“There are nine circles in Hell, each corresponding to the seriousness of the sins of the damned souls, in the lowest of which is Satan himself, frozen forever in ice.”
“About halfway through the course of my pathetic life, I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place. I’m not sure how I ended up there; I guess I had taken a few wrong turns.”
Darkness. Absolute. Impenetrable, save for a howl of wind, its biting cold convincing him he might be blind but he was not dead. He struggled to move. Something was pinning him down by his shoulders and waist and left arm. The claustrophobic suddenness of the situation triggered a hot flush of panic even as a strand of memory forced him to reason.
The medevac chopper…
His eyes widened. He craned his neck to see past a ceiling of black yielding to a patch of cloud-infested lunar light. The panic subsided. Replaced by a dawning recognition: He was strapped in his pilot’s seat. He was in a dense forest. It was night.
Wind whistled through the vented acrylic glass, biting his flesh, the frigid air seeping bone deep. Unseen oaks, their creaking branches made brittle from winter’s embrace, clawed against the shattered cockpit.
Shep’s right hand explored until it located and unbuckled his shoulder harness. He attempted to stand, only to discover that his prosthetic arm was pinned between the crushed forward console and floor. He could not see the predicament, nor could he pull himself free.
Panic crested again like a wave. He tugged at the accursed appendage, his efforts succeeding only in separating the plastic flesh from its metal skeleton. He continued the battle, each thrust husking the false skin from the steel rod, inch by excruciating inch.
He stopped, sensing the animal. He smelled the raw musk of fur. His hair bristled against his wool sweater as he heard paws negotiate the forest floor. Adjusting to the darkness, his eyes focused on the evolving pattern of movement through the broken cockpit glass.
The wolf stepped out of the woods into the dull lunar gray. It was a male, dark and emaciated. Saliva gurgled within its throat, its quivering upper lip drawn back, revealing yellowed fangs and wisps of breath.
The predator crept closer, evaluating its trapped prey.
Shep’s heart pounded in his chest as his right hand searched the cabin for anything he could use as a weapon. “Go on, git! Get out of here!”
The wolf growled louder, a thin web of saliva dripping from its exposed teeth.
Adrenaline pumping, Shep braced his legs against the crushed forward console and forcibly yanked his prosthetic arm free, bolts popping loose from his pincers as he sheared the molded flesh from the steel appendage.
The wolf approached the cabin. It peered inside, its ears suddenly perking. It listened, then retracted its head and dashed off effortlessly, consumed by the night.
Shep laid his head back, panting. Then he too heard it — a deep baritone rumbling of thunder overhead. Only not thunder. Spotlights cut swaths from above, the helicopters’ search beams barely able to penetrate the dense forest canopy.
Move!
He climbed out from behind the console, tripping and falling over a cabin crushed topsy-turvy, kicking away remnants of glass from the shattered windshield. Overhead, the thunder of rotor blades violated the trees, the two shifting searchlights illuminating the forest floor. Shep looked up. Spotted the soldiers rappelling from their perches and ran.
The vaccine!
Retracing his steps, he hurried back to the medevac and ducked inside, his right hand searching the copilot’s seat until he located the polished wood box. Turning again to flee, he sliced his forehead on an unseen shard of glass, droplets of blood dripping into his eyes.
The invaders punched through the forest canopy, the heavily armed commandoes forced to slow as they negotiated a jagged entanglement of upper tree limbs.
Shep found himself surrounded by woods and darkness without a discernible path.
“Hello? Anybody alive?”
He turned in the direction of the unseen man, his voice somehow familiar. Seeing the handheld flashlight, he hurried toward it. “Over here! Can you help me?”
The heavyset man stepped into the clearing, his unzipped leather coat revealing the white letters of the hooded navy Columbia University sweatshirt. White hair and ponytail. A matching beard…
“Virgil?”
“Sergeant Shepherd? Were you the one piloting that helicopter?”
“Yes! I was transporting plague vaccine when I was forced down.” He looked up as dark bodies dropped into beacons of light revealing assault weapons. “They’re after me. Can you get me out of here?”
“Take my hand.” Virgil led him through the forest along an unseen path into a periphery cloaked in darkness.
The staging area had tripled in size, two more battalions of National Guardsmen having arrived with their heavy artillery. In the distance, black smoke continued to rise from the smoldering remains of what had been the center portion of the George Washington Bridge, the five-hundred-foot gap preventing anyone trapped in Manhattan from using its roadways to escape into New Jersey.
David Kantor had barely made it over the bridge before the interstate had collapsed in a ball of flames in his rearview mirror. Exhausted, growing angrier by the minute, he paced the medical tent, waiting for his commanding officer to return.
Colonel Don Hamilton entered. Fifty-nine, yet still active in the National Guard, Hamilton had been shanghaied from his auto dealership in Newark and tossed into the domestic emergency with a short briefing and a skeleton staff. For the first few hours, his mind kept drifting back to his Christmas week sale of hybrids, until the unexpected detonation of the George Washington Bridge had doused him in its sobering reality.
Hamilton handed the medic his cell phone. “All calls into Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs are being jammed, but you should be able to reach your wife in New Jersey on this line. Remember, no details about the operation.”
David dialed his home number, the colonel remaining within listening distance. “Leslie, it’s me.”
“David! Where are you? I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Have you seen what’s happening?”
“I was called to duty by the Guard. I’m close by. Les, did Gavi make it out?”
“No, but I managed to get through to her school. They’re keeping everyone in the gymnasium overnight. David—”
“Don’t panic. If she stays inside, she should be fine.” He looked up at Colonel Hamilton, who was motioning for his phone. “Leslie, I have to go. I’ll do what I can from my end.”
“I love you.”
“Love you, too.” He hung up, handing the phone back to his CO.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your daughter, Captain. My wife and I… we lost our son to leukemia when he was seven. Passed on our fifteenth wedding anniversary. There are no words.” Hamilton turned to leave.
“Colonel, the Gutierrez woman… how’s she doing?”
“Orders are orders, Captain. I’m sorry.”
Adrenaline mixed with anger and fatigue. David grabbed Hamilton by his biceps hard enough to bruise, driving him backward into a table. “What do you mean you’re sorry? She was fine!”
“Back off!” The colonel twisted free. “No one leaves Manhattan unless they’re in a Racal suit or a body bag. Those are my orders.”
“Bastards, you killed her! Not the baby, too?”
“War is hell, Captain. I’ll say a prayer for your daughter.”
Governor’s Island: 172 acres of prime real estate situated in New York Harbor. A mere half mile from the southern tip of Manhattan, Governor’s Island had been a fortified outpost during the Revolutionary War and a strategic military base in the War of 1812. Over the century that followed, the island had been converted to a military prison before opening to visitors and boating excursions. For decades, investors had flirted with turning it into a gambling resort.
Tonight, the tourist attraction had been designated a gray zone.
Leggett Hall occupied the very center of Governor’s Island. Large enough to house an entire regiment and once listed as the longest structure in the world, the building was hastily being refitted as a Level-4 isolation ward—a holding area for world leaders and diplomats desperately awaiting relocation back at the UN Plaza.
Captain Jay Zwawa walked through the enormous barracks, relieved at finally having shed his Racal suit after nearly twelve hours. His younger brother, Jesse, had remained at the United Nations to coordinate a scheduled midnight airlift — assuming the medical “way station” would ever be ready to receive its guests.
The man in-charge of converting the barracks was Joseph “Joey” Parker, a good ole Tennessee boy with the frame and disposition of an offensive tackle. Jay Zwawa located the medical engineer inspecting a ventilation duct while yelling at his foreman over a walkie-talkie.
“Listen to me, you dumb sumbitch, there are more holes in this barracks than a Vegas whorehouse. And this piece of Swiss cheese you call a ventilation system needs a total rehaul.”
“Problems, Mr. Parker?”
The engineer snapped his cell phone shut, turning to confront Zwawa. “My constipated horse has problems. What we got here are life-and-death situations. For starters, we need to jack up the exhaust flow rate in this antiquated turd house, or we’ll never reach a differential pressure strong enough to keep your virus from escaping with the next cool breeze. And don’t ask me when we’ll be finished. I’ve seen chicken coops that were less porous.”
“Tell me what you need. More men? More equipment?”
“What I need is more time and a few dozen miracles. Whose brilliant idea was this anyway? You should be flying those ivory-tower assholes to a real Level-4 containment facility.”
“We have our reasons, Mr. Parker. Now how soon?”
“How soon… how soon. Assuming I can get the new ventilation system online by nine o’clock… you might have one ward ready by two A.M.”
“Our goal was midnight.”
“And my goal was to keep all my hair, but that sure as hell didn’t happen either.” He snatched his cell phone on the first ring. “Susan Lynn, I gotta call you back.”
Zwawa shot him a look.
“Lookie here, Captain, you flew me in to do a job, and I’ll do it. My crew’s working their asses off, the problem is your choice of facility. It’s old, and even with the new internal sheeting in place, we’re still leaking air everywhere. Lose air, and you lose the vacuum that keeps viruses from flowing out of a containment area. If that happens, you can kiss this whole prairie-shit island good-bye.”
Jay Zwawa’s cell phone vibrated. “Zwawa.”
“Sir, the woman from the VA Hospital just arrived. We have her in Building 20.”
“On my way.” The captain turned to his engineer. “Two o’clock, Mr. Parker. A minute later, and your next job will be cleaning air-conditioning ducts in midtown Manhattan.”
They had moved with purpose through the forest, Virgil using the tree trunks as cover against the soldier’s night-vision glasses. Descending along paths unseen, the rocky elevation had dropped precariously, sending Shep tripping over knotted roots camouflaged by leaves and the heavily forested darkness.
In due time they had left the helicopters’ searchlights behind and eventually the thunder of the choppers’ blades. Emerging from the woods, Virgil led them to a clearing harboring a children’s playground.
Shep coughed, the cold affecting his lungs. “Where are we?”
“Fort Tryon Park. What happened to your arm?”
“My arm?” Patrick inspected the damaged left appendage under the light of a park lamppost. From the elbow joint down, the prosthetic device had been stripped of its fake flesh. The pincers were gone, too, the distal end of the sharp metal forearm now bent into a sickle-shaped curve.
“Must’ve done that when I yanked it loose from beneath the console.” Shep raised the deformed device, then cut downward, the sharp edge of the mangled appendage whistling through the crisp night air as if it were a blade. “Cuts like a scythe. Bet it would make a nasty weapon.”
“Just the same, you’d better remove it before you slice open your own leg.”
Shep reached beneath his sweater and attempted to unbuckle the harness. “It’s jammed. And the sensors below my deltoid… they must have fused together. I can’t budge it.”
“Patrick, that wooden box… you said it contains a vaccine?”
“That’s what Leigh… what Dr. Nelson said. The bastards shot her as I took off in the chopper. They came after me, too. I’m lucky to be alive.”
“The night’s still young. Open the case. Let’s see what’s inside.”
Shep sat down on a park bench, placing the polished box on his lap. Releasing the two front clasps, he opened the lid. There were eleven vials of clear liquid secured inside the case, the twelfth foam compartment empty.
Virgil read a typed note that had been folded and tucked inside one of the styrofoam edges. “Warning: This antibiotic contains a powerful neurotransmitter that crosses the brain-blood barrier. May cause hallucinogenic effects. Anger and reactive behavior exacerbate symptoms. Keep patient calm. Do not leave unsupervised for the first six to twelve hours.”
“Nelson wanted me to deliver this to the Center for Disease Control in New Jersey. I guess that’s no longer an option.”
“Patrick, people are dying in the streets by the tens of thousands.”
“What should we do?”
“We? You’re playing God on this one, not me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you hold the power of life in your hand, and that, my friend, makes you God. So, Lord Patrick, who shall live this evening, and who shall die?”
“DeBorn… I forgot about him! Virgil, I have to find my family, they’re in terrible danger.”
“Patrick—”
“DeBorn tried to kill me, now he’ll go after my family. I have to get to Battery Park before—”
“Patrick, I spoke with your soul mate.”
The blood rushed from Shep’s face. “You spoke with Bea? How? When?”
“This afternoon. After I visited you in the VA.”
“What did she say? Did you tell her how much I miss her? Does she want to see me again?”
“She loves you, but she’s afraid you may do something desperate. I told her you’re lost and you’re scared, and she prayed that I could help you find your way again. I promised her I would. I promised that I would bring you to her and to your daughter… when you’re ready.”
“I’m ready! I swear to God, Virgil—”
“Son, look around us; everything has changed. The Angel of Darkness feasts in Manhattan, the entire city is in a state of panic. We’re in Inwood, at the very northern tip of the island, Battery Park its farthest point south. That’s a good seven miles as the crow flies, double that on foot. There’s no public transportation, and the roads are stifled with endless gridlock. We’d have to walk the entire way, and the streets are paved with death, entire neighborhoods stricken with plague.”
“I don’t care. I’d walk through Hell if it meant seeing my family again.”
“All right, Dante. If it’s a journey through Hell you seek, then I’ll lead you there, only you’d better drain one of those vials first or you’ll never make it out of here alive.”
“Yeah… okay, that makes sense. You’d better take one, too.”
“Me? I’m an old man, I’ve seen my better days. Besides, one of us needs to keep his faculties if we’re to find your family.”
“You take the vaccine then, I’ll lead the way.”
“A noble gesture, but it’s not an option. I know the area. You’d get us lost in five minutes. Now do as I say, we’re wasting precious time. Those soldiers want the vaccine, too, and I suspect they’ll shoot first and ask questions later. But who am I to tell you.”
“Okay, but I’m saving vaccine for you, just in case.” Shep removed one of the containers. He pulled off the corked cap with his teeth and drained the vial of its clear liquid.
“How do you feel?”
“Good… excited. Like I finally have a sense of purpose.”
“Better prepare yourself, son. What lies ahead… it can steal a man’s soul.”
Virgil set off, following a line of shrubs paralleling Riverside Drive, the tarmac path leading them toward the river and the Henry Hudson Parkway.
The following entry has been excerpted from a recently discovered unpublished memoir, written by surgeon Guy de Chauliac during the Great Plague: 1346–1348.(translated from its original French)
I am surrounded by death.
It encompasses every waking moment of my existence. It haunts every dream. That I remain free of plague at the moment of this diary entry may be God’s will or a result of my precautions while treating the infected (translator’s note: see Chirurgia magna). Either way, it is important only in that my continuance in this life might grant me the time needed to record the observations necessary so that others may fair better in finding a cure to this Great Mortality.
That I remain symptom-free is not to say I have not been affected. As personal physician to the last three Popes, I could have chosen to remain within the safer confines of the papal palace, spending my days monitoring His Eminence’s bowel movements and analyzing stool samples. These tasks were acceptable before the arrival of plague, but not now. To expand the body of medical knowledge requires me to take risks. Ignoti nulla curatio morbid—do not attempt to cure what you do not understand. That I may succumb to the very malady I seek to cure is a fate I have entrusted to God, but in truth part of me would welcome an end to the mental anguish that has become nearly unbearable.
There are no words that adequately describe real human suffering, and I am only bearing witness to the deed. To comfort a weeping mother as she clutches her suffering infant is to witness grief; to assist the grieving parents with the child’s burial is to share their sorrow; to beg the shattered husband to abandon his wife’s infected corpse a day later is well beyond my medical training.
How does one console the tortured? How does one continue to pray to a Creator who blesses us with life, only to snatch it away so cruelly? How does one awaken each morning and will oneself to get out of bed when all that awaits is more of the same?
In my loneliest hours, my poisoned mind contemplates our existence and I see things with a clarity only Death can provide. Suffering has been with us far longer than plague, we of the unaffected simply had chosen to ignore it. The devastation of war… the cruelty of starvation… the evil unleashed by the regal and royal among us who believe themselves blessed by our Maker to wreak havoc upon the lives of others. As a physician, I have stood in the presence of both the mighty and the meek, I have borne witness to the beauty of life and its ugly cousin, callousness, and I know now that we are reaping what we have sown… that God is an angry parent, disappointed with his children, and we are paying His penance for our indiscretions.
My penance is to remain free of the infection while I treat the afflicted. In truth, I have tasted so much suffering that my heart has become numb, my veiled existence creating perpetual darkness — a darkness that awaits the light of the Angel of Death.
He watches me, this reaper of souls, for I have seen him lurking by the grave sites, his face shrouded by his hooded gown, his bony hand clutching his staff — a common sickle used by the farmer to slice through fields of wheat. That he senses me watching him I have no doubt, for he comes to me often in my dreams, his presence weighing cold on my soul.
I am not alone in my observations. Others speak of his presence, this merchant of death, greeting him with la Danse Macabre. When first witnessed, I thought the gesture to be one of hysterics… the infected mind of the survivor unable to cope with the sudden, painful loss of so many loved ones, but now I am not so sure. When there is nothing left to live for… when every breath is torturous and every heartbeat bitter, then the living welcome death with open arms and beg his merciful embrace.
One day soon, I, too, may beckon the Grim Reaper, but not now — not when my work remains unfinished. Until then I will carry on, recording my observations, attempting to find a way to curb the Great Mortality, if only to justify my own wretched existence to my Maker.
— Guigo
“This way to the city of pain. Thru here ceaseless agony awaits. All lost souls must enter here. Justice inspired God to make this place. It was built with three tools: Omnipotence, Wisdom, and Love. When only eternal things were made. And it, too, shall remain immortal. Abandon all hope upon entering here.”
Patrick Shepherd followed Virgil through a clearing onto Riverside Drive. The deserted access road led them down to the southbound lanes of the Henry Hudson Parkway, an eleven-mile highway that ran along the west side of Manhattan, offering scenic views of the Hudson River.
Stretched out before them was a sea of vehicles, wedged bumper to bumper and door to door between the parkway’s concrete dividers. The three northbound lanes were submerged beneath a blinding wall of stagnant headlights. The three southbound lanes merged into scarlet trails of taillights that paralleled the river before looping higher in the distance as it rounded an access ramp to reach the now-destroyed George Washington Bridge.
Nothing was moving. The urban chaos was eerily silent, violated only by an occasional gust of wind and a few engines still purring in neutral, burning their last gallons of fuel.
“Virgil… what happened here?”
The old man pressed his bearded face to a passenger window, peering inside a stalled SUV. “Plague.”
Clutching the vaccine box, Shep moved from car to car, the scenes within each vehicle varying, the implications inarguable. Trapped together in endless gridlock, a diverse community of tens of thousands of strangers had mingled along the roadside to vocalize their grievances, discuss options, perhaps even to share a snack or beverage. As the sun had faded into dusk and their anger had turned to desperation, they had retreated back to their mobile shelters against the plunging temperatures, the infected among them condemning the rest.
Scythe had been swift and merciless, each vehicle serving as its private incubator, equipped with a recirculating ventilation system that ensured a saturation of toxic bacilli among its passengers.
The images were as gruesome as they were heart-wrenching: parents clutching their children in a final embrace. Grandparents wrapped in blankets. Pale complexions frozen in fear and anguish. Blue lips pasted with blood. Family pets and cargo spaces overloaded with personal belongings.
Human desperation. A highway of death.
Everything suddenly so familiar. Shep swooned, his vision swirling from the vaccine—
— as night became day, winter retreating into summer.
Patrick Shepherd’s sweater evolves into body armor, the remnants of his bladelike prosthetic arm morphing into flesh, securing his M16A2 rifle.
The passenger vehicles on the Iraqi highway are charred, smoldering beneath the desert sun. The scent of scorched flesh mixes with gasoline. Black smoke drifting above orange flames. Body parts are everywhere, the car bombs having turned the public bazaar into a bloodbath. Date palms line the Shiite enclave, the thick tree trunks chewed apart with shrapnel from rocket-propelled grenades. Their shade wasted on twenty-one bullet-ridden corpses. The men, all local farmers, had been dragged from their homes by gunmen wearing Iraqi military uniforms before being shot.
