We kept to the middle of the street as we approached Port Authority. This must have been the last part of the city to be evacuated. We saw piles of luggage - sometimes just trash bags sealed with masking tape, sometimes great heaps of Prada handbags or Tumi suitcases - stashed on the sidewalk and everywhere there were leaflets tacked up on the walls or skating along the streets like albino manta rays advising people to STAY TOGETHER and KNOW YOUR GROUP NUMBER BY HEART! The bus terminal must have been the only way out of town at the end. I had no great desire to go inside and see what had become of all those panicked refugees. It would be depressing at best, I thought, shocking at worst.
Then we passed by the bulk of the terminal and entered Times Square and I discovered a new definition for the word 'shocking'.
It will sound ridiculous to some, I know, after all the devastation I'd witnessed, but Times Square was the most horrifying place I saw in this new New York. There were no piles of dead bodies, no signs of looting or panic. There was just one thing wrong with this Times Square.
It was dark.
There were no lights on anywhere, not a single bulb. I turned to Ayaan but she didn't understand, of course, so I turned around again and stared up at the vast blank faces of the buildings around me. I wanted to explain to her - how there used to be television screens here six stories high, how the neon lights had glowed and shifted and shimmered so brightly the night had been transformed into a luminous blue haze unlike daylight, unlike moonlight, something wholly transcendent and localized. How there had been a law requiring every building to put out a certain amount of light so that even the police station and the subway entrances and the military recruiting center had blasted out illumination like the Vegas strip but how could she understand? She had no point of reference - she had never seen the big advertisements for Samsung and Reuters and Quiksilver and McDonald's. She would never see them now. With my mouth open I turned in place, so shocked I couldn't think. The heart of New York City - that was what all the tourist books called Times Square. The heart of New York City had stopped beating. The city like its inhabitants had perished and now existed only in a nightmarish half-state, an unliving undeath. Ayaan had to grab my hand and lead me away.
We passed between the movie theaters and then we saw Madame Tussaud's on our right. Dozens of wax mannequins had been dragged out into the street, their paint washed off by rain and their half-melted white faces staring up at us in reproach. We could see the big ragged gouges in their throats and torsos where the hungry dead had ravaged them, obviously having mistaken them for real human beings. I was still staring at the broken forms when I heard someone speak. I looked up at Ayaan at the same moment she looked up at me. We had both heard it - which meant it had originated with neither of us.
We heard it again. "Hey, guys! Over here!" Ayaan's face set in grim planes. In this haunted city another voice could only mean Gary - but he was long dead, now, buried under an avalanche of DVD boxes, we had been there, we had done it. It didn't sound like Gary anyway. Could there be another like him? If so we were in desperate trouble.
"Living people, man! Survivors! Come on!" The voice was coming from the direction of Broadway. We rushed to the subway entrance and found it barred with iron gates. Standing just inside were three men who were very much alive and breathing. They were covered in sweat as if they'd just run a long distance and they were waving wildly at us.
"Who - " I began but of course who they were was obvious. Survivors - New Yorkers, still alive after all this time. Had they been living in the subway since the Epidemic broke out? It seemed impossible yet here they were. They looked malnourished and scruffy but they weren't dead, they weren't dead at all.
"You must be here to rescue us, man," one of them shouted, sounding convinced this was not the case but desperately wanting it to be so. "It's been so long but we knew you would come!"
Ayaan shook her head at me but I ignored her. The drugs could be damned - these were living people! I peered in through the bars. The men were armed with pistols and shotguns and hunting rifles - civilian weapons. Each of them wore a nametag stuck to his shirt: HELLO MY NAME IS Ray; HELLO MY NAME IS Angel; HELLO MY NAME IS Shailesh. Ray held out one sweaty, desperate palm, pushing his arm through the bars up to his shoulder. He pushed the hand toward me, not to grab me, not to tear me to pieces but to greet me. I shook his hand heartily.
Shailesh asked the first question. "What are those suits for? We're not infected. We're clean!"
"They keep the dead from smelling us," I explained hurriedly. "I'm Dekalb and this is Ayaan - we've been here for a couple of days now but you're the first survivors we've seen. How many of you are there?"
Ray answered: "Near on two hundred. Everybody who was here when the Guard's last barricade broke. Listen, you didn't see any survivors at all? We've got two guys out there looking for supplies. Paul and Kev - are you sure you didn't see them? They've been gone way too long."
I looked to Ayaan as if she might have seen something I didn't but of course we all knew what must have happened to the foragers. "We have a ship on the Hudson," I told them. "We'll need to find a way to get you all safely to the river but after that you'll be safe. Who's in charge? We'll need to start organizing how we do this." I planned on running this like a classic UN refugee operation - the first step was to look for the existing social order. Not only would the local boss know how to keep order among his or her people, they'd be offended if you didn't recognize their authority no matter how temporary it might be. I never thought I would be applying this kind of group psychology to Americans (who would be unused to direct civil authority) but the principles had to be the same.
"That'd be el Presidente," Angel said with a sneer. He clearly had some kind of contempt for the local authority. It softened though when he realized that escape might be close at hand. "Sure, man, I'll talk to him, I'll get this moving. You want to come in, maybe have a bite? We haven't got so much but it's yours."
I shook my head but the gesture would be hard to interpret through the faceshield so I raised my hands in negation. "Don't open the gate. No need to endanger yourselves. We're going to head back to the ship now but we'll be back in a couple of hours. Alright?"
The three men looked at me with such open and honest trust on their faces that I had to turn away or choke up. Ayaan cleared her throat as we moved away from the subway, trying to get my attention. I knew what she was going to say but I didn't want to hear it.
"Dekalb. The Arawelo is cramped even now, with only twenty-seven of us. It is not possible to take two hundred refugees onboard." She kept her voice low so the survivors wouldn't hear us arguing.
I followed suit. "So we'll make multiple trips... or, I don't know, maybe Osman will get his wish - maybe we'll find some way to get the Intrepid free. God damn it, Ayaan! We can't just abandon them."
"Dekalb," she said, much louder, and I turned to shush her but she had a different topic of discussion in mind. The side door of a dumpster had slid open and a naked dead man had wriggled out. Moving on all fours he came right up to us, his nose wriggling.
"He must smell the survivors," I hissed at Ayaan. "Stay perfectly still."
The dead man crawled closer and pulled himself stiffly up to his feet. In life he had suffered from male pattern baldness. He had tiny, beady eyes. He wavered before me for a long uncomfortable minute before bending forward at the waist and craning his neck out to give me a big snuffling sniff. He seemed to find my right hand fascinating.
It was only natural to look down and see what had excited him so. That was when I noticed the sheen of dampness on my palm. Sweat, on the outside of my glove.
Two more dead men slithered out of the dumpster. From down the street I saw movement - lots of movement.
"You shook the living one's hand! You're contaminated!" Ayaan screamed, her rifle strap getting tangled as she tried to get to the weapon. I looked from her back to the dead man as his talon-like fingers slashed down at me. They slid harmlessly off the Tyvek suit - I could feel the four hard points of contact (one for each of his fingernails) glance along my ribs - and then they caught on the seal of my glove.
At this point I tried to get away. Instead I got my legs tangled up in the baggy fabric of the hazmat suit and nearly fell down. The dead man gave a quick tug and my glove came off altogether, exposing my bare hand to the air.
My vaporproof integrity been compromised.