'Rats,' he said to himself. 'Oh, Jesus!'
He descended the next few stairs cautiously. The rats scuttled down ahead of him, and he could see their eyes reflecting the dim light from the open street door. He managed to reach the sidewalk, kicking a couple of rats aside, and it was only then that he realized how many there were. The office building was teeming with rats, and so were the streets. Disturbed by the chaotic violence and looting, frightened by fires, aroused by the smell of dead bodies, they were rising from the sewers and electrical conduits of Manhattan in a gray tide.
Edgar ran across Third Avenue and turned down 52nd Street. Now he was out in the open, his confidence was shaken. It was menacing and strange, and the fires that burned through the drizzling rain cast enormous shadows. He had no idea where he could find a doctor, and he peered hopelessly at all the signs and nameplates he saw.
From Third Avenue, he reached Lexington Avenue. Uptown, he could see immense fires blazing. Whole blocks were alight. Downtown, it was all darkness and savagery. He crossed the street and walked quickly towards Park Avenue, panting hard and clutching his pistol tight.
He didn't see them until he had turned the corner. There were eight or nine of them — marauding black teenagers with clubs and knives and razors. They had raided three hotel bars on the East Side, and they were fiercely drunk. The day before, white hoodlums had come up to Harlem and thrown gasoline bombs in their neighborhood stores and their houses, and they were out to fix honkies and nothing else.
Edgar raised the.38.
'Don't you come a step nearer, or I'll shoot!'
The black kids jeered and laughed. Edgar, holding the pistol in both hands, aimed directly at a silhouetted head.
It went through his mind like an action replay. The supermarket doorway. The laughter in the car park. The shot. One of the kids fell to the ground, without a sound. The rest of them scattered. 'He's dead all right. I got him in the head.'
And while his finger froze on the trigger, a tall black boy in green jeans ducked under his line of fire and stabbed him straight in the face with a broken gin bottle. The glass sliced into his cheeks and mouth, and he dropped the gun on to the sidewalk in a slow-motion twist of agony.
They cut his face up first. He felt knives in his eyes. Then one of them grappled his wet, petrified tongue, and they sliced it off with a razor. The last thing he felt before he died, in a hideous burst of agony, was the broken bottle they forced, laughing, into his rectum.
Shark McManus died that night, too. As he lay on the floor of the office, helpless and weak and soaked in diarrhoea, the rats came scampering in. He was so close to death that he scarcely felt them running over him, and at one moment he thought of the kitten his father had given him when he was six, and he opened his arms to embrace the scuttling gray tribe that bit at his flesh and turned his hands into raw bloody strings.
'Paston?' he said hoarsely.
There was no answer — He heard a squeaking, pattering noise that he didn't understand.
'Paston?' he said again.
No answer.
'Paston?'
After the hideous chaos of the night, the morning was gray and silent. The rain stopped, and a smeary sunlight filtered across the East River and into the broken streets. Uptown, fires still burned in Harlem, and the black carcasses of buses and cars were littered all over the streets of the midtown hotel district, smoldering and smashed. The sidewalks were glittering with powdered glass, and amongst it, like frozen explorers caught in a strange kind of snow, were the bodies of plague victims and riot casualties.
One or two police cars patroled the streets slowly and cautiously, driving over rubble and bricks and debris. The cops all wore respirators and goggles, and were heavily armed. There were still a few stray looters around, and they had orders to shoot to kill.
The rats were still in evidence — swarming into abandoned delicatessens and restaurants, and over the corpses that lay huddled up in every street.
Every office block and apartment building was locked and guarded and under siege. But even if the residents were able to keep out the looters and most of the rats, they couldn't protect themselves from the plague. During Monday morning, the fast-breeding bacilli brought painful death to thousands of New Yorkers, transmitted by minute specks of infected saliva. It only took a word of encouragement to pass the plague on, or the touch of a hand in friendship.
Some people died slowly, in prolonged agony, while others succumbed in two or three hours. By midday, almost seventeen thousand people were dead, and several apartment buildings had become silent, pestilent mortuaries. As the People collapsed, the rats scurried in, devouring food and flesh in a suffocating orgy of self-indulgence.
Other people, trapped in elevators since Sunday by the power failure, began to collapse from exhaustion, thirst and lack of air. There was no one to rescue them, and they died in a squalid confusion of darkness and urine.
In the subways, imprisoned in darkened trains, people moaned and cried and waited for the help that would never arrive. Old people and invalids sat in their apartments in front of dead televisions, waiting for nurses who didn't dare take to the streets. Drug addicts, shivering and sweating, haunted the Lower West Side looking for fixes.
Dr. Petrie, up on the sixteenth floor of Concorde Tower, stared down at the city for almost an hour. Adelaide and Esmeralda had taken Prickles to meet the Kavanagh children on the floor below, and Ivor Glantz was locked in his study, laboriously working out the mathematical probability of destroying the plague with radioactive rays. Dr. Petrie drank coffee and tried to relax. He had slept badly, with nightmares of travelling and suffering and violence, but he felt better than yesterday. He was just wondering how long they could survive on the sixteenth floor, without food supplies, or any guarantee that their water or power would hold out.
He was going to pour himself another cup of coffee when there was a rap at the door. He walked across the sitting-room and switched on Ivor Glantz's closed-circuit TV. The building super was standing outside, looking agitated. Dr. Petrie opened the door.
'Hi,' said the super. He remembered Dr. Petrie from the night before, when they had banged on the glass doors of Concorde Tower and shouted to be let in. He was a thin, nervous man with greasy hair and a neatly-clipped mustache. 'Can I come in?'
'Sure. Professor Glantz is working right now, but if it's urgent — '
The super worriedly chewed at his lip. 'It's getting pretty serious, to tell you the truth. I got assistants going round the whole building, informing everyone.'
'What's the problem?'
'Well,' said the super, 'we got quite a crowd outside. You know — people who were caught on the streets when the power went off. They want us to let them in, and they've started cracking the front doors already.'
'How many are there?'
'Well, it's hard to tell, maybe a couple of dozen. I took a look off the roof, and the same thing's happening to other condos, too. I guess quite a few people got caught out last night, and now they want to get back inside.'
'You can't let them in — you know that, don't you?' Dr. Petrie said. Even if they're residents, they may have plague. This whole apartment building could be wiped out in an afternoon.'
'Well, yes, sir, I know that. But I was tryin g to figure how to keep them out. They're smashing down the doors, and some of them have guns.'
There was another knock at the door. Dr. Petrie turned around, to see a stocky, bristle-headed man standing in the doorway, wearing a turtle-neck sweater, plaid pants and bedroom slippers. His face was bruised, and he had a magnificent black eye.