Chapter Five

By the light of an oil lamp Marisol examined a handful of yellow stalks. “Winter wheat,” she explained, but that meant nothing to Sarah. The Mayor of Governors Island dropped the stalks on the table and examined her fingers. A thin, soft black powder coated them and resisted being easily brushed off. Marisol sniffed her fingers and frowned. “It’s a fungus of some kind. That’s new for us, and I don’t like it.”

In the corner of the room Osman sat with one hand on his head. The other held a bottle of milky liquid. Judging by the way he kept blinking in slow motion and slumping forward to nearly fall out of his chair, Sarah decided he must be drunk. She looked at Marisol.

The Mayor shrugged. “It’s been years, he said. Let him have a taste. In the morning he’ll feel like shit and he’ll curse God and then he’ll go back to normal. It’s not like we make enough liquor for him to become an alcoholic.” She frowned. “After the things we’ve seen, all of us, I think we deserve to get polluted now and again. I wouldn’t mind getting a snoot full myself, actually. To you,” she said, and pointed at the blighted wheat on the table, “that might look pretty banal. To me it’s a reminder. The first couple of winters here were... hard. There were two hundred of us, originally. Now, even with the refugees we’ve adopted and a couple of births we’re down to seventy-nine.”

Sarah didn’t know what to make of that. It sounded bad, it was true, but like nothing compared to what had become of Africa. There had been a whole nation of survivors there once. It wasn’t around any more.

“I know you saw the slacks in the garden. I know what you must think of us. But we couldn’t have made it without help.” Marisol smiled and reached forward with one tentative hand. When Sarah didn’t flinch Marisol cupped the younger woman’s chin and smiled at her. “You know some of the stories, of course. You know about Gary.”

Sarah nodded. No more needed to be said. What Gary had done to Marisol, and how eventually he was destroyed, was part of the myth of Governors Island. It was part of the myth of the Epidemic.

“There are things I have to tell you, hard things. It’s too bad I’m such a spineless coward. So instead I’m just going to show you and you’ll have to cope whatever way you know how. You can hate me later, I’m okay with that.”

Sarah’s heart sank. She had something to learn—something which would make her cry. Jack had told her as much, in his usual, cryptic way. This was going to be it, she was sure of it. She didn’t speak or protest in any way, though, as Marisol took her hand and lead her back out into the darkness. The Mayor paused only to speak to her son, to little Jackie, and tell him to stay put with Osman and wait for her to return.

“When I saw you I hated you a little,” Marisol said. “It’s not fair that Dekalb gets to have such a healthy and beautiful daughter. My little boy is what we used to call sickly.” She grunted a little in pain, but not the physical kind. “He’s got genetic problems, a heart murmur, the early signs of scoliosis and maybe even Lupus. Do you know about those? We can barely diagnose them—there’s no treatment at all, not anymore.”

“Is he going to be okay?” Sarah asked, scared for the kid. Most sickly children in Africa died in their first couple of years.

“I won’t let him slip away from me, not when he’s all I have left of... of some old friends.” Marisol grew quiet then, very quiet. She lead Sarah along the edge of the water, along a concrete parapet lined with a steel railing that had fallen away in places. When she saw where they were headed Sarah felt her heart speeding up.

Marisol had lead her along a narrow causeway to the octagonal ventilation tower at the northern tip of the island. It rose over them in the dark like a giant robot out of science fiction, a clattering, enormous construction of fans that turned endlessly and vents that flicked open and shut in a pattern of willful randomness. A skeletal crown of exposed girders topped it, the stars showing through rusted gaps in the metal.

They threaded a simple maze of empty cargo containers and came to a set of three metal stairs leading to the tower’s doorway. “This place was nothing special, back in the day,” Marisol told Sarah. “It’s just a vent, a pipe stuck in the ground to provide air for the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel.”

“There’s a tunnel under the bay?” Sarah asked. As usual the marvels of twentieth-century engineering fascinated her, even if her elders found them trivial and commonplace. “How did they build it without all the water getting in?”