Sergeant Shepherd searches the dead, his gun barrel trained to swivel toward anything that moves. He pivots to his left, the tip of his right index finger flirting with the M16's trigger, the crosshairs of his gun sight homing in on the Shiite woman. Cloaked in a traditional black burka, she weeps and babbles incoherently as she clutches the torn body of her dead son, wiping his blood on her charred face.
He moves on, as useless to the bereaved mother as is his English.
Paranoia fuels a body overweighed with equipment. Confusion fills a mind deprived of sleep. In the distance, he hears the cries of another female, only these screams are different, reflecting a present tense.
Separating from his men, he enters the charred police headquarters, ignoring the commands coming through his earpiece. The building, riddled with shrapnel, had been one of the targets of the Sunni insurgents’ raid. He moves through the rubble-filled interior, his assault rifle drawn as he approaches the back room.
There are three of them… and the girl. She is in her early teens, her shirt torn open and bloodied, her lower body naked, stretched belly down across a desk.
The sadists are part of Iraq’s patchwork security force, a renegade bunch long accused of protecting sectarian death squads. One man violates her doggy style, his trousers around his ankles, his fingers entwined in her onyx hair. His two companions, both heavily armed, await their turn like animals in heat.
Dark eyes and rifles greet him as he enters the den of iniquity.
A tense moment passes. The men grin nervously at the American, emboldened by their shared gender. “You wish a taste of this Sunni dog, yes?”
The voice in Shep’s earpiece urges his retreat. “…not our battle, Sergeant. Leave the premises… now!”
His conscience, stained yet still functioning, says otherwise. His mind negotiates with his tongue to speak.
The girl cries out to him. The Farsi needs no translation.
Shep’s pulse pounds in his ears. The injustice demands he take action, yet he knows his next move will set off a chain reaction that could end his own life and possibly the girl’s.
His right hand quivers against the M16's magazine, his index finger sliding toward the trigger. The dark eyes watching him grow antsy.
“Sergeant Shepherd, report at once.”
God, why am I here?
“Shepherd… now!”
He hesitates, then backs out of the building—
— day returning to night, the frigid December wind causing his sweat-laced body to shiver.
“Sergeant?”
He turned to Virgil, his eyes glassy with tears. “I didn’t act. I should have killed them all.”
“Killed whom? Whom should you have killed?”
“Soldiers. In Baladruz. They were raping a young girl. I stood by… I let it happen.”
Virgil said nothing, weighing his response. “These men… they deserved to die?”
“Yes. No… I don’t know. It’s complicated… a Shiite village, there were bodies everywhere. The insurgents were Sunni, so was the girl, but there has to be rules. But there were no rules, no sides. One day you’re fighting a Sunni, the next day a Shiite… all the while innocent people are dying… butchered like sheep. They look at you like it’s your fault, you try not to think about it, but inside you know you’re a part of it… maybe the cause of it… a million people dead since this whole thing began. Why am I here? They didn’t attack us. They weren’t a threat. Saddam… sure, he was an evil bastard, but were we so much better? Killing is killing, no matter who fires the bullet.”
“Was there hatred in your heart on that day?”
“Hatred? I was numb. I found myself walking on a road covered in body parts, my boots drenched in the blood of children. Then something happened, I heard a scream. Instinct took over, I mean, what if it was my daughter they were raping? Hatred? Yeah, there was hatred. You should have seen their eyes… like wild animals, filled with lust. I should have stopped them. I should have blown their fucking heads off!”
“Three dead men for one dehumanized soul. One act of evil begetting another.”
“Yeah… I mean, no. It’s just… I was ashamed. It’s like, by not acting, I became a part of it. I mean, what should I have done?”
“It’s not for me to say. You could have taken action, perhaps you should have. Sometimes there are no clear answers, sometimes innocent people suffer. You told me you were deployed how many times? Four?”
“Yeah. This happened on my first deployment, my third week out.”
“There are interesting parallels here. Life is a test, Patrick. Some souls, like soldiers, must be redeployed over and over, condemned to repeat their journey until their lessons on Earth are learned. The ancient wisdom I spoke about earlier calls this tikkun, the process of spiritual repair. It is said that a soul may travel to the Malchut—the physical world — up to four times to correct its misgiving. Perhaps the Creator was offering you an opportunity for transformation.”
“Come on, Virgil. Are you saying God purposely had me witness an innocent girl being sodomized so I could learn some lesson? What possible lesson is worth all that?”
“That’s for you to discover. The Creator operates on a level beyond our perception. Just remember that a single act of evil, like a drop of plague, can infect a million people, but so too can one good deed. What happened to the girl?”
“She died. Badly.” Shep moved to the southbound lane’s concrete barrier, his eyes drawn to the Hudson River. He paused, his blood running cold as he spotted the figure standing by the Amtrak train tracks sixty feet away.
“Oh… geez.”
The blinking red train signal illuminated the gangly figure every twenty seconds. Dark hooded garment. Long staff, curved sickle. Shep could not see the Reaper’s face, but he could sense the cold stillness of the being’s presence.
“Virgil, we need to go… we need to get off this highway, now!”
“Calm yourself, Sergeant—”
Shep wheeled around to confront the old man. “Don’t call me that anymore! It’s Patrick or Shep, not Sergeant. I’m no longer in the military.”
“Understood. Patrick, the vaccine… is it affecting your senses?”
“The vaccine?”
“It causes one to hallucinate. Are you hallucinating?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” He searched for the Grim Reaper but saw only shadows. “There’s too much death around us, Virgil, too much plague. Unless you intend to immunize yourself with the vaccine, we need to get you away from this highway of death. Look, there’s a bunch of exit ramps just past the bridge. Are you up for a quick jog? Come on, I’ll help you.”
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:
Welcome to Hell.
Abandon all hope upon entering.
“Huge hailstones, dirty water, and black snow pour from the dismal air to putrefy the putrid slush that waits them below. And they too howl like dogs in the freezing storm, turning and turning from it as if they thought one naked side could keep the other warm."
The rain became a driving sleet. Patrick and Virgil sought shelter beneath the concrete arch — the massive foundation supporting Riverside Drive. Situated within the underpass was a garage, part of a maintenance system run by New York’s Department of Transportation.
Entering the garage revealed a vast cavernous substratum formed by the roadway overhead. Steel girders framed a ceiling five stories high. A gravel access road disappeared into the dark recess before them. The wind howled through the tunnel, causing Shep to shiver uncontrollably, his rain-soaked sweater all but useless against the December cold front.
A small windowed office lay dark and vacant on their left. Virgil tried the door. Finding it unlocked, he entered, returning a moment later carrying a black ski parka. “Put this on.”
“Too small. I c-c-can’t get it over the p-p-prosthetic.”
Virgil stretched the jacket’s left sleeve in front of him. “Use your prosthetic blade. Cut the left sleeve, so your appendage can slip through the hole.”
With one downward swipe, Patrick slashed through the material at the elbow, sending goose down feathers flying.
Virgil held the altered garment for Patrick. Guiding the end of his deformed steel arm into the tailored left sleeve, Shep managed to work the alpine ski jacket over his shoulders, the old man helping him with the zipper. “Better?”
“Much better. Virgil, listen.”
The wind had died down, allowing them to hear a woman’s cry for help, the desperate plea echoing in the darkness.
“Come on!” Shoving the vaccine container inside his ski jacket, Patrick raced into the bowels of the underground structure, Virgil trailing behind.
The tunnel continued for several hundred yards, dead-ending where the ceiling tapered down to meet a concrete retaining wall and a descending stairwell, lit by a fading emergency light. Three rottweilers were bound by their leashes to the step’s iron rail, preventing anyone from using the exit. The animals’ chains had become entangled, pinning the vicious black-and-tan guard dogs side by side. Their lathered fangs remained out of reach of the woman.
She was in her late fifties, Caucasian and rotund. Stripped down to her underwear, she was standing chest deep in a pit of mud created by one of the drainage pipes, which had cracked open, depositing its refuse around the stairwell.
Seeing Patrick and Virgil, the woman immediately began to vent. “Well, it’s about time, I’ve only been screaming for help for twenty minutes. First they stole my jewelry. Then they took my air mask, which cost me five thousand dollars. Then the little bastards stripped me down to my bra and panties and left me here to die.”
The snarling dogs barked at Patrick as he approached the woman—
— their bodies morphing together in his mind’s eye, melding into a single three-headed beast… Cerberus! The mythical hound of Hades rears on its hind legs, its multiple mouths snapping at Patrick, saliva flying from its lathering jowls.
Shep backed away, the surroundings spinning in his vision—
— the cement wall becoming a long, concrete-block corridor, barred steel doors on either side. The prisoners huddle together on the floor at the end of the hall. The guards are laughing, barely restraining the three guard dogs. The rottweilers tug at their choker leashes, growling at the terrified, naked Iraqi prisoners.
The Intelligence Officer turns to Shep. “We call this ‘fearing up’ the detainees. The interrogators appreciate it. They say it helps loosen their lips.”
“What did they do?”
“Who cares? Our job is to put the fear of Jesus in ’em for the Gitmo boys. That one, drag his fat ass over here.”
Shep grabs the Iraqi by his elbow, separating the frightened man from the group.
The Intelligence Officer shoves the barrel of his sidearm in the man’s ear. “Smitty, tell him to grab his ankles. Tell him if he let’s go, I’ll blow his brains out. Shepherd, when I tell you to, I want you to beat this Arab dog across his back with the rubber hose.”
“Sir… I don’t think I can.”
“Think? Who asked you to think? I’m giving you an order, Sergeant.”
“Shepherd, these orders come directly from the defense secretary’s office. We do our jobs over here, and we prevent another 9/11 back home. Is that so hard to understand? Now pick up the fucking hose. Go on, Smitty — tell him!”
The private contractor from Titan Corporation issues commands in Farsi to his prisoner. Quivering in fear, the heavyset Iraqi bends over and grabs his ankles.
“Shepherd, now — beat his terrorist ass!”
Patrick hesitates then lashes the forty-one-year-old taxi driver and father of five across his hairy back with the rubber hose.
“What are you, a Muslim lover? Hit him, Sergeant! That’s it! Beat him like a mule.” The MI Officer winks at the private contractor as he removes the cigarette from his mouth and stubs it out in the detainee’s left ear.
The Iraqi man howls in pain. Fearful of releasing his ankles and being shot, the prisoner falls forward, smashing his head against the unforgiving tile floor, knocking himself out.
The Intel Officer and private contractor break out in hysterics.
Shep backs away from the injured man, the dogs barking and snapping—
— one rottweiler suddenly gagged. Another followed suit, then the last — all three animals choking at something lodged in their throats.
“Patrick, are you all right? Patrick—”
Shep shook the memory of Abu Ghraib from his vision until he was again standing in the underground maintenance shaft. Virgil was by his side, his right hand caked in mud.
The three dogs were gagging, their mouths filled with the muck.
The heavyset woman was on her feet. Wallowing past the dogs, she disappeared down the concrete stairwell, leaving a trail of sewage and mud.
Virgil looked at Shep, who appeared pale and shaken. “Another hallucination?”
“A bad memory.”
“Tell me.”
Patrick stared at the dogs, the scene still vivid in his mind’s eye. “My second deployment… I was assigned to Abu Ghraib prison as a systems administrator — basically a glorified computer guy. The new guys got relegated to the night shift. That’s where a lot of things happened.”
“By ‘things,’ you mean torture?”
Shep nodded. “I was forced to participate. When I complained, I was told to shut my mouth and do my job. Things got worse when the spooks arrived from Guantanamo. Sick bastards. They’d use sleep deprivation… playing children’s nursery rhymes nonstop around the clock, it drove the inmates insane. Sometimes they’d handcuff a prisoner in painful contortions and leave him like that for hours. I never saw it myself, but I heard about the waterboarding. A few times the spooks went too far and drowned the detainee. When that happened, they’d toss the dead man’s remains in a body bag and order us to dump it somewhere during the night.”
“But that’s not what haunts your dreams.”
Shep shook his head, his eyes misty. “There was an Iraqi flag officer, Hamid Zabar. To get him to talk, the spooks brought in his sixteen-year-old son. They tortured the officer’s kid while he was forced to watch… while I was forced to watch.”
Patrick regains his composure. “I was stationed there for six months. A few of us managed to leak the details back home. After a while, there was an inquiry. I was back in New York at the time and offered to testify, but they refused to bring me in. The whole investigation was a sham, designed to appease the media and the American public while placing the blame on a few ‘bad apples,’ all noncommissioned officers, even though our commander in chief had authorized the use of torture. Nothing about Rumsfeld, who had encouraged the worst of it, or his deputy henchman, Paul Wolfowitz, who saw it for himself, or Major General Geoffrey Miller, the man Rumsfeld sent over to turn Abu Ghraib into Gitmo East. None of the guilty were ever charged or disciplined, only schmucks like me, the ones who blew the whistle. For offering to testify, we were dropped a pay grade, then secretly placed on a ‘permanent redeploy’ list. Eight months later, I was back in Iraq.”
“And the detainees?”
“That’s the worst part. Most of these people were innocent bystanders, picked up on sweeps by the private-army guys or turned in for cash rewards by locals. A lot of them weren’t even being tracked or registered, just held indefinitely.”
“And you did nothing to stop it?”
“I told you, I reported it. What else was I supposed to do?”
“Hey, you two! You’re late.”
They turned, confronted by a man dressed head to toe in camouflage black fatigues, his face concealed behind a rebreather. He motioned down the concrete stairwell with his assault rifle. “Better move it, assholes. The barge’ll be here any minute.”
Grabbing the dogs’ leashes, he pulled the animals aside, allowing Patrick and Virgil to make their way down the concrete stairwell into the dark recesses below.
Built in 1875, Pier A was a 285-foot-long, forty-five-foot-wide solid masonry dock that jutted into the Hudson River at the southwest end of the Financial District at Battery Park Place. The pier supported an aging three-story structure, highlighted by green-and-white-painted arched windows and a Victorian clock tower located at its seaward end.
Hours earlier, the ferry docks adjacent to Pier A had been a beehive of activity. Tens of thousands had converged upon the waterfront park, mostly visitors, desperate to secure passage off the island. Kayaks were sold for $5,000 in cash, paddleboats exchanged for the keys to Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. By sundown, any vessel that could float had been purchased, overloaded with civilians, and launched into the Hudson—
— each one intercepted within minutes and sunk by the Coast Guard, the surviving passengers forced to swim back to shore in frigid, limb-paralyzing water.
Few survived. The lucky ones had drowned.
The gate to Pier A’s chain-link fence swung open and closed with each gust of wind, the Arctic blasts coming off the harbor rattling the scaffolding. There were lights on in the structure — a half dozen bare bulbs connected to a portable generator.
Beneath the lights, resting on its trailer, sat the 1982 Bayliner 285 °Contessa Sedan Bridge Cuddy Cruiser. The boat was ten feet long, its fiberglass hull trimmed in blue and cream. Large enough to hold eight passengers comfortably, the cruiser featured a galley equipped with an alcohol-and-electric stove and a head that housed a sink, shower, and Porta Potti. The aft berth slept three.
The cruiser was hooked up to a winch, perched over a retractable section of deck that allowed access to the water beneath the northwest section of the pier.
Heath Shelby had purchased the boat for $6,000 from one of the pier’s managing partners. The engine seemed sound, but the hull was leaking from a collision that had occurred years earlier. The repairs had been improperly completed, making the vessel less than seaworthy. As part of the deal, the owner agreed to keep the vessel inside Pier A while its new owner completed the necessary repairs.
Heath Shelby lay on the dust-covered wood floor, his Santa Claus outfit serving as a blanket. He was burning with fever. Every few minutes, he coughed up a quarter-sized glob of bloodstained bile. A kiwi-sized tumor grew ripe beneath his left armpit.
Alone and terrified, Heath was more frightened of exposing his wife and son to plague. And so he had isolated himself here with the boat, praying he would survive the night.
His cell phone rang again. Through feverish eyes, he gazed at the caller ID, making sure it was not his wife. “Speak.”
“Heath, is that you?”
“Paolo?”
“I just spoke with my sister, she’s worried sick.”
Heath sat up, delirious. “Jennie’s sick?”
“No, I said she’s worried sick. She says you won’t answer your phone.”
“Bad day at work.”
“Bad day? Heath, Manhattan’s been infected by plague; we have to get our families off the island.”
Heath lay back down, fighting the urge to vomit. “How?”
“The boat we were working on for Collin. It can take us across the river. Did you fix the leak?”
“Yeah… no, I don’t know. Paolo, I’m in the boathouse… I’m really sick. I don’t want anyone else exposed to this thing. It’s ripping my insides apart.”
“What can I do?”
“Nothing. Just stay away. Tell my family to do the same.”
“Heath, the plague is spreading everywhere, by dawn no one will be safe. Your family hasn’t been infected yet, they can still be saved. Get the boat ready to motor across the Hudson. Francesca and I will meet Jenni and Collin in Battery Park as soon as we can. I’ll make sure we get them to safety. When we get to Jersey, we’ll find a way to help you.”
“Too late for me. Take the boat, I’ll finish the repairs and leave. Just do me one favor, Paolo. Tell Jenni I love her. Tell Collin his daddy is very proud of him.”
“I… will. Hello? Heath, are you still there?”
Dropping the cell phone, Heath Shelby crawled to the nearest trash can and retched.
Rising high above the northwestern shore of Governor’s Island was the circular red sandstone fortification known as Castle William. Built in 1807 to protect New York City, the structure was two hundred feet in diameter, its walls forty feet high and eight feet thick.
Leigh Nelson followed Captain Zwawa past a large garden in the center of the castle. Entering the tower, they ascended a winding stairwell, emerging on a terrace overlooking New York Harbor. Battery Park and the Manhattan skyline loom a scant half mile across the waterway.
“Captain, please… I need to call my husband. I need to let him know I’m okay.”
Jay Zwawa ignored her, his attention focused on the magnificent view of the Financial District, the skyline aglow with lights. “I’m a bit of a history buff. Did you know that, prior to the attacks of 9/11, the worst violence ever experienced in New York happened right here? It was July of 1863, during the Civil War. Rebel agents from the Confederacy incited riots that left two thousand dead and another eight thousand New Yorkers wounded. Governor’s Island was attacked, but the militia drove the insurgents back.”
“Captain… my phone call?”
“When we get the vaccine.”
“I’m cooperating. You asked me to cooperate, and I have. What happens if your men can’t find Shep?”
“Then your call isn’t going to matter.”
An aide joined them on the terrace. “Sorry to interrupt, sir. All cell-phone signals are now being jammed. We’re ready to black out the island.”
“Do it.”
“Yes, sir.” The aide disappeared down the stairwell.
Leigh Nelson looked aghast. “You’re shutting down power?”
“Our objective is to contain three million people. By shutting off the power we darken the city, giving our thermal sensors a better view from above. We also want to encourage the populace to remain indoors.”
“You’re inducing more panic.”
“Doctor, we passed panic five hours ago.”
As they watched, the southern tip of Manhattan seemed to evaporate into the night. The rolling blackout continued through Battery Park and the Financial District… Chinatown and the Lower East Side… Tribeca, Little Italy, and SoHo. Continuing north, the wave of darkness worked its way through midtown and Central Park, blanketing the Upper East and West Side until the entire island of Manhattan — save for the glow of light from the vehicular traffic — was suffocated in velvety black.
The sound rose from the emptiness as one, reaching across land and sea like screams from a distant roller coaster–
— the sound of millions of condemned souls, crying out in the darkness for help.
Through the darkness they descended, Patrick and Virgil, one man inoculated against plague yet debilitated by the emptiness in his heart, his older companion debilitated by age yet inoculated by a selfless sense of purpose. The two men held hands to keep from falling down a concrete stairwell illuminated only by the gunman’s flashlight. Each unseen step brought them closer to dankness and disease, each breath rendered putrid by the stench of sewage that rose to greet them from below, the scratching sounds of rodent claws over cement setting their flesh to tingle.
