“Anyway, I’ll drop you two off downtown, then I’m gone until four in the morning,” Jack was saying to Molly. “You’ll make it home okay?”
“So long as it doesn’t rain,” Molly sighed. She was pretty, with long dark hair just like Lily’s. She really could have been the girl’s mother, except Lily knew her parents were dead.
“Did you have a nightmare last night?” Molly asked Lily. “I heard you saying something in your sleep.”
Lily couldn’t explain to her new guardians that they weren’t nightmares — that Death was her friend, that he’d saved her life more than once. He had a kind, gentle face. His doll-like eyes made her think of a baby, innocent and unformed. In a lot of ways, he was like a child; he didn’t seem to understand a lot of things, like feelings.
But he and Lily had still gotten along. He’d held her while she wept for her parents, and he’d saved her from the house in the swamp where her brothers and sisters were undead. She longed to see him again, and somehow knew that she would — that he was searching for her right now, at this very moment.
“What are you building today?” she asked Jack. Sometimes he was reluctant to talk about his job, but other times he had funny stories. This time he only shrugged. “I can’t say, exactly. I can tell you we’re laying a sort of asphalt right now. We hope it doesn’t rain either.”
He couldn’t tell her about the airfield project — hell, he wasn’t even supposed to tell Molly, but he had. It was a secret that only the Senators knew about.
The firm he worked for had restored most of downtown over the past five years. It was a huge company, but only a select handful were chosen for the airfield. He had no idea what they intended to use it for — did they even have planes? — but he was starting to form a theory.
If he was right, then he would have to do something. It might mean a real future for him and Molly. And, well, Lily…
Thunder rumbled overhead. Molly cursed, and Jack tightened his grip on the steering wheel, his knuckles already bone-white.
Nine / Beginning of the End
At dusk, Thackeray sat on a rock and whittled arrows from kindling. The evening fires were being lit, and the day’s purchase — rats and other small vermin — were being cleaned for supper. To almost anyone it might seem like a dismal life of poverty. But he knew better. He’d seen what was on the other side. And he knew that, soon, the Senate’s empire would fall.
Somewhere far off, at the very edge of his hearing, a little bell began to ring.
A few others heard it too. They looked to the west end of the quarry. The jingling increased in volume as other bells were triggered.
Then, to the east. More ringing. And the north.
Thackeray snatched a bow off the ground at his feet and peered into the trees on the quarry’s rim. Didn’t see a damn thing. Ringing to the south now.
Panicked exclamations split the air. Women grabbed their children and ran for their tents. Others took up torches and bows and watched the woods above. The ringing was almost deafening, every single lizard kicking its tiny legs as they were bathed in the aura of a presence massive, something huge and unseen watching the humans from the trees.
Then came the scream, the most godawful thing Thackeray had ever heard — a ragged, high-pitched banshee’s cry that seemed to come from all directions. It was in that moment that Thackeray realized all of them were about to die.
The rotters surged forth, all runners—all of them—cascading down the sides of the crater in a wave of gray flesh that swept over the men standing at the camp’s edge. Thackeray stared in abject horror as he saw his men torn limb from limb in seconds, ripped apart and simply thrown aside — fresh meat discarded while the undead went after the others!
He ran for the nearest fire. Fire, that was all they had. And fires were being stomped out right and left by the feet of the dead as tents collapsed under the weight of ravenous attackers and then the screams of the women filled Thackeray’s head, women grieving and dying all at once. Still the rotters kept pouring in.
Thackeray spun, a torch in each hand, and saw a pair heading right for him. He ran at them, flames thrust forth, ready to beat them both to pulp with the goddamned things if he had to—
They weren’t two. They were one.
Siamese twins, rotters fused at the torso and scrambling along on three legs like some sort of giant insect. Its heads snapped and slavered and both stared Thackeray dead in the eyes. He dropped the torches and fell to his knees. God in Heaven, it was them — it was him.
A shadow towered over him from the back. Turning he saw, framed in firelight, a great hulk of a man, covered in obscene tattoos and wielding a massive hammer.
Thackeray saw the hammer coming down and couldn’t even close his eyes. He was trapped in this waking nightmare, forced to see the death blow as it rocketed toward his face; and then
Kill. Then eat.
He’d taught them that taking down the entire herd at the onset left more meat for each of them. If they were to stay strong, to stay fast, they needed to eat well. To increase their chances of survival, all of the pack needed to stay healthy — and each of them understood that.
That said, Eviscerato was the alpha, and he always fed first.
All of the night’s kills had been dragged into the open, out from beneath bloody canvas and away from the heat of those campfires still burning; stripped naked and laid out before the King of the Dead, for him to select his morsel.
The young girls were soft and fatty. He grabbed one by the bracelet on her wrist, letters chained together. He couldn’t read them, and cast the item aside. J-O-S-I-E.
Pulling her away from the others, he knelt over her, lifting her to his mouth by her little ponytail — then tore into her. And the pack leapt at the remaining meat, spitting and gnashing in a frenzy of blood.
Eviscerato still wore his old suit, the crimson vest and top hat, even his cane — a handy bludgeon — and he hadn’t lost his showman swagger either. The dancer among the dead, they’d called him. He still moved with a sort of grace uncommon in thee dead. There were no memories of his former life, at least not in his mind; but his muscles remembered that peculiar gait with which he walked, and a certain instinct told him to smile grandly in the face of a large crowd. So he often came at his victims with an ear-to-ear grin, lipless and rotten, cane swinging in the moonlight.
They were animals, the lot of them; but preserved in each member of Eviscerato’s circus was a sense of identity. The Strongman and the Fakir and the Geek each knew his place.
And they all followed Eviscerato — who, in turn, had been following the withdrawal, the human convoys heading north. With those convoys long gone he pressed on, guided by am intuition which told him that there was a great nest of living flesh at the end of this long and bloody road.
There, they would feast until their bellies burst.
The joke was that they called it Old New York. Some people didn’t get it, some people didn’t know history and didn’t care to know about the world before, and that was fine. But for those looking for a little light in the world after, for a little humor in the burnt-out labyrinth, the dust-swept amphitheater of silence, the concrete-and-steel canyons of the dead island — they called it Old New York and maybe cracked a smile.
101 years or so out from the Year of the Plague, the Last Day, End Time, Old New York was a sun-bleached husk of a city. Nature had reclaimed what it wanted, but it had left a lot of the skyscrapers and sewers and streets to themselves, a decaying spectacle bespeaking an ancient fallen empire. The skeletons of monolithic business enterprises and government concerns loomed over ruptured veins of asphalt and seas of dirt and glass. Loomed over nothing.