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.
3
“They had pudding in these tiny plastic cups. You would peel back the foil on top and the pudding was in there already made,” one of the Islanders said. He was a fortyish man with grey hair and squinting eyes. 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. Gathering fuel from the city 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. New York 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. They went over the bridges. The George Washington is still standing.”
Sarah hugged herself. The night had come on colder than she expected and her hooded sweatshirt, 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 what an L.I.E. was. 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 talk, leaving her in the company of people she didn’t know. She’d been fed, welcomed effusively, cheered and toasted. She’d been invited to sit by the fire, brought into the conversation, given their full attention whenever she talked. Yet as much as they seemed to want to make her feel at home they never stopped looking at her, studying her. There were plenty of other 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 nine day’s wonder. And surely, anyone who had survived the last twelve years had reason enough not to trust strangers.
Yet the feeling Sarah got from the Islanders wasn’t so much mistrust as it was furtiveness. They weren’t concerned with what she would do, so much as they acted as if they had a secret they were afraid she would learn.
She didn’t expect to find it so soon after realizing it must exist. Yet as she squatted by a gingerbread porch coated in flaking white paint, she looked up and nearly fell over in fright. She saw energy. Dead energy.
Blotches of it all over the place. She hadn’t been paying attention, but that was when her unusual senses worked best. There was one of the dead right in front of her—in the field of mixed crops at the center of Nolan Park. Scratching at the soil with a hoe, or a rake, or... something. Sarah frowned. The dead don’t garden.
Not unless someone—specifically, a lich—told them to.
She still had her pistol. Post-apocalyptic standards of hospitality allowed visitors to hold onto their weapons at communal bonfires, especially when the visitors casually forgot to mention they possessed said weapons. She drew it out of her pocket, slid the magazine into place, thumbed off the safety. The dead thing didn’t notice as she crept up on it.
Impossible, but there it was. Not in this place, of all places, this last citadel of humanity in New York. But the hair on the backs of her arms didn’t lie. It stood up straight as the quills of a porcupine. Horripilation. The most classic sign of the presence of the undead.
Sarah tried to make sense of it in her head. She must have brought the dead to Governors Island, she thought. The Tsarevich must have followed her. She had doomed all those nice, boring people at the bonfire. Fear sent cold daggers through the muscles of her back. Why the thing was gardening she had no idea—maybe it was tampering with the survivors’ crops, maybe it intended to poison them.
She lifted her pistol. Lined up a shot. The dead gardener scratched open another furrow in the silvery moonlit dirt. Its face, its skull didn’t move. Its features might have been a mask of bone. It was dressed in stained overalls and its feet were bare. Sarah cocked her pistol and held her breath for the bang.
“Please don’t hurt him. He’s just a slack,” someone said, their voice soft. It was as loud as a gunshot in Sarah’s terrified ear. She pivoted on one ankle and saw the boy, Jackie, standing off to her right. He moved forward quickly out of her blind spot—he must have been trained how to approach someone with a gun.
Slowly she pried her finger away from the Makarov’s trigger, uncocked its hammer. “A slack? What does that mean?”
“He’s tame.” Jackie rushed up to the gardener and waved his hand in its face. Sarah bit her lip to hold back a wave of nausea. She knew what was supposed to come next, what always came next. The ghoul would bite the child. Grab him and devour him. Except of course it didn’t. That was the point. The gardener stopped its hoeing just long enough to look down at the boy and issue a mindless little smile. The dead man’s eyes moved slowly around in their sockets.
Jackie turned to address her again. “He’s a slack. They do what we tell them, though sometimes it takes so long to explain things. We couldn’t survive without them. There aren’t enough of us to keep the gardens going.”
Sarah narrowed her eyes. She had never heard of such a thing. “How—how do you tame a ghoul?” she demanded. “They only exist for one thing.”
The boy shrugged. He was twelve, she knew now, but tiny for his age. His eyes were huge, his hair thinner on his head than it ought to be. “I think it’s one of the ceremonies my Mom does on Halloween. They don’t let me watch because they get naked but I know stuff anyway. I know you tie the ghouls up in a circle you draw on the ground and then there’s some dancing and chanting and stuff.” The boy shrugged again. “You know. Science.”
Sarah was breathing heavily, unsure of what to do next. She put the pistol back in her pocket. Then she rushed forward and knocked the slack off its feet. It felt like she’d smacked into a p
illowcase full of twigs. The gardener fell over, clattered to the ground. Then it got back up, retrieved its hoe, and went back to work. It didn’t bother smiling at her. If she hit it again—and again—and again—it would do the same, she decided.
