I called for a stop and we clustered around the statue of Gandhi. I looked up at the smiling bronze face and issued a silent apology for surrounding him with heavily-armed child soldiers. I could remember when hippy kids would put garlands of flowers around the great pacifist's neck but all I saw there now were loops of wire.
"They ate the flowers," Gary pointed out, almost as if he'd heard my thoughts. I looked back down at him.
"Flowers?" I demanded.
"Anything living."
"Why, damnit? Why do they do this?"
Gary shrugged and sat down at the base of the tree. "It's a compulsion. You can't fight it for long - the hunger just takes over. I have a theory about it, but it's still pretty vague... I mean, they should have all rotted away by now. Human bodies decompose fast. They should be piles of bone and goo by now but they look pretty healthy to me."
I glared at him.
"Okay, okay, that was a brain fart. By 'healthy' I mean 'in one piece'. I think when they eat living meat they get some kind of life force or whatever out of it. Some energy that helps hold them together."
"Horseshit," I breathed. I looked at the girls to see if they agreed with me but they might have been statues themselves. They had shut down, unable to contemplate just how bad things had gotten. They needed someone to tell them what to do and now, with Commander Ifiyah out of action, they didn't know where to look.
I was out of ideas. Where were we going to go? Our only escape route was cut off. We could take shelter in one of the buildings - maybe the Barnes and Noble on the north side of the Square. At least then we would have plenty of reading material while we starved to death. I had gotten this far on adrenaline but now...
We didn't hear the dead coming for us. They made no sound. Through the trees in the park we could hardly see them either but somehow we knew we were being surrounded. Call it battlefield paranoia if you want. Maybe we were developing a sixth sense for the dead. I ordered the girls up the stone steps and into Union Square proper where maybe we could see things a little better. When we got to one of the pavilions over the subway entrances the girls raised their rifles out of sheer habit.
"Wacan... kurta..." Ifiyah said softly. Something about head shots, if I can trust my shoddy Somali vocabulary. She seemed to lack the strength to issue a real order. Her leg was bleeding badly, so I called Gary over and told him to tend to it. He'd been a doctor, once, he'd said. I put a hand over my eyes and scanned the far eastern side of the park, looking for any movement.
I found it quickly enough. There was plenty to be seen - dozens, maybe fifty corpses converging on us while we just waited for them to show up. But what could we do? We were pinned down. We had a horde of the undead coming up behind us - not moving much faster than we could walk but they didn't need to rest and they would eventually catch up. There were a lot less of them in front of us. We would just have to fight our way through.
"Fathia," I said, summoning the soldier to stand next to me. "There, do you see them? Are they in range? Every shot has to count."
She nodded and raised her rifle to her eye. A shot echoed around the park and a branch fell out of a tree in the distance. She took another shot and I could see one of the dead men flinch. He kept coming, though. Ayaan took her turn next but had no better results. I would have given a lot for a pair of binoculars just then.
They came out into the open near the statue of Lafayette. Big guys with bald heads - no, helmets, they were wearing helmets of some kind. Motorcyclists? One of them had either a big stick or a rifle in his hand and for a bad second I considered the possibility of dead men with guns. He dropped it, though, whatever it was, to free his hand so that he could reach for us even if he was a hundred yards away. These things were like meat-seeking missiles, incapable of guile or subterfuge. They just wanted us so badly they could do nothing else but want. That had been Ifiyah's bad mistake. She had known they weren't terribly bright but she'd thought they were like animals, that they could learn to leave you alone if you butchered enough of them. She couldn't seem to look at something that had once been human and understand that now it was an unthinking machine. She was too young, I guess. Maybe she'd never met a junkie. Then she might have understood better.
"That one." I pointed at the foremost and three shots rang out in quick succession. One of the shots must have connected - we could see sparks leap up from the helmet. He barely flinched, though. Then I realized what we were looking at. Riot police.
Sure. There had been widespread looting in the early days of the Epidemic. Lots of public panic. Of course they would have called out the riot cops to keep order. And of course some of them would have succumbed to chaos on the scale of the Epidemic. "Try again," I said, and they both fired at once. The ex-policeman spun around in a circle as the bullets pelted his head. He collapsed to the ground and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Then he slowly got back up.
"The helmet - it must be made of Kevlar," Ayaan said. Jesus, she had to be right. Only a head shot could destroy the walking dead and these particular corpses had bulletproof helmets on.
What the hell could we do? The girls kept firing. I knew they were wasting ammunition but what else could we do? They were trying for face shots now but the helmets had visors to protect against that.
"Give the orders," one of the girls said, looking up at me. "You in commander now. So give the orders."
I rubbed my cheek furiously as I looked around. There was a Virgin Megastore on the southern side of the park. I remembered going there when I was last in New York and I seemed to recall it only had a couple of entrances. It would take time, though, to get inside and barricade the place. Time we didn't have if we couldn't stop these xaaraan. "Shoot for the legs," I suggested, "if they can't walk..." But of course riot cops would be wearing body armor too.
The horde of the dead coming up Fourteenth were still getting closer. The former riot cops were maybe fifty yards away.
"Give the orders," the girl insisted. I stood there as still as a block of stone without a thought in my head.