school. He got his revenge, though. A dozen or so strong, well-fed undead came around the corner just then, responding to his previous summons. Paul tried to run around them but a dead woman with enormous broken fingernails snatched at his belly as he passed her. He kept running a few more steps before stopping to look down. The front of his shirt was red with blood. He looked up at Gary as if pleading with the doctor to make it all better in the moment before his broken skin tore open and his intestines spilled out steaming onto the asphalt.
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