9781629270050-Text-for-ePub-rev (13 page)

“Course I’ll help you,” said Bishop in what he imagined was the tone employed by a
friendly uncle.

The faintest hint of a smile touched her lips and her eyes fluttered closed.

Bishop shoved her off the ledge and craned forward to watch her descent.

Her nightdress flapped out like a failed parachute.

She didn’t scream.

* * * * *

Milandra gazed out of the picture window at Central Park. Nothing much moved out there
except litter, blown about by the strengthening winter winds, and squirrels, who seemed
to be enjoying having the park to themselves. She watched them scurry here and there,
leaping onto benches and off, emboldened by the absence of people. She yearned to
be out there with them.

Jason Grant and Lavinia Cram
were
out there. They had left almost two hours ago on a scouting mission. Milandra had
tried to persuade all four Deputies to go together, but Grant had insisted that George
Wallace and Simone Furlong remain with her.

“Just in case unwelcome visitors come calling,” Grant had cautioned. “Me and Lavinia
will be quite safe.” He patted the Uzi that hung against his side from a shoulder
strap.

Milandra did not argue. She knew that he was right: he and Lavinia were more than
capable of taking care of themselves, with or without guns. On the other hand, so
was she, and the main reason for her suggesting that the other two Deputies go with
them was that she would welcome a little time on her own. Although Milandra had never
truly been alone—as the Keeper, she was in constant connection with the rest of her
people here on Earth—she enjoyed being physically alone. In this open plan apartment,
solitude was almost impossible to find except in the bathroom or one of the bedrooms,
and Milandra did not want to disappear into her bedroom too often. Once or twice,
when the girl wasn’t away with the fairies, she had caught Simone regarding her in
a cold, calculating manner, as though measuring her, and she did not wish to give
the Chosen any excuse to find weakness. Now was not the time for challenges. Besides,
the girl had a lot—an infinity—to learn before she would be ready.

The return of Grant and Lavinia brought her out of her reverie. Wallace let them in
and Milandra moved to the armchair at the head of the couches around the coffee table
to hear their report. The Deputies took their places around her.

Not one for preliminaries, Grant launched straight into his report.

“There are no indications that there is anyone alive in this building. Most apartments
are locked and silent. We could sense no signs of life from within.”

He glanced across at Lavinia, who nodded. Milandra thought briefly about the woman
who had knocked on the door of her apartment. Holly; that had been her daughter’s
name. She pushed the image away.

“Three apartments,” Grant continued, “had been left unlocked but are deserted. The
concierge desk is unoccupied. The main entrance to the building is still secure. When
the power fails, that will no longer be the case, but that won’t much matter. So far
as we could see and sense, there’s no-one out there alive to cause problems.”

“In any case, we’ll be gone soon, right?” said Wallace.

“Right,” said Grant. “Though
how
we’re going to leave is something we need to decide. Let me continue.

“We scouted round some of the other apartment buildings. No signs of life. Most windows
we could see from outside have been blocked against the light.”

“We heard a dog barking,” said Lavinia. She folded her arms across her chest. “Grant
wouldn’t let me find it.”

Grant nodded. “It sounded far away and towards the Hudson. Not the direction we need
to take. We went across the Park. There’s only squirrels moving about in there now.”

“And penguins,” added Lavinia. She smiled.

Grant smiled back. “Yep, we took a detour and, ah, liberated the animals from the
zoo.” His smile faded. “Those that were still alive.”

“That was an unnecessary risk,” said Milandra. “I’ve seen those polar bears. Captivity
has driven them crazy.”

“Yes,” said Grant. “Though crazed may be a better description. There was no risk,
though. I could have handled them both on my own. With two of us, no problem.”

“I told them to go north,” said Lavinia. “We caught them some squirrels. Man, they
was
starving
.”

Grant chuckled. “They sure were. Never seen a bear chew on a squirrel before with
such relish. Anyways, the bears have gone. Headed for Canada last we saw them.

