Chapter Three

Back on Governors Island the living came before Dekalb, one after the other. As he healed each of them he sank lower and lower in the lawn chair they’d set up for him but the survivors didn’t seem to care. One by one they came up and he put his hands on their shoulders and when they walked away they breathed easier and their skin looked clear.

It seemed to surprise no one on the Island that Dekalb could heal them. It was lich magic that had infected their crops, their buildings, their bodies. Of course it was lich magic that would undo the blight. Sarah wondered if they expected her father to clean the mildew off the buildings, too. Did they want him to go around the gardens in the middle of the island and heal each individual stalk of winter wheat?

“I’m getting hungry,” he said, when she stopped the line momentarily. He had slipped down so far in his chair his hands lay across the ground like discarded bones. His head rolled around on his chest. “But don’t worry, pumpkin, this will all be fine. When I'm done we can find a house for you.”

Sarah stood up and looked at the ones who had already been healed. They were gathered in a joking, laughing knot, their hands on their knees, their mouths open and wet as if they were practicing being healthy again. “You guys,” she said. “Help me out, will you? He needs food. Meat, if you have any.”

“I’m not wasting my time hunting up grub for some fucking ghoul,” one bearded man shot back. “Not after years of them hunting me.”

Sarah sighed, exasperated, but her father clasped at her wrist. “Honey, go easy on them. They’ve lost so much. They don’t have what we have now.”

She left him there with the living still crowding in, demanding their turn with the healer. She headed toward the warehouse buildings at the south end of the Island—there had to be something there for him. On the way she touched the soapstone. “Is he behaving himself?” she asked. She had left Ptolemy in charge of Gary. The skullcrab hadn’t made a threatening move since the time it paralyzed her but she hadn’t lived to the ripe age of nineteen by being stupid around the dead.

he quietly in speaks in riddles and riddles sits speaks in quietly, the mummy told her.

Sarah let it go. She crossed through the cool, shadowy interior of Liggett Hall, which bisected the island, and came out into the verdant fields beyond. The southern part of the Island remembered what it had been before the Epidemic, a sprawling Coast Guard base. Three piers stood out into Buttermilk Channel, their names drawn from a naval alphabet: Lima, Tango, Yankee. The old ball fields might have been turned into farmland but basketball hoops still stood in the middle of green pastures, listing a little in the sun and the wind like emaciated scarecrows.

To get to the warehouses Sarah had to pass by the strangest of the Island’s structures, the commercial facilities off Tango Pier. There was a hotel, a laundromat, even a supermarket with shelves bare so long they sagged under their own emptiness. Vending machines once full of ice cold Pepsi stood forgotten or vandalized on every corner. Weirdest of all was the burnt-out shell of a Burger King restaurant, something Sarah had only heard of before in her father’s bedtime tales of a decade earlier. Metal signs creaked in the evening breeze down there and old neon tubes stood lifeless and cold. The soft and rusted shapes of cars lurked in the weed-choked parking lots.

When the kerosene lamps were turned on up in Nolan Park, in the old half of the Island, they looked natural, they looked normal. In the gingerbread houses a little flickering light was a welcome thing. Down on Tango Pier an open flame looked altogether different. It looked wrong in front of all those broken unpowered light bulbs. It was no surprise people rarely came down so far—the survivors tended to stay on the north side except to work in the fields or if they needed something from the general supplies down on Lima Pier. Even then they usually sent a slack to do the job.

Sarah was a little surprised then when she saw Marisol standing in front of the main warehouse. The Mayor had a shovel in her hand and a small bundle wrapped in white cloth over her shoulder. Sarah stopped in her tracks and didn’t move, embarrassed for some reason to be caught in such a quiet place.

They just looked at each for a while, and it wasn’t a particularly friendly look. Marisol, after all, had threatened Sarah with summary execution the last time they’d spoken. For her part Marisol’s bundle was readily discernible, from closer up, to be a dead human body.

“Did you come to help me bury my son?” Marisol asked. Her voice was rough with crying but it lacked much in the way of emotion.

Sarah sought out her own voice. “He didn’t make it?” she asked.

“He wasn’t magic, like you. Dekalb’s daughter lives and my Jackie dies. We’re just normal people, you see. He didn’t have any magic.”

Sarah started to object, to say that she had no magic, but it wasn’t true. Her father could have saved the boy. If he hadn’t rushed to Manhattan to fix her broken arm, he could have stayed on Governors Island and saved the boy. If he’d even known that he had that power—if Sarah had told him, if she had broken her promise to Gary and told the secret—

There were too many ways to feel guilty, and too many possible excuses, for Sarah to make any moral sense out of the boy’s death. She said nothing and hoped her silence would sound like solemnity.

The two of them entered the field of winter wheat and hacked out a narrow space for a grave. The Islanders always buried their dead in their fields, just as a practical measure—the bodies returned certain nutrients to the soil. If the corpses were sunk deep enough the health risks were minimal.

They didn't waste time getting started. Marisol dug and Sarah pulled and pushed and carried dirt out of the hole. It was horrible, draining, sweaty work and neither of them had brought any water or food. Sarah’s sweatshirt turned into a stained rag almost instantly. The dirt got into her eyes, into her nose. It coated her lips and stuck to her hair. She didn’t complain once.

