“Again with the children? Sir, with all due respect… what are you talking about?”
“Half a million dead children, to be precise.” The Iraqi physician’s dark eyes fill with rage. “When you invaded our country back in ’91, your military purposely targeted our civil works, a calculated yet immoral act that violated the Geneva Convention. You destroyed the dams we used for irrigation. You destroyed our pumping stations. You destroyed our water-purification plants and sewage-treatment facilities. My little boy was not killed by a bullet or explosive, Sergeant Shepherd. My son died from diphtheria. The drugs I would have used to treat Ali’s inflamed heart were banned from entering my country, thanks to American and British sanctions imposed by the United Nations.”
The flatboat moved closer. Shep could make out a hooded figure standing in the stern. Paddling slowly.
“We are not a backward nation, Sergeant. Before the first American invasion, Iraq possessed one of the best health-care systems in the world. Now we are fraught with cholera and typhoid, diarrhea and influenza, Hepatitis A, measles, diphtheria, meningitis, and the list goes on and on. Five hundred thousand children have perished since 1991. Hundreds more continue to die every day because we no longer have access to safe drinking water. Human waste is rampant, leading to infectious diseases.”
Shep spots the body, submerged in weeds…
“—one in eight Iraqi children now dies before its fifth birthday, one in four is chronically malnourished.”
He lifts the seven-year-old girl’s drowned corpse to his chest, his body convulsing as he recognizes her face—
“So please, do not tell me you are sorry for my son’s death. You have no idea what it feels like to lose a child.”
— Bright Eyes.
“Patrick, watch out!”
Flames flared up as a pool of gasoline ignited. Shep staggered back, clutching his face.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded at Paolo, pulling his hands away. His blood ran cold. The flatboat from his daydream was moving slowly down Park Avenue.
A lone figure stood in the wood boat, the Grim Reaper using the stick end of his scythe to guide his craft along the flooded thoroughfare.
Shep backed away as the current swept the craft down Park Avenue and onto 68th Street. The Angel of Death turned its wretched face to him as he passed. The supernal creature nodded, beckoning him to follow.
Shep slogged through the flooded street after him.
The flatboat spun out of the current and over the submerged curb, coming to rest along the sidewalk leading up to the darkened entrance of a neoclassical limestone structure. Nearly a century old, the four-story building, located on the northwest corner of East 68th Street, had large arched windows that wrapped around the first floor and octagonal windows on the upper floor, all situated below a cornice and balustrade roofline.
An engraved sign reads: council of foreign relations.
The floodwaters were washing down the curbside gutter, which inhaled everything the rapids drew into its orifice. Including the remains of the dead.
The Grim Reaper stared at Shep. The two orbital cavities within its skull were filling with dozens of fluttering eyeballs, the unnerving image resembling a honeycomb overflowing with bees. The Death Merchant waved the olive green blade of his scythe at the sewer.
The flooded crevice widened into a massive sinkhole. Tainted water swirled down the oval gullet as if it were a drain, the aperture twenty feet across and still growing. Pools of gasoline ignited, illuminating the subterranean depths below in a fiery orange radiance.
The Reaper pointed a bony index finger at the void, silently commanding Shep to peer into the abyss.
Patrick refused.
The Angel of Death raised its scythe, pile driving the blunt end of the staff against the flooded sidewalk. The resounding tremor unleashed a ring of foot-high waves that cascaded down 68th Street.
Shep glanced around. Paolo, Francesca, Virgil, and the Patels stood rigid as statues, as if they now existed in an alternative dimension from his own. It’s just the vaccine… it’s just another hallucination.
He moved to the edge of the breach. Knee deep in water, he braced his quadriceps muscles against the tug of the icy current as he looked down.
“Oh, God… no. No!”
Patrick Shepherd was peering straight into Hell.
Stone Street was a narrow avenue in Battery Park, its road paved with ancient cobblestone, the ground level of its buildings serving as storefronts to many popular eateries. Seventeen hours earlier, locals and tourists had been ordering lunch at Adrienne’s Pizzeria and buying desserts at Financier’s Pastries. Five hours later, they were crowding the Stone Street Tavern, the pub one of many public refuges for out-of-towners with no place to go to escape the mandatory curfew.
By 7 P.M., the free-flowing alcohol had transformed Stone Street into a raucous block party. Music blared from battery-powered CD players. A doomsday “anything-goes attitude” had paired women off with men they had just met, converting the backseats of parked vehicles into temporary bedrooms.
Families with young children abandoned Stone Street, initiating a pilgrimage up Broadway to Trinity Church.
By 10 P.M., the music had stopped playing. By ten thirty, the inebriated turned violent.
Fights broke out. Windows were smashed, businesses vandalized. Women who had consented to sex hours earlier were gang-raped. There was no police, no law. Only violence.
By midnight, Scythe had delivered its own version of justice to the debauchery.
Five and a half hours have passed since the calendar date changed to the dreaded twenty-first of December, the winter solstice transforming Stone Street into a fourteenth-century European village.
There were no lights, just the orange glow of embers smoldering from steel trash cans. A ceiling of mud-colored clouds churned surreally overhead. The cobblestone streets and alleyways were littered with the dead and dying. Melting snow had drenched their remains. Thawed blood flowed again from their nostrils and mouths — drawing rats.
Rats outnumbered the dead and dying sixty to one. High on fleas infected with Scythe, the vermin converged upon the fallen in cannibalistic packs, their sharp teeth and claws gnawing and stripping away husks of flesh, each meal contested, igniting another blood-frothed frenzy.
The black Chevy Suburban turned slowly onto Stone Street. For the last five hours, Bertrand DeBorn’s driver had squeezed and bulldozed and maneuvered the truck around endless avenues of abandoned vehicles that had restricted their speed to six miles an hour. Reaching another impasse, Ernest Lozano swerved onto the sidewalk, the truck’s thick tires rolling over human speed bumps, crushing rodents refusing to abandon their meals.
Sheridan Ernstmeyer was seated next to him, riding “shotgun.” The female assassin had killed anyone approaching within ten feet of the Suburban.
Bertrand DeBorn stirred in back. The secretary of defense’s glands were swollen, the low-grade fever building in his system. Eyes closed, eyelids fluttering, he rasped, “Are we there?”
“No, sir. We’re about a block away.”