“Good. Okay, everyone stay together now and watch where you’re walking.” He followed the middle schooler through a tight passage between rows of cars, the older teens plying him with questions.
“Did these people all die of plague?”
“How are you gonna drive a bus? The streets are jammed.”
The sound was faint — popping sounds — like distant firecrackers.
“Manhattan’s been quarantined. How’re you going to get us off the island?”
“We were safer inside. Maybe we should go back?”
“Quiet!” David stopped to listen.
The disturbance was growing louder, approaching from the north, the popping becoming more of a bashing of metal on metal, accompanied by a deep, rumbling sound.
“That’s an ESV. The military must be clearing an evacuation route. Kids, come on!”
Sheridan Ernstmeyer heard the eruption of metal on metal the moment she exited the building lobby, the sound resembling a demolition derby. She approximated the location, then hustled back to the SUV. “Bert?” She shook the secretary of defense awake.
“Where’s Shepherd’s wife?”
“Dead,” she lied, “but the military’s here. There’s an ESV moving north on Broadway. Must be an extraction team.”
Bertrand DeBorn sat up, his mask spotted with specks of blood. “Get us out of here.”
The survivors — seven foreign girls wrapped in blankets — followed their one-armed angel and the American teenager through pitch-dark corridors and up a set of creaky wooden steps to the first floor of the Chinese souvenir shop.
The brothel’s 270-pound madam was standing before the store’s front door, the Mexican woman’s rotund mass blocking the exit. “And where do you think you are going, Chuleta?”
Patrick Shepherd stepped in front of the girls, aiming the dead Colombian’s gun at the madam’s head. “Move it or lose it.”
The madam smiled through bloodstained teeth. “You do not frighten me. I am protected by Santa Muerte.”
“Never heard of her.” Raising his right knee, Patrick launched a front-thrust kick into the obese woman’s belly, sending her crashing backward through the store’s plate-glass window.
The girls scampered over the body of their former keeper and into the night.
Pankaj Patel led his family and fellow plague survivors down Bayard Street to the perimeter fence. Columbus Park’s asphalt basketball courts and synthetic baseball field were covered in snow, the reflective alabaster surface offering a peek at the extent of Scythe’s infestation upon the rodent population.
Hundreds of black rats moved as one in a symbiotic dance of tug-of-war. Rendered mad by the perpetual bites of ten thousand starving fleas, competing packs of rodents swarmed and retreated across the basketball court like schools of fish. At the center of this blood-laced scrum were the remains of an elderly couple, their ravaged torsos left recognizable only by their tattered outer garments, which provided grappling materials for tiny claws and teeth.
The visceral battle caused the six survivors to back away from the fence.
Francesca moaned, her contractions coming more frequently with every passing minute. “Paolo, do something!”
“Virgil, my wife’s having our baby.”
“And what would you have me do?”
“Lead us away from this horrible place. Get us to the waterfront and my brother-in-law’s boat.”
“What about Patrick?”
“We can’t wait for him any longer. If what he said was true, then we’re running out of time.”
Manisha nodded at Pankaj. “He’s right. We cannot wait any longer.”
“Mom, no!”
“Dawn, sweetheart, whatever he’s doing, he’ll find us when he can.”
“Perhaps you should build a golden calf?”
The four adults turned to face the old man.
“Pray to the idol, perhaps it will grant you the salvation you seek.”
“Virgil, my wife is about to have a baby. We’re surrounded by death—”
“—and who led you across this valley of death? Who inoculated your wife and child from plague? Manisha, who was it who risked his own life to save your family from the hangman’s noose? Yet here you are, ready to abandon your leader as easily as the Israelites abandoned Moses at Sinai. Faith is easy when things are going right, when the challenges remain negotiable, not as much so when faced with your own mortality. But what if this is the very purpose of the physicality? To test one’s faith, to battle the ego, to trust the system.”
Pankaj broke into a cold sweat. He could hear the rats growling thirty feet behind him as they tore into morsels of human flesh. “What system, Virgil? What are you advising us to do?”
“Act with unquestioning certainty.”
Dawn pointed. “There he is!”
Shep was jogging toward them, accompanied by a small group of girls, ages ten to eighteen. The youngest — a Mexican child, clung to his chest.
Manisha burst into tears of shame, immediately connecting Patrick’s “errand” to the sex slaves he had just liberated. She took the child from him, allowing Shep to catch his breath. “We need to hurry, the sun’ll be up soon.”
Nodding at Virgil, the one-armed man led his growing flock west on Worth Street toward Broadway.
The Boeing CH-47F Chinook commercial transport helicopter flew low over New York Harbor, its tandem rotors kicking up the frigid waters, its pilots purposely avoiding the ominous layer of brown clouds swirling several hundred feet overhead. Reaching the East River, the heavy-lift airship headed north, following the narrow waterway to Lower Manhattan, landing at the United Nations Plaza.
A procession of delegates exited the lobby of the Secretariat Building, each survivor dressed hood to boots in an environmental suit. The ambulant occupied the permanent seats situated in the center of the Chinook. Those on stretchers were secured in the cargo area—
— President Eric Kogelo among them.
The sound reached them first — booming metallic collisions that rattled the night. The lights appeared next, blazing and bright, silhouetting a wave of vehicles tossed from the monster's path as it crashed its way east on Worth Street.
"This way!" Shep led them south into Foley Square.
Engines growled in the distance. Strobe lights illuminated the columns of the surrounding civic buildings. A Reaper drone loomed overhead, its camera catching Shep as he attempted to lead his followers up the US courthouse steps — the same steps Bernard Madoff had trod years earlier. As with the captured Ponzi schemer, there was no escape.
A midnight wave of Rangers swarmed in from all sides. They pinned Patrick Shepherd to the concrete, their flashlight beams blinding his eyes as they pawed every square inch of flesh and stripped the clothing from his body. He screamed in agony as two Rangers wrenched his steel prosthetic from his lacerated shoulder, tearing nerve endings and tendons as they amputated the limb by force.
Patrick writhed on the ground, his wounded body in spasms, his mind set on fire. He heard Dawn cry out in pain. He registered Paolo’s protests as gloved hands performed a cavity search on his laboring spouse.
The terror ceased, its victims left naked and shivering on the snow-covered lawn. Major Downey stalked the area. “Report.”
“Sir, we found three vials of Scythe vaccine on Sergeant Shepherd, nothing more.”