We spotted the Intrepid from half a mile away but only I knew what it was until we were practically underneath its dull grey shadow. When Osman had gotten a good look at the decommissioned aircraft carrier he started rubbing his jaw agreeably. "Can we... can we just take it, do you think?" I shook my head but he wouldn't be dissuaded so easily. "I don't think your Navy will miss this, Dekalb," he suggested.
I smiled at him. "It's half-buried in the riverbed. They had to dredge the Hudson just to get it in here." I looked up at the historical airplanes tethered to its deck. The military value of such a thing was not lost on me, not after all we'd been through but frankly - this was a new kind of conflict. Fighter jets and naval gunnery just no longer applied.
Just south of the carrier we nosed in to a stop at the Circle Line pier, pier 83 at Forty-Second street. The sight-seeing ferry boats were all gone of course and so were the tourists that used to wait for hours to sail around New York harbor. The dead had come in their place, milling through the crowd control barriers, lining up to be the first ones to get to us.
The girls stood at port arms at the rail while Ayaan and I helped each other into the hazmat suits. It was a two-person operation - you had to be zipped into them - but we couldn't let anyone else touch us. Osman and Yusuf watched us with an impassivity I knew was borne from their belief we were leaving them for good. I ignored them and concentrated on Ayaan. We pulled on gloves and then I poured bleach over our hands. I attached Ayaan's Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus unit to her mask and put it on her head and she returned the favor. We struggled into the suits and pulled up each others' airtight zipper and then smoothed down the Velcro stormflaps. I tested my valves and seals and then switched on my internal air before the inside of my suit could get stuffy. We had twelve hours before we would have to change the tanks on the SCBAs, something that could not be done out in the field. Not a lot of time to waste. "Ready?" I asked her. She pulled her sterilized AK-47 over her suited shoulder and adjusted the strap before she nodded yes. Through the wide aperture of her faceshield I could see she looked calm and disciplined. She looked like Ayaan, in other words.
Under Fathia's command the girls lifted their rifles and fired one short volley into the crowd of xaaraan that awaited us. A few fell - others just spun around and looked disoriented for a moment before returning to their ravening. They fired another round and the dead grew agitated, pushing harder against the crowd barriers until some of them squeezed through and fell into the water. The shooting had the desired effect, which was to draw attention away from us as we quietly debarked. Moving quickly but ever careful not to puncture the suits on splinters Ayaan and I lowered a narrow gangplank to the shore and dashed down its length. Osman and Yusuf were ready and yanked the sheet of particleboard away as soon as we touched solid ground. We didn't stick around but instead made our way hurriedly to the promenade on the far side of the waiting area.
A dead man with gold chains tangled up in the curly hairs on his chest came at us, his arms wide, his legs flailing beneath him as he tried to run. Ayaan readied her weapon but I put one gloved hand on the barrel and shook my head. She hardly needed me to remind her of our agreement - that she should shoot only in dire necessity, for fear of alerting the dead with the noise of her gunshots - but it made me feel better. By steadying her I steadied myself and right then I needed it. I could feel my skin trying to crawl away from the animated corpse as it lumbered ever closer.
He put out one hand and grabbed at my sleeve and I thought it was over, that I had made some kind of critical error. Maybe the dead could sense the life force Gary had spoken of, maybe they could see right through the suits. I braced myself for what surely came next - the grapple, the bite, the sensation of having my flesh torn away from my bones. I closed my eyes and tried to think about Sarah, about her safety.
The dead man pushed me aside and stumbled between myself and Ayaan. We had just been in the way of his true goal - the girls on the Arawelo. I listened for a minute or two to the heavy cyclic respiration of my SCBA, just glad to still be alive. Whatever special senses the dead might have they couldn't see through the suits. My plan actually had a chance of working.
"Dekalb," Ayaan said, her voice blurred by the layers of plastic between us, "we are breathing borrowed air." I nodded and together we set off.
We crossed the West Side Highway, weaving carefully in between the abandoned cars so as not to tear the suits and then the buildings of Forty-Second street closed around us like the walls of a maze. I had hoped the street would be clear of vehicles and for once I'd been right, with one exception: a military Armored Personnel Carrier stood at an angle in the middle of the street. It had smashed into a newsstand, spilling glossy copies of Maxim and Time Out New York everywhere, their pages ruffled by a mild breeze. I wanted to check to see if the APC was drivable but Ayaan suggested, quite rightly, that if her rifle made too much noise then a big diesel engine would be completely unacceptable.
We moved cautiously around open the back of the vehicle, probably both of us remembering the armored riot cops in Union Square. No former National Guardsmen came out at us but it didn't take us long to find them. Three of them still dressed in their Interceptor body armor and their ballistic helmets were squabbling over a trash can halfway down the block. It must have been ransacked months ago but still they fought over its contents. One of them grabbed an armful of trash and sat down hard on the curb, busily sniffing and licking the dry yellow newsprint and shiny Styrofoam. Another dug out an old soda can. The red paint on its side had worn off over time leaving it featureless and silver. He stuck his finger deep inside the can perhaps trying to scoop out one last droplet of sugar water but the finger got stuck. He shook his hand violently trying to get it loose but it just wouldn't come off.
It sounds almost humorous now that I describe it but at the time... well, you just don't laugh at the dead. It's not a matter of respect so much as fear. After your first few encounters with animated corpses you never failed to take them seriously. They were too dangerous and too horrible to make light of.
Unless, of course, they could talk. The thought made me wince. I'd made a bad mistake in trusting Gary. I didn't stick around to even look at the Guardsmen. We walked on past the playhouses of Theater Row, past their colorful blandishments for entertainments that hardly made sense any more. Beneath the marquees the dead scrabbled and hunted for food. We saw an elderly woman with blue hair and a colorful scarf around her neck lying face down on the sidewalk. Her bony arms were stuffed down inside a sewer grating snatching up spiders out of the darkness below. Every dumpster rattled with the dead people inside rummaging for one last morsel of food.
Most pathetic of all were the weak ones. For one reason or other they couldn't compete for the small supply of food available. Some lacked limbs or were too small or too scrawny to strive with the others. Many had been children. They were recognizable by the mottled pulpy skin on their faces, by the receding lips that had dried up and left their teeth permanently bared in broken grimaces. They did what they could to keep themselves fed but this never amounted to much. We saw a girl Ayaan's age scraping at the green lichen growing on a brick wall. Others gnawed desultorily at the bark of dead trees or chewed clumps of dry grass until green paste leaked from their grinding jaws. It was only a matter of time, I knew, before even the strongest of the dead would be reduced to these measures. There was a limited supply of food in the city, no matter how broadly you interpreted the term. They didn't eat each other for whatever unknown reason so this was what remained to them.
This was the future, then. The rest of history in a new paraphrase: a human face chewing on a leather boot, forever. I kept my head down and Ayaan did the same. Neither of us stopped to reflect further as we trudged eastward breathing canned air and listening to the creaking of our suits.