With his right arm, Patrick Shepherd swept the older man around his waist, hurrying him through the southbound lane’s jigsaw puzzle of vehicles, the smoldering George Washington Bridge looming ahead.
The cellar walls were gray cinder block, the floor concrete and damp.
Leigh Nelson lay curled in a fetal position on the bare mattress beneath an olive green wool Army blanket. Her body ached from the impact of the rubber bullets. Her stomach growled with hunger. The shackles around her ankles had rubbed the skin raw. Her mascara was smudged from crying. She missed her family. She wanted desperately to call her husband and ease his worry. Most of all, she tried to convince herself that her worst fears were unwarranted, that an outbreak of plague could never become a worldwide pandemic, and that her captors knew she was a physician — one of the good guys.
Try as she might, she was losing this psychological battle. After being shot, handcuffed, and strapped down in a portable isolation unit, she had been airlifted to Governor’s Island, then stripped and doused with a green bactericide before being subjected to a ninety-minute medical exam. Blood tests confirmed she was plague-free, but the indignity she had felt from one MP’s lust-filled eyes had unnerved her, fueling her resolve not to cooperate.
She heard the front door opening upstairs. Several people entered the building, their presence registering along the squeaking floorboards above her head. Crossing the expanse, they reached the cellar door.
Leigh sat up, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders as the men made their way down the basement stairwell.
The MP led the way, his commanding officer descending two steps behind him. He was a big man, his body language revealing fatigue. “Ms. Nelson?”
“It’s Dr. Nelson. Why am I being held like some prisoner of war? We’re supposed to be on the same side.”
“Is that why you allowed your friend to flee aboard the medevac chopper with the Scythe vaccine?”
“Your commandoes assaulted our hospital like we were a terrorist camp. You killed my boss!”
“We used rubber bullets.”
“How the hell was I supposed to know that? Haven’t we had enough shock and awe for one day? Why couldn’t you have just introduced yourself properly? I would have gladly handed over the vaccine, along with the redheaded woman who created it. We could have worked together to save Manhattan.”
“Manhattan can’t be saved.”
She felt light-headed. “What are you talking about? Of course it can be saved.”
“The president can be saved. The diplomats at the UN under triage — most of them can be saved—if we locate the vaccine in time. Most important, the world can be saved from a global pandemic, assuming the quarantine holds up through morning. Everyone else on Manhattan…” He shook his head.
“Are you insane? There are two million people—”
“Three million, including the daily workforce, all sharing twenty-eight square miles of urban jungle, exposed to a highly contagious form of bubonic plague that kills its victims within fifteen hours. Even if we had the vaccine, we’d never be able to produce enough of it in time.”
“My God…”
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Everything I have to in order to keep this nightmare contained to Manhattan. We estimate upward of a quarter of a million people are already dead, half of them on the access routes leading out of the city. We’ve sealed the tunnels and blown the bridges, but as the remains of the dead become more visible and the people more desperate, we stand a far greater chance of a few creative individuals slipping through unnoticed. Your family… they live in New Jersey?”
“Hoboken.”
“That’s a short boat ride, or an hour’s swim across the Hudson. Most of them won’t make it, of course, but New Yorkers are a pretty resilient bunch, so maybe we lose Jersey, too.”
“What is it you want?”
“I want that vaccine. Your pilot made it as far as Inwood Hill before he crash-landed in the park. Who is he? Where would he go?”
“Sergeant Patrick Shepherd, he’s one of my patients.”
Jay Zwawa typed the information on his BlackBerry. “He’s a vet?”
“Yes. As of this morning, he’s wearing a prosthetic for a left arm. His wife and daughter are living somewhere in Battery Park.”
“What’s her name?”
“Beatrice Shepherd.”
“Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Release Dr. Nelson. She’s coming with me.”
Beatrice Shepherd exited the northern stairwell of the twenty-two-story apartment building, her mind in a state of panic over her daughter, who was still not home. She made it as far as the lobby entrance, then froze, remaining hidden in the shadows.
Death had taken Manhattan, rotting the Big Apple to its core. It lay spread-eagled on the curb beneath the building awning and bled on the sidewalk. It lurked in the driver’s seat of a still-purring taxi. It infected a city block of buses and mobilized the living dead… desperate, frightened tourists with nowhere else to go.
Across the street, a father of three smashed a brick paver through the plate-glass door of a darkened pawnshop. A visitor from England seeking shelter for his family. The shotgun blast was blinding and lethal, the store owner, huddling in the dark, firing into the night.
Beatrice backed away from the lobby. God had given her a sign. Her daughter had a better chance of finding her way home than she did of locating her in this chaos.
She would remain in her apartment and pray.
It had taken them twenty minutes to reach the George Washington Bridge’s underpass, the closer they got, the louder the chaos. Screams and cries for help rang hollow in the frigid December air, interspersed with the staccato popping sounds of distant gunfire. Strange whirring noises echoed across the Hudson as unseen aerial drones soared overhead. Patrol boats passed in the darkness, their searchlights trained on the river, their engines growling. High above their heads on the Cross Bronx Expressway, bonfires turned the night into patches of glowing orange. Dozens of vehicles burned, illuminating silhouettes of a gathering mob.
