“Cap,” one of the Stormers’ voices crackled around us, thick with a musical accent. “Cap, this is Team Leader.”

Happling spat tobacco juice onto the floor. “Go ahead, Team Leader,” he boomed, then turned to look at Hense. “No gunfire.”

“Cap, send the VIP on down. No threats identified. Hell, we got nothing but bodies down here.”

XXX

Day Ten: I Was Pretty Sure Bullets were no Longer Going to be Enough

“All clear,” the round-faced Stormer said to me, her cowl dangling behind her head. “Watch your step, now. They’re all pretty soft.” She sounded like she’d stepped on plenty of softening corpses in her time.

I imagined the smell around me like a green haze, it was so thick and heavy. We were just a block away from the remnants of the Pennsylvania Hotel, but I felt I’d arrived in a strange new city-a city of silence, of smoke. A city of dead bodies rotting in the cool June sun.

They were everywhere, looking a little better than I would have expected, a little fresher. The airpad was past me behind its cinder-block walls and security checkpoints; the empty space around it had always made me a little itchy, all that air around you. I preferred the tall canyon walls of ancient, crumbling skyscrapers or the bursting pipelines of downtown, flesh pressing against you. The big open square felt like eyes on you.

We’d landed, rough and shaking, just outside the airpad, crushing a few dozen festering corpses beneath us. The bodies fanned out from the airpad in a crush, swelling in their clothes, luggage piled around them. They all looked like they’d been eaten alive, their chests and necks pulpy wounds, bones showing through ravaged skin. I stepped carefully through them, staring down and picking out details-good clothes, jewelry, clean fingernails. These people were rich. Their eyes were all open, and most were untouched, staring at us.

“Fucking hell,” Happling muttered next to me. “This shit is disgusting.” He pointed. “Entry wounds. Shredders. I don’t know what’s eating these poor bastards, but what killed them was good old-fashioned guns.”

We both glanced over at the airpad walls. The gates were shut but it appeared empty, and Marko hadn’t gotten any response to his hail. I scanned the crowd again. Every now and then I had the sense that the mass of bodies rippled, but I couldn’t catch it to be sure.

“Poor bastards,” Happling said, turning away. “Just trying to get out.”

I lingered on the closed gates for a moment. Fucking cops. I didn’t doubt for a moment that Happling would have given the order to shoot, too, if he’d been in charge of the airpad with a crush of desperate people trying to get in. I stood there for a moment with the sour wind pushing against me, listening to my own coat flapping. There was a muffled burst of gunfire in the distance, there and gone just as suddenly. Happling and I looked at each other, the big man grinning at me as he chewed tobacco.

“Not everyone’s dead,” he said, sounding happy. He spun away. “Troopers! Form up! I want to see a fucking humping formation in thirty seconds!”

I remained where I was for a moment, staring at the crowd of corpses around me, just to ram home the point that I wasn’t one of Happling’s troopers. As I turned to follow him a hand shot up from the jumble of bodies and grabbed my ankle in a slick, loose grip.

I stumbled backward as one of the corpses seemed to pull itself toward me, a jowly man in an impressive suit, his lower jaw missing, his throat a wet sore, blood oozing from the ruined skin. His tongue, fissured and blackened, writhed in the open space above his neck like a worm.

Panting, I tried to flee backward, and stomped my free foot down onto one of the inflating bodies around me. It went right through the softened chest as if I were stepping into half-dried mud, a spray of jellied blood, black and chunky, splattering me as I lost my balance and fell back onto my ass, the jolt sending a shock of pain through me that made my vision swim.

The jowly guy, flesh jiggling loosely, peeling away from him in spots, continued to feebly pull himself toward me, tongue working like he was trying to talk and hadn’t yet noticed that his jaw was gone. He had no eyes, just scabby craters in his face where they’d been eaten away. I bottled up a scream-Avery Cates did not scream-and searched for my gun, hands trembling. For a moment I couldn’t find it, panic swelling inside me, and then I felt its familiar hard shape in my pocket and pulled it out, pointing it down at the ghoul clawing toward me, its soft hands on my thighs. I stared at it for a moment, hands shaking. I’d done this. This had started with me.

I pulled the trigger and the shot was fucking thunder, the loudest thing you’d ever heard. The ghoul’s head exploded, the torso dropping down onto my legs and disgorging a thin gruel of fluid from the neck that soaked into my clothes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Stormers drop into combat positions and then slowly relax.

“Fucking hell,” Happling bellowed.

I continued to stare at the ghoul’s torso for a moment. A mercy killing, I told myself. Poor bastard was better off dead. As I stared it twitched and I hurriedly pushed the gun back into my pocket and climbed painfully to my feet, walking as briskly as I could toward the group of cops, wincing every time I stumped onto my fractured leg. Bendix, still blindfolded, with his arms bent painfully back behind him, stood calm and still among them. When I was a few feet away, a noise to my right made all of us whirl and drop, the metallic rattle of readied guns echoing off the street. A block south, a small crowd of people sprinted across Eighth Avenue, just shadows against the sky, and disappeared past the corner.

For a moment, we all just crouched, ready. Bendix stood without moving, smirking.

“All right,” Happling said, “don’t get your panties in a bunch, kids. Form up, weapons check, give me a D-nine formation, and let’s move out.”

I kept moving my eyes from point to point and holding my focus, searching for any sign that someone was holding back, skulking around a corner, waiting for us to turn away. As I watched, a second group of people burst into the intersection, running full speed across the street, and were gone.

“Avery?” Hense said from behind me.

I stood up, joints popping, gritting my teeth. Turning your back on a possible threat was suicide-you learned that right away when you were a kid-but the whole city was a goddamn three-sixty threat, so it didn’t matter. I stumped over to Hense and nodded, moving past her. “This is my city,” I said. “Follow me.”

Her hand fell on my shoulder, surprisingly strong, and pulled me off-balance, forcing me to stop and turn. “Avery,” she said, expressionless, “you are the only reason any of us are still alive. You will not march out in front like a goddamn target.”

I smiled. “Your concern is touching, Colonel.”

She took me by the arm and pulled me toward her troopers, most of whom, I was pretty sure, would gladly put a bullet in my head themselves. “You let us form up around you, and you duck when shooting starts, understood?”

I shook my head. I wanted to use her name, but it stuck in my throat. “Stop thinking like a fucking cop protecting some ass-hat VIP from up the Mountain. You want to get me killed? Then parade me around in the middle of a brick of Stormers. You want me to make it down this street alive? You’ve got fourteen Stormers, the gorilla man, Marko, and Bendix, who’ll tear your head off the moment he can see you. You really think you’re going to control this situation? I need to be fluid.”

She glanced at my splinted leg. “Fluid?”

I bunched my jaw muscles and swallowed. “Let’s get moving.” There was a scrape behind me, followed by a soft grunt, and her eyes flitted over my shoulder and then back to my face. I resisted the urge to whirl around, the urge to whirl and just dump a whole clip into the empty space I knew would be there. New York was a Ghost City. I was pretty sure bullets were no longer going to be enough.