You’re going to learn things, Jack had told her, and some of them are going to make you cry. Was this what he’d meant? Or were there worse shocks in store?
“Come back with me,” Jackie told her. “Mommy wants to talk to you.” He held out his miniscule hand and Sarah took it.
4
Her feet ached, and fog wrapped the world in gauze. She was walking on wooden planks. Her arms were sore but her feet were just burning. She looked down and saw them huge, swollen, and dark.
Cicatrix wrapped a blanket around Ayaan’s shoulders. “Don’t look, will only upset you.” The Russian woman put an arm around Ayaan’s waist. “Is not much farther now.”
Ayaan nodded absently. She couldn’t muster much in the way of emotion. The fog on her skin felt good, it felt cool and soft and whisper smooth. That was about as deep as she went. She remembered everything—the engine compartment, the strap, the Tsarevich coming to her. His dark suggestions. The memories were flattened, though. Stretched out and made into mere visions, something she had seen in a movie, with all the fear and pain carved away.
Her neck itched but she couldn’t lift her arms to scratch. She had a bandage wrapped around her throat anyway. She remembered them working there, the hornet dragging its sting across her skin. What that had been about she couldn’t have said.
“Almost... and we are here,” Cicatrix said. They stopped there on the boardwalk and Ayaan lifted her head to look up.
Stay alive, she thought. Or she remembered thinking. Time had done something funny, had turned on her.
In front of her stood the shell of a building, no more than half a brick wall remaining, painted a blue the color of a clear sky. A painted face floated against that backdrop, laughing hysterically, in perfect silence. Even the sound of Ayaan’s breathing was eaten up by the fog.
Ayaan thought of Sarah. She tried to think of Sarah. She tried to remember the girl’s face, her close-cropped hair. That filthy sweatshirt she always wore, which she thought might have belonged to her father. Sarah.
“There will be none of this,” Cicactrix said, and waggled a finger in Ayaan’s face. She couldn’t remember what she had been doing to earn such disapproval. Then she looked down and saw she was naked. The blanket lay behind her, pooled on the boardwalk like liquid that had dripped down.
Ayaan’s hands were near her face. She had summoned up enough strength to lift her arms, to touch her face. No, wait. Her face hurt. It stung, in eight specific places. She could count them. She looked down at her fingers and saw bits of skin under the nails.
Had she... had she been trying to claw her own face off?
Time had turned on her. Time and... time and memory. They went inside. “Can I lie down?” Ayaan asked. Her feet hurt so badly. “Just for a while.”
“Oh yes,” Cicatrix told her. She lead Ayaan into a little plastic tent set up inside the ruin of the building. There was a bed there... or not a bed but a place that looked like... well it looked a little like a bed, or maybe a long couch, a divan. But it was full of ice. “Here, let me to help,” Cicatrix said, and held Ayaan’s arm as she lay down on the cold, cold bed.
“The ice is sticking to my back, to my skin,” Ayaan announced. There were a lot of people in the tent, suddenly. Her heart pounded fast and then it skipped a beat. Someone shoved a tube up her nose, its tip slick with lubricant. She tried to sneeze and cough and fight but they wouldn’t let her. They were so much stronger than she remembered. A woman in a nurse’s uniform, complete with a little peaked cap, leaned over her, throwing her into shadow, and jabbed a hypodermic in Ayaan’s neck.
“What—what was—what—was—that?” Ayaan demanded. Her arms were quivering, her body shaking. Was it the ice, was she shivering from the cold? She couldn’t really feel it any more. She was shaking too much. She was shaking a lot, she was trembling—convulsing. “What did you just give me?” she asked.
The nurse’s mouth was a flat line, a slot that ticker tape might come out of. “Cyanide,” she answered.
Darkness clanged shut across Ayaan’s vision like shutters closing with a sound of ringing, a tinnitus ring.
