Chapter Three

“They had pudding in these tiny plastic cups. You would peel back the foil on top and the pudding was in there already made,” a fortyish man with grey hair and squinting eyes said. He mimed the action of pulling back on a piece of foil, his fingertip and thumb pressed very close together, and a light bloomed in his face that didn’t come from the bonfire. “There was always a little dollop of pudding on the foil, that was the best part, it tasted the best anyway.”

A younger woman in a shapeless sweater poked at the fire with a long branch. There wasn’t much firewood on Governors Island but an enormous amount lay just four hundred yards away in Brooklyn. A boat went over every day to retrieve great bundles of sticks and logs from the trees that choked the old city streets. It had been a dangerous occupation once, the survivors told Sarah, but in recent months it was rare to even spot a ghoul, much less be attacked by one. The city had largely emptied out. “Then you could just throw the cup away, right? I kind of remember that,” the woman said. She stared into the fire. “You didn’t have to wash it out.”

“Yeah,” the squinting man agreed, nodding happily. “They had coffee you could just pour boiling water on, and it was ready. They had orange juice that came frozen in a tube and you just let it melt in some water and you could drink it.”

One of the children, a skinny girl of maybe fourteen years, laughed heartily. “Why freeze it in the first place if you were just going to let it melt?”

The old man smiled and laughed but without the girl’s abandon. “Sure.”

“Where did they go?” Sarah asked. She drew a lot of blank stares. “Where did the ghouls go?”

The old man shrugged. “West. Jersey, I guess. It’s not like they migrated or something. They just started wandering away, one by one, maybe looking for food. Over the bridges, the GWB is still standing.”

Sarah hugged herself. The night had come on colder than she expected and her hooded sweatshirt, so perfect for desert evenings, couldn’t keep out the damp of the Island. “But why to the west, why did they go into New Jersey?”

“Well,” the old man said, “if they went east they’d get stuck on the L.I.E.”

That elicited more than a few snorting laughs from the older survivors. Sarah had no idea what it meant, or why he had spelled out “lie”. She stood up and watched the fire for a second. She didn’t want to leave its warmth but the clustered survivors sitting in a circle around the blaze were confusing her more than anything else. All they wanted to talk about was what they’d lost, what the world used to have in it. For Sarah, who knew nothing except apocalypse, such talk was just wasted breath.

One of the younger men, a big guy with muscles, jumped up when she turned away from the bonfire. “Where are you headed?” he asked, not necessarily unfriendly. She definitely got the sense he’d been tasked with keeping an eye on her, though.

“I need to urinate,” she announced. The younger survivors tittered. Her guard nodded meaningfully, as if she’d passed a test.

Everything on Governors Island, she ruminated as she headed into the shadows between two Victorian houses, felt like a test. Osman and Marisol had gone off to catch up on old times, leaving her in the company of people she didn’t know. She’d been fed, welcomed effusively, cheered and toasted. She’d been welcomed to sit by the fire, brought into the conversation, given their full attention whenever she spoke. Yet as much as they seemed to want to make her feel welcome they never stopped looking at her, studying her. There were plenty of black women on the Island, so it wasn’t that. She supposed it might be that in such an insular community any newcomer was a thing of fascination, a nine day’s wonder. And surely, anyone who had survived the last twelve years had reason enough not to trust strangers.

Yet the feeling Sarah got from the Islanders wasn’t so much mistrust as it was furtiveness. They weren’t concerned with what she would do, so much as they acted as if they had a secret they were afraid she would learn.

She didn’t expect to find it so soon after realizing it must exist. Yet as she squatted by a gingerbread porch coated in flaking white paint, she looked up and nearly fell over in fright. She saw energy. Dead energy.

Blotches of it all over the place. She hadn’t been paying attention, but that was when her unusual senses worked best. There was one of the dead right in front of her—in the field of mixed crops at the center of Nolan Park. Scratching at the soil with a hoe, or a rake, or... something. Sarah frowned. The dead don’t garden.

Not unless someone—specifically, a lich—told them to.

She still had her pistol. Post apocalyptic standards of hospitality allowed visitors to hold onto their weapons at communal bonfires, especially when the visitors casually forgot to mention they possessed said weapons. She drew it out of her pocket, slid the magazine into place, thumbed off the safety. The dead thing didn’t notice as she crept up on it.

Impossible, but there it was. It couldn't be, not in this place, of all places, this last citadel of humanity in New York. But the hair on the backs of her arms didn’t lie. It stood up straight as the quills of a porcupine. Horripilation. The most classic sign of the presence of the undead.

Sarah tried to make sense of it in her head. She must have brought the dead to Governors Island, the Tsarevich must have followed her. She had doomed all those nice, boring people at the bonfire. Fear sent cold daggers through the muscles of her back. Why the thing was gardening she had no idea—maybe it was tampering with the survivors’ crops, maybe it intended to poison them. That wasn't the style of most undead she'd met, though. Too subtle.

She could figure it out later. She lifted her pistol. Lined up a shot. The dead gardener scratched open another furrow in the silvery moonlit dirt. Its face, its skull didn’t move. Its features might have been a mask of bone. It was dressed in stained overalls and its feet were bare. Sarah cocked her pistol and held her breath for the bang.

“Please don’t hurt him. He’s just a slack,” someone said, their voice soft. It was as loud as a gunshot in Sarah’s terrified ear. She pivoted on one ankle and saw the boy, Jackie, standing off to her right. He moved forward quickly out of her blind spot—he must have been trained how to approach someone with a gun.

Slowly she pried her finger away from the Makarov’s trigger, uncocked its hammer. “A slack? What does that mean?”

“He’s tame.” Jackie rushed up to the gardener and waved his hand in its face. Sarah bit her lip to hold back a wave of nausea. She knew what was supposed to come next, what always came next. The ghoul would bite the child, tear his flesh. Except of course it didn’t. That was the point. The gardener stopped its hoeing just long enough to look down at the boy and issue a mindless little smile. The dead man’s eyes moved slowly around in their sockets. “He’s a slack. They do what we tell them, though sometimes it takes so long to explain things. We couldn’t survive without them. There aren’t enough of us to keep the gardens going.”

Sarah narrowed her eyes. She had never heard of such a thing. “How—how do you tame a ghoul?” she demanded. “They only exist for one thing. To eat us.”

The boy shrugged. He was twelve, she knew now, but tiny for his age. His eyes were huge, his hair thinner on his head than it ought to be. “I think it’s one of the ceremonies my Mom does on Halloween. They don’t let me watch because they get naked but I know stuff anyway. I know you tie the ghouls up in a circle you draw on the ground and then there’s some dancing and chanting and stuff.” The boy shrugged again. “You know. Science.”

Sarah was breathing heavily, unsure of what to do next. She put the pistol back in her pocket. Then she rushed forward and knocked the slack off its feet. It felt like she’d smacked into a pillowcase full of twigs. The gardener fell over, clattered to the ground. Then it got back up, retrieved its hoe, and went back to work. It didn’t bother smiling at her. If she hit it again—and again—and again—it would do the same, she decided.

You’re going to learn things, Jack had told her, and some of them are going to make you cry. Was this what he’d meant? Or were there worse shocks in store?

“Come back with me,” Jackie told her. “Mommy wants to talk to you.” He held out his miniscule hand and Sarah took it.