Three levels became six, eight a dozen, until the stairwell finally ended, depositing them at the opening of an eight-foot-high concrete tunnel, the passage a foot deep in partially frozen mud and sewage. Footprints revealed the hundreds who had come before them.
The gunman barked orders for them to continue moving. Calf deep in filth, they negotiated the trail, the armed man driving them forward into the darkness.
Patrick’s temper flared. The former Marine contemplated wheeling about with a vicious backhand of his damaged prosthetic, using the makeshift blade to slice open the gunman’s throat.
As if reading his mind, Virgil maneuvered Shep in front, separating him from his intended target.
The passage continued east another hundred yards, releasing them on the banks of the Hudson River. The sleet had let up, the stars made visible in the night sky by the strange absence of city lights.
Patrick looked to the shoreline where a crowd of people were huddling in small groups. Moving closer, he could distinguish two clearly different sects. The elite were dressed in expensive parkas, their faces concealed behind high-tech gas masks and rebreathers, sized even for the few children among them. Their servants, the majority being foreign, were wearing secondhand outer garments, filtering the night air through cloth painting masks and scarves while they kept vigil over children’s backpacks and overstuffed suitcases. A few were walking dogs on leashes.
A dozen masked gunmen herded the procession to a small pier. All eyes were on the river, where a massive garbage scow was slowly making its way south down the Hudson.
The barge docked. Patrick recognized its corporate logo, the vessel owned by the Lucchese family, a crime syndicate operating out of Brooklyn. A skeleton crew tied off the three-thousand-ton flattop. An African-American woman in her early forties climbed down from the pilothouse, dressed in a long black leather coat, matching boots, and dark camouflage pants. A gas mask was strapped to her face. A holstered.44 Magnum at her slender waist.
She approached Greg “Wonderboy” Mastroianni, a capo in the Lucchese crime family. “I’m Charon. The senator’s aide arranged for us to off-load the suits at Governor’s Island. We need to move. We’ve only got a twenty-minute window before the Coast Guard cutter returns.”
“Load ’em… after they pony up the admission fee.”
“You heard the man! Cash, jewels, gold — no one gets on board without paying up front.”
A well-dressed man in his forties cut in front of an older couple, opening his attaché case. “Here’s $26 million in bearer bonds. That should be more than enough to cover the eleven of us and our two au pairs.”
Charon used her flashlight to exam the bonds. “Oil companies, huh? Works for me. Okay, old man, you’re next. How many you bringing on board?”
The frail man with the silver hair and fur-lined aviator hat was in his late seventies. His wife balanced on a walker, assisted by two large bodyguards. “There are eighty or ninety of us. Half the money’s already been transferred, you’ll receive the other half when we arrive safely. My wife just had a hip replacement, make sure you find her someplace comfortable on board.”
“This look like the Queen Mary to you? She can sit in garbage like everyone else.”
The frail man’s voice rasped venom. “How dare you! Do you have any idea who I am?”
Virgil pulled Shep aside. “We need to leave… now.”
“What about the children? I still have ten vials of vaccine. If I save two for my family, that leaves me with—”
“Hide the box and say nothing. We’ll cross paths with other souls more worthy of being saved.”
“What if I give them a few vials to take to the health authorities in New Jersey. Dr. Nelson said—”
“Open your eyes, Patrick. These are society’s gluttons, they have no desire to save anyone but themselves. Rich and powerful, they’ve lived their entire lives believing the world was left to them alone to control. Corruption veils them from the Light, greed binds them to Satan. Behind those masks are the faces of men who raped the retirement funds of hardworking families even as they pocketed tens of millions of dollars in bonuses. Even now, they attempt to use their ill-gotten fortunes to buy a passage to freedom, oblivious to the reality that their escape from Manhattan could potentially spread the plague to the rest of the world. Take a good look at them, son. See these gluttons for what they really are.”
Patrick stared at the silver-haired old man, who had foolishly removed his gas mask to argue with the black woman. “Now you listen here. My ancestors were running this country back when yours were still running buck naked in the jungle. And you, my Sicilian friend, who do you think arranged this little excursion out of Manhattan? Your boss works for me, and so does the senator! Without me, you assholes wouldn’t make it a hundred feet past this pier.”
The Mafia capo shined his flashlight on the old man’s identification, then unfolded a slip of paper and verified the name. “Ah, damn. Let him on.”
“Get some of your thugs to assist my wife, then get us to Governor’s Island, pronto. My private jet is waiting for us at LaGuardia. I need to be in London in eight hours.”
The silver-haired man paused, as if sensing a presence. Slowly, he turned to face Patrick—
— his eyes nocturnal and glowing, like a cat’s. His ears — pointed and bat-like. Thin lips retract to reveal rotting, pointy yellow teeth. The fingers narrow into talons. Though his posture remains decrepit, the frail old man seems wired with an inner strength. A living corpse, more reptilian than human. A creature of the night.
The servants cleave to him, their bodies encircled by swarms of wasps and hornets. The domestics’ faces are swollen and bleeding from the stings, their mouths sealed permanently with a sewn-on hundred-dollar bill.
The silver-haired Nosferatu rasps at Shep, each word hissing like a snake. “Yessss? You wisssh sssomething?”
The black woman, Charon, hovers behind the vampire’s right shoulder. She smiles seductively at Shep, her leather coat having morphed into a pair of giant wings. The gunmen surrounding her have devolved into Neanderthals, their bulging eyes behind the gas masks jaundice yellow.
Virgil dragged Shep back through the crowd, away from the hungry eyes burning with malice, out of earshot of the whispers cursing him in the darkness. They managed to clear the area without incident, moving south along a deserted shoreline dusted white with sleet and snow.
Patrick faced into the wind, the frigid air helping to clear the hellish vision from his brain. “The vaccine… the hallucinations seem so real.”
“What did you see?”
“Demons and the damned. Bags of flesh without souls.”
“What I see are people who have no love of God nor respect for other human beings. They may succeed in crossing this river, but the baggage they carry with them is chaos and darkness. They’ll die unrepentant and pay for their sins with a currency measured by the suffering they’ve inflicted upon their fellowman.”
Virgil and Patrick huddled by the river’s edge, watching as the last group climbed aboard the barge, the rich using their luggage as chairs on the acre of garbage. After a few moments the twin engines throttled to life, the churning propellers gradually moving the flattop away from the pier, pushing the scow on its southerly course toward Governor’s Island.
The sensation was one of weight, as if the Earth’s gravitational pull had suddenly doubled around him, turning Patrick Shepherd’s blood into liquid lead. In a dream state he turned to his left, his movements slow and surreal, the terror causing his lower intestines to clench.
The Angel of Death stood by the Hudson’s lapping waves, its black wing-like garment tattered and heavy, the creature exuding an aged musk that permeates Patrick’s lungs. The hood had reduced the profile to a long, thin nose and pointed chin, the flesh spackled over bone. The knobby right hand clutched the scythe by its wooden handle, the blade held upright, the metal tinged a bizarre asparagus green.
The Grim Reaper watched the barge as it passed… and grinned.
The Reaper hovered three thousand feet above the Hudson River, its nocturnal eyes piercing the darkness as it hungrily searched for any humans attempting to escape Manhattan.
Thirty-six feet long, with a sixty-six-foot wingspan, the MQ-9 Reaper was a five-thousand-pound unmanned aerial drone designed to provide its operators with long-range intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Larger and more powerful than the MQ-1 Predator, the Reaper was classified as a Hunter-Killer, its reinforced chassis armed with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided smart weapons, and GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions.
The “Reapers” had arrived at JFK International aboard a C-130 Hercules transport plane, accompanied by a dozen technicians, four two-man flight-control teams, a mobile trailer containing two advanced cockpit ground-control stations, and Major Rosemarie Leipply, a former drone operator and the unit’s commanding officer.
It took two people to fly a Reaper aerial drone — a pilot using real-time imagery provided by infrared sensors and a sensor operator who controlled the aircraft’s cameras, sensors, and laser-guided munitions. Major Leipply’s trainees were neither commandoes nor pilots, they were the future of military combat: Generation Xers — video-game wizards whose reflexes and hand-eye coordination made them exceptional candidates for operating remotely controlled drones, their lack of flying experience actually an asset.
Leipply’s star pupil was Kyle Hanley, his military bio typical among her crew. Poor grades in school. Anger issues. Impregnated his girlfriend at seventeen. Stole a car. Enlisted in the Army as an alternative to a jail sentence. Lasted two weeks before going AWOL. Sent to military prison, where he demonstrated superior reflexes in a video game called World of Warcraft — bringing him to the attention of Major Rosemarie Leipply.
Kyle was stationed on Reaper-1 as the drone’s sensor operator. Before him was an array of monitors featuring night-vision and thermal scanners, the latter able to distinguish a warm-blooded human from the icy waters of the Hudson. Kyle called out instructions over his headset to his pilot, Brent Foehl, a three-hundred-pound behemoth wearing an old Brian Dawkins Philadelphia Eagles football jersey. “Two more jet skis. Zooming in on Camera One. We’ve got two passengers each. Descend to three hundred feet.”
“Roger that. Descending to three hundred feet, coming about on course one-eight-zero… that should put you right in their path.”
“Munitions locked and loaded.”
“Targets are splitting up.”
“I see ’em. We’ll take ’em north to south.”
“Roger that. Range: fifty meters. Reducing speed to forty knots. Hit ’em, baby. Let ’em feel the rain.”
The hail of white bullets across the dark screen cut a lethal broadside swath through the first Jet Ski, instantly killing forty-eight-year-old South Carolina native Cindy Grace and her husband, Sam before homing in on their in-laws. A sudden blast of white light momentarily blotted out Kyle’s thermal imager as the second jet ski’s gas tank exploded.
“Four more in the hole.” Kyle leaned over and high-fived his pilot.
“Enough!” Major Leipply felt her insides quaking, her undigested rations threatening their return. “Those bogeys are not monsters on a video game or enemy combatants, they are human beings. American citizens!”
“We had to make a game of it, Major,” retorted Brent Foehl. “You think we could do this if we actually thought about what we were doing?”
“We’ll try to keep it on the down-low,” Kyle promised, bowing his head.
“That would help, thank you.” She glanced at the digital clock posted above their station. “Finish your shift, I’ll check on your relief.”
Kyle waited until Major Leipply left. “Those bogeys are not monsters on a video game… blow me, Major Hypocrite. Funny how you never had a problem with it when we were picking off locals in Pakistan.”
“Amen, brother. Eddie baby, what’s the score?”
Sensor operator Ed White leaned out from his station on Reaper-2. “Six minutes, assholes. We’re still up by fourteen kills.”
“Don’t start spending your winnings yet, hotshot.” Brent launched Reaper-1 into a steep climb before following the Hudson to the south. “Coming to course two-seven-zero. Let’s see if anything’s brewing down by the remains of the G.W.”
Kyle leaned over to whisper to his pilot. “Yo, man, the Hudson’s a no-fly zone until 2300 hours.”
“So says you. I was told anyone escaping Manhattan could infect the rest of the world with plague. No one’s going near the Harlem River for at least another half hour, and I ain’t losin’ this bet. I don’t care if it’s a rowboat, a scuba diver, or a bunch of whores on a dinghy… as far as I’m concerned, if it leaves, it bleeds.”
“True that.”
Brent altered the Reaper’s course, banking to the southwest, keeping the drone four hundred feet above the Hudson River’s eastern shoreline.
Kyle scanned the four screens mounted above his control console. As the drone passed the George Washington Bridge, a large wake appeared on his Synthetic Aperture Radar, a remote-sensing device that used microwave electromagnetic energy to create two-dimensional images that pierced both dense cloud cover and the night.
“Got something, partner. Big-ass bow wake and two wave trails. Come to course two-three-three. Target is 3.7 kilometers south of the bridge, moving south at twelve knots. Way too big to be a cutter. Drop us to five hundred feet so I can get a thermal reading.”
Brent homed in on the coordinates, reducing his airspeed as he maneuvered the Reaper on a steady descent. “Forget it, it’s just a garbage scow.”
“A garbage scow… loaded with people! Dude, check out the thermal imager. We hit the mother lode!”
Eric White climbed out from his station console to take a look. “You’re out-of-bounds, girls. The Hudson’s no-man’s-land until 2300 hours.”
“Ignore him, Kyle. What’s your body count?”
Kyle scanned the data scrolling across his thermal scan. “Two hundred and twenty-eight people… along with seventeen dogs and a few hundred rats.”
“Man your weapons, partner, it’s time to toast vermin.”
Kyle typed in commands on his monitor, his pulse racing. “Locking and loading one Hellfire missile. Been waiting all night to launch one of these babies.”
“Twenty seconds. Hurt so good… c’mon baby, make it hurt so good. Here we go, sweetheart… Four… three… two—”
Kyle grinned. “Time to light the night.”
There was no telltale sound of engines, no warning, simply a white-hot blinding phosphorescent burst of energy that ignited night into day, followed by a thunderous explosion that unleashed a blast wave of heat across the river, expanding in all directions.
Patrick collapsed to his knees and covered his head. Purple blotches clouded his vision, his eardrums rang as he was consumed by a wave of intense heat—
— followed by a blistering hail of shrapnel. Scalding hunks of garbage sizzled as they struck the Hudson’s tainted waters, charred lumps of human flesh plopping down on the melting snow around him like burnt marshmallow spewed from a roaring campfire. Not until the debris stopped sleeting did he dare raise his head to gaze at the sinking island of fire.
The flame’s diminishing glow revealed another spectator standing to his left. The Grim Reaper tilted its robed head back, the creature’s bony arms spreading its wing-like cloak wider, as if the supernal being were inhaling the souls of the incinerated passengers.
The Reaper turned slowly to face him. Death’s once-vacant eye sockets were now filled with hundreds of fluttering eyes. The curved olive green blade of his scythe dripped fresh blood.
Shep’s throat constricted in a vise. His muscles locked up.
A gust of foul wind cooled the soggy earth. A crack of purple lightning rippled across the spinning heavens.
Darkness reached for Patrick Shepherd, pulling him toward Hell…
The following entry has been excerpted from a recently discovered unpublished memoir, written by surgeon Guy de Chauliac during the Great Plague: 1346–1348.(translated from its original French)
The Angel of Death walks among the living, sent by God to destroy us. That these are the End of Days, I have no doubt, for I have borne witness to the very evil that has summoned the Reaper to oversee our demise.
To what evil do I speak? The murder of innocent children. The burning of thousands of victims at the stake. The inhuman slaughter of an entire sect of people.
The blasphemy of our actions is as audacious as our denial of the sin.
That I am recording these thoughts to paper endangers my being as much as my daily exposure to the pestilence itself, yet I am compelled to render the words, if only to save my own soul from the Hell that awaits.
History has not been kind to the Jew — a resilient yet despised people who have been abused and slaughtered since the time of the Pharaohs and through the subsequent rise and fall of the Roman Empire. During the seven centuries that followed, hatred demonized itself into a new kind of persecution — the pogrom. In what can only be described as an almost erotic form of massacre, Christian crusaders would raid Jewish communities in the middle of the night, dragging innocent men, women, and children from their homes by the hundreds. Family members were forced to watch the mutilation and burning of parents and siblings — acts so horrendous that some Jewish men chose to kill their own wives and children rather than see them face the horrors that awaited them outside.
Unable to travel freely or acquire land, Jews turned to the profession of money-lending, an act restricted by canon law to Christians. High interest rates brought more hatred upon the Jews, who were forced into alliances with kings, bishops, and governing councils for protection. In France, this hatred was manifested by the Parisians’ infamous “Trial of the Talmud” in 1240, the mass expulsion of Jews in 1306, and the pogroms that followed the Great Famine, an era that preceded the plague we now face.
It was around the time of the Great Famine, in the spring of 1320, that a band of shepherds, the Pastoureaux, assembled in southwest France along the banks of the Garonne River. Desperation breeds fear, fear manifests into hatred, and the Jews were easy targets. Recruiting more pagans and peasants, the shepherds marched to Toulouse, killing every Jew they could find. When the movement’s leaders were captured, they were set free by the monks, who pronounced their escape “divine intervention.”
The killing spree continued, the evil spreading like plague. When it was finally over, the Pastoureaux had wiped out over one-hundred Jewish communities in the south of France, Spain, and Catalonia, brutally murdering more than ten thousand innocent people.
Though the Pastoureaux were eventually arrested, the crops continued to fail and the populace to starve, bringing more hatred upon those who had acquired the financial means to survive. In 1321, a rumor spread about an alleged plot involving the use of lepers to poison the wells in southern France, an attempt to overthrow the crown. When word reached Philip V, the king ordered mass arrests. Lepers who confessed were burned at the stake, those who pleaded their innocence were tortured until they confessed, then they, too, were burned at the stake.
Naturally, the lepers’ wealth was confiscated by the crown.
If the vast treasures accumulated by the lepers made them enticing targets, then so, too, did the wealth of the Jews. By Holy Week, conspiracy rumors had expanded to include the Jews as coplotters, and eventually the Muslims.
The killing began anew. In Toulon, one-hundred-and-sixty Jews were marched into a bonfire. In Vitry-le-Francois, another forty Jews slit their own throats before their Christian torturers could reach them.
On April 26, a cosmic event took place in France that sealed the Jews’ fate. Over a four-hour period, the afternoon sun was blotted from the sky as if engorged in blood. (Editor’s note: solar eclipse) Convinced the day of doom was upon them and that the Jews were to blame, another series of pogroms was unleashed, with every Jewish soul living in France either exterminated or imprisoned.
I was but a young man during the Great Famine, my early years spent on my parent’s farm in Languendoc, pushing a plow. The violence that spread through southern France was appalling, still I turned a blind eye to it, for what else could I do, other than thank the Almighty that I wasn’t born a Jew.
Then one day, as fate would have it, I witnessed a young noblewoman tossed from her horse. The wounds were severe, her left leg broken. I was able to stop the bleeding and set the bone so that it healed properly. Months later I was paid a visit by her father — a moneylender and Jew. In gratitude for saving his daughter’s leg and perhaps her life, her father agreed to pay for my medical education. I immediately enrolled in Bologna, where I studied anatomy and surgery… my course in life having been significantly altered by an act of kindness, my indifference to the plight of the Jews — and any oppressed people changed forever.
All of which brings us back to the plague.
It came as no surprise when blame for the Black Death was eventually assigned to the Jews. In point of fact, one of the reasons I have worked so feverishly to find the cause of the mortality was to forestall this inevitability.
Though expected, the ferocity of the attacks on the Jewish community has left me sickened and stunned.
Like the pogroms of the past, the first massacre occurred during Holy Week. On the night of Palm Sunday, April 13 past, the Christian locals in Toulon raided the Jewish quarter, dragging family members from their beds. Homes were torched, money and valuables stolen, the Jews butchered in the streets, their naked bodies dragged through the village.
From Toulon, the pogrom spread as fast as the plague. Massive bonfires exterminated entire Semitic villages. In some cases, Christians offered to spare Jewish infants by baptizing them, but their mothers refused to turn against their faith and leapt into the fire, clutching their children in their arms.
By Easter, a new “fear” was spread throughout France, this one stating that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning the wells and springs. Though similar to the stories of 1321, the rumor was given further validity when it was reported that authorities in Chillon, Switzerland, had tortured confessions from a few of their Jewish villagers, linking a local Jewish surgeon and his mother with creating the plague poison.
As I pen this entry, a terrible cycle of evil runs rampant throughout Europe. By blaming the outbreak of plague on the Jew, the populace has acquired a Satanic sense of empowerment. Instead of feeling helpless, they feel proactive, believing their village might be spared if every Jew in the region is butchered. That Jews are also dying of plague makes no difference to these angry mobs, for even if innocent, the death of a moneylender carries with it the added benefit of erasing the killers’ debt.
Three hundred Jews were murdered just last week in Tarrega, dozens more in Barcelona. New tortures are being invented every day, the latest being the violent placement of a crown of thorns upon a Jew’s head, the object then mashed into the skull using a blunt object until the prisoner is dead.
