I threw myself backward, knocking Jack against the wall, trying to crack his spine, trying to break his hold on my face. It only made him more determined. Jack had been a lot stronger than me in life. In death he was strong and desperate. He wrapped a forearm around my throat and pulled, trying maybe to break my neck. He succeeded in pinching closed my windpipe.
I swung around wildly, my hands pulling at the legs he had wrapped around my waist. I might as well have tried to bend iron. The little air in my lungs turned to carbon dioxide but I couldn't exhale and suddenly dark stars were spinning in my vision, sparkles of light like signal fires, one each for the neurons dying in my head as I asphyxiated. I lost it, lost all reason at that point and just panicked. Without a thought in my head I dashed forward, away from the thing on my back, my subconscious mind unable to realize that it was still attached. Jack's grip on me merely tightened as my feet dug for purchase in the brick floor. Like a mule pulling a plow I tried to pull away from him.
Anoxia distorted my hearing - the sound of my heart beating was a lot louder than the noise of Jack's vertebrae cracking inside his neck. He let go of me in a sudden and unexpected way and I slumped forward, catching myself on my hands, spit streaming from my mouth as my body heaved for air. Not so much breathing as swallowing oxygen, gulping it down. I tried very hard not to throw up. If I had I would surely have aspirated something and drowned on my own vomit.
My eyes hurt, the tiny blood vessels inside them burst open by the fury of Jack's assault. I blinked them madly to get some tears going and then turned to sit down and tenderly touch my throat, trying to soothe the burning flesh there. I looked up.
I did a double take when I saw what had saved me. Jack hung from his chain, the links wrapped tight around his throat. Tight enough to be buried in his deliquescent flesh. Somehow while waiting to ambush me he'd gotten mixed up in the chain. It probably hadn't bothered him - he had no need to breathe - until the constricting pressure had shattered the bones in his neck. His body dangled limply in the coils of the chain like so much cast-off clothing.
His head remained animate. His eyes stared hard at me. His lips moved in anticipation of one more bite of my flesh. I looked away...
...and realized I was bleeding to death. I looked down at my chest and the fresh blood that covered me. I reached up two trembling fingers and felt out the contours of my wound. Jack had bitten me very close to a major artery. He'd taken a chunk out of my body where my shoulder met my neck. I tore a strip off of my shirt and jammed it into the gaping hole - anything to stop the flow of blood.
"Oh man that was too good," Gary laughed as I clutched the bandage to my neck. "Do you get it now, Dekalb? The human race is over and you living guys came in last place! You can't compete, man. You don't even qualify."
I lurched to my feet, one hand on the rough brick wall to steady myself. I got a pretty bad head rush just standing up. A definite bad sign. I walked over to the tub and stepped down onto the cracked floor.
"You can't destroy me, asshole. You can shoot me in the head and you can burn me to the ground but it doesn't matter. I can repair myself - rebuild myself!" Gary's mutilated head rocked against the bricks as he spoke. "I'm invincible!"
I kicked at his neck until his head came away from his body and rolled away on the floor.
I wasn't quite done. It took me a while to find the pumphouse again but it was necessary. I needed a bag and I needed to make sure the VX cylinders weren't going to go off on their own. In the fading light of the glowsticks I peeled the plastic explosives off of the canisters. I disassembled the detonator and broke the parts, scattering them around the room. I buried the cylinders under some loose bricks. There wasn't much else I could do - you can't just dump nerve agents into the sewer system or throw them in a landfill but at least this way no wandering dead guy would unleash the chemical weapons by accident.
There was another weapon of mass destruction to consider. I didn't like it but I would have to take it with me. I emptied out one of the heavy packs that Jack and I had brought to the fortress and stuffed Gary's head inside. I believed him when he said he could eventually regenerate himself, that he could survive anything. I could crush the head to a fine paste but even that might not be enough - he had after all survived being shot in the brain. By keeping the head with me I knew I would be able to kill him again if he came back. As many times as it took.
