I wedged myself through the spring-loaded emergency room doors and ran down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk, half-expecting to find myself alone. Commander Ifiyah and her company were there waiting for me, though. It looked like they'd taken a prisoner. They had somebody kneeling on the ground with a rope around his neck.
It didn't matter - I had to tell Ifiyah what had happened. It had been stupid of us to think we could actually find the medical supplies we needed in this haunted city. We had to leave, and now, before anyone else died.
"Ifiyah," I shouted, waving her over. I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and tried to get my wind back. "Ifiyah! At least one of your soldiers is dead. The enemy is in there, and they are coming for us!"
The commander turned to face me with a look of passionately studied disinterest. "Three, is more," she said. I saw then that Ayaan stood next to her. Oh, thank God, I thought, at least one of the girls survived. "Three is dead. Ayaan keeps her head on and made slaughter with your enemies, Dekalb. They are no more."
I headed over to where they stood looking down at the prisoner. "Great - but still, there's no reason for us to stay here. There were no drugs in there. The place had been looted," I told Ifiyah. She just nodded distractedly - of course Ayaan would have told her as much. A cold pang went through me as I thought of what else Ayaan might have told her commanding officer. How I ran at the first sign of trouble, for one thing (although surely they would understand - we were talking about the living dead here), abandoning my team-mates.
It was while pondering the fact that not only would Ayaan be within her rights to give such a report she would be duty bound to do so and that I was, in fact, pretty derelict in my duty back in that hospital that I finally spared the time to glance down at the prisoner and see he was one of the dead.
Jesus fucking Christ they've got one of those things on a leash -
My brain sputtered to a stop even as my feet danced backward, carrying me away from the animated corpse. For one of his kind he didn't look so bad - you could see the dark veins under his pasty white face and his eyes looked kind of yellow but otherwise his flesh was intact. He showed me his teeth though and I gave out a startled yelp until I realized he was smiling at me.
"Thank God, an American," he said.
That just made my brain hurt. The dead didn't talk. They didn't moan or howl or whimper. They certainly weren't capable of distinguishing between people of different nationalities - true believers in diversity, the dead were equal opportunity devourers.
"You have to help me," the thing started but we heard a thumping sound then and looked back to see two of the dead - including the eyeless one who nearly got me by the stairwell - slamming up against the emergency room doors. There might have been more of them inside. It was too dark to tell.
"Ifiyah, we need to head back to the boat now," I said but the commander had got there before me. She threw hand signals to her squads and with only a couple of barked words we got moving. Ayaan fell in beside me. "I thought you said you got them all," I told her, not feeling very generous at that moment.
"I thought I had," she countered. She squinted back at the hospital but the doors held - the dead lacked the mental power to figure out they needed to pry the doors open instead of just pushing at them. "The twelve that ate my kumayo sisters are no more. I did not hear you firing in our defense. You are not a warrior, Dekalb, are you? At least we know that much."
I grimaced and stepped up my pace to get away from her. I guessed correctly that she was too disciplined to break ranks. Moving ahead I caught up with the captive dead man and the girl soldier who held his leash - it was Fathia, the bayonet expert.
"Listen, just talk to them for me," the dead man pleaded when he saw me.
As we turned onto Fourteenth Street I shook my head sadly. "What the hell are you? You're not one of them, not really - "
"Yes, really," he admitted, hanging his head. "I know what I am, you don't need to humor me. That's not all I am, though. I was a doctor, originally. Okay, okay, a med student. But I could help you guys - every army needs some doctors, right? Yeah, like on M*A*S*H! I can be your Hawkeye Pierce!"
The massacre in the hospital had left my imagination stoked up. "A doctor. Did you - did one of your patients attack you? Somebody you thought was still alive?"
"My name's Gary, by the way," he answered, looking away from me. He held out his hand but I couldn't bring myself to shake it. "Fair enough," he said. "No, it wasn't one of my patients. I did it myself."
I must have blanched at that.
"Look - there didn't seem to be any choice. The city was burning. New York Fucking City was burning to the ground. Everybody else was dead. It was either join them or be their dinner. Okay?" When I didn't answer he raised his voice. "Okay?"
"Sure," I mumbled. This didn't make any sense... except that it did. I had done terrible things to survive the Epidemic. I had entrusted my seven year old daughter to a Fundamentalist warlord. I had locked up my dead wife and just abandoned her. All because it seemed like the logical choice at the time. What if it had been me, alone?
"I'm a physician, like I said, so I knew what was going to happen to me. I knew my brain would start to die the second I stopped breathing. That's why they're so stupid, post-mortem degeneration of nervous tissue. But I could protect my brain. I had the equipment. Christ, I bet I'm the smartest one on the planet right now."
"The smartest of the undead," I repeated.
"If you don't mind, I prefer the term unliving." He shot me a grin to show he'd been joking but his posture betrayed his cheer. He seemed so desperate and lonely - I wanted to reach out to him but come on. Even for a bleeding heart like me this was a stretch.
"I put myself on a respirator and then submerged myself in a bathtub full of ice," Gary explained. "It stopped my heart instantly but oxygen kept flowing to my brain. When I woke up I could still think for myself. I can still control myself. You can trust me, man, okay? Okay?"
I didn't answer. The soldiers had stopped and Ifiyah was yelling orders I couldn't understand. I looked up the street, trying to figure out what was going on. We were in front of Western Beef, the big meat market. Nothing on this Earth could have persuaded me to go inside. Right next door was another kind of meat market - a swank nightclub called Lotus. That's the meatpacking district for you. You could cut the irony with a spork.
Ayaan dropped to one knee and brought up her gun. Had somebody heard something? I couldn't see any movement amongst the piles of cardboard crates in front of Western Beef. The smell was god-awful but what did you expect of a warehouse full of meat when the power goes down?
It was the door of Lotus that opened first. A short squat man in a fashionably cut black suit stumbled out into the street. At this range he might just have been drunk, not dead. Ayaan lined up a shot with perfect slowness and precision and caved in his left temple.
"There must be more than one," I said out loud. One of the more superfluous comments I've ever made. The shot made the air around us vibrate like a bell, the noise of it echoing off concrete storefronts and brick buildings long after the dead man fell. Summoned by the sound, others came.
Dozens of them, big burly guys in white aprons stumbling out of Western Beef, Eurotrash out of the club, not even stopping to acknowledge one another, sometimes crawling over each other in their frenzy to get at us. They piled through the doors, clawing and scrambling to be the first to reach us. Dozens turned into scores.
When you added the dead who came staggering out of the buildings on every side, well.
Scores turned into hundreds.