At first she just thought she was being polite. That she was helping Marisol because she’d been asked to do so. She figured it was the right thing to do and she was a good person. She even considered that this would get her in good with Marisol, whose help she would probably need in the future—she was earning credit at the price of her own sweat. After the first hour though when her arms started to burn and her hands cramped up and her back became one fused bar of glowing heat and pain from bending down and then rising up over and over and over, after all that, she stopped thinking about herself.

Burying Jackie wasn’t a political maneuver or a gesture of apology. It was an ugly necessity and she was there when the time came. It was just one more task on a list of things that had to be done.

When the hole was deep enough Marisol just knew it and she put her shovel aside. She held out her arms and Sarah picked up the boy’s tiny body. Jackie weighed next to nothing but he didn’t feel like a corpse in Sarah’s hands. She knew what it was like to hug a skeleton like her father or a mummy but Jackie felt different. His flesh was cold but still soft and pliant. The winding sheet didn’t cover his head very well and she got an unwelcome look inside. She saw the hole in the middle of his forehead.

Sarah knew what that hole was for. In Somalia, in her first years under Ayaan’s tutelage when she was still too young to carry a gun Sarah had been given the task of sanitizing the dead. She had a little hammer and a chisel for the task and she’d learned to be quick about it—the dead didn’t take long to come back, not long at all. When a soldier fell you paid them the final respect. You sent them off to rest by destroying their nervous system. So they could be dead, truly dead, not the restless kind.

She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to do it to your own flesh and blood. Your only child. Wouldn’t you want, despite all wisdom to the contrary, to just see them move again, to see their eyelids flutter open? Wouldn’t that stay your hand even just for a moment?

But of course Marisol was tough. Ayaan had recognized it when she’d stood on the Island and looked at the bleak future facing the survivors. Marisol was tough and she could make hard decisions. Sarah handed the woman her son and watched as she laid him down gently in the worm-riddled earth. Then Sarah reached down and helped Marisol climb up out of the grave. Together they pushed the dirt over the boy, concealing him forever from view.

Marisol didn’t say any prayers or offer the boy a eulogy. Her obvious grief, written in the streaks of dirt on her face, was eloquence enough. Sarah sat and watched her and wondered why she didn’t feel just as strongly about Ayaan. Maybe because it wasn’t real to her yet. Maybe it was because Ayaan hadn't stopped moving yet. After about half an hour of just sitting and mourning Marisol turned and looked at her. “What do you want?” she asked.

Sarah understood what she was being asked. Why had she come to Governors Island, and what would it take to get her to leave? “I won’t lie to you. I’m on a dangerous journey and no good is coming of it. Originally I was on a rescue mission. Now I’m after revenge.”

Marisol smiled, a quiet, overworked smile. “Jack taught me about revenge. He said it was the only form of suicide accepted by the Catholic Church.”

Sarah shrugged. “Okay, maybe revenge isn’t the word I want. We used to call it sanitation. The woman who raised me is dead now. Undead. It’s my last duty to her to put a bullet in her head.” She looked down at the fresh grave. That had been Marisol’s last duty to her son. It was the same. She wanted to say as much but she knew the words would profane Jackie’s death. “I need guns, and I need soldiers. Right now though I need some meat to feed my father.”

Her father—wasn’t it also her duty to sanitize him?

No. She would never think about that again. Anyway. Ayaan had told Sarah a hundred times what she wanted done if she ever turned into one of the walking dead. She had left explicit instructions. Her father seemed to want to go on.

She refused to explore that thought any further.

Marisol helped her find what she needed in the main stores. An economy-sized bag of pork rinds, guaranteed not to spoil for decades to come. They brought it north, into the half of the island where a bonfire was already being built, where lights were coming on in the houses and the sound of playful violins and acoustic guitars hung in the air like the music had gotten caught in the tree branches. They found Dekalb slumped forward across his own knees, still sitting in his lawn chair, while all around him living people set about making a communal dinner. The lich took the pork rinds from his daughter and tried to tear open the bag but he just didn’t have the strength. Sarah did it for him. As she handed the bag to her father she looked at Marisol, and Marisol looked back. It was a lot more comfortable, the silence that passed between them, than it had been before.

“We need to find you a house,” Dekalb said around a mouth of what looked to Sarah like dirty pink styrofoam. “If you’re going to stay here with me you’ll need a proper house. You can’t live in the ventilation shaft with us, it’s not healthy.”

Sarah’s brow furrowed. “Daddy, I didn’t plan on staying,” she said. “I’ve got work to do. Important stuff.” She felt like an infant as the words came out of her mouth.

Dekalb shook his head. “It’ll wait,” he told her. “We have way too much catching up to do. And there’s the question of your education. Marisol, what about the officer’s quarters over by the schoolhouse, what’s available over there?”

“Dad!” Sarah interjected, “I—”

He pushed his hand into the bag and rustled it in his annoyance. “I will not let you be put in danger again,” he told her. He drew out a handful of rinds and shoved them into his permanently stretched-out rictus. “Who’s the grown-up here, after all?”