The children hurried off the school bus, racing to the water’s edge, as the three helicopters crossed the Hudson a mile to the north.
“Let’s go, let’s go, everyone move! We have to hurry!”
David and Marquis Jackson-Horne passed the children to Pankaj and Manisha, everyone holding hands, forming a line behind Paolo and Francesca, who quickly led the exodus across the harbor. The middle schoolers and former sex slaves helped the younger children, hustling them across the slippery surface. David climbed onto the floe, rejoining his daughter.
The Elder stopped Marquis. “Choose the course for the rest of your days now.”
His little sister nodded.
Reaching into his waistband, the gang leader removed the 9mm and tossed the gun into the harbor. He followed his sister onto the ice.
The Elder climbed after him, bringing up the rear.
Sheridan Ernstmeyer waited until the thirty-six men, women, infant, and children were a good thirty yards offshore before she convinced herself to follow, gingerly stepping onto the frozen surface. “This is crazy.”
Ahead, Paolo and Francesca slid their feet along the slippery opaque surface as if skating. Liberty Island was less than a quarter mile ahead, the Statue momentarily disappearing from view behind a white mist that formed around the frozen path, concealing the exodus from Manhattan — the frigid fog serving to obliterate their heat signatures from the Reaper drones’ thermal sensors. Paolo focused on the advancing ice floe as it continued to form and harden several yards ahead of him, even as he registered a sudden bone-deep chill that raced down his spine, causing him to shiver.
Glancing to his right, he saw the dark form appear out of the haze, standing along the path like a sentry.
The hooded figure was cloaked in black, the scythe held within the bony grip of the being’s left hand. The Angel of Death was standing on the edge of the newly formed ice, signaling for them to advance.
Averting his gaze, Paolo led his procession past Death, gripping the prosthetic arm even tighter. “Keep moving, keep your eyes on the path! Look at nothing else.”
Ignoring the warning, Dawn looked up at the Grim Reaper and smiled. “Thank you, Patrick.”
David Kantor’s eyes widened. The Elder swept the former Army medic and his teenage daughter along, restricting his own gaze, though he sensed the supernal being’s weighty presence.
Sheridan Ernstmeyer did not see the Grim Reaper until she was almost upon it. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”
The Angel of Death grinned—
— as the ice beneath the female assassin’s feet cracked open, and she plunged feet first into the unforgiving depths of the Hudson River.
Her legs were moving, but she could not feel them, the numbness of fear making her trek across the compound feel like an out-of-body experience. The two guards half carried, half dragged her past the courtyard and out a small gate in the fortress wall.
Leigh Nelson stared at the fog-enshrouded harbor, her limbs trembling uncontrollably. She thought of her husband and children. She prayed they would remain safe from the pandemic.
The guard on her left placed the gun to the back of her skull—
— and collapsed… dead. The second man’s eyes bulged out of their sockets in terror, then he, too, joined his comrade in death.
Leigh looked around, giddy with relief—
— her legs buckling, her mind taken aback by the tall figure in the hooded cloak, his eye sockets aflutter with three pairs of seeing eyes. Floundering on all fours along the frozen ground, she looked up, terrified. “Please… don’t… hurt… me.”
The Reaper spoke, his voice a familiar rasp. “I have a basic rule: I never take a good soul after Wednesday.”
“Shep?” Leigh Nelson’s eyes rolled up into her head as she fainted.
High over Manhattan, the three military helicopters reached their designated drop zones. Praying for forgiveness, the distraught pilots released their payloads…
The corridors, rendered powerless, were vacated and dark. The interior was autumn cold, disrupted by an occasional chorus of coughs and moans coming from wards harboring the forgotten. Shown respect in words but never compensated for their sacrifice, the veterans of foreign wars remained yesterday’s problem — a burden to society, like the crazy uncle who never received an invitation to the wedding or mourners at his funeral. Dealing with amputees and cancer-ridden returning soldiers was a depressing reality to the “patriotic masses” and remained a very low priority for the members of Congress, who receive greater “fulfillment” by funding a new weapon of mass destruction than by cleaning up the “mess” left over from their two ongoing wars.
Of course, those who made it their life’s work to bring light into a wounded veteran’s life know different. And yet Scythe had chased even these stalwarts of spirituality away.
Having emptied the hospital of its staff, the plague had stalked the antiseptic halls like a hungry wolf. Desperate to feed, it had acquired new life when a fleeing member of the maintenance crew had failed to secure the vacuum seal on the doors leading into the VA’s wards, summoning the beast to the banquet.
Open wounds and immobilized victims. Fresh meat lined up like sausages.
Twelve hours later, there was nothing left but incubators of death.
The life sign resonated like a flower blooming on a desert pampa, its isolated bubble energized by a self-contained battery pack. The newborn, an auburn-haired girl less than twenty-four hours old, slept peacefully under the watchful eye of her mother.
Mary Louise Klipot stared at her daughter, yearning to hold her… to give her the love and affection that she was denied by her own parent. She looked up as a dark silhouette reflected off the neonatal intensive care unit’s Plexiglas incubator. “Go away, Death. You’re not stealing my baby. Santa Muerte protects her.”
The Grim Reaper slammed the wooden handle of his scythe upon the tile floor, the sledgehammer-like impact opening an eight-inch fissure that divided the room in half.
“What is it you want? Not my child!”
“You must answer for the ten thousand infants your actions stole this day. You shall reap the pain you’ve sown through all eternity, and your child shall be part of the harvest.”
“No!” She threw herself over the incubator, begging for mercy. “Please don’t compound my sins by stealing another innocent life! God, I know you are out there… please forgive me… have mercy on my daughter’s soul.”
The Reaper stared at the innocent newborn. “Renounce Santa Muerte, and I shall spare your child.”
Mary looked up as a brilliant white light filled the city outside her room—
“I renounce her!”
— the intense heat melting the scream from her larynx, liquefying the flesh from her bones.
Paolo and Francesca gingerly stepped off the ice and onto the pier at Liberty Island. The teens and children ran past them, everyone hurrying up a paved sidewalk leading to the Statue of Liberty.
David Kantor kicked open the sealed doors at the base of the monolith, and they entered the pedestal’s observation level—
— as a brilliant white burst of heat ignited to the northeast like an expanding bolt of lightning.
President Eric Kogelo opened his eyes. The pain that had wracked his head and internal organs over the last six hours had ceased, the fever gone.