“After the zoo, we went along East 65th to 1st. From there, we went down to the 59th
Street Bridge. Everywhere we’ve been, the roads are empty. It worried me a little.
Where had all those vehicles gone? The answer, or part of it, we found at the bridge.
It’s completely blocked. Both directions. Something must have happened on the Queens
side. An accident maybe? Shit, even a truck breaking down and blocking one lane might
have caused it, the number of cars trying to get off this island. There are a lot
of people still in them cars. Rotting people.” He shrugged. “Whatever, we ain’t getting
out that way.”

“What about the Midtown Tunnel?” asked Wallace.

Grant shook his head. “There was a lot of smoke coming from that direction. Difficult
to tell with the wind, but it might have been coming from the U.N. building. I think
we should avoid it. And tunnels in general. If we are going to encounter anything
that might cause us problems, I’d rather do it in the open air. Not trapped like rats
underground.”

There was a general murmur of agreement.

“North, then?” said Milandra. “The RFK Bridge?”

“I think so,” said Grant. He sighed. “It’s a pity we weren’t in Florida when the message
came. We’d have had much further to travel, but it would have been a hell of a lot
easier.”

There was no hint of it in his tone, but Milandra sensed the mild rebuke nevertheless.
She
could
have waited for them to pack and return to Florida before sending the e-mail; a day
or two’s delay would not have made any difference. She couldn’t tell him the real
reason why she had sent the e-mail immediately: every minute that she delayed meant
another minute during which she could invent excuses to delay further, which meant
more minutes to come up with reasons not to send the message at all.

“Yes, well. . . .” she sighed, “we had no control over when the message would arrive.
So. North?”

“Yes. We’ll have no problems reaching FDR Drive. If there are blockages, that’s where
we’ll encounter them. I think we should take the flatbed, with the bikes on the back.
If the bridge is blocked, we may be able to get through on those.”

“Why not just start on the bikes?” said Simone. Milandra had almost forgotten she
was there.

“Well,” said Grant, speaking slowly as though addressing a child. “We can travel together
on the truck and carry more equipment. If we’re lucky, we can take the truck all the
way to JFK and not have to dump anything along the way. If we need to switch to bikes,
some of our stuff is going to get left behind.” He shrugged again. “Nothing we can’t
cope without, but still. . . .”

Simone tittered. “Cool. Okay.”

Milandra sat forward. “Is that decided then? The flatbed. As far as we can take it?”

Everyone nodded.

“Good,” she said. “The only thing left to decide is when do we start. There’s no hurry.
The others are coming in from all over the country and Canada. We’ll have to wait
in JFK for them to arrive. Nevertheless, I for one would like to get going as soon
as possible. I think we’re all going a little nuts cooped up in here.”

“As far as I can see, there would no advantage to be gained by delaying,” said Grant.
“If there’s anyone still alive out there, they’ll be in no condition to cause us any
problems.”

“Okay,” said Milandra. “So unless there are any objections, I suggest we head out
tomorrow. At first light.”

Nobody objected.

* * * * *

With each passing day, Diane Heidler encountered more and more obstacles during her
cross-country trip. The route she had chosen was intended to make maximum use of interstate
freeways, but she frequently had to retrace her steps when she found the way blocked
by a tangled wreckage of vehicles. This was especially true near cities and she could
always tell when she was approaching a large city by the number of abandoned or crashed
vehicles she encountered.

It seemed that many people had decided to flee the cities in a last desperate attempt
at survival, even though they were already ill. Quite possibly, many of the pile-ups
she saw had been caused by drivers passing out at the steering wheel and careering
across carriageways, causing mayhem.

Whenever she left the main highway, she’d find an alternative route to bypass the
obstacle and rejoin the main road as soon as she could.

On more than one occasion, she had been forced onto the hard pan to the side of minor
roads to skirt an accident scene. During one of these detours, for a few heart-stopping
moments the car’s wheels had spun in loose sand and the engine’s pitch rose alarmingly,
before the tyres had found traction in some harder material beneath the surface and
the car shot forward. As Diane thankfully rejoined the paved road, her hands had been
shaking. It would have been no joke having to abandon the car in the desert midst
or plains of Utah or Colorado or Kansas. She would no longer be able to call a recovery
firm. It was evident from the bodies strewn around crash sites or still sitting inside
cars that emergency services had ceased operating days past.