The scent of the smoldering bridge remained overpowering.
Patrick and Virgil hurried past the bridge’s eastern foundation, keeping low behind the Henry Hudson Parkway’s central divider. Beyond the labyrinth of off-ramps connecting the ruptured expanse, they climbed over a four-foot concrete barrier to access the northbound lanes, then over a steel guardrail onto the 158th Street exit ramp. Deserted, the winding road was a steep and steady climb. The two men continued their trek, their breaths visible in the chilled air.
“Virgil, back at the hospital, you said everything has a cause and effect.”
“Fix the cause, and you’ll fix the effect.”
“And how do you fix all this? People are dying by the thousands. DeBorn and his ilk are manipulating the world into another war. How can you fix so much evil?”
“A timeless question. Am I responding as a psychiatrist or as a spiritual counselor?”
“I don’t care, I just need to know.”
The old man continued walking, weighing his response. “I’m going to give you an answer, but you won’t like it. Evil serves a purpose. It makes the choice of good possible. Without evil, there could be no transformation — transformation being the desire to change one’s nature from the selfish to the selfless.”
“What kind of esoteric bullshit is that? God, I actually thought you were tuned in. Is that what you’d tell a grieving mother whose kid was gunned down in the street?”
“No. It’s the response I’m offering the soldier who pulled the trigger.”
The road spun out from under him, a sudden vertigo that forced Patrick to his knees on the concrete ramp. His chest constricted. He fought to breathe. “Who… told… you? DeBorn?”
“Does it really matter?”
“The father was angry… he was running at me. The Farsi, I couldn’t remember what to say, I was trained to react. I didn’t want to kill him! I didn’t have a choice.”
“Do you honestly believe that?”
Shep shook his head. “I should have ended it right then… my life for the boy’s father. Instead… oh, God!” The dam burst, raking his body in convulsions, his anguish flowing into a night already heavy in despair.
“Suicide is not transformation, Patrick. It’s blasphemy.” Virgil sat down next to Shep and placed an arm around his shoulder. “The incident, it happened how long ago?”
“Eight years, three months.”
“And you anguish over these deaths to this day?”
“Yes.”
“Then there is some justice. What is lacking is transformation.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You asked me about evil, why God allows it to exist. The more important question is why does any of this exist? What is man’s true purpose? What if I told you that everything that surrounds us — this ramp, this city, the planet — everything you refer to as the physical universe represents a mere one percent of existence, created for one purpose… as a challenge.”
“A challenge for who? Man?”
“Man is just a vessel, designed to be fallible.” Virgil winced. “My back is stiffening, help me up.”
Shep slid his right arm around the older man’s thick waist, assisting him to his feet. With a grunt, the old man continued walking up the long, winding highway off-ramp.
“Every being possesses a soul, Patrick, and every soul is a spark of the Creator’s Light. God’s Light is pure, intended for only one purpose — to give. The soul is pure, intended for only one purpose — to receive the Light’s endless fulfillment. To receive the Light requires desire. To be more like the Creator, the soul desired to earn its endless fulfillment. That required a challenge. And here we are.”
“That’s your answer? Here we are?”
“There’s more to it than that, and I’ll tell you more when I think you are ready. For now, understand that man’s ego taints the soul’s desire to receive. Ego is the absence of Light. It leads to reactive behavior — violence, lust, greed, jealousy. The story you told me about the soldiers molesting that girl… it’s an example of what happens when the Light of God is cut off from the soul, allowing the negative forces to run amok.”
“You should have seen them. The look in their eyes… the anger.”
“Anger is the most dangerous trait of the human ego. It allows one to be taken over by the darker forces. Like lust, anger is an animal response. It can only be corrected through selfless acts that expand one’s vessel to receive more of God’s Light.”
“But people who have sinned… aren’t they forbidden from accessing the Light?”
“Not at all. Transformation is available to everyone, no matter how evil the deed. Unlike man, the Creator feels unconditional love for all His children.”
“Wait. So Hitler can exterminate six million Jews, but as long as he asks for forgiveness, then everything’s cool? Come on.”
“Transformation has nothing to do with asking for forgiveness or saying ten Hail Marys, or fasting. Transformation is an act of selflessness. What you did in Iraq, you’ll be judged for in Gehenom.”
“Gehenom is Hell, right?”
“It can be for some. Just remember, every act of kindness completed before your last breath can help ease the cleansing process after you move on.”
“So how do I transform?”
“For starters, stop being a victim. You weren’t created to be miserable. By wallowing in misery, you’re veiling God’s Light. Surely there must be something you desire?”
“Honestly, the only thing I desire is to see my family again.”
“There’s a reason you’re apart, Patrick. You need to resolve the cause to overcome the effect. Until you can do that…” The wind picked up, bringing with it a driving rain. The old man glanced up at the heavens, then ahead, where the ramp ended at a highway underpass. “There’s shelter up ahead.”
The ramp had brought them to Manhattanville. Ahead lay 158th Street, the deserted road cresting before them, running through a massive arch belonging to a highway overpass. Someone had spray-painted graffiti on its concrete wall, the red letters still dripping: