City Under the Moon (36 page)

The Chrysler Building loomed above them on the right side of the street, across from a less-impressive counterpart skyscraper of reflective glass. The two of them reminded Lon of Master Tolkien’s
The Two Towers.

Infected were everywhere, leaning out of buildings, kneeling on the street, standing on cars. Their eyes bulged and their necks contorted as they kept up with their forced screams. Lon’s throat was killing him out of sympathy.

He couldn’t have predicted Valenkov’s ability to enthrall his victims in such a manner; it wasn’t in any of his literature. Sure, a pact bond between master and minion was to be expected. Hell, it was practically a religion to the drama mamas writing erotic fan fics. But this sort of overt brainwashing, especially during the human phase, was completely unexpected.

He was writing his doctoral thesis in his head.

His body ached, but he still had energy. Maybe it’d come from Tildascow’s pills, or maybe his metabolism had caught up with newfound bravery—or maybe that’d come from the pills, too.

They were power-walking right down the middle of the street, veering between abandoned cars. Tildascow was in the lead, followed by Jaguar. She kept scratching the bandage on her neck.

Lon couldn’t shake the image of Mantle peppering that old lady with bullets. Little tiny red explosions all over her chest, punching her backward, but she couldn’t be stopped.

The old woman had known Tildascow’s name. Valenkov must have targeted her. But why?

“Will it happen tonight?” she’d asked Ilecko.

“Cannot be sure.”

And that was all that was said. Mantle disinfected and bandaged the wound. Since then, she’d only barked orders for them to keep moving.

Lon followed their footsteps in the snow, stepping around occasional crimson patches and body parts. Ilecko kept pace next to him, looking at each screamer as if any one of them might have something new or interesting to say. In the VA hospital, in front of Bellevue and in the blocks north, they’d seen hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. And unseen voices came from everywhere. How many were inside these buildings?

Mantle kept up the rear, looking around with a doomsday gaze. When he caught Lon looking, he faked a smiling wink.

Lexington Avenue seemed to grow longer in front of them, an endless stretch of delis beneath four-story brownstones. Somehow Lon’s legs kept going.

At 39
th
Street, an American flag hung above the entrance to a bar. The lower half had been slashed, and its red and white tendrils thrashed in the wind.

At 40
th
, the buildings grew to six and eight stories, a running jump to the skyscrapers in the blocks ahead. The glut of cars thickened too, so they began climbing over them instead of walking around.

Lon ducked as a low-flying helicopter thundered past. He’d get dizzy trying to count all of the aircraft in the sky. A banana ‘copter with two rotors was lowering an armored truck into the next intersection. From here it looked like the truck was sinking in a quicksand of taxis.

The Shadows led them up the last great hill of vehicles before the Chrysler Building. Ilecko lifted Lon into Tildascow’s grip on the steeper climbs. She’d pat him on the shoulder after pulling him up, as if that made it better.

They finally reached the military perimeter, half a block from the Chrysler Building at 42
nd
Street. Special ops soldiers stepped right over screamers to help them climb down the car pile.

Lon couldn’t spin fast enough to take in all of the activity.

Armored personnel carriers, Humvees, and two tanks had blocked off Lexington to the north at 43
rd
. To the west, 42
nd
was blocked by a three-story dam of abandoned vehicles. An APC headed their way from the east with soldiers clinging to its outside.

Even the street markings were dizzying to this Ohio boy: A frantic crisscross pattern filled the intersection, surrounded on all sides by vertical lines. A woman had fallen in the middle of the street, her tattered clothing soaked in brown slush, her face the color of blood. Everyone went on ignoring her as she bucked and rasped through blown vocal chords, “Find a cure!”

A salty-haired gruff called Major General Jefferson Beach—
great pornstar name,
Lon thought—told them his men were having trouble inside the Chrysler Building because thick groups of infecteds had the stairs blocked. He led them north on Lexington, toward the Chrysler Building’s entrance, which looked like a squat coffin lined with black marble (and that wasn’t just Lon’s goth soul making an observation).

The tower was dizzying and dreary from its base, an endless ladder of gray stretching into the thick smoky sky. Twin twelve-story rectangles hugged the north and south sides of the structure, looking like the legs of—

“A king on his throne,” Tildascow said to herself, some kind of profundity known only to her. If there was a king up there, he had a good view of himself in the mirrored Hyatt skyscraper across the street.

On the ground level, a fashion store called Strawberry had been adapted into a makeshift holding pen. Green Berets kept their rifles trained on the growing collection of thrashing, shrieking captives.

Each soldier’s backpack was affixed with Valenkov’s portrait from the airport security camera. It was a smart move, but it gave Lon the eerie feeling that Valenkov was watching them from everywhere. Hell, maybe he was. Lon found himself diverting his gaze every time it met Valenkov’s.

Troops had busted through the window of a drug store called “duane reade.” Was that someone’s name, and was he morally opposed to capital letters? These drug stores and pizza shops on the ground floors of gigantic buildings—did they, like, pay rent or something? And the people who lived or worked above—weren’t they always hungry? And why would folks want to live so crammed together like this?

He’d been trying not to think about his dark goddess Elizabeth, lest he be overcome with worry. But she’d said so many times that she felt lonely here in Manhattan. It seemed impossible to Lon, to be lonely in the most crowded city in America, until he touched the crushing sensation of New York. The gigantism of everything made any one thing—or person—seem pitifully insignificant. In Ohio, his street was
his
street. Nothing truly belonged to anyone here.

Ilecko’s blood droplets crept toward the coffin entrance.

“He’s in there,” Tildascow said, gazing up at the crown.

“It’s taken a couple of hours to get to the 20
th
floor,” said Beach. “They got it stopped up good. We’re prepping to transport directly to the sixty-first-floor terrace.”

“What’s holding you up?”

“Nothing,” he frowned, not liking her tone. “We’re readying the—“

“Desperation One,” she abruptly radioed, “this is November, what’s your ETA to the Chrysler Building, over?”

“Five minutes, November.”

“Roger that, we need pickup on Lexington north of 42
nd
, plenty of room to get down here. Transport to a terrace on the sixty-first floor. Over.”

“Roger, November. Desperation out.”

Beach’s temper flared over his ‘stache. “I want to send a preliminary—“

“All command units this net!” Tildascow interrupted again. “HPT is in the Chrysler Building; all units rally to this location,” she said, retrieving coordinates from her loathsome GPS device, “8333-3234. I say again, 8333-3234. Over.” Her “threes” sounded like “trees.” She stowed her GPS, still with her eyes to the sky, and brushed off Beach. “I apologize, sir, I’m just a bit eager.”

“We’re
all
eager, Agent Tildascow.”

“This is Central Command,” the radio blared. “8333-3234. Roger that. Wilco. Over.” That was followed by “Southeastern Command. Roger that. Over,” and “Southwestern Command. Roger that location. Over.”

Tildascow turned to her team. “The Crash Hawk will take us up to the—” She stopped short as a strange sensation swept over the whole crowd.

Thunderous silence. As if someone had hit the mute button on life.

Each person registered the uncanny effect, slowly realizing…

The screams had stopped.

Tildascow turned toward the Strawberry store, where the captives were writhing in pain.

Jaguar and Mantle followed her, rifles trained. Lon went with them, passing Ilecko, who was still gazing up at the sky.

One of the victims was a petite 20 year-old girl. She struggled to her feet, sobbing and wheezing, ignoring the guards’ orders to sit back down, and groaned, “Help!”

Tildascow came closer, keeping her hip turned to hide her gun.

“Help,” the girl cried. “Please help.”

“We’re going to help you, miss,” Tildascow called. “I promise.”

“Help.” Now she could only mouth the word. “Help.”

“We will.”

The woman’s face went into sudden shock. Her lids and cheeks were blackened by burst blood vessels, making her bloodshot eyes seem to glow red. For a horrible moment they rolled back and forth between Tildascow and the soldier, teasing some dark secret.

She held her breath, still looking around.

Was she about to pass out? Or die? Did she have a new message?

“Hkkk--“ She choked.

“Miss?” Tildascow asked. “Are you okay?”

Her eyes rolled back in her head as she took a deep, sniffling breath…

“Miss?”

And then she howled.