Marisol shook her head. She didn’t know, or didn’t care to answer. She took an enormous keyring from her belt and unlocked the tower’s door. Then she stepped aside. Clearly Sarah was supposed to go in alone.

A little light illuminated the tower’s guts, a wan little electric light that came from hundreds of weak bulbs, some mounted in cages on the walls, some dangling on wires draped across the vast open space. Sarah found herself on a gallery, a narrow enclosed walkway that ran around the edge of an open pit. She looked down and saw that the vast majority of the tower was just an empty shaft, an air shaft with one enormous fan at its bottom. Its vanes rotated with geological slowness but still it generated a vast wind that rushed up into her face and pushed the hood of her sweatshirt back. She imagined a generator must be hooked up to that fan to power all the lights.

The place was a miracle, in that it was still running. Yet discovering that hardly seemed worth all the suspense Marisol had created. What next? When Sarah finished staring into the blackness below the great fan she had no idea what to do. Was she supposed to climb down into the shaft, or ascend one of the tower’s ladders towards the catwalks high above? She turned to look back at the doorway and found a mummy standing directly in front of her.

She screamed, of course, but cut it short. This one was far older than Ptolemy, yellow with antiquity and largely unadorned. His tattered wrappings hung on him like the flag of a forgotten nation. Obviously he was there to guide her. He started moving as soon as she quieted down, heading away from her at a brisk pace. She kept an eye on his dark energy—much easier to follow him that way in the dimness. It was like a perfect sphere of darkness, buzzing and complete. He didn't hunger the way ghouls did but he lacked the busy mind of a lich. Funny. She had never bothered to study Ptolemy's energy like that. She wondered what she would find if she did.

They climbed up a long enclosed ladder with cold metal rungs until they reached a platform maybe twelve feet above the doorway. Catwalks ran away from them in three directions. They took the middle way and walked through the center of the shaft toward an identical platform at the far side of the tower. The wind rising through the shaft thrummed the narrow catwalk like a guitar string. Sarah clutched to the handrail but the mummy traversed the perilous way like a tight-rope walker—with no hesitation at all.

A bizarre and horrifying tableau waited for them at the far platform. A ghoul crouched there, feasting on a corpse, while something else, a tiny skeletal thing like a dog or... no, not like a dog at all, she couldn’t really say what it was at first but then...

It was a skull, a human skull, with no lower jawbone. Very human eyes looked out from its sockets. Six jointed crab-like legs jutted out from underneath and carried it along as it scuttled backward away from her. She screamed again—it was that kind of place, a chamber of horrors—and the skull crab backed up even farther.

Then she looked down at the feasting ghoul. It was time to go, time to get out. Had she been sent here as a sacrifice? Did Marisol and her constituents do this with all their visitors, did they feed them to the island’s resident monsters? Sure, it made sense. Send the occasional snack up to the tower and the ghouls would leave the Islanders in peace. Sarah turned to flee, only to find mummies blocking the catwalks. They didn’t advance on her, just stood there waiting for her to make a move.

She had her pistol, her little Makarov, and she had the soapstone scarab. She could... she could fight her way free, at least take down a few of her captors if... if she...

“Sarah,” the ghoul said behind her. She whirled around and was in for a mild shock. It wasn’t a ghoul, it was a lich. Its energy told her that much. And the corpse it had been eating—well, her special senses told her that it hadn’t been alive for quite a while. Her actual eyes told her as much as well. The unliving corpse, the meal, had the dried up look of someone who had died years previous. The ghoul, no, the lich had been eating a slack, not a living person.

“Sarah,” it said again. There were so many things hidden in the word, so many different kind of emotions and questions. She gave the lich a good once-over.

Blue eyes. Flannel shirt. She was pretty sure she knew what that shirt would smell like, if she got close enough to bury her face in it.

She stepped closer. He had his arms open wide and she pushed herself into his embrace. Shoved her face right into his shirt.

“Daddy,” she said, and she was eight years old again, and crying.