And so the pestilence has unleashed an orgy of not only death but immorality, our fears and hatred bringing forth the very worst attributes of mankind. My soul is sickened by the conduct of my own species, and I have voiced as much to Clement VI. In response, the Pope recently issued a papal bull stating that it cannot be true that the Jews are the cause of the pestilence, for the plague infects them as well.
Still, the slaughter goes on.
Meanwhile, the Pope has left the papal palace for his retreat in Etoile-sur Rhône with Cardinal Colonna, swearing to me that he will keep the chamber fires burning to cleanse the air.
I have refused Clement’s invitation to escape to the countryside. As chief surgeon, my rightful place is in Avignon, but there is another reason I have turned down my Pope’s request–
— I, too, have been stricken with the mortality.
— Guigo
"It was squandering and hoarding that have robbed them of the lovely world, and got them in this brawl. I will not waste choice words describing it! You see, my son, the short-lived mockery of all the wealth that is in Fortunes' keep, over which the human race is bickering; for all the gold that is or ever was beneath the moon won't buy a moment’s rest for even one among these weary souls."
Patrick Shepherd opened his eyes. The human sleet had passed. The cloud cover overhead yielding to blotches of starry sky.
“Are you all right, son? You fainted dead away.”
He looked up at Virgil, the old man kneeling by his side. “What happened?”
“Something destroyed the barge, probably a military drone. The blast wave must have knocked you out.”
“All those people—”
“They died as they lived… only for themselves.”
Shep’s memory came flooding back. “Virgil, I saw him. He was standing on the shoreline, just before the explosion.”
“Saw who?”
“The Angel of Death, the Grim Reaper. He’s been following me since the chopper crash!”
“Calm down—”
“It’s not the vaccine, Virgil, I’m not hallucinating this! You have to believe me.”
“I believe you.”
Patrick saw the look in the old man’s eyes. “You’ve seen him too, haven’t you?”
“Not tonight, no. But the souls of the wicked call out to him. We need to hurry if we are to find your family. Can you walk?”
Patrick stood, feeling light-headed. He couldn’t remember his last meal. He could barely remember his name. He looked around, unable to get his bearings.
The shoreline was littered with smoldering debris and the remains of the dead. Arms and legs and upper torsos and parts rendered unidentifiable. Scorched beyond recognition.
To the south, Manhattan’s skyline was cloaked in darkness, the outlines of its buildings blotting the horizon like a towering alien mountain range. The neighborhood to the immediate east was aglow in sporadic patches of orange light, its elevation above the banks of the Hudson making it difficult to discern the source. To reenter the city they must again ascend the gauntlet of highway overpasses and exit ramps, a task that seemed impossible.
“Virgil, I don’t think I have the energy to climb another exit ramp.”
“I know a better way.” Virgil handed him the polished wooden box. “Don’t forget this, your loved ones will need it.”
Gripping Patrick’s right elbow, he led him back toward the Henry Hudson Parkway and a stretch of sidewalk that intersected with Riverside Drive West.
Thumpa… thumpa… thumpa.
The rhythmic pounding was relentless, baiting her consciousness through the blackness like a fish to a bobbing worm.
Thumpa… thumpa… thumpa.
So annoying… just let me sleep.
Thumpa… thumpa… thumpa.
Gavi Kantor opened her eyes, the teen lost in a sea of delirium.
Bare bulb. Bare mattress. The heavy stench of sex. People talking gibberish.
Thumpa… thumpa… thumpa.
She stared like a fascinated kitten at the IV bag dangling high above her head, her dilated eyes tracing its plastic tubing down to her forearm even as her drugged mind fought to gain a foothold on reality. When it did, she could only manage a moan.
“Help. Somebody please… hello?”
The sound echoed in her brain, hollow and distorted. She attempted to sit up and was introduced to the restraining straps around her ankles and wrists.
And that was when the dream is shattered, her captivity rushing at her so fast its gravity drained the blood from her face, and she bellowed a hyper-ventilated, anxiety-induced scream, “Oh my God… oh my God… help! Help me!”
She cried and thrashed about until her captor showed herself.
The Mexican woman was in her fifties. The fatty deposits on the back of her arms quivered as she coldly injected the elixir into Gavi’s IV bag and adjusted the drip. “Go back to sleep, Chuleta. We’ll tend to you shortly.”
The thumpa… thumpa… thumpa of the industrial washing machine faded into blackness as the thirteen-year-old sank back into the depths of unconsciousness.
The MH-60G Pave Hawk soared over New York Harbor, its pilot having taken a circuitous route from New Jersey to avoid the Hudson River’s no-fly zone. The medium-lift combat helicopter contained two GAU-2B machine guns mounted along its side windows and a pair of.50 caliber machine guns situated just inside the cabin’s two sliding doors. A pilot, copilot, and flight engineer were stationed in the cockpit, eight heavily armed US Army Rangers in back… along with one exhausted and slightly intimidated Army Reserve medic.
David Kantor felt like a field-goal kicker among defensive lineman. His insides recoiled as the airship lurched into a dizzying turn and descent, landing with a bone-jarring thud. The Rangers methodically checked their gear and disembarked before the twin engines were switched off.
Alone in the cabin, David closed his eyes, gathering himself mentally. Why am I here? There must be a reason. Forcing his exhausted leg muscles back into action, he regained his feet and jumped down onto the frozen lawn.
An MP stood by a jeep, signaling him over. “Captain Kantor? Come with me, please.”
David climbed in the vehicle, gripping the edge of his seat as they accelerated across the frost-covered lawn, then over a dry moat’s one-lane bridge into the harbor fortress.
Fort Jay’s ancient quadrangle had been turned into a twenty-first-century command post. Rows of generators and a seemingly endless entanglement of heavy-duty cables crisscrossed the compound, providing power to portable banks of computer consoles and satellite dishes. David was led into one of four brick barracks, the interior illuminated using portable lights, the heat provided by kerosene furnaces. At the center of the room was a seven-foot-by-ten-foot map of Manhattan, spread out over a Ping-Pong table.
The commanding officer was a large man wearing an orange Racal suit, the upper torso of which hung tied off around his waist. He was yelling over the phone, his voice hoarse. “No, you listen! There are no exceptions to a Level-4 quarantine, I don’t give a rat’s ass what arrangements the senator made.” The man’s complexion changed from red to purple. “I don’t care if your V.I.P.’s the king of Siam! And if you ever try to end-run me again, I’ll personally fly down to DC, toss you and the senator in an Apache helicopter, and drop both of your asses in the middle of Times Square, you got that, maggot!”
The CO slammed the receiver down. “Ker… rist.”
The MP hesitated. “Excuse me, sir. I brought Captain Kantor as ordered.”
The big man looked up. “Who?”
“David Kantor, sir. We flew him in from New Jersey. Dr. Nelson’s patient—”
“The medic, right… sorry.” The CO turned to David. “Jay Zwawa, welcome to purgatory. Did Colonel Hamilton brief you?”
“No, sir. Only to say my services were needed for something special.”
“If by ‘special’ you mean saving the lives of our president and several hundred diplomats while preventing a global pandemic, then yeah, I’d say this was special.” Zwawa dismissed the MP, then handed David a military file. “The man we’re after managed to acquire the only known vaccine to a biological weapon that’s already infected half the population of Manhattan, killing off a good four hundred thousand by our latest estimates. Turns out the most wanted man in the world is a friend of yours.”
David opened the file and stared at a photo taken three years earlier at a security checkpoint in Iraq’s American-controlled Green Zone. “Shep? You’re after Shep?”
Zwawa signaled to another MP, who escorted a petite brunette across the room, her torso swallowed by an Army parka. “Dr. Leigh Nelson, Dr. David Kantor. Tell Kantor about your patient.”
“Seven hours ago, Patrick escaped an unnecessarily violent military invasion of the VA hospital in Manhattan aboard a medevac chopper. He crash-landed with a box of plague vaccine in Inwood Hill Park. I strongly believe he’s making his way south through Manhattan, heading for the Battery.”
“Why? What’s in the Battery?”
“His wife and daughter.”
David laid the file down on the table, his mind racing. “Shep told you his family was in the Battery?”
“Actually, no. I managed to track them down earlier in the day.”
“We’re sending in an extraction team, Kantor, only we can’t take a chance that your pal won’t flip out and destroy the vaccine. Captain, are you listening?”
David looked up, weary. “You want me to join your extraction team to hunt down Shep.”
“Basically, yes.”
“And what if his wife and daughter are no longer in Manhattan? What if they’ve already left the city?”
“He thinks she’s in the Battery, that’s all that counts. We know he attempted to contact her earlier today. It’s the vaccine we’re after, not your friend.”
David walked around the table to the southern tip of the map, glancing down at Battery Park City. It’s close to Gavi’s school, no more than a few miles. Don’t appear too anxious. Force him to strike a deal.
“One condition… this is it for me. No more deployments, no more stopgaps or reservist action. I want signed discharge papers now, or I’m not going anywhere.”
“Done. Dr. Nelson, why don’t you grab our boy here a couple of sandwiches from the mess tent while we fit him for body armor.”
It began with a headache, a dull throb, followed by an annoying purple blind spot. The chills came next, a prelude to the fever. The lump removed any lingering doubts — a small reddish welt about the size of a quarter, growing over a gland, perhaps the neck or armpit, perhaps the groin. By hour two the welt became an annoying purple grape, swelling with blood and pus. The fever raged on, the eyes became glassy. The sweat was unusually thick, laced with a distinct stench. The complexion paled as the buboes blackened, ripening to the size of a small onion, unleashing the Black Death into the bloodstream.
Nausea took over. A gag reflex ignited the vomit — traces of the victim’s final meal laced with blood. The teeth and lips were stained, but vanity meant nothing when everything hurt. The pain was bone-deep. The muscles ached. Internal organs were failing. Hour four arrived, and there was no relief in sight… except death.
The sensation originated in the toes and feet as an icy chill. The numbness rose slowly up the legs, then into the groin. The intestines shut down. The sphincter unclenched, releasing the bowels — one last indignity of the human condition. A reflexive twinge disrupted the victim’s final breath as Death’s cold hand claimed the heart.
The soul abandoned the body. It lingered, but only briefly, drawn to the Light and its warm, soothing sanctuary.
The plague, too, had abandoned the body, its DNA instructing it to seek another victim. It was all too easy. A touch of sweat, an unavoidable sneeze or cough, a noxious breath inhaled, a bloody towel tossed in the garbage. Care was a fleeting concern when one was overcome by grief. Isolation was impossible in a two-bedroom condo in a ten-story high-rise.
Horror was the realization that set in after the first family member passed, leaving behind a fleshy sack of infection that had to be disposed of, coldly and immediately.
A closet? The stench was too overwhelming. The hallway? What would the neighbors say?
Scythe in Manhattan was the Titanic sinking without a solitary lifeboat. There were no miracles to be had, only a steady dose of reality: Death was advancing—
— and there was no escape.
Shelby Morrison sat on the living-room floor nursing her fourth beer, staring at the scented candle burning on the coffee table. Her girlfriend’s uncle was seated by the living-room window. Rich Goodman taught high-school chemistry. His wife, Laurie, was in the master bedroom with their two young children.
Jamie Rumson was in the guest room. Moaning and retching.
There was no doubt in Rich Goodman’s mind that his niece was dying. The question that burned like a hot cinder in his brain was how many members of his family would she take with her.
The answer was all of them… unless he acted coldly and decisively. And that was the dilemma, for what was the cost of survival? My soul… to save my family. Do it now before the debate is moot… the girlfriend first.
Rich Goodman picked up the brass candlestick, blew out the candle—
— and whacked Shelby Morrison hard on the back of her head. The blow fractured her skull with a gut-wrenching craaack. The thirteen-year-old’s forehead struck the kitchen table as it followed the body’s deadweight onto the floor. Dark blood pooled like pancake syrup along the linoleum, a bone fragment causing the wound to spurt like a whale’s blowhole, splattering Goodman’s left cheek and sweater.
Goodman tore the garment from his body and doused his face with dishwasher liquid and water. He stepped over the girl to access the kitchen window. For an infuriating minute and a half he struggled to release the double catch before he worked each prong with two hands and managed to fling the frost-covered window open.
An arctic wind whipped through the apartment, blowing out the candles.
Goodman dragged Shelby’s body off the floor, blood dripping everywhere. Making haste, he half tossed, half shoved her corpse headfirst out the window, her midsection balancing precariously over the ledge. Grabbing her ankles, he coldly flipped the girl out the open apartment window.
Ten floors. Thirty-two feet per second.
The body struck the sidewalk with a pulse-jumping thud.
Goodman backed away, trembling yet somehow feeling a sense of accomplishment. His shoes slip-slid in blood as his criminal mind, entering its adolescence, raced to catch up with the deed. Clean the blood first! No, no… do that after you toss Jamie. Then clean, bleach, and fumigate. Gloves… you’ll need gloves and a mask.
Goodman rummaged beneath the kitchen sink until he located a pair of women’s rubber gloves and a small stack of cloth filter masks last used when he painted the kitchen six years ago. Dousing the gloves in bleach, he headed for the guest room—
— ignoring the queasiness building in his gut and the fever rising in his bloodstream.
They had followed Riverside Drive for several miles, their silence heavy against the backdrop of wails and agonizing screams hurled into the night from the neighborhoods to the east.
The cacophony of human suffering unnerved Patrick. Shards of memory flashed across his mind’s eye, each image harnessed to a specific emotion that had defined the moment.
Purgatory at Fort Drum. Endless training. Burning hatred. Like sulfur.
Deployment. Transport plane. Kuwait’s desert heat. Annoyance as they were herded into tents like sheep.
First night. Air-raid sirens. Scuds. Fumbling with his gas mask. Two more alerts. No sleep, no food, just liquids. Body armor and mask and hundred-degree heat. Combat is a terminal sauna. Confusion as his body had shut down. Anxiety as the medics tore off his flak jacket to administer fluids.
Baghdad. The sound of air being torn as an AK-47 round zips close by. Welcome to the show, rookie. Bone-rattling 155mm shells. Ears ringing. Nostrils burning from white phosphorous and oil.
Blood flows from an injured comrade. He dies as Shep fumbles to wrap the gushing mortal chest wound in gauze. An Iraqi mother clutches her armless infant… a husband his butchered spouse… a child her lifeless mother. This is the war the politician can never allow his fellow countrymen to see, a reality that energizes demonstrations and forges peace.
For the rookie soldier, combat replaces hatred with doubt, patriotism with questions.
Home is a million miles away, combat an island of loneliness and fear and confusion — confusion over right versus wrong, good versus evil, morality redefining itself with every passing moment. Eventually the rules simplify — to get home you have to survive.
To survive, you have to kill.
The village is on the Euphrates River, the locals rural, most having never seen an American before. The man and his son are rushing toward Patrick, their intent as alien as the Farsi phrases they are shouting from their mouths. He motions for them to stop, but his mangled translations are ignored. The distance is closing, the threat of a hidden explosive imminent as he enters their kill zone.
His weapon spits out a round of hot lead. The father goes down.
The son, all of nine, kneels by his murdered parent in disbelief, reality slowly bleeding into cognizance… churning into rage. The Iraqi youth sprints toward the invader who has stolen his father and perhaps the rest of his family, all in the name of a cause he cannot possibly fathom.
Life is conceived in an instant and ends in an instant. The boy’s proximity defines him as a threat. The rules of survival are simple.
Patrick shoots the boy, reuniting him with his father.
Time passes in a vacuum. It is like that for animals. Shep has devolved into a subhuman grunt, a tool of the military establishment, intended to be used but not interviewed by the press, seen but never given a voice. Day becomes night, the dreams of a better life gradually fading into nightmares that force accountability of the soul. The mind is placed on life support, just as the military always intended. Creativity is vanquished, along with the memory of his wife’s face and the child he’ll never hold again in his arms — a relationship stunted in its infancy.
The geography changes. The first tour is over. Two weeks in detox, pretending to be Patrick Shepherd, and now he’s back in Boston—
— alone.
The town house is cold and empty. His wife and daughter are long gone. There is no note, but the soldier already knows the story: The misery he has sown he must now reap.
Reality comes crashing in, the pain ripping apart his heart. Somewhere the souls of a hundred thousand dead Iraqis are smiling as the real torture begins.
He self-medicates. His friends come by, but the Patrick Shepherd they once knew is dead. The Red Sox inquire, but the image of the nine-year-old boy intervenes. He sells the house and moves into a bad neighborhood, just to be left alone.
Uncle Sam finds him eight months later. He is missed in Hell.
Deployment number two begins…
“Patrick, open your eyes! Patrick, look at me… can you hear me?”
“Virgil?”
“You went into a stupor. You were hallucinating again, weren’t you?”
Hot tears poured from his eyes.
“Patrick?”
“I can’t… sorry. Let’s just… let’s keep moving.”
“Son, you can’t run away from your own head.”
“No! You don’t talk about this, you just… you deal. You just deal with it and move on.”
“Only you haven’t moved on. Your family’s moved on, but not you.”
Ignoring the old man, Shep continued walking south on Riverside Drive.
“Stop playing the victim, Patrick. Victims are like worms, they prefer to live out their lives under a rock. It’s easier in the darkness.”
“Maybe the darkness is what I deserve.”
“Spoken like a true victim.”
“Leave me alone, shrink.”
“If that’s what you wish, we can part ways here. Your soul mate was convinced you still had something positive to offer the world. I guess she was wrong.”
The words cut deep. “She really said that?”
“It’s the only reason I’m here.”
Shep turned to face the old man, his vision blurred by the tears. “I killed a child. He was as close to me as I am to you, and I shot him… right after I shot his father.” Shep wiped snot from his watering nostrils. “I’m not a victim, I’m a murderer. How do I cleanse that from my soul?”
“You begin by taking responsibility for your actions.”
“Are you deaf, old man? Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
“What I heard was a confession. Guilt and self-loathing will not help you, son. If you really want to change, if you want to bring the Light back into your life, then you have to take responsibility for your actions.”
“How? By going to confession for the rest of my days? By talking to a shrink?”
“No. You take responsibility, not by exiling yourself in pain but by transforming from being the effect to the cause, by making a positive difference in other people’s lives. Within you lies the force of giving, sharing, loving, caring, being generous. No matter what you’ve done, there is still good inside you. ”
“You don’t get it. Making a difference is why I enlisted. I sacrificed everything… my family, my career, fame and fortune, all to right a wrong… to protect my country!”
“A righteous man, surrounded by chaos, corrupted by his environment.”
“Exactly.”
“Perhaps you should have built an ark?”
“Yes. Wait… what? Did you say an ark?”
“You’re not familiar with the story of Noah? Noah was a righteous man born during a time of great corruption, only he had to confront difficult obstacles in his life, both in his heart and in the real world. Like you, Noah was far from perfect, but he lived within a world so completely corrupted by avarice — the excessive desire for wealth — that he stood out from all the others. The Book of Genesis calls these people the Nephilim, the fallen angels, men of renown. Giants. Decode the passage, and we gain a clearer picture. To the common man they were giants, not in their physical size but in their influence. They were the equivalent of the power brokers who have corrupted Wall Street and Washington, using fear and warfare to make themselves even richer. That they considered themselves to be on a higher plane of existence defined their arrogance, and by their rule man was corrupted, all to appease their unquenchable thirst for power and possessions. The physical world became a very dark place, void of the Creator’s Light. And so the Creator sought out the brightest light — Noah — warning him that He would wipe man from the face of the Earth unless things changed. Noah attempted to warn the people, but they refused to listen. And so the Creator instructed him to build an ark so he might save his family and repopulate the world with a new generation who would seek fulfillment through the Light… through the act of treating one another with kindness the way God had intended.”
“It’s a nice story, and you spin it like a true psychiatrist, but come on… animals lining up in pairs. A flood that covered the world? I’ve never taken any of those Bible stories literally.”
“The Bible stories were never meant to be taken literally. The entire Old Testament is encrypted, each Aramaic passage revealing a vital truth about man’s existence, the ancient wisdom intended to instruct man on how to remove chaos through transformation by reconnecting with the endless Light of the Creator.”