Jack's Glock 9 mm went into my pocket. It wasn't much but it was a weapon and obscenely enough its presence made me feel safe. That was something I needed. My injuries made me feel like any second I might just collapse.
By the time I was ready to leave the fortress my breathing had become labored and my vision was shot. When I staggered out into the daylight I was momentarily blinded. What I finally saw cheered me up a lot. An orange and white blur hovering in the air. Coast Guard colors - that would be Kreutzer. Oh, thank God. He had come. I had half expected him to take the Chinook to Canada Something yellow hung beneath the helicopter but I couldn't quite focus enough to make it out.
By the time I reached the lawn between the houses Marisol already had the survivors lining up to get onboard the chopper. Rotorwash from the Chinook cleared the blur out of my eyes and I saw the look on her face. It was one of total disbelief - and hope. I'd never seen her look like that before.
I ran to the hole in the wall and saw thousands of dead men just outside, impatient in their lust for food, being held back by six mummies. Just six. The Egyptians had their arms linked where they stood side by side in the gap, their backs to me. The collective weight of hundreds of dead men and women pressed against them but they held fast, kicking back those who tried to climb between their legs. I saw the female mummy, the one I'd spoken to, headbutt a dead boy and send him flying.
Out there in the midst of the dead, though - one of them stood head and shoulders above the rest. Literally. There was a giant there making his way toward the line of mummies. He batted the other ghouls away from him like flies as he approached. Whether the mummies could stand against his onslaught was still an open question.
Enough - I didn't have any time left to worry. That line would hold. It had to. I turned around and saw the helicopter with clear vision as it made its descent. The yellow blur beneath it turned out to be a school bus attached to the Chinook's undercarriage by three steel cables. Kreutzer put the bus down gently - well, it rocked badly as its tires popped one by one, but at least it didn't turn over - and then dropped in for a landing twenty feet to the right, the cables draped along the ground. He popped the ramp at the rear of the chopper and living people stormed onboard, Marisol screaming at them to keep the line orderly and neat. "Women and children first!" she screamed, "and no fucking shoving!" Other people clambered into the bus through the back emergency door. The line of survivors waiting to get seats never seemed to end but without really thinking about what I was doing I found myself bringing up the tail of the line, calling out to Marisol to see if she'd done a head count.
"That's all of them," she screamed back over the noise of the helicopter. "Every last one!"
(I would speak with Kreutzer later about how he knew to go and fetch the bus, that there wasn't going to be enough room in the helicopter for everybody. "I was in the systems motherfucking directorate of the USCG, you know?" he swore at me, as if that should explain everything. "The computer techs. We're good at math!" He had figured out how many people could fit in an empty Chinook and decided that we would come up short. I never really liked the guy but I have to admit that was some excellent thinking on his part.)
I watched Marisol climb into the back of the helicopter and then I clambered into the bus, using the front entrance. There was barely room for me to stand on the steps. A truly nice couple of survivors offered to give up their space for me in the aisle but I declined. As the bus lifted into the air, its metal frame creaking alarmingly and its suspension falling apart and dropping from the undercarriage as if the floor might give way at any minute I wanted to be able to look outside.
I wanted one last look at the city, that's all. I barely glanced at the mob of dead people below us as the mummies gave way and they surged into the fortress, two million hands raising to try to grab at us as we flew away. That wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted the water towers. I wanted the fire escapes and the overgrown rooftop gardens and the dovecotes and the ventilation hoods like spinning chef's toques. I wanted the buildings, the great square solidity of them, their countless empty cubical rooms where no one would ever go again and I wanted the streets too, the streets clogged with cars with abandoned taxis sprouting everywhere like bright fungi. I wanted one long, meaningful look at New York City. My hometown.
It would be my last chance to get a good look, I knew.
My body was already burning with fever, my forehead slick with sweat though chills kept running down my back like ice cubes falling. My head was light, my tongue coated.
I was dying.