She guessed that it might have been possible to take one of the cars that had been
pulled to the side of the road when, presumably, the occupants became too ill to go
any further, but the thought of having to drag putrefying bodies from them first made
her shudder. Hand on heart, she didn’t know if she would have been able to do it.

Fortunately for her, she never had to. She always managed to find an alternative route,
a way of skirting around the major obstructions. She became adept at judging the optimum
moment to leave the main highway and find circuitous roads, sometimes meandering back
roads, that avoided the approaches to the main cities like Denver, Kansas City and
St. Louis where the congestion was worse.

Sometimes, she saw thick, billowing smoke in the distance that usually marked a town
or city and that served as her signal to exit at the next ramp and head south or north
until the smoke was behind her and she could make for the main highway again.

In this manner, driving day and night, Diane passed through seven states in four days.

That is when she began to notice the next, and more serious, problem. More and more
of the rest stops and filling stations were closed. Some had handscrawled signs saying
things like, ‘Closed until further notice’ or, more starkly, ‘Shut—Plague!’ Many more
had simply been abandoned. She had been lucky to come across an abandoned filling
station off Route 64 in Illinois whose former owner had not bothered shutting off
the power to the pumps. She was able to fill the car’s tank, but all the stations
she found from then on—and she stopped at them all, in case—either had their power
turned off or it was already down.

Diane was not a particularly practical woman. Even had she heard that there was a
way of manually pumping gas from the tanks beneath the forecourts, she would not have
known where to start.

By the time she entered West Virginia, her gas tank was almost empty once more. She
pulled off at the next filling station and switched off the engine. More in hope than
expectation, she pulled a gas gun from its holder, but no pump clicked into whirring
motion. She depressed the trigger a few times experimentally, but not so much as a
drop trickled out.

A battered grey station wagon stood at another pump. Diane walked over to it and peered
in. A family had owned the car: they were still inside it. The father sat slumped
forward against the steering wheel; a woman—his wife?—occupied the passenger seat,
leaning against the door, head hanging forward onto her chest, still strapped in by
the seat belt; a young teenage girl lay on her back across the rear seat, staring
sightlessly at the car ceiling. The trunk was jam-packed with belongings, on top of
which lay a basket containing a cat. It was still alive. It noticed Diane peering
in and began to mewl and scrabble at the wire caging of the door. The creature was
probably starving, Diane thought.

Something else caught her eye. A coiled length of clear plastic tubing lay next to
the cat’s cage. Like a garden hose for a model village. What Diane didn’t know, and
wouldn’t have cared even if she’d been told, was that the father had recently undergone
a colostomy. When the family had been frantically packing the car to flee their home
in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, the father had picked up the spare surgical tubing
that he had for carrying out emergency repairs to his colostomy bag and that, thankfully,
he hadn’t yet needed to use. He had paused for a moment, fighting back the tickling
cough that made his head ache, considering whether to take it. He already knew that
repairing his colostomy bag was likely to be the least of his problems. With a shrug,
he had chucked it into the back, next to Candy’s basket.

Diane tried the handle of the back door. With a creak, it came open, letting out a
gust of foetid air. She stepped smartly back, coughing and clutching her nose.

Taking a deep breath, she held it and ducked through the doorway, placing her knee
carefully on a space on the rear seat not occupied by the girl’s corpse, and reached
for the tubing.

The cat spat and tried to claw at her.

Diane grabbed the tubing and backed out of the car. She thought for a moment, then
repeated the process, this time grabbing the cat’s cage. The creature yowled and threw
itself at the wire. Diane laid the basket on the ground and knelt on the tarmac to
peer in. The cat was scrawny and bare patches of pink skin showed through its tawny
fur. The floor of the cage was thick with the cat’s waste. Its paws were stained and
soaking. At least one of its claws had come off when it had attacked the caged door.
One of its ears was tattered and bleeding where it must have snagged on a protruding
wire in its frantic efforts to escape.