“How come I never heard of this ancient wisdom?”
“It remained hidden for most of the last four thousand years. Only now, as we approach the End of Days, has the knowledge become available to everyone.”
“And the story of Noah… what’s the hidden meaning there?”
“We could spend weeks on the subject, so I’ll give you the broad strokes that relate to your particular situation. According to the encrypted wisdom, every person who comes into our lives represents an opportunity for growth, salvation, and fulfillment. Noah built the ark as the Creator commanded, but he did so seeking revenge against those who had wronged him. As such, he never attempted to convince God to allow him to save anyone besides his own family. Building the ark was a test of transformation, and Noah failed miserably, accepting the elimination of the world’s populace, refusing to offer the fallen ones an opportunity at redemption.
“The story of Noah happened on two levels. In the Malchut, an Aramaic term that refers to our physical world, there was an actual cataclysm that wiped out the populace. On a spiritual level, Noah’s entering the ark represented the Light of the upper worlds entering the physical universe, the positive energy destroying the negative energy.”
“God wiped out evil, I get it.”
“No, Patrick. The Creator never wipes out anyone. The Light of the Creator can only do good. What determines the outcome is the receiver. Think of God’s Light as electricity. Plug in your appliances, and one renders power to the tools of fulfillment. Stick your wet fingers in the socket, and you can be electrocuted. Either way, the nature of the Light never changes. When Noah entered the ark, the Light of the upper realms destroyed the negativity and greed that had stained the Earth. Those who cared and shared and tried to change themselves into something better were protected. Those who didn’t were destroyed.”
“Whatever happened to Noah?”
“He died, impure.”
“Wait… you just said—”
“The ark was built so that Noah and his family could hide inside a protective vessel when the Angel of Death arrived to smite humanity. The flood lasted twelve months, allowing time for Noah and his family to complete the purification process while the souls of the wicked were sent to Gehenom. But Noah made one last mistake, the same mistake Adam made. The fruit that tempted Adam was not an apple, but a grape, or the wine that comes from them. Wine can be abused, placing man in touch with levels of consciousness that cannot sustain a connection with the Light. When the floodwaters receded, Noah succumbed to temptation, consuming the fruit of the vine in an attempt to access the upper dimensions. Noah was born circumcised. When his son, Ham, the future father of the land of Canaan found Noah lying drunk and naked, he castrated him. That’s why Noah cursed the land of Canaan.”
“That was a bit severe, don’t you think?”
“Again, the story requires a translation. Noah went from being a righteous man to a victim, at least in his own state of mind. He had borne witness to the deaths of every living soul in the world, save his own family, but he never truly understood the root cause of suffering. Noah’s failure was that he built the ark, then, like all victims, assumed his own pain would purify his soul. Because he never felt the pain of those who had suffered, he couldn’t grow in a spiritual sense.”
They continued walking west on Riverside Drive, Shep deep in thought. “I’ve caused great pain, Virgil. How do I seek salvation for my sins? I mean, if a guy like Noah screwed up, what chance in Hell does a schmuck like me rate?”
“When a man seeks to cleanse his soul from difficult circumstances, he must first create an opening in his heart.”
“You’re saying I’ve grown cold. Unfeeling.”
“Have you?”
Shep contemplated his response. “Sometimes cold is the only way to survive. There’s a lot of evil in this world, Virgil. When fighting terrorists, one can’t always be Gandhi.”
“Gandhi said, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’ Violence only creates more violence.”
“Fine words, but not very practical when you’re dealing with enemy insurgents intent on killing innocent people.”
“The difference between an insurgent and a freedom fighter is defined by whose side one happens to be on at the moment. Either way, it means nothing to the dead. Life is a test, Patrick. Noah failed his test, his soul denied access into the endless Light of the Creator. Like all souls who fail to complete their tikkun, his soul was redeployed on another mission.”
“Redeployed? You mean reincarnation?”
“The process is known as Gilgul Neshamot—translated as Wheel of the Soul. A soul descends upon the physical world because it needs to make a correction, oftentimes from a sin committed in a past life. If a soul lives one lifetime without fulfilling its correction, it may return only three more times to complete its tikkun, its spiritual repair. Of course, for each lifetime a soul is recycled, it risks exposure to the negative forces that lie in wait.”
“Let me get this straight: You’re telling me that everything I’m going through now is punishment for sins committed in a prior life?”
“It’s possible.”
“No, it’s crazy. I have zero recollection of living a past life.”
“Do you recall every moment of your life, from birth throughout your childhood?”
“Of course not.”
“Yet you obviously lived them. When it comes to past lives, your conscious memory is as limited as your five senses, which lie to you with every passing moment. Accept it or not, every soul that lives in the physical world today has lived before. Who you were is not as important as the tikkun you must complete for your spiritual transformation.”
“Okay, fine. For the sake of argument let’s say I accept what you’re saying. What do you think my tikkun is?”
“I don’t know. Often, the things that cause us to react in the most negative ways are the things that require the greatest correction. The pain you’re experiencing, the pain that is blocking the Light from reaching you… I believe it has something to do with your separation from your wife. Resolve the cause, and you resolve the effect.”
Rounding Riverside Drive, they came to the western gate of an ancient graveyard.
Trinity Cemetery: Twenty-four acres of historic hillside overlooking the Hudson River. In 1776, its earth had been bathed in the blood of British and Rebel forces during the Battle of Washington Heights. In 1842, an outbreak of cholera, typhoid, and smallpox had converted the land into grave plots. Today, more than thirty-two thousand deceased were buried in tight rows or held in mausoleums on the property.
Shep hesitated, unsure about entering the graveyard.
“It’s all right. The Angel of Death has no interest in a cemetery.”
Virgil entered first, leading him past hundred-year-old oaks, the trees’ thick branches creaking in the wind, their knotty roots bursting through the broken cement walkway that ascended to its snow-covered summit. Shep helped Virgil up a narrow path bordered by ancient headstones aged with America’s history. John James Audubon. John Jacob Astor. John Peter Zenger.
The slope steepened. The old man breathed heavily. “I need to rest.”
“Over here.” They sat together on a dry landing, the moon peeking between clouds.
“Virgil… the Grim Reaper, is he evil?”
“No. The Angel of Death is a neutral force that tailors his pitch to his audience. There have been cycles of darkness in the history of mankind where Satan has grown very strong, blocking the Creator’s Light. When evil becomes widespread, when lust and avarice lead to a depravity that runs amok, then the wickedness of the world summons the Angel of Darkness to stalk the earth. These are trying times, but the darkest hours can yield the greatest Light.”
“You lived during those times. Tell me about the Holocaust. How did you manage to survive?”
“Why is this suddenly so important?”
“I don’t know. Something inside of me needs to hear it.”
Virgil closed his eyes. For a long moment he said nothing, his expression appearing pained in the moonlight. “Like the Iraqi child you believed you had to kill, I, too, was only nine the night the Nazi soldiers dragged my loved ones from our beds and marched my family and the other Jews through our Polish hamlet to the train station. They squeezed us into cattle cars… it was so difficult to breathe. People were climbing on top of one another to reach a solitary air vent. I must have passed out; the train’s whistle summoned me from my dreams when we arrived at our destination — Oswiecim — Auschwitz.
“I can still see the bright searchlights and the soldiers in black uniforms armed with machine guns. Like it is tonight, the air was frigid, the heat from the train’s engines expelling whirling gusts of steam. Moving through this fog was a well-dressed man, an embodiment of evil. We later learned his name: Dr. Josef Mengele.
“That was the first time I saw the Angel of Death. He was dressed in a white robe and hood, hovering over Mengele’s left shoulder. He looked at me, then he looked at my mother and my three sisters, each eye socket clamoring with dozens of fluttering eyes — witness eyes — eyes that had looked upon evil. As I watched, the green-tinged blade of his scythe began dripping fresh blood.
“Mengele motioned to me and my father, and we were separated from the women and led away to the right. The rest of the women, the mothers with young children, the sisters and daughters, the aunts and the elderly… all were sent to the left. I remember people screaming as families were separated. I remember one mother refusing to pick up her wailing infant, knowing the bond would seal her fate. I saw the SS shoot her on the spot.
“That was the last night I saw my mother and sisters alive. We would learn that they were taken to the gas chambers. Later, when the crematoriums were built, the children were tossed directly into the ovens or thrown into open burning pits.”
Shep felt ill, his body trembling.
“The men and boys deemed strong enough to work were marched down a road bordered by fencing and barbed wire that led to the main gate. There was a sign posted in German, Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Brings Freedom. There was no freedom at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There was no Light, only darkness.
“Each morning began with roll call and the daily selections. We were forced to stand naked in the cold, sometimes for hours while the doctors examined us, determining who would live and who would die. I was instructed by my father to run in place to flush my cheeks and show them how strong I was. They fed us rations that would starve a dog — a piece of bread, a ladle of soup. A slice of potato was a good day. We became walking bags of bones — human skeletons, the muscle and fat gone, our pulses visible through the skin. My mouth became sore from abscesses, and the chronic hunger drove me insane. One day I found a patch of green grass, ate it, and became deathly sick, the diarrhea nearly ending my life. The clothes we wore were foul, the shoes were wooden clogs, impossible to move very fast in, but it was better to wear them than be naked. To be naked was to be defenseless. To be naked increased our shame.
“Things grew worse after the crematoriums were up and running. The furnaces ran night and day, funneling fumes through a single chimney that billowed a great column of black smoke, darkening the sky like a winding river. There were days I imagined Satan’s face in the thick air, watching us, laughing. I saw the Angel of Death several times after that, only his garments by then were black.”
“Did you fear the Angel of Death?”
“No. I feared the Nazis. I feared Mengele. The Reaper was death, and death was salvation, but the Nazis made the journey so horrible that you did whatever you could to stay alive. We had also made a pact, deciding it was our duty to our families to survive, if only to inform the rest of the world about the atrocities we had suffered.
“We labored on the dead. We became dentists, extracting metal fillings and bridges. We loaded possessions — luggage, women’s purses, jewelry, clothing. We disinfected the hair of the gassed victims and dried it in the attics. We emptied gas chambers and fed the ovens, the furnaces fueled by the fat of the deceased. We ground the remains of our people into compost and used it to fertilize the camp fields.
“We were living in Hell, but as your friend, Dante, illustrated, Hell has many circles. The deepest was Block 10, the medical-experimentation block. This was Mengele’s pathology lab, his personal chamber of horrors, where he conducted experimental surgeries performed without anesthesia. Sex-change operations. Fluid transfusions. The removal of organs and limbs. Incestuous impregnations. Mengele preferred to do most of his work on children, especially twins. Young Jews and Gypsies were castrated, others placed in pressure chambers or frozen alive. They were blinded, tested with drugs, and exposed to tortures too gruesome to speak aloud. You would think these horrors would cause revulsion among the German medical institutions. Instead, their physicians flocked to Auschwitz to take part in Satan’s circus, relishing the opportunity to work on human cattle. And every day, the trains brought Mengele fresh victims.”
“Didn’t anyone try to escape?”
“A few tried. Most were recaptured. When someone did escape, all of us were ordered to stand at attention for hours on end in the courtyard while the escapee was tracked down, then humiliated and hanged. Remember, Patrick, we were Jews, exiled into Hell because no one else wanted us… where would we have escaped to? Even the Allies that eventually liberated the camps never entered the war to save us. We were told we were God’s Chosen and God had abandoned us, as so many of us had abandoned Him at Mount Sinai.
“Prayer became intolerable, we were humans reduced to vermin. Still a few of us managed to find a speck of Light, one last shred of human dignity that represented our refusal to accept our fate. For me, it was cleanliness. Each night before I lay down on my bunk with four or five other living corpses, I found a way to wash my hands, to cleanse them of the grit and ash deposited from the day. This was the way I fought my oppressors. This was the small victory that kept me out of the darkness.”
“Did you ever believe you’d be rescued? How did you manage to maintain any hope?”
“In Auschwitz, hope was a sin. Hope kept you alive another day, and to stay alive you were forced to think and act in ways that were inhuman. I saw mothers renounce their children in order to live, I saw women allow themselves to be raped by the guards in exchange for a slice of bread. I witnessed one man suffocate his brother to steal his rations. Evil begets more evil, Patrick, as well you know. And yet, through the madness of it all, yes… we held out hope that one day the world would be a different place, that our survival would usher in the change we yearned for.”
Virgil opened his eyes. “Now you’ve heard my story. Does it set your misery in perspective?”
“To be honest, it only reinforces what I came to realize in Iraq — that there is no God, that this Light force you claim is part of all of us can’t possibly exist. If God is so omnipotent, why is there so much evil in the world? If God is so loving, why didn’t He stop the Holocaust? If you’re saying He chose not to, then He’s no God of mine, He’s a monster.”
Virgil struggled to his feet, his back aching. “I understand your feelings, Patrick. I’ve heard these same thoughts a thousand times a thousand. The answer goes back to the true purpose of life, which is a test for the soul — the completion of its tikkun. Evil exists so that free will can have a choice.”
“What choice did you have when your mother and sisters were being gassed? If God was around, why didn’t He answer your prayers?”
“God did answer our prayers. The answer was no.”
“No?” Patrick shook his head, incredulous. “And that’s acceptable to you? The Nazis were tossing children in ovens and God was cool with that?”
“Of course not. But who are we to judge the Creator’s plan? You’re one man, living in your own limited microcosm of time and space, your entire perspective of existence based on a single lifetime spanning three decades, lived in a physical dimension that represents less than one percent of what’s really out there.”
“Those people were innocent, Virgil! They were victims of rampant evil.”
“Rampant evil, as you call it, has been around a long time. Just for argument’s sake, what response would have sufficed? Another flood? Or maybe God should have killed the firstborn son of every German household like He did in Egypt? How about a new set of plagues? Or were you expecting more of a fire-and-brimstone response… like an atomic bomb? Wait, that came later, and thank God, because the world’s a lot safer for it now, isn’t it? Free will, Patrick. God gave us His laws; it’s our choice whether to obey them or not. Or do the words, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ appear with a special clause that says it’s okay to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people if you want to take over the Arabian oil fields?”
“Saddam was evil. We came as liberators.”
“And who did you liberate the Native Americans from when your ancestors stole their land and wiped out their tribes?”
Patrick started to reply, then mulled it over. “Okay, point taken. We did this to ourselves, and I am as guilty as anyone.”
“Yes you are, and like every soul, unless you complete your tikkun, you’ll be coming back again… assuming there’s something to come back to.”
Reaching the crest, they could see acres of headstones spread out across Trinity Cemetery. Down the sloping hill to the east was Broadway, the main thoroughfare glowing from the light of hundreds of bonfires.
Virgil pointed. “We can follow Broadway all the way to Battery Park, but the journey will be dangerous. The plague has spread, the people are in a state of panic. Keep the vaccine concealed beneath your overcoat, or we’ll have nothing left for your wife and daughter. Patrick, are you listening?”
Patrick was not listening, he was staring at the path ahead, the cracked concrete sidewalk bordered on the right by a row of mausoleums, on the left by gravestones.
“What is it?”
“I think I’m having a major déjà vu.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“I don’t know. But suddenly I’m very cold, like I just stepped into a deep freezer. Oh, no… it’s him.”
Standing on the path, pointing a bony finger at a tombstone topped by the sculpture of an angelic child, was the Grim Reaper.
“Virgil, he’s here.”
“The Angel of Death? Where?”
“Can’t you see him? He’s on the path just up ahead. He’s pointing to a grave. Virgil, what should I do?”
“Don’t get too close, do not let him touch you. Can you see the name on the headstone?”
“No.”
“Are you certain you’ve never been to this cemetery before?”
“Yes!”
The Reaper motioned again, this time more emphatically.
Shep could feel the Angel of Death’s icy tentacles crystallizing upon his flesh — cold, bony fingers clawing at his scalp, seeking to penetrate his brain. He had never felt terror like this before, not in Iraq, not in his worst nightmare.
The fear was too much, unleashing waves of panic that curdled his blood.
Patrick Shepherd ran!
In four strides he was past the mausoleums, sprinting down the east side of the hill through a maze of graves, the route made more treacherous by the snow cover. His mangled prosthetic arm swung wildly by his side, the curved blade clipping headstones, each shearing contact generating a spark — a beacon that threatened to lead Death straight to him.
The walkway appeared on his right, an icy stretch of twisting tarmac that angled along the periphery, ending at the east entrance on Broadway. He headed for it—
— tripping over a snow-covered grave marker that launched him face-first down the hill like a human toboggan — spinning, rolling — the snow rushing down his open collar, the night sky whirling in his vision, until he landed in a heap against the ancient stone foundation that supported the eastern gate of Trinity Cemetery.
Shep rolled over on his back, sore and disoriented. He was no longer afraid, the Reaper’s icy presence gone. Lying in the snow, he stared up at the night, the full moon having risen high enough to reflect its light behind a haze of clouds. God, if you’re really up there… help me please.
He heard the reverberations — boots on snow. He closed his eyes, waiting for Virgil to arrive.
The voice belonged to another. “There’s one.”
“Leave him be, he’s mine.”
“Marquis, you promised me the last one.”
"You tryin' to push up on me, capullo?"
"No man. It’s cool.”
"Yeah, that's what I thought you said.”
Shep sat up — the night bursting into colors as the boot connected with his face.
"No gloom of Hell, nor of a night allowed no planet under its impoverished sky, the deepest dark that may be drawn by cloud; ever drew such a veil across my face, nor one whose texture rasped my senses so, as did the smoke that wrapped us in that place."
Colonel John Zwawa wore the day with a weariness that grew with each passing moment, every challenge magnified by the blood pressure intensifying in his veins.
Chaos had broken out at the United Nations. Scythe had killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, the highest-ranking political and religious authority of the nation. The Council of Guardians had convened in an emergency meeting in Tehran, naming Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati their new Supreme Leader. Jannati, head of the hard line Council of Guardians and one of the biggest opponents of democratic reform in Iran — a man who once told worshippers that he wished someone would shoot Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni — now commanded Iran’s new cache of nuclear-tipped Russian-made ICBMs.
The new Supreme Leader remained sequestered in a private suite somewhere in the Secretariat Building; only a handful of mullahs knew his location. Through an emissary, he was demanding to be taken by chopper to JFK International Airport, where he would be flown by private jet back to Tehran. What Jannati didn’t know was that his last encrypted e-mail to Tehran had been intercepted by the NSA and translated.
Upon his return to Tehran, Iran’s new Supreme Leader would declare himself Mahdi, the prophesied redeemer of Islam, initiating the Yaum al-Qiyamah, the Day of the Resurrection, where he, as the "Guided One," would rid the world of terror, injustice, and tyranny. Translation: Jannati intended to unleash Iranian insurgents armed with nuclear suitcase bombs, targeting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Riyadh, and the Victory Base Complex that served as the US military’s headquarters in Baghdad.
Briefed in his suite at the UN, President Eric Kogelo had immediately ordered all evacuation plans delayed until dawn while he and his advisors decided how best to handle the developing situation.
While the president’s staff covertly organized an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, it was left to Colonel Zwawa to clean up the mess in Manhattan.
The Big Apple was rotting from the inside. New estimates coming in from health officials at ground zero were placing the death toll at well over half a million people, with the dead and dying contaminating another hundred thousand every hour. Apartment buildings and high-rises were becoming Scythe incubators, the streets and alleyways repositories for the infected, and there was nowhere to escape except into the rivers.
To contain a potential mass exodus, the military had deployed another four armed Reaper drones, along with three more Coast Guard patrol boats. Fortunately, the river’s currents were swift, with water temperatures dipping below forty-five degrees, making immersion a baptism into hypothermia.
But Zwawa knew that desperation fueled creativity, and by dawn legions of survivors with access to scuba gear could manage to elude the Reaper’s thermal scans and find their way to the shorelines of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and New Jersey, their arrival unleashing a global pandemic. As a precaution, Manhattan’s neighboring boroughs were being evacuated, along with the Jersey shoreline communities of Englewood and all parts south to Bayonne.