The sound squealed up to a howling, an echoing scream that might have come from her own throat except except except
time didn’t just turn on her it turned a wheel it turned like a wheel
(For a moment she was outside her own body, looking down, pointing at herself. Blood raced through tubes running down her throat, up her ass. A machine like a bagpipe bellowed up and down and breathed for her. There was a man next to her, a very hairy naked white man with blue tattoos curlicuing all over his body. He had a rope around his neck like a punk rock neck tie, or like a noose cut way too short. “That’s me,” she said, “they’re killing me,” and he smiled the way you might smile at a baby who suddenly, as its first words, announced it had crapped in its diaper. “I know you, don’t I?” she asked.)
a nurse came through the tent, and passed right through him, as if he were a ghost
(Yes, the man told her, without opening his mouth. Her vision went away and instead she saw a brain in a glass jar. I’ll be in touch, he told her, and then she was back in her body, in the dark, with that noise.)
Then:
the noise stopped
everything
stopped
.
She opened her eyes with a scream.
Ayaan sat up in bed, naked under silk sheets. She was in a small bed room with a fireplace. A cheerful little blaze danced away at the corner of her vision. Her head felt as if it had been cracked open and stuffed full of scrap metal. She touched her face, felt a cold, rubbery mask there.
She wasn’t breathing. She sucked in a deep breath of air and felt it sigh back out of her. She touched her wrist with two fingers and couldn’t find a pulse. She did find a black vein running underneath her grayish brown skin. It was as hard as a length of wire. The blood inside that vein wasn’t going anywhere.
She screamed and screamed, shouted and cursed and her throat never got sore. She sobbed, big wracking hard heaves but no tears came.
Nausea surged upward inside of her and she jumped out of the bed, looked around frantically for something to throw up into. Nothing presented itself so she clutched her hands over her mouth and just held on, held on until the need, the desire to vomit went away. It left her feeling drained, depleted and sore.
And then hungry. She could really use a snack, she told herself. She was going to need to keep up her energy reserves for what came next.
What came next? She couldn’t remember.
She stood up again. Looked around the room. A faded newspaper clipping was pasted to one wall, a picture of a building by a boardwalk, its windows broken, its paint faded or missing altogether. A place that died even before the world came to an end. A little lamp in the corner had been draped with a red scarf.
She found a closet and inside the closet one single set of clothes. A black leather catsuit with lots of straps. A pair of black leather boots that came up to the middle of her calves. A black leather jacket stenciled all over in white spray paint with a motif of grinning skulls. She put the clothes on with fumbling fingers that felt twice as thick as they looked. The clothes fit her perfectly.
At the back of the closet she found a sliver of broken mirror. She picked it up and stared at her reflection. She looked mostly the same, though sick. She looked as if she’d been very sick for a long time. Something leapt out at her, though, and required extensive examination. She had a tattoo on her throat and neck, running all the way around, bright silver ink inscribing cursive Russian characters. Like a choker she could never remove. She’d seen that kind of writing before, she thought. She’d seen it inscribed on a glass jar with a
brain inside.
Don’t speak, she thought. Except it wasn’t her own thought. Someone had spoken into her head, his voice braying and too loud. It made her headache worse. Don’t react at all. Whatever they say to you, just nod and smile.
A knock came on the bedroom’s door.
5
By the light of an oil lamp Marisol examined a handful of yellow stalks. “Winter wheat,” she explained, but that meant nothing to Sarah. The Mayor of Governors Island dropped the stalks on the table and examined her fingers. A thin, soft black powder coated them and resisted being easily brushed off. Marisol sniffed her fingers and frowned. “It’s a fungus of some kind. That’s new for us, and I don’t like it.”
In the corner of the room Osman sat with one hand on his head. The other held a bottle of milky liquid. Judging by the way he kept blinking in slow motion and slumping forward to nearly fall out of his chair, Sarah decided he must be drunk. She looked at Marisol.
The Mayor shrugged. “It’s been years, he said. Let him have a taste. In the morning he’ll feel like shit and he’ll curse God and then he’ll go back to normal. It’s not like we make enough liquor for him to become an alcoholic.” She frowned. “After the things we’ve seen, all of us, I think we deserve to get polluted now and again. I wouldn’t mind a drink myself, actually. To you,” she said, and pointed at the blighted wheat on the table, “that might look pretty banal. To me it’s a reminder. The first couple of winters here were… hard. There were two hundred of us, originally. Now, even with the refugees we’ve adopted and a couple of births we’re down to seventy-nine.”
Sarah didn’t know what to make of that. It sounded bad, it was true, but like nothing compared to what had become of Africa. There had been a whole nation’s worth of survivors there once. Somalia had kept a million of its citizens alive for the first year. Now Somalia wasn’t around any more. Ayaan’s small group had been all that remained.
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