Chapter Six

Crate after crate of MP4s lined the metal shelves of the smallest of the Island’s warehouses. The small arms magazine was the best-maintained of the buildings outside of Nolan Park. Fresh paint inside and out, not a speck of dust. Someone had been busy, and it wasn’t the slacks. “We still don’t trust them in here,” Marisol explained. She showed Sarah the basement, filled with collapsible cots and a gravity-fed water purifier.

“About three years after we arrived a ship came through. People, living people were onboard and I can’t tell you how excited we were.” Marisol’s eyes went misty with time as she remembered. “We’d just gotten through yet another terrible winter and we were all half-dead. None of us had the energy to start digging up the baseball diamonds and start planting seeds. So when we saw the newcomers we shouted and waved and set off flares. This turned out to be a bad idea.”

“This must have been when I was still recovering,” Dekalb said. “I don’t remember any of it.” Gary perched on his shoulder like a morbid species of parrot. Sarah wished she could have left him resting in the house—this errand was one she definitely needed to be in charge of—but so far she hadn’t been able to tell her father anything.

“They were pirates,” Marisol went on. “They traveled from one enclave of survivors to the next, killing all the men, raping all the women and then killing them too, and stealing all the food. We figured that much out when they started shooting at us. I got everybody in here and sealed the door before they could even make landfall.”

There were weapons in the small, well-lit building that were advanced beyond anything in Sarah’s experience. Crazy Special Forces stuff. Experimental arms. Sniper rifles that got plugged into laptop computers and fired by remote control. Unmanned aerial vehicles little bigger than cooking pots that could fly into buildings and kill everyone inside on their own volition. Sarah picked up an enormous pistol from an open crate and checked its action. It was a .45 caliber ACP, a Heckler and Koch Mark 23 Mod 0 according to its spec sheet and it had a tubular laser aiming module on top. Sarah pointed the weapon at the wall with the safety still on and flicked on the LAM. Nothing happened. Well, sure. It had been twelve years at least since the weapon had been stowed away. The batteries would have run down or something.

Marisol came over to her, smiling, staying well uprange of the pointed weapon. She slapped a pair of night vision goggles on Sarah’s head and switched them on. In the green world of the NVGs she saw a brilliant pinpoint on the far well—exactly where the laser was pointing. Nice, she thought.

“We keep all the batteries charged with a little windmill on the roof. Not enough power to let us have light or heat in the houses but it keeps the guns ready to shoot.” Marisol took back the NVGs and continued her story. “Well, with us locked in here and with enough guns to last until the Second Coming the pirates didn’t have a lot of options. A couple of them got killed. We specifically didn’t go for head shots. When their own people got back up and started eating them they fell back to their boat. A couple of days later they just left. We shot the ghouls and came back out hungry but unscathed. The pirates had messed the place up a little, spray-painted graffiti on the houses, burned up half our furniture for firewood. They took those few crops we’d already put in the ground, even though nothing was ripe. It didn’t matter. We were alive.”

“I wish I had known this was happening. I would have helped,” Dekalb said.

Marisol and Sarah looked at his slight, bony frame, and then at one another. Nothing more needed to be said.

Sarah opened a crate in the middle of the room and dug through the shredded newspapers inside. Gingerly she lifted out a rifle with a bizarre blocky forearm and a curved rail running from the muzzle back to the receiver. It weighed less than the Mark 23 Mod 0 had, she thought. It wasn’t made of metal at all but some kind of lightweight resin. The only metal she could find on it was the stubby little barrel and the bullets themselves.

“Is this...?” she asked, unwilling to say it out loud in case it sounded foolish.

“Objective Individual Combat Weapon,” Marisol said, nodding. “The rifle that was supposed to replace the M16. It’s just a prototype. We have ten of them—I think they only ever made about five hundred before Congress killed the project.”

Ayaan had spoken about such weapons the way some people might talk about the houses they wanted to live in some day or what kind of food they would serve at their weddings. It fired regular NATO rounds or, with minimal reconfiguration, airburst munitions, the so-called smart grenades. The sighting system—which included not just an optical scope but laser, infrared, and night vision elements—had its own computer that could tell the difference between an ally and an enemy. If it detected an ally it wouldn’t shoot. The rifle was supposed to be smarter than its user. Sarah laid it back down. “So I’m sorry I interrupted. You fought off the pirates.”

“No,” Marisol told her. “We sat them out. From day one we’ve had a place like this. Some place safe we can run to and fortify as necessary. Whenever bad things happen we’re trained to come here and sit tight and wait it out. Jack taught me that.”

“Jack.” Sarah turned away so Marisol wouldn’t see her face. She felt deeply, deeply embarrassed, too lame even to feel guilty. As if she had had an affair with a man she’d always been told was Marisol’s husband only to find out he was somebody else altogether. Jack was dead, Jack was a ghoul hanging from a chain miles to the north but he lived in Governors Island and always would as long as the survivors remembered his teachings. Sarah had never met Jack in her life.

“You remember Jack, sweetie,” her father said, coming up to put a hand on her shoulder. “He was the Army Ranger who killed me.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said, blushing. She reached for another weapon and found a heavy plastic pipe with a slick translucent coating inside. Various bits and pieces could be clamped onto the tube. It was a SMAW according to its crate but she couldn’t remember what that stood for. “So. So, Marisol, that’s a great story about the pirates. I guess you weren’t just making conversation, though.”

“No,” the Mayor admitted. “I need you to understand. I owe you for killing the lich in Manhattan.” Sarah understood what Marisol didn’t say: she would have owed Sarah a lot more if Jackie hadn’t died. “You can have all the guns you can carry out of here. My people, on the other hand, are all staying here where I can keep an eye on them. Okay? I’m not going to let you have so much as one soldier.”

Sarah started to speaked but she was forestalled by her father. “That won’t be a problem,” Dekalb chirped. “Since we’re not going anywhere, either. Sarah’s going to stay here with me.” He stepped between the two women. “I have my own people to look after.”

She shook her head. She was going to have to confront him, and soon. It was just so hard. When he sat motionless in a chair he terrified her, he was one of the walking dead. When he got up and moved around and talked he was her long lost daddy. A big emotional part of her was terrified that if she said anything he would stop loving her and leave her life again.

Finding him on Governors Island, finding him still, in a certain sense, alive, meant so much. It changed her whole life. It gave her a life, where before she’d only had a past.

On some level she wondered if she was expecting too much from him. If she was setting herself up for disappointment. But no, she wouldn’t explore that just yet. She retreated into those corners of her mind where Ayaan’s training still reigned. Connecting with her father was going to make her vulnerable. It was going to hurt. She didn’t have time to resolve any of it, just yet. “Excuse me,” she said, and slipped out of the warehouse.

Outside she put her hand in her pocket and touched the heart scarab. “Ptolemy,” she whispered. “Have they mobilized?” Time for business.

perhaps vehicles one hundred perhaps vehicles, he told her. west heading west

She bit her lip. There was still time to catch the Tsarevich—and sanitize Ayaan—but she needed to get moving herself. “I only wish we knew where they were headed. We could just get there first and ambush him. If we follow in his footsteps there’s no telling what will be lying in wait for us. But the only person who might know where he’s headed isn’t talking to me.”

perhaps, the mummy told her, i there help can be i of help there