The question remaining was how to deal with Manhattan.
The facility was located six stories underground, its existence known only to a handful of non-black ops intelligence personnel. Exiting the elevator, Colonel Zwawa was escorted through two more security checkpoints before being led through a nondescript white-tiled corridor to a set of steel doors labeled dept. c.
The locks unbolted, the left door swung open, greeting him with a blast of INXS from the interior sound system.
John Zwawa entered the chamber, the room heavily air-conditioned. Seated alone at a rectangular light table was a man in his forties, his head clean-shaven, his complexion kept tan all-year-round by a UV bed. He was wearing an orange-and-white Hawaiian shirt, surfboard shorts, and Teva sandals. The sunglasses were prescription, the pipe tobacco laced with opium.
As the colonel approached, he realized that the tabletop was actually a 3D hologram, the image created by a real-time satellite view of Manhattan. “I’m Zwawa.”
The man tapped his sunglasses, the stereo lowering. “Dino Garner.” The physical chemist reached beneath the table to a small refrigerator, removing a can of soda. “Dr Pepper?”
“No thanks.”
“Been analyzing your problem, Zwawa. You got lucky and screwed at the same time.”
“How’s that?”
“Got lucky in that it happened in Manhattan. If this had happened in any other New York borough, you’d be screwed six ways to Sunday. As an island, you were able to establish a quarantine, hence you got lucky. You also got screwed, being that Manhattan is also the most densely populated and expensive piece of real estate in the world… all of which complicates my job — cleaning up your mess.”
Garner walked around the table, eyeing the skyline from different angles. “In essence, this comes down to incinerating every biological and organic contaminant, dead or alive. That means human, rodent, flea, tick, bird, and the family Chihuahua — all while maintaining the infrastructure. As we say around here, that’s a simple complexity. I’m still calculating the minimal number of delivery systems, but the basics are sound. We do this in two phases. Phase I is to create a very dense cloud ceiling of carbon dioxide just above Manhattan’s skyline, combined with a few other stabilizing elements. We’ve already commandeered three turbine jet engine Air Tractors from a Jersey pesticide company, with two more on their way. Chemical payloads should arrive at Linden Commuter Airport within three hours. Another hour to load up, then it’s a quick flight over the New York Harbor to Manhattan.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Garner… why do we need a CO2 ceiling?”
“It’s Dr. Garner, and you need the cloud ceiling to contain Phase II, the burn. Think of it as putting a tent over a house before you fumigate it for pests. In our case, we’re going to fumigate the entire city, using a combination of white phosphorous, magnesium, and a few ingredients you don’t want to know about, all to create enough heat to melt flesh off the bone.
“Oxygen will be the catalyst, the combustible gas that fuels the furnace. Once the fuse is lit, it’ll torch every pocket of oxygen in the city — the subway tunnels, the ratholes, the apartments — it’ll all go up in one massive flash fire that will smother itself as soon as the air burns up.”
“Jesus…”
“Jesus only walked on water. Incinerating two million plague victims and three million rats requires serious ingenuity. Fortunately for you, this is how I make my living.”
Colonel Zwawa felt ill. “This carbon-dioxide cloud, how long must it remain over the skyline?”
“No worries. It’ll disperse when the incendiary charges go off.”
“No, I mean… how long can it remain in place before we decide to… you know, to fumigate?”
“I’m not following.”
“The president needs an excuse to delay the UN evacuation. Scythe is spreading rapidly through human contact as well as the rat population, specifically by way of infected fleas. My epizootic specialist is worried about these same fleas infecting birds, especially pigeons. An infected pigeon could deliver Scythe into New Jersey or the other four New York boroughs by first light.”
“The carbon dioxide will kill any escaping bird. There’s your excuse for releasing the CO2 cloud.”
“And for delaying the UN evacuation.”
“You’re a blessed man, Colonel. To answer your question, in this weather the cloud should remain stagnant until dawn. We’d have to launch Phase II by then, or the sun’s rays will gradually burn it off. Figure 8 A.M., give or take a few minutes.”
Colonel Zwawa checked his watch. “Seven and a half hours. Can you pull everything together that soon?”
“It’ll be done, and that’s all you need to know. As for the infrastructure, it’s gonna be three to five months before anyone can move back in, but that’s your headache, not mine.”
“May I ask you a personal question, Doctor?”
“You want to know how I sleep at night.”
“Forget it.” Zwawa shook his head, turning for the steel doors.
“Guilt is for civilians, Colonel, blame is for the pundits and politicians. Down here, we make choices… it’s an old game we call us or them. You want my advice? Take a Vicodin and a shot of Captain Jack, and you’ll sleep like a baby.”
There were six of them, all Latinos, all in their teens, dressed in black jackets and red, white, and blue bandannas — the colors of the Dominican Republic’s flag. A violent group, the DDP (Dominicans Don’t Play) had carved out their territory in Washington Heights, Queens, and the Bronx, moving drugs through their connections in the Colombian crime cartel.
A cornrowed eighteen-year-old named Marquis Jackson-Horne straddled Shep, leaning in close. “No wallet or bling… whoa, what’s dis? Got somethin’ in your coat fo’ me?”
He tore open Shep’s jacket, revealing the polished wooden box. The gang leader grabbed it—
— Shep’s prosthetic arm jumped to life, its curved blade pressing against the muscular youth’s Adam’s apple, his right hand grabbing a fistful of Marquis’s leather coat, drawing him in close. “Sorry, friend, you can’t have that.”
Instantly, five 9mm handguns appeared, every barrel aimed at Shep’s face.
“Remove the blade, nice and slow, whitebread.”
“If they fire, I’ll still manage to slice open your throat. Tell your crew to back off, and I’ll let you go.”
No one moved.
“There’s no money in the box, just medicine… for my daughter. I know the world’s gone insane, and you could give a rat’s ass, but maybe just once before you meet your Maker, you and the homeboys here could do the right thing.”
The gang leader’s eyes widened, revealing an inner rage. “Do the right thing? You messin’ with the wrong gangbanger, Spike Lee. I’m a hater. I’m fightin’ a war.”
“I just got back from fighting a war. Four tours’ worth. Now I’m a hater, too, only you know what I just realized? Haters hate because they think they’ve been wronged, now all they want is justice… only justice and happiness don’t mix very well. My family hasn’t been in my life for eleven years. I blamed a lot of people for that. Now I just want them back.”
Marquis’s eyes lost their intensity. “Nobody move. You neither, Captain Hook.” Gently, he unlatched the box, revealing the vials of serum. The gang leader turns to his crew. “Ya stuvo.”
The Dominican teens looked at one another, unsure.
“You heard me. Roll out!”
Tucking their guns back into their waistbands, the teens walked away.
Shep waited until they’d reached Broadway before releasing their leader. “How old are you?”
“Old enough to kill.”
“I’ve killed, too. Trust me, there are better ways to live out your days.”
“Fuck you. You don’t know shit about me. My mother’s dead. Cousins, too. My little sister’s dyin’ in her bed, spittin’ up blood. Six years old, never did nuthin’ to hurt nobody.”
Shep reached inside the box, removing two vials. “Give this to your sister. Have her drink it, you do the same.”
“You crazy.”
“It’s plague vaccine. Take it. Tell no one about it.”
The gang leader stared at the vials. “This for real?”
“Yeah. Watch the side effects, it causes hallucinations. It probably won’t bother your sister, but it makes you see things about yourself you may not want to see.”
“Why you givin’ me this?”
“I have a daughter.”
“And me?”
“Call it a chance at transformation.”
“Maybe I should just take the whole box.”
“You’d never make it home. The military’s after me, no doubt they’re watching us by satellite as we speak. Go. Save your sister. The two of you find a way off this island.”
Marquis hesitated. Then he jogged off.
Shep turned—
— confronted by Virgil. “That was dangerous. He’ll come back with his gang to collect the rest of the vials. We have to go.”
“What about the Grim Reaper?”
“Pray your act of kindness buys us some time before he finds you again.”
Bertrand DeBorn waited in the back of the black Chevy Suburban, seated behind the driver. Both Ernest Lozano and the secretary of defense were wearing gas masks.
The former CIA operator glanced at his boss in the rearview mirror. The rebreather secured to DeBorn’s face had left his silky white hair unkempt, revealing patches of scalp and liver spots near the head straps. His gray-blue upturned eyes appeared menacing behind the plastic shield as they stared, unblinking, out the rear window.
Lozano saw Sheridan Ernstmeyer reappear beyond the secured perimeter, escorted by a man wearing a white Racal suit. The female assassin double-timed it back to the Suburban and climbed in the backseat. She was breathing heavily behind her mask.
“Well?”
“It’s bad. They gave up on containment twelve hours ago, now they’re just trying to organize an evacuation.”
“Can your contact get word to the president that I’m down here?”
“He’s just local PD; there’s no way he can reach him.”
DeBorn slammed his fist against the back of the driver’s seat. “I’m the damn secretary of defense!”
“Sir, all communications have been shut down, with the exception of a secured line between Washington and Kogelo’s suite. No one’s allowed on the president’s floor, not even the CDC.”
“Sonuvabitch.” DeBorn’s mask fogged up. He fought the urge to rip it from his face and heave it out the window.
“Sir, there’s something else. Special Ops is organizing an assault team, my contact’s one of the cops selected for their ground support. They’re after Shepherd.”
DeBorn’s gaunt face paled.
“It’s not what you think. Shepherd escaped the VA hospital with a case of Scythe vaccine.”
DeBorn sat up, his mind racing. “We need to find Shepherd before they do… he’s our ticket out.” The secretary searched his jacket pockets, retrieving a piece of folded notepad paper with Beatrice Shepherd’s address.
“Get us to Battery Park City… fast.”
Ernest Lozano turned around to face him. “Sir, every street in Manhattan’s stuck in endless gridlock. People have abandoned their cars—”
”Drive on the damn sidewalk if you have to, I don’t care. We need to get to Shepherd’s family before the military does.”
The buildings and streetlamps were dark, the densely packed neighborhood set aglow by hundreds of car fires and the streams of conflagration dispensed from the authorities’ flamethrowers. Plague-infested corpses riddled the streets. Plague-riddled victims staggered along sidewalks and lay sprawled on curbs — their mouths and nostrils blotched in blood as if they had just finished cannibalizing the neighborhood. The surreal scene swept south down Broadway, as if taken straight out of a 1970s horror movie.
Homeland Security, dressed in storm-trooper black, their faces concealed behind gas masks, advanced in formation down the vehicle-littered avenue, herding the angry mob back inside their apartment dwellings. Sensing an ambush, a cop ignited a cluster of bodies with his flaming stream of propane and natural gas, chasing off a black woman and her two young children who had been hiding behind the remains of the deceased. The shrieking mother dragged her screaming kids down the sidewalk, all three engulfed in the blaze, the infested flesh dripping from their bones.
Shots were fired from the surrounding buildings’ darkened recesses. Two officers went down; their comrades returned fire.
“Pull back!”
Dragging their wounded, they moved toward the safety of their fleet of Hummers.
A Hispanic woman, hysterical over the death of her infant, tossed her lifeless child from a third-story window. The fragile corpse struck one of the retreating storm troopers, who freaked out—
— his reaction compelling dozens of enraged, grief-stricken parents to hurl the infected remains of their dead offspring from their balconies and windows, pinning down the militia in the middle of Broadway’s southbound lanes.
The change in tactics energized the revolt. Within minutes, hundreds of locals were streaming out of their apartment buildings, armed with baseball bats and knives, handguns and assault weapons. A final outburst of flames, and the battle was over, the masses victorious, their burning rage quelled, but only for the moment.
Reclaiming the streets, the multitudes scattered, unleashing their wrath upon local businesses, smashing windows as they looted their own neighborhood.
Virgil pulled Shep from the scene, leading him around rows of abandoned cars, the campus of Columbia University in the distance. “The breakdown of social order… it’s always followed by chaos. We’re bearing witness to a test of faith, Patrick. It appears as if Satan has won.”
The Reaper hovered a thousand feet above Broadway, its scarlet eyes focused on the street below—
— its remote operator, thirty miles away, scanning faces in the crowd on his monitor. Each head shot was sent to a physiognomic range finder, which created a two-dimensional facial map using eighteen plotted points. The reciprocal points were then compared to a three-dimensional morphology of the targeted subject’s face, already loaded into the computer.
The optical scanner zoomed in on the old man and his younger companion as they moved quickly south down Broadway. The younger man’s image was acquired, pixelized, refocused, and plotted.
match confirmed: target acquired.
“Major, we found him! Subject is heading south on Broadway, approaching West 125th Street.”
Rosemarie Leipply leaned over the drone pilot’s shoulder, confirming the match. “Well done. Lock onto the subject, then alert Captain Zwawa’s people on Governor’s Island. Be sure they’re receiving the live feed.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The MH-60G Pave Hawk reverberated on its landing struts, the combat helicopter’s rotors violating the cold December night. The nine members of the Army Ranger extraction team were already seated in back, waiting impatiently for the last recruit to climb aboard.
David Kantor willed his exhausted body to carry him and the forty pounds of equipment strapped to his back across the lawn to the waiting airship. As he approached the open side door, two Rangers reached down and dragged him on board, practically tossing him onto the far bench.
Major Steve Downey leaned in next to him, powering on the headset built into David’s mask. “You Kantor?”
David nodded.
The Ranger offered a gloved handshake, shouting to be heard. “Major Downey, welcome aboard. I understand you’re familiar with our target.”
David grabbed on to the bench as the helicopter lurched into the air. “We served a tour together in Iraq.”
“That it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Downey pulled his mask and hood off, revealing spiked hair, a goatee, and harsh hazel eyes. “Your record shows you crossed paths on at least three tours. Your personnel records indicate you invited him to your oldest daughter’s wedding, though he never showed. Don’t screw with me, Kantor. There are lives at stake… the president’s life, the UN delegates, and just maybe every person fortunate enough not to be in Manhattan. My mission is simple — get the vaccine. Whether your pal survives the night is up to him… and you. Am I being clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Once we land in Morningside Heights, we’ll divide the squad into two awaiting military vehicles. I want you seated next to me.”
“Yes, sir. Wait… did you say Morningside Heights? I was told we’d be landing in the Battery.”
“One of our drones spotted Shepherd in the vicinity of Columbia University, that’s our new destination. The wife’s strictly backup at this time. Is that a problem, Captain?”
David closed his eyes behind the tinted mask. “No, sir.”
There were thousands of them. Some had traveled miles on foot, others lived in the surrounding neighborhoods. Their government had abandoned them, the medical industry had no answers, and so they sought help from a higher power, pushing their infected loved ones in wheelbarrows and shopping carts. They pounded the sealed arched doors and shouted into the night, their pleas for last rites and salvation falling upon deaf ears… just as they had in Europe 666 years ago.
Inside the cathedral, the Reverend Canon Jeffrey Hoch moved through the massive hall, his face cloaked behind a red silk scarf. Several thousand people were scattered throughout the chapel, many asleep in the pews.
They had started arriving just before noon, senior citizens at first, as if they could sense the threatening storm. By two o’clock, hundreds were pouring in — angry families and frustrated tourists caught in the chaos, everyone seeking a warm place to wait out the hours, preferably one with a clean restroom.
The rush began an hour before dusk, when anger and confusion turned to desperation, desperation to fear. A mandatory curfew meant several hundred thousand people would be channeled into school gymnasiums, missions, and Madison Square Garden, the latter igniting memories of Hurricane Katrina and the chaos of the Superdome — only this time the desperate, destitute, and poor would be sharing space with the infected. As the multitudes began lining up along Amsterdam Avenue to be screened, Bishop Janet Saunders had ordered the clergymen inside, the cathedral sealed.
The Reverend Hoch paused to light a prayer candle, joined by Mike McDowell, the dean of the religious school. “Reverend, this isn’t right. How can we keep the public from sanctuary? How can we continue to deny the dying their last rites.”
“I am no longer in charge. You must speak with Bishop Saunders.”
“John the Divine is a multidenominational cathedral. I don’t recognize the bishop’s authority.”
“Unfortunately, Mr. McDowell, I do.”
The pounding on the three-ton bronze doors continued unabated, the sound dispersed throughout the cavernous 601-foot-long nave. McDowell headed down the center aisle for the apse, where Janet D. Saunders, the second woman elected primate in the Anglican Communion, was leading a small group of worshippers in prayer.
“Bishop Saunders, may I have a word with you in private?”
The sixty-seven-year-old Kansas native looked up. “Whatever you have to say, you can say it in front of my flock.”
“With all due respect, Bishop, the majority of your flock are locked outside the cathedral, and they’re terrified. St. John’s can take them in; we can provide them with sanctuary.”
“The Almighty has unleashed His plague upon this city, Mr. McDowell. Everyone outside these walls has been exposed. Open the doors now, and you’ll condemn the few whom Jesus has chosen to survive the night.”
Heads nodded in agreement.
McDowell felt his face flush. “And if we are being punished by the Almighty, is this not a prime example of our wickedness? Of our corruption? If we simply allowed those in need to seek refuge in our basement away from the uninfected, would this not convince God that we are worthy of being saved?”
The worshippers looked to the bishop for rebuttal.
“I considered this, Mr. McDowell. As the hour grew late, I consulted the Bible for answers. The first time God decided to strike down the wicked, he instructed Noah to build an ark, a vessel of salvation similar in size to the dwelling in which we now find ourselves. Noah warned the people, but they refused to listen. Once the rains began, no one else was allowed inside the ark, for the Angel of Death had come. The ark is now closed, Mr. McDowell. The Angel of Death shall not enter these premises.”
Thirty-seven worshippers breathed a sigh of relief, a few actually applauding.
The thunder of the helicopter’s rotors reached them seconds before the spotlight isolated them from the darkness.
Patrick and Virgil looked up, the Army chopper hovering overhead, preparing to land.
“We need to find cover… better yet, a crowd.”
“This way.” Virgil led him down West 113th Street past rows of candlelit apartments, the spotlight staying on them like an angel’s halo. They emerged on Amsterdam Avenue, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine looming across the street, the grounds a refugee camp for tens of thousands. They quickly melted into the crowd, ducking low as they gradually made their way around the Peace Fountain—
— the spotlight losing them as they cut across a snow-covered expanse of lawn, emerging on Cathedral Parkway.
The night swirled. Patrick’s vision blurred. He looked up—
— shocked to see a black winged demon hovering eighty feet overhead, its unblinking scarlet eyes staring at him, as if looking through the void into his soul.
Virgil grabbed him by the arm, tugging him hard. The two men cut through an alleyway sandwiched between apartment buildings, only to find the passage blocked by stacks of human corpses. Retracing their steps, they zigzagged around abandoned vehicles.
The Pavehawk’s searchlight picked them up again as they hurried down Amsterdam Avenue. Virgil bent over, out of breath. “Go on… without me.”
“No.” Shep looked around, desperate to find a place to hide—
— as a flock of winged demons dropped from the sky overhead. Time slowed to a crawl, each double cadence of his beating heart magnified in his ears, the night creatures descending from above, attempting to swoop him up in their talons—
The searchlight swiveled as the chopper battled a forty-mile-an-hour gust of wind, the airship’s heavenly blue light illuminating a storefront sign: minos pizzeria.
Every business on Amsterdam Avenue had been vandalized, every window broken, every store left in shambles except for Minos Pizzeria. As the light refocused on Shep, he could see sixty to eighty homeless people standing guard outside the premises — and not one looter dared cross their gauntlet.
Shep helped Virgil to the storefront, the ragged men and women blocking their way. “Please, we need a place to hide.”
A stocky Italian man with salt-and-pepper hair and an unruly goatee and glasses pulled out a large bowie knife. “Walk away or die.”
Shep saw the dog tags hanging around the man’s unshaven neck. “Patrick Shepherd, Sergeant, United States Marines, LIMA Company, Third Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment.”
“Paul Spatola, 101st Airborne.”
“Who are you guarding, Spatola?”
“The owners of the pizzeria. They’re good people.”
“I can save them.” Shep opened the polished wooden box, showing him the vials. “Plague vaccine. The government wants it to disappear. We need sanctuary — fast.”
Spatola looked around, his eyes drawn to the helicopter’s searchlight. Rangers were rappelling down to the street. “Come with me.” He led them through the crowd of homeless, then banged on the rolled-up aluminum security gate covering the front glass doors.
The door opened a crack. The man inside remained hidden in the shadows, his voice muffled behind a painter’s mask. “What’s wrong?”
“This vet and his grandfather need to get off the streets. He says he has a vaccine for the sickness.”
“A vaccine?”
Shep pushed in closer. “The military’s right behind us. Help us, and we’ll help you.”
A woman’s voice called out from inside the restaurant. “Paolo, don’t!”
A flashlight passed over Patrick’s face, the small box in his hand, then on Virgil. “Should I trust you?”
The old man nodded. “Only if you and your wife wish to survive this night.”
On Amsterdam Avenue, heavily armed Rangers moved through the crowd, searching faces. “Inside, quickly.” Unlocking the grating along its base, Paolo rolled the gate up high enough to allow the two strangers to enter.
Paul Spatola quickly slammed the security fencing back down so it locked, then passed the word, “No one gets through.”
The pizzeria was empty. An aroma of Italian meat coming from the dark recesses of the kitchen set Shep’s stomach to gurgle. He headed for the food—
— Paolo stopped him. “I need to check your skin for infection.”
They lifted their shirts and lowered their pants, Paolo’s light scanning their necks and armpits, legs and groins. Shep jumped as a cat nuzzled his left calf muscle from behind.
“You seem clean. Come with me.” They followed the Italian past checkerboard-clothed tables back through the kitchen. Spread out on a row of aluminum tables were half-sliced salamis and bricks of cheese, loaves of bread and a tray stacked with already prepared sandwiches. “Take what you want; the homeless get the rest. Everything’s spoiling anyway.”
Shep grabbed a sandwich, consuming it in three bites. “Virgil, take something.”
“I’ve eaten, and we don’t have much time. The soldiers will—”
The aluminum door of the walk-in refrigerator swung open, revealing a pregnant Italian woman with jet-black hair. In her hand was a shotgun.
“It’s okay, Francesca. They’re clean.”
“No one’s clean. This plague will kill us all.”
They heard men arguing outside. Shots were fired.
“Quickly, inside the cooler!” Paolo hurried Shep and Virgil inside the walk-in refrigerator, slamming the door closed behind them.
They huddled in the stifling darkness alive with meowing cats and the rotting stench of spoiling perishables. A dull circle of light from the woman’s dying flashlight settled on her husband, who had pushed aside crates of lettuce and was kneeling by the exposed wet patch of wood floor. In his hand was a thin piece of bent wire. Feeding it through a knothole, he fished until he found a loop of rope. Standing, he pulled hard, dragging open a trapdoor set on hinges. The flickering light from an oil lamp below illuminated a ladder leading down to what appeared to be a basement.
Paolo climbed halfway down, waiting on a rung to assist his pregnant wife.
Virgil was next, followed by Shep. Paolo climbed back up and called for the cats, who scrambled down the hole. Resetting the trapdoor, he slid down the ladder, joining the others.
They were in an old wine cellar, the stone walls and mortar dating back several centuries. The room was stuffy but dry. Cardboard boxes and an old dresser were stacked against the far wall. “Please.” The Italian handed the oil lamp to Virgil, then he began moving aside the stack of boxes, assisted by Shep. Hidden behind the chest of drawers was a small wooden door sealed with a padlock.
“The passage connects with the Eighth Avenue subway line. We can follow it south as far as 103rd Street, then cut through Central Park. Francesca’s brother has a small boat in the Battery that can take us off the island.”
“The Battery? My wife and daughter are in the Battery!”
“Then the vaccine for your safe passage.”
“Yes, absolutely.” Shep opened the box, removing two of the remaining eight vials.
Francesca snatched the lantern from Virgil. “How do we know it even works, Paolo? How do we know it won’t kill your son?” Francesca shined the light on her belly, then at Shep. “Are you a doctor, Mr. War Vet?”
“The name’s Patrick, my friends call me Shep. This is Virgil. I have no medical training, so I can’t even guess whether the vaccine will affect your baby. So far, the only side effect I’ve experienced are hallucinations—”
“—which is why I haven’t taken it yet,” adds Virgil.
“No medical training, huh?” She held the clear elixir up to the light while her husband opened the padlock sealing the small door. “Three years ago I was studying to become a registered nurse, only I had to quit. Now, instead of working in a hospital with a decent insurance plan, I get to serve pizzas and care for the homeless.”
“Darling, now is not the time. Forgive my wife, she’s due any day now.”
Virgil squinted against the raised lantern. “For what it’s worth, Francesca, I was at the VA hospital earlier with Patrick. They had a pregnant woman infected with plague in an isolation tent. I suspect all who worked there are probably dead by now. As for the homeless, it seems they have repaid their debt.”
Paolo dragged open the wood door, unleashing a howling gust of cold air into the basement. “The homeless are no match for assault weapons, Francesca. Yes or no, should we take the vaccine?”
“For the baby’s sake, I’ll wait. You take yours.”
“Yes, that’s wise… my wife is the wise one.” Paolo loosened the cork, then drained one of the vials of vaccine. Lantern in hand, his wife crawled through the opening, followed by Virgil, Shep, and the cats.
Tossing aside the empty vial, Paolo dropped down on all fours and crawled in after them.
They were connected to one another via audio headsets, their spoken words translated into text on their monitors in French, Russian, Chinese, and English — the languages of the five permanent Security Council nations.
President Eric Kogelo drained his bottled water, waiting for the President of the Security Council to take roll.
“Hello. This is Rajiv Kaushik, the Assistant Secretary General. I regret to inform you that the President and Secretary General were both exposed to plague; neither is well enough to participate on this call. Unless there are any objections, I will be fulfilling their duties during this emergency session. Is the gentlemen from France on the line?”
“Oui.”
“The gentlemen from the Russian Federation?”
“Da.”
“The gentleman from China?”
“This is Xi Jinping. President Jintao has taken ill. Since I am the senior member of our party, the Standing Committee has requested my presence at this meeting.”
“Thank you, Mr. Jinping. Is the gentle lady from Great Britain with us?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“The gentleman from the United States?”
“Present.”
“Then let us begin with the gentleman from the United States. We have been repeatedly promised that an evacuation is imminent. Why does it seem we are purposely being left here to die?”
“My apologies if it feels that way. This situation is very serious. Our goal is to commence the airlift at dawn.”
A flurry of Russian shot back at President Kogelo, the translated text coming up on his screen in spurts. “This is a disgrace. Entire delegations have been wiped out. You cannot keep us quarantined, it is in direct violation of the United Nations charter.”
Kogelo took a deep breath, refusing to lose his cool. “President Medvedev’s concerns are shared by all of us, my own staff included. But let us be clear. We are facing an outbreak that could easily turn into a global pandemic if the quarantine is not 100 percent secured. The death toll in Manhattan has now exceeded half a million people. All of us have lost colleagues, allies, loved ones, and friends. The last thing any of us wants is to rush the evacuation without proper precautions and end up being the carrier who unleashes the plague in your own countries, and across the globe.”
“We have heard reports that this plague originated in your CIA-run bio labs.”
“Again, a half million people have died, more are suffering, and the vast majority are Americans. There will be a proper time to investigate and assign blame. For now, our priority is to safely transport United Nation diplomats and heads of state to a secure medical facility on Governor’s Island. To accomplish this requires each evacuee to wear a self-contained environmental suit, which will prevent any infected individuals from passing the plague on to others. The environmental suits are en route as we speak, they will be brought to your suites as soon as they arrive. I am also being told that a vaccine has been located that can not only inoculate but reverse the effects of the plague.”
Kogelo waited for the delayed murmurs as his words were translated. “While this is good news, there is another issue that must be discussed. Mr. Kaushik?”
The acting Security Council President took over. “President Kogelo has strong reason to believe Iran’s new Supreme Leader, upon his return to Tehran, will provide Iranian insurgents in Iraq, Israel, and possibly the United States with nuclear suitcase bombs. The transmission you are about to hear comes from a private conversation between Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati and a general who oversees the Qods training centers, which have been linked to insurgent activities.”
Everyone listened intently, their eyes scanning the text as it appeared in their own languages on the monitor.
The senior Standing Committee member from China was first to speak. “I do not hear a threat. I hear only Mr. Jannati’s intention to declare himself Mahdi.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Jinping, our intelligence agencies have provided us with a far more lethal interpretation of his intentions. We are requesting the Security Council to issue stern public warnings to Mr. Jannati, the foreign minister, and Iran’s hard-line clerics that any nation providing enriched uranium to terrorist organizations shall, in the event of an attack, suffer the same fate as the perpetrators.”
“And how are we to know, in the event of such an attack, whether the Iranians were responsible?” the Russian president retorted. “There are factions within your own government, Mr. President, that have been pushing for an invasion of Iran since Vice President Cheney was running the White House. How can we know if a nuclear explosion was not intentionally detonated by the CIA or Mossad in order to instigate war?”
“My administration seeks peaceful solutions to the conflicts in the Middle East.”
“If this is so, why are your troops still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan? When will your military bases in the region be closed? Your new secretary of defense continues to ally himself with Georgian officials, pushing them to challenge our own nonaggression pacts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These actions send quite a different message.”
“Secretary DeBorn was chastised for his actions. Our plan is to continue to reduce our troops in Iraq, reaching our targeted goal of fifty thousand by next August. An act of war by Mr. Jannati would undermine these efforts, fuel a neoconservative agenda in both Washington and Tel Aviv, and force us to respond in kind.”
“And what of this plague that has killed off so many, including most of the Iranian delegation. Would this not be considered an act of war in Tehran?”
Eric Kogelo fought to maintain his focus through the headache and fever. “A half million Americans have died. Our largest city has been rendered unlivable. If this were an act of war, then America was the target. Let me again assure you, we shall investigate and bring to justice all those responsible for the plague. What we cannot do is allow these radical factions to succeed in pushing our nations into nuclear war. That is why all of us agreed to come to New York this week — to prevent another war.”
But the Russian was far from done. “Mr. President, in August of 2001, President Putin sent a Russian delegation to Washington, DC, to brief President Bush about an al-Qaeda plot to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center. We were not the only nation issuing warnings. There were at least a dozen other intelligence agencies that sent warnings, including the Germans, who provided the dates of the attacks. Why were those warnings ignored? The reason became obvious to all — the Bush administration wanted the attacks to succeed so they could justify a second invasion of Iraq. Now here we are, a decade later, only this time the desired target is Iran. Mr. President, if you really want to avert a nuclear holocaust, do not ask us to issue threats against the Iranians. Instead, show the world you mean business by policing the radical elements within your own country that continue to undermine your efforts to bring about peace.”
Rubber bullets and tear gas had dispersed the homeless, a grenade tearing the steel security gate from its tracks. Major Downey stepped over broken glass and debris, entering the dark storefront. “They’re in here somewhere. Find them.”
The Rangers in black moved through the deserted pizzeria, tossing aside checkerboard-clothed tables and ransacking closets and cabinets, searching every square foot of space that could conceivably hide two grown men.
“Sir, someone was in the kitchen making sandwiches. Looks like they’re gone.”
“The homeless weren’t guarding sandwiches. Search the apartments upstairs.”
Two Rangers exited the walk-in refrigerator, pushing gruffly past David Kantor. The medic entered the warm enclave, the beam of his flashlight revealing containers of pizza dough and grated cheese. He sat down on a crate of tomatoes, his body weary, his nerves on edge. Got to find a way to separate myself from the group and get to Gavi’s school.
He heard the cat meowing somewhere in the darkness, but could not locate it. Saw the crate-shaped wet stain. Tapped on the floorboards with the butt end of his assault rifle. The sound was hollow. He checked the kitchen. Heard the Rangers in the apartment upstairs.
Returning to the wet mark, David stomped on the floorboards with his boot—
— caving in the trapdoor.
Three stories beneath a dying city, through a maintenance shaft bored fifty years ago, the fluttering illumination of Paolo’s lantern was all that kept the claustrophobia at bay. Light danced on concrete walls riddled with pipes and graffiti. Shoes scuffed cement against a backdrop of dripping water that nourished unseen puddles cloaked in perpetual darkness. Francesca squeezed her husband’s free hand, her mind burdened with fear, her lower back and shoulders by the unborn child that might never be.
After ten minutes, the shaft intersected the Eighth Avenue subway line. Rails cold and traffic-free made for new obstacles in the shifting light, along with the dead rats. The vermin were everywhere, black clumps of wet fur. Sharp teeth beneath pink noses lathered in blood.
Francesca crossed herself. “Paolo, maybe you should give me the vaccine.”
Paolo turned to Virgil, uncertain. “What do you think?”
“It’s your decision, son. Perhaps you should pray on it.”
Patrick scoffed. “After the story you told me about Auschwitz, how can you possibly suggest prayer?”
“I simply said prayer might help Paolo find the answer. It’s their child. They need to decide, not you.”
“And if God ignores them, like he ignored you? Like He ignored six million of your people during the Holocaust?”
“I never said the Creator ignored our prayers. I said His answer was no.”
“Apparently, He’s still saying no. Think any of those families stranded in their cars on the parkway were praying tonight when the plague took them? Or those people dying on the street?”
“God is not a verb, Patrick. We must be the action. Prayer was never intended to be a request or plea. It is a technology that allows communication into the higher spiritual dimensions, helping to transform the human ego into a more selfless vessel to accept the Light. The Light is the—”
“We don’t have time for the whole Light dissertation. Francesca, take the damn vaccine.”
“Not yet.” Paolo turned, the lantern’s light swimming in Patrick’s eyes. “I think Virgil’s right. In times like these, we must have faith.”
“You know what faith is, Paolo? Faith is nothing more than belief without evidence, a waste of time. The vaccine’s real.”
“Faith is also real,” Virgil retorted. “Or perhaps we are wasting our time trying to find your wife and daughter.”
A sickening rush of anxiety dropped Shep’s blood pressure. “That’s different. You said you spoke with her.”
“Yes, but that was long before so many people got sick. For all we know, she may be dead. Maybe we should head straight for the boat.”
“Bea is not dead.”
“And you know this how?”
Patrick struggled in his skin to remain calm. “Pray your damn prayer, Paolo.”
“O Lord, You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You…”
The sensation felt like ice water running down his spine. Shep turned around slowly, his eyes focused on the maintenance shaft. Peering at him from the darkness was the Grim Reaper. Arms raised, scythe frozen in mid-swing. Hooded skull and empty eye sockets aimed at Paolo, the devout man’s words were clearly agitating the supernal being.
“—grant us the grace to desire You with our whole heart, that so desiring You, we may seek and find You, and so finding You, we may love You and share equitably with our neighbors—”
The Reaper screamed in silence, melting back into the shadows of the underground passage.
“—through Christ Jesus we pray this. Amen.”
Shep wiped beads of cold sweat from his forehead, his right hand shaking. “Amen.”
She was dragged from her nightmare by her hair, the pain forcing Gavi Kantor from her drug-induced stupor and onto her feet. Using her hair as a leash, a wiry man drenched in aftershave pulled her through a basement maze lit by candles. Past doorless bathrooms and into a hallway bordered by a dozen curtained stalls. The sour air reeked like old onions, the grunting sounds coming from these recesses more animal than human. In her delirium, she caught glimpses of male predators forcing naked girls to perform acts that caused her to scream.
The silhouetted man punched her in the back of the head, the glancing blow felling her to her knees.
“Enough!”
The Mexican madam’s rotund mass outweighed the silhouette’s by a good sixty pounds. “Give her to me, she is mine. Come here, Chuleta. Did Ali Chino hurt you?”
Good cop — bad cop. The thirteen-year-old crawled into the woman’s embrace, bawling her eyes out. The madam winked to her associate.
Human trafficking was not prostitution. Human trafficking was the multibillion-dollar global business of kidnapping and purchasing children and young adults to be used as sex slaves. It was the third-most-profitable criminal enterprise in the world. Controlled by organized crime. Dominated by the Russians, Albanians, and Ukrainians, who trafficked women into Western Europe and the Middle East.
America remained a major consumer. Thirty thousand foreign women and children were trafficked into the United States each year. Smuggled across the Mexican border, they were sold to sex rings and transported to stash houses and apartments, some in major cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, others in smaller suburban towns, where they hid in plain sight.
But the highway that ran slavery into the United States was far from a one-way street. American children and teenagers were in high demand overseas. A six- to thirteen-year-old could be sold at a six-figure premium. Many end buyers included Saudi princes, “allies” the State Department was loath to crack down upon. When it came to human trafficking, corruption remained the lifeblood of immorality, the public’s indifference its pulse.
The chamber was windowless. A dozen bare mattresses covered the concrete floor. Shared by twenty-two girls, ages ten to nineteen. Working in shifts. Business was rampant at the End of Days.
The “harvest” was mostly Russian and Hispanic. Halter tops and cheap makeup covered emaciated flesh. Bare arms sported track marks and bruises. The victims’ eyes were vacant, as if the light of their souls had been sealed in amber — a result of having been gang-raped and beaten, forced to service twenty to thirty men a day.
The madam kicked a Romanian girl off a mattress, shoving the American teen down in her place. As “surrogate mother,” the matriarch’s job was to psychologically torture her charges before passing them off to male trainers who would repeatedly rape and beat each new recruit into submission. After two weeks, the American merchandise would be drugged and exported to Eastern Europe for sale to the highest bidder. For this, the madam would receive $3,000.00.
“Please let me go! I just wanted to buy a watch—”
The obese woman backhanded Gavi across her face, drawing blood. “You will wait here until I come for you. If you try to escape, the other girls will tell me, and Ali Chino will return. Ali Chino kills many girls. Do you wish to be killed?”
Gavi Kantor’s body shook uncontrollably, her eyes blind with tears. “No.”
“Then do as I say. I am here to take care of you, but you must listen.” She scanned the room, pointing to a Russian girl. “You. Teach her how to use the penicillin.”
With that, the Hispanic overlord left, locking the door behind her.
Central Park West defined the western border of Central Park, running from 110th Street south to 59th Street.
Dousing the lantern, Paolo exited the deserted subway station, leading Francesca, Virgil, and Patrick across Frederick Douglass Circle to Central Park West, darting between abandoned cars.
The moon was cloaked behind endless clouds, its veiled light revealing the high-rise buildings bordering Central Park. Home to some of New York’s wealthiest, the structures had been rendered dark and foreboding. But far from silent. The cries of the destitute and suffering pierced the night, joined by the occasional sickening thud of a body as it plunged from an open window, striking the snow-covered sidewalk below.
Reaching 106th Street, Paolo led his entourage to the Stranger’s Gate, a modest park entrance composed of a black slate stairway that deposited them in a wooded area. Moving beneath a canopy of American Elms laid bare by winter, they headed east across a hilltop meadow until they came to the tarmac path that was West Drive.
Closet psychotics and sexual deviants roamed the periphery — wolves wearing human flesh whose whispered cravings added another layer of terror to the night. Francesca pulled her husband closer. “We’re too exposed out here. Take us along the ravine.”
Two hundred feet overhead, the Reaper drone hovered, silently tracking its quarry.
The information was relayed over Major Downey’s communicator, the target’s coordinates visible in his right eyepiece. “They’re in Central Park. Let’s move!”
“Sir, we’re missing a man… the National Guardsman.”
Downey cursed under his breath as he switched radio frequencies in his headpiece. “Control, I need a track on Delta-8.”
“Delta-8 is four meters south of your present position.”
Downey looked around, confused. He entered the walk-in refrigerator—
— locating David Kantor’s communicator lying in an open container of mayonnaise.
Paolo’s eyes scanned the dark field, searching for the blotch of shadow. “This way.”
