We spread out to cover the first floor of the megastore, moving quietly through the rows of display racks, pointing rifles behind counters and into closets. The afternoon daylight lit up the main floor pretty well but the lower level was lost in darkness. I sent Ayaan and a squad of girls down there with flashlights to scope it out. They returned in a few minutes looking scared but with nothing to report. Good.
The first order of business was to secure the cafe door. We found the keys to the store in a manager's office and locked it, then pushed tables and chairs up against it to form a barricade. Some of the girls did likewise with the front doors. By this point the dead had already arrived. They pressed up against the windows and for a bad ten minutes or so I thought the glass might break just from the pressure of their bodies but it held. They were terrible to look at - their faces bloated or congested with dead blood, their vacant eyes rolling wildly, their hands cut and broken as they impotently pummeled the glass. I told the girls to move away from the windows, into the shadowy back of the store, just for morale's sake.
We got Ifiyah propped up in the manager's leather chair and the undead guy, Gary, used a first aid kit from the cafe to bandage her wound. The skin around the bite looked bloody and swollen. I didn't hold out a lot of hope. Commander Ifiyah could still talk at that point and Fathia, her bayonet expert, held her hand and asked her a series of quiet questions I didn't fully understand.
"See tahay?" Fathia asked.
"Waan xanuunsanahay," was the reply. "Biyo?"
Fathia handed her commander a canteen and the wounded girl drank greedily, spilling water all down the front of her blazer. I turned away and saw Ayaan coming toward me down the display aisles. "Dekalb. We are safe for now, yes? Some of the girls would like to pray. It has been too long."
I nodded, surprised she would even ask. It seemed that in the power vacuum left by Ifiyah's debilitation, as the only adult present I had become the absolute authority of the team. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. I didn't think I really wanted that kind of responsibility though as a Westerner it was a relief to not have anyone else barking orders at me.
The girls laid down handwoven derin mats on the floor of the megastore and pointed them toward the east, my best guess for the direction of Mecca. I listened to them chanting sonorously in Arabic while I watched the other girls - the less devout ones I suppose. Mostly they stared out the windows at the dead outside. Were they wondering what we were going to do next? I know I was.
One girl - one of the youngest, her name was Leyla, I think - wandered along the merchandise racks, one hand holding the strap of her AK-47, the other flipping through the various CDs on display. Her lower lip curled down or up as she read the titles and sometimes she would bend at the waist as if desperately trying to contain the urge to jump up and down in excitement at finding some particularly popular group. Watching her made me think of Sarah. Leyla might be a good deal older and much more dangerous but she still thrummed with spirit, with the barely-controlled energy I had come to adore in my daughter.
Sarah never felt so far away as then.
"There's nothing more that I can do for her," Gary told me, peeling off a pair of latex gloves. I looked over at Ifiyah and saw that she was sleeping or at least passed out. My mind had been wandering.
Gary sat down on the floor and peeled open a piece of beef jerky. Chewing idly on it he stared at me until I began to feel the silence between us turn into something that had to be tamed. It was Gary who spoke first, though. "Why did you come to New York?" he asked. "Did you have family here?"
I shook my head and peeled myself away from my navel-gazing. It wasn't easy: I had a powerful urge to just sink into myself and shut out the world. "My parents died years ago. It's funny - at my Mom's funeral I remember thinking how badly I wanted her to come back." I glanced toward the windows. "I guess you should be careful what you wish for, huh?"
"Christ, you're so hardcore," Gary said, rolling his eyes. "Relax a little."
I nodded and squatted down next to him. I realized I was hungry and gratefully took one of his plastic-wrapped food-like snacks. "Sorry. I guess I'm scared. No, we came to Manhattan looking for medical supplies. The President-for-Life of Somalia has AIDS but anti-retrovirals just aren't available in Africa right now."
"What's in it for you?"
I took Sarah's picture from my wallet but I didn't let him touch it, not with those dead hands. I showed it to him and then stared at it for a while myself. "She and I get full citizenship in one of the safest places on Earth." In the picture Sarah, aged five at the time, petted the nose of an unaccountably docile camel. The picture didn't show what came next - the camel's wet sneeze, little Sarah's shrieks as she ran all over a camp full of nomads who smiled and clapped their hands for her and offered her fruit. That had been a good day. I always tend to think of our life in Africa as one long horror story - an occupational hazard, I guess - but there had been so many good days.
I realized with a start that I'd been ignoring Gary for minutes while I thought those thoughts. How rude of me. "I'd like to rest a while, if you don't mind," I told him. I wasn't tired so much as so introspective it was becoming difficult to focus on anyone else. He obliged by scuttling off to a dusty corner of the store where he could chew on his sticks of meat in peace.
For my part I turned to look out the window - not at the gathered dead people, I was barely aware of them but instead at the Empire State Building, clearly visible above the trees at the north end of Union Square. The iconic skyscraper seemed to just hover there detached from the world. I wondered what if anything you would find in its uppermost stories now - a hell of a walk, since the elevator wouldn't be running, but worth it perhaps. What kind of safety, what manner of serenity might still exist up there? I'd visited the observation deck plenty of times when I was a kid and I knew you could see the entire city from up there but in my musing nothing was visible but long icy sweeps of cloud, white rarefied ribbons of nothing at all in particular. A veil between me and the filth and strife on the surface.
I'm told this kind of detachment is common among soldiers in combat zones. In the aftermath of a perilous fight the mind shuts down its faculties one by one and drifts - perhaps endlessly reliving the moment when a squadmate caught a bullet, perhaps trying to remember all the details of the chaos once it was past, perhaps just - as mine was doing here - wandering without thought or feeling at all. There's even a name for this phenomenon, the "Thousand Yard Stare", this kind of temporary mindlessness. Modern medicine sometimes refers to it as "Combat Stress Reaction." Doctors are trained to look out for it. Sometimes it's healthy, just a purging of all the encrusted fear and bloodlust but sometimes it can be a sign of incipient mental illness. Usually a victim snaps right out of it as soon as a new task or duty presents itself. Sometimes soldiers drift in and out of it for the rest of their lives - that's called "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," which everyone knows about.
It seemed to me then a pleasant enough way to escape the reality we were in. Nothing pressing presented itself, no duty I had to perform. Idleness would have proved a breeding ground for doubts and fears and now that we were safely (if hopelessly) ensconced there was nothing to do but wait - wait for the dead people outside to rot away. Wait for one of the girls to have a brilliant idea. Wait for all of us to starve to death. I watched the light change, the Empire State transforming from a grey edifice to a ruddy obelisk to a stroke of black paint across the starry blue sky as afternoon gave way to evening gave way to unlit night.
In time I slept and I dreamed.