Fifteen

Situation Room

The White House

3:48 p.m.

The madmen at CNN were broadcasting live from their New York studios overlooking Columbus Circle. The shaky, handheld footage they’d shot through their windows offered the best available angle on the central command post.

The heads of state watched along with the rest of the world as the soldiers staved off the rioters to maintain the landing zone for the never-ending traffic of Chinooks.

With the infected screaming themselves silly and the civilians in hiding, the command post had operated unencumbered for a glorious ninety minutes. In fact, their efficiency was so monotonous that most in the Situation Room had stopped watching.

Allison Leslie noticed it first. “Something’s happening!” she screamed.

The room fell quiet as an aide turned up the TV’s volume. “—screaming stopped just a minute ago, and now the victims seem to be stirring.” The unseen CNN correspondents might have been shooting the footage themselves. “Yes, they’re definitely conscious now. The soldiers at the edge of Columbus Circle are yelling at them, but we can’t hear them.”

The soldiers had their perimeter covered. The activity within the circle never slowed as the crowd came to their feet.

“There’s so many of them,” said another CNN correspondent, panning across the southern end of Central Park. “There must be thousands.” As they sprouted like weeds, it became apparent just how decisively they outnumbered the military. “My God.”

Quick pans with long-distance lenses made for nauseating viewing. Someone in the control room had the sense to cut to another camera, one with a birdseye shot of a victim who had already gotten to his feet—a teenage boy in tattered clothes, exhausted from his ordeal. The boy ran his hands through his hair and whimpered at the sky.

“What’s he doing?” Luft asked, at the same time as the CNN correspondent.

Sixteen

405 Lexington Avenue at the Chrysler Building

3:48 p.m.

“Not yet! Not yet!” Lon’s voice cracked through five major scales.

The victims’ eyes turned yellow, fur sprouted on their faces, and their lower teeth emerged from swelling underbites. It was only the first stage of the transformation.

And it was three hours early.

Soldiers called out for instructions. Reinforcements raced to the Strawberry, where the pack had begun sizing up their captors.

The werewolves had their own reinforcements en route. A steady stream of wolfmen were traversing the vehicle pile and massing along the military perimeter.

That woman who’d been lying in the intersection slowly rose to her knees. Her soaked, dirty clothes clung to the thin fur covering her body. She panted, her shoulders bobbing, while watching the rifles turn toward her. Yellow hatred glimmered in her eyes.

“What’s happening?” Tildascow asked Ilecko.

“It is when moon is bright and sky is thick,” Ilecko murmured, drawing his sword in his underhand style. “Wolves come early.”

Lon looked up at the “thick” sky. Storm and smoke had created a thick umbrella over the city, reflecting the moonlight from beyond the horizon. Yet another detail that had escaped his research.

“They will transform slowly,”
Ilecko told him in Romanian.
“We still have time. They will not attack.”

Lon relayed that to—

“This is information we could have used sooner,” Tildascow grunted, reaching for her radio: “Desperation, this is November! We need immediate extract, do you read?”

“Roger that, November,” the Black Hawk pilot said over the radio. “We are one minute away. Stand by for evac.”

Wolf eyes steadily materialized from corners and shadows, increasing in number and steadily closing in.

The perimeter grew tighter as soldiers backed toward their team, forming a circle of protection.

Lon wanted to believe Ilecko’s promise. “You said they wouldn’t attack, right?”

Ilecko silently clocked the wolf men skulking in every direction.

He said they wouldn’t attack, though. He did say that.

“Switch to silver!” Tildascow yelled.

Amid a chorus of “Hooah,” soldiers swapped out their tan SCARs in favor of smaller black rifles.

Tildascow switched her pistol with another in her hip holster. She checked its chamber, flipped its safety, and proffered it to Lon. “Silver bullets.”

But they’re not going to attack!

“Take it, Lon.”

No guns! No guns for him!
Frak!
“I—I don’t know what to do.”

“Use both hands,” she said in a soothing tone, wrapping his fingers around the handle. “Lock your elbows. Point and fire.” She removed her cap and glasses and leaned in with bubblegum breath, her pretty blonde curls falling over her face. “Stay with me, kiddo.”