Spanning ninety acres of Central Park's northern quadrant, the North Woods was a dense woodland so thick, it obliterated any trace of the surrounding metropolis. Running through the forest was the Ravine, a stream valley encompassing the Loch, a narrow lake that cascaded into five waterfalls before flowing into a brook that paralleled a southbound trail.
Moving quickly across the snow-covered lawn, they reached the forest edge. A frigid wind whipped at their backs, setting the trees to dance. Paolo knelt in the damp grass, shielding his lighter as he attempted to ignite the lantern. The flame would not catch. He tried again and again until his frozen fingers burned. “The wick’s gone. The lantern’s useless. Francesca, try your flashlight.”
Francesca aimed the beam, but it was too faint to penetrate the trees. “Now what?”
“Shh.” Paolo listened, his ears homing in on the rushing sound of water. “Hold hands. I can get us to the trail.” Taking Francesca’s hand, he stepped over brush and entered the woods.
The darkness was so encompassing, he could not see his groping hand in front of him. Through leaves and stumbling over logs, past unseen branches slicing their coats and cheeks, they continued on until the forest floor yielded to a narrow tarmac trail. Somewhere in the pitch ahead was Huddlestone Arch, a natural underpass consisting of huge schist boulders held in place by gravity. Inching forward, ducking their heads, they felt their way through the arch, carefully progressing along the steadily descending path.
A sliver of moonlight revealed the southbound trail. It looped to their right, leading to a small wooden bridge that crossed a stream.
Standing on the bridge was the Grim Reaper.
“Paolo, my feet… I need to rest a moment.” Oblivious to the Angel of Death, Francesca approached the bridge, leaning back against its wooden rail.
Shep attempted to shout a warning, only his voice constricted, as if a weight were pressing against his throat. His eyes widened in terror as he watched the Reaper silently raise its scythe high over its right shoulder, the curved metal edge targeting the back of the pregnant woman’s frail neck!
Francesca shivered, her exhaled breath thick and blue in the moonlight. “Suddenly it’s so cold.”
Death grinned at Shep as its cloaked arms — bone wrapped in decaying ligaments, tendons, and flesh — sent its olive-tinged blade arcing downward.
Shep pushed past Paolo in two quick strides, unfurling a backhand strike with his steel prosthetic. The metallic arm caught the Reaper’s scythe mid-strike, the clack of metal meeting metal generating a brilliant orange spark that briefly illuminated the entire ravine.
Temporarily blinded by the light, Shep dropped to one knee, his body trembling.
“What was that?” Francesca whipped her head around, staring wide-eyed at her husband.
“What was what?”
“You didn’t see that flash?”
“No, my love. Virgil?”
The old man was kneeling by Shep. “Son… are you all right?”
“The Reaper… it’s after Francesca.”
Virgil stared into Shep’s constricted pupils. “Paolo, give your wife the vaccine.”
“But you said—”
“Do it now.”
Francesca took the vial from her husband and drained it, choking on the clear elixir.
Shep stood, the purple spots in his vision gradually fading. “I met his blade with mine. Tell me you saw the spark of light.”
“No, but Francesca obviously saw it. You must have pulled her from the tunnel.”
“The tunnel?”
“The passage every soul must travel through when leaving Malchut, the physical world. The tunnel leads to the Cave of Machpelah, where the patriarchs of all humanity are buried.”
Shep pulled him aside. “The plague… all this death — it’s like bait to him, isn’t it?”
“It’s not death, Patrick, it’s the negativity… the reactive behavior that is increasing the power of Satan. In a way, the Angel of Darkness is a barometer of man’s psyche. The transgressions of the world have tipped the scales beyond a critical mass, granting Death a free reign. The End of Days is upon us, and this time even the souls of the innocent will not be spared.”
The biohazard lab had been set up in one of the island’s former military residences. Powered by a portable generator growling in the open garage.
Doug Nichols handed Leigh Nelson a mug of coffee. The lieutenant colonel had arrived seven hours earlier from Fort Detrick to supervise the analysis and replication of the Scythe vaccine. The square-jawed veteran smiled at the pretty brunette. “Are you all right?”
Leigh’s lower lip quivered. “I’d be much better if you allowed me five minutes to contact my husband.”
The smile waned. “You can use my cell phone… after we’ve identified the vaccine.”
“You’re a real sport.”
“You say you held the box containing the serum? Think you could identify it if you saw it again?”
“Probably.”
Nichols opened his laptop. Typed in the address of a secured Web site. “These are standard field carrying cases Dr. Klipot would have had access to. For instance, these packs are used to transport influenza vaccine.”
“No, it wasn’t metal. This was a polished wood case, fitted with foam packing for twelve vials, each about three fluid ounces.”
“Any identifying marks on the box? Serial numbers? Department logos?”
“None that I can remember. But there was a warning inside the lid. Something about the vaccine containing a powerful neurotransmitter that could produce temporary hallucinogenic effects.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“Positive. The Klipot woman wigged out on me shortly after I gave her the antidote. I remember thinking—”
The lieutenant colonel clicked through several pages, searching the site. “Was this the box?”
Leigh stared at the image. “Yes. That’s it, I’m sure of it. What’s wrong?”
“This is a shipping case used for antimicrobic therapies, including tetra-cyclines, chloramphenicol, or streptomycin. AMTs are grown in artificial media from organisms inactivated with formaldehyde and preserved in 0.5 percent phenol. For that reasons and others, serum antibodies need direct access into the bloodstream. You of all people should know that digestible antimicrobic sera can't cross the brain-blood barrier, they must be injected.”
“You think I’m making this up?”
“The Klipot woman escaped under your care. So did Sergeant Shepherd. Now you’re deliberately lying about the nature of the cure. Either everything’s just an inconvenient coincidence, or you’re working with the terrorist groups responsible for infecting Manhattan.”
“That’s insane.”
“Guard!”
An MP rushed in from the next room. “Yes, sir.”
“Dr. Nelson’s been lying to us. Have Captain Zwawa question her… under suitable duress.”
They had made their way through the North Woods. Circumnavigating the North Meadow and the orgy of shadows segregated by bonfires, they crossed the bridge at 97th Street, where they stopped to rest by the life-sized bronze statue of Danish sculptor Albert Thorvaldsen.
Patrick had left them there to do reconnaissance along the eastern border of the park. Remaining concealed behind a four-foot stone wall, he had surveyed Fifth Avenue. Vehicles clogged the artery. Shadows stirred beneath dark awnings. He was about to leave when a disturbance shook the night.
The two black Hummers were weaving their way south on Fifth Avenue, avoiding the gridlocked lanes by veering onto the extra-wide sidewalk bordering Central Park. Screams cut through the frigid night air as the military vehicles ran over civilians sprawled out along the walkway, crushing limbs and skulls beneath the Hummers’ double-wide tires.
Patrick hurried back through the park, locating the others on the East 96th Street playground. “They’re coming. We have to move.”
Francesca moaned, her feet aching. “How did they find us so quickly?”
Shep glanced up at the overcast heavens. “Probably using aerial drones to track us down. Come on.”
“Where are we supposed to go?” Paolo asked, annoyed. “We came from the north, there’s nothing to the west but athletic fields, and everything to the south is blocked by the reservoir. They’d overtake us long before we could get around it.”
“We were safer at the pizzeria,” Francesca complained. “I told you not to let them in, Paolo. I begged you.”
“Francesca, please.” Paolo knelt by the frost-covered sliding board, closing his eyes to pray. “God, why have you led us here only to kill us? Lead us out of here safely… show us the way!”
“Help us, God, show us the way.” Virgil mimicked Paolo, his inflection dripping with sarcasm.
“Virgil, please—”
“And Moses whined to God, ‘God, do something. We have the Red Sea in front of us and Egyptians in back of us.’ And God answers back, ma titzach alai—why are you yelling to me?’ That’s right, Paolo, Moses was screaming to God, ‘help us’ and God was screaming back, "Why are you yelling to me?’”
Paolo stood. “I… I never read this Bible passage before.”
“That’s because the King James version removed it, and no rabbi or priest will ever discuss it. Few could accept that God would answer Moses like this, after all, God is good… God is just. What God was telling the Israelites was that they held the power to help themselves.”
“I don’t understand. How could the Israelites cross the Red Sea without God’s help?”
“The answer lies in the verse itself, Exodus verse 14, the most important passage in the entire Torah. By pulling letters in a specific order from lines 19 through 21, you are left with seventy-two three-letter words — the very triads that God had engraved on Moses’s staff.”
“What were they?” Paolo asks.
“The 72 names of God. Not names in the ordinary sense but a combination of Aramaic letters that can strengthen the soul’s connection to the spiritual realm and channel the unfiltered Light. Abraham used the 72 names in his youth to keep from being burned alive by Emperor Nimrod when he was tossed in an oven. Moses used the energy to control the physical universe.”
“Virgil, I’m sorry… but how can any of this help us now?”
“Paolo, if you truly believe God is all-knowing and all-seeing, then it’s insulting to think He needs to be reminded to help you. ‘Hey, God, I need you down here, and don't forget my soul mate, my money, my food.’ That's why God the Creator, God the Light said to Moses, ma titzach alai—why are you yelling to me? What God was saying was, ‘Moses, wake up, you have the technology, use it! It’s the concept of mind over matter.”
Shep paced, his eyes focused in the direction of the approaching engines. “Virgil, this really isn’t the time for a sermon.”
The old man grimaced. “Patrick, the connection fostered by the 72 names won't work when your thoughts and actions are impure. Moses doubted, so the sea didn’t part. But one man never wavered in his belief. One devout man took Moses’s staff, engraved with the 72 names, and walked straight into the Red Sea until the water was up to his chin… and that was when the waters parted. You see, Paolo, when it comes to faith, there can be no doubt, no ego, only certainty. There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. One key letter is missing from the 72 names of God — the gimel, which stands for ga'avah—the human ego. If you truly believe in God, there can be no room for doubt.”
Shep turned away from the conversation, his adrenaline pumping as he waited for the military vehicles to appear. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide… slowed down by a crazy old man and a pregnant woman.
He looked out at the reservoir. So vast was the waterway that its borders stretched nearly from one end of the park to another, its ten-block horizon disappearing in a fog bank.
Fog?
“Paolo… we need to find a boat!”
The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir was a forty-foot-deep, 106-acre body of water encircled by a 1.58-mile jogging track and tall chain-link fence. The reservoir’s maintenance shed was located off the bridle path.
Shep kicked open the door. Paolo peered inside with his light. The yellow inflatable raft was hanging from the ceiling, secured to the wooden beams by two pulleys. Shep cut the lines with one swing of his prosthetic arm. Grabbing an oar, he helped Paolo drag the rubber craft outside.
“Over here.” Virgil and Francesca were waiting by the jogging track’s public bathrooms. The old man had pulled a section of fencing loose from where it attached to the edge of the brick facing, allowing them access to the water.
The building’s facade was covered in spray-painted graffiti, representing everything from gang insignias and messages of love to colorful artistic endeavors that would put Peter Max to shame. Appearing along the top of the wall, painted in black letters, was a prophetic message:
you are under surveillance.
Below that, represented in four-foot-high stylized white letters was a rock fan’s homage to his favorite band:
STYX
Shep stared at the stylized graffiti, a distant memory tugging at his brain.
“Patrick, we need you.” Virgil and Paolo had pulled back the loose section of fence, allowing Shep to maneuver the raft through the opening and into the water. Paolo climbed down into the boat first, then reached up to assist Francesca and Virgil.
Squeezing through the opening, Shep dragged the fencing back into place and lowered himself into a kneeling position in the stern next to Virgil. He gripped the middle of the oar in his right fist but could not secure the top with the mangled pincer of his prosthetic left arm.
“Allow me, my friend.” Paolo took the oar from Patrick and stroked, guiding the raft away from the reservoir’s northern wall. The water was dark and murky, though noticeably warmer than the frigid night air, the temperature differential the cause of the dense fog bank.
The shoreline gradually disappeared from view, along with the night sky.
Paolo continued paddling, quickly losing all sense of direction. “This isn’t good. I could be taking us in an endless circle.”
Virgil held up his hand. “Listen.”
They heard a crowd cheering somewhere in the distance.
“Head for the sound, Paolo. It will guide you to the southern end of the reservoir.”
Altering their course, he paddled, the sound of the water crisp in the December air, the fog thickening with each stroke.
The smell reached them first, the putrid scent similar to an open sewer.
The bow struck an unseen object. Then another.
Paolo abruptly withdrew the oar. Snatching the lantern from Francesca, he again attempted to light the wick, succeeding on his third try. He held the lamp out over the side, the fog-veiled glow revealing what lay upon the surface. “Mother of God.”
There were thousands of them, floating like human flotsam. Some drifted facedown, most were facing up, their red-rimmed eyes bulging in death, their mottled flesh bloated and pale, their necks festooned with grapefruit-sized purplish black buboes, swollen even more from their immersion in water. Men and women, old and young — the cold water having combined with the plague to disguise their ethnicity, their body compositions determining their ranking within the reservoir. The heaviest among them, being the most buoyant, occupied the surface of the man-made lake. The thin and muscled, unable to float, had been relegated to the mid and deeper waters, along with the infants and children.
Paolo cupped his hand over his wife’s mouth before she could scream. “Close your eyes, look away. Scream, and the soldiers will find us.”
Virgil wiped at cold tears. “Paolo, douse the light and work your oar… take us across this river of death.”
“River of death… Styx.” The words of the Divine Comedy cracked open another sealed chamber of Shep’s memory, Dante’s hellish prose laid out before him. The water was a dark purplish gray, and we, following its somber undulation, pursued a strange path down to where there lay a marsh at the slope's culmination—
— Styx was the name that swamp bore.
Shep’s eyes widened as the vaccine-created hallucination gripped his mind, the flock of floating corpses spinning in his vision—
— the dead suddenly animating!
Limbs gyrate. Waterlogged hands paw blindly at one another, stripping clothing from skin in the process. Growing steadily more restless, the awakening dead reach out to tug at their neighbors’ hair and gouge their eyes. Several of the more feisty corpses actually propel their ghastly heads from the frigid water, sinking their bared yellowed teeth into another plague victim’s rotting flesh as if they were zombies.
As Shep watches in horror, bizarre flashes of bluish white light ignite randomly from somewhere within the depths, each strobe-like burst revealing haunting glimpses of more plague victims — a submerged army of the dead fighting their way to the surface. Suddenly, Shep finds himself looking out onto a sea of faces — Iraqi faces — all staring at him in judgment, their silence deafening.
“Ignore them, Shepherd, they’re nothing but godless heathens.”
Patrick looks down, stunned to find Lieutenant Colonel Philip Argenti. The clergyman is floating on his back next to the raft, his body dressed in his long, flowing black cassock, his corpse towed by the boat’s moving current.
“War is hell, Shepherd. Sacrifices had to be made in order to achieve our objectives. We did what was necessary.”
“Necessary… for who?”
“Freedom comes with a price.”
“And who pays that price? We killed families… entire villages. These people never asked to be bombed and invaded.”
“Whoa there, Sergeant. People? They’re Muslims, scourge of the earth. Bunch of no-good Arabs hell-bent on destroying Western society.”
“You’re wrong. The majority of these people simply wanted to live in peace.”
“No one asked for your opinion of the mission, Sergeant. You were trained to defend America against those who seek to destroy our way of life. Instead, you took the coward’s way out, you cut and ran. In doing so, you shamed your family, you disgraced the uniform… but most of all, you betrayed our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus was a man of peace. He’d never support any act of violence.”
“Wake up, Sergeant! America is a Christian nation. One nation, under God.”
“Since when is America a Christian nation? Since when does God need man to fight His holy wars? Invoking God’s name in our military actions does not sanctify violence any more than al-Qaeda proclaiming Jihad. Take a good look at them, Colonel. These are the lives we’ve butchered in God’s name, the people we vilified as an excuse to bomb their cities, the children we’ve slaughtered in order to—”
“Save your speech, traitor. Would you stand by and allow these Islamic extremists to strike our shores again? What kind of an American are you?”
“One who refuses to be your tool any longer. Linking 9/11 with Saddam, weapons of mass destruction, democracy on the march… it was all a lie. All you fanatics ever wanted was an excuse to gain control of Iraq’s oil supply. War is nothing more than a cash cow for the military-industrial complex. Who’s next? Iran? Venezuela? Is that all part of God’s plan, too?”
“Who are you to preach to me? We both know why you went to Iraq — you were looking for a target… an enemy combatant, someone you could line up in your crosshairs and blow away, reaping sweet revenge. We gave you that opportunity, Sergeant, and this is how you repay us?”
Shep gazes upon the multitude of mottled brown faces staring at him in silence. “You’re right. No one forced me to go. It was my decision, I wanted justice… revenge. I killed innocent people, convinced that God was on my side… until I took my first life. My actions never brought justice, they only brought more pain and suffering. I allowed my anger to tarnish my soul, and the blame is all mine.”
Another burst of luminescent light appears, this one a spark that ignites directly below the raft, illuminating the faces of the dead. Instead of fading, the light rises, circling Colonel Argenti like a hungry shark.
The clergyman senses the supernal being’s approach. “The Angel of Death! Don’t let him take me, Shepherd… in the name of all that’s holy—”
“It’s time, Colonel. It’s time you and I both reaped what we’ve sown.”
“I am an ordained minister… an ambassador of Christ our savior!”
The light circles closer, its luminous energy shearing the cassock and undergarments from the clergyman’s body. Philip Argenti screams as his naked form suddenly heaves out of the water onto the raft. His lifeless limbs thrust forward, his dead hands somehow managing to hook themselves around the lapel of Patrick Shepherd’s coat. “I… am a man… of God!”
“Then go to Him.” Wielding his mangled prosthetic arm like a scythe, Shep slashes Argenti's throat. The colonel flails backward, the gash in his neck spurting black ooze as he plunges back into the water—
— the spectral glow dragging him below the frothing surface with one final, sizzling flash of light.
A thousand Iraqi faces — men, women, and children — close their eyes and sink beneath the corpse-littered surface… satisfied.
Wild-eyed, Patrick Shepherd stood in the raft, slashing his steel appendage through the empty fog-ridden night.
“Stop him! He’ll slice through the raft!” Francesca held on to the sides of the roiling vessel, commanding her husband to act.
Virgil reached for Shep’s right hand, squeezing it. “Son, it’s all right. Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
Shep shook the vision loose. Confused, he allowed Virgil to guide him to his seat. The old man turned to Paolo. “He’s all right. Continue on.”
“No… this is all wrong. We’re disturbing the holiest of the holies. We shouldn’t have come—”
Francesca took her husband’s hand. “Look at them, Paolo… they’re all dead. Your son, on the other hand, he wants out.”
“My son…” Returning the oar to the water, he paddled in the direction of the crowd noises.
Virgil placed a hand on Shep’s shoulder. “What did you see? Was it the Reaper?”
“No. I saw people… victims of warfare. They rose from below… only—”
“Go on.”
“Only I didn’t kill these people. And yet, somehow I felt responsible for their deaths. There was a detached sense of familiarity to everything. Like a bad déjà vu.”
“Accepting responsibility for your actions is the first necessary step in reconnecting with the Light.”
“You’re not hearing me. I didn’t kill thousands of people.”
“Maybe you didn’t kill them in this lifetime.”
“Virgil, I already told you, I don’t believe in the whole reincarnation thing.”
“Whether you believe in it or not doesn’t make it any less true. Our five senses cause us chaos — the misperception that there are no connections. In fact, everything is connected. Déjà vu is a past incarnation experienced by the present. Whatever you did in your prior lives, I suspect that this may be your last chance to make things right again.”
“Make what right? How am I supposed to know what to do?”
“When the time comes, you’ll know. Trust your gut, your instinct. What does your intuition tell you?”
“My intuition?” Shep looked to the south.
The fog thinned as they neared the reservoir’s shoreline. Half a mile away, the night was aglow with the orange haze of a thousand fires.
“My intuition tells me things are about to become a lot worse.”