The thirty-foot trailer barely had room for a crew of three. With the girls all struggling to get in and have a look at the monitors the air inside quickly became too muggy and close to be breathable. I mopped sweat away from my forehead and nodded when Kreutzer asked if I was ready. Jack still had the Predator in the air, making wide circles around Manhattan at about twenty thousand feet but even he couldn't help his curiosity. We all wanted to know what the spy plane had seen.
I blinked rapidly as the display shot images rapid-fire at me of buildings passing far too close and fast on either side. I nearly lurched forward in my chair as the view opened up dramatically, the Predator gliding over the head of the Columbus statue at 59th street. Beyond the barrier of Central Park South the view changed again, and dramatically, into a landscape of mud laced with junk. The park had become unrecognizable, even the green grass torn away by the changes of the Epidemic. I hadn't even considered at that point that the dead might converge on the plants there and I felt my head shaking from side to side in doubt and distaste to see what had come of one my favorite places in the world.
In silence we watched as the plane sped uptown. Jack had kept it low so we could get a better view - maybe five hundred feet off the ground. At that height when we saw the first of the dead people in the park they looked like pieces of popcorn scattered on a dark tabletop. Kreutzer froze the frame and ran an image enhancement algorithm to zoom in on one and we saw its hair had fallen away in patches and its skin had turned a kind of soft and creamy white. Its clothes hung in tatters from its twisted limbs. We couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.
Kreutzer, who had seen only a handful of the dead, had to turn away for a moment. The rest of us just ignored the corpse and studied the background - looking for places to entrench, fortifiable positions from which to stage an assault.
Then the Predator's nose camera swung forward to show us the skyline and our eyes went wide.
The dead filled half the park. They were close enough to one another to have trouble swinging their arms as they pressed closer and closer to something round and grey in the middle of the Park. They filled what had been the Great Lawn, and the Ramble, and the Pinetum. They covered the ground like a writhing sea of whitecaps. No. That was far too pleasant an image. They looked more like a maggot mass. Disgusting as it might be that was the only analogy I could think of - their colorless, pulpy flesh and their constant mindless motion could only call up images of fly larvae seething across the stretched dry skin of a dead animal.
There was no way to estimate how many of them there were. Thousands, easily. Hundreds of thousands I guess. I went to a peace rally in Midtown just before the first Gulf War. My war-hating colleagues and I had numbered, according to the media, at least two hundred thousand and we only filled up a few dozen blocks of First and Second Avenues. To completely cover half of Central Park like that...
Gary had mentioned a million dead men. It looked like he wasn't far off.
"What's this feature?" Jack asked, scraping his chair across the floor of the trailer as he moved in for a closer look. He tapped his finger against the monitor with a soft, dull sound that shook me out of myself again. He was indicating the round grey shape at the very center of the crowd.
Kreutzer's fingers flickered over his keyboard as he called up a three-dimensional rendering of the object, extrapolating details from hundreds of frames of two-dimensional video footage. The trailer's hard drives chunked and rumbled for a minute and then he put his product up for display. What we saw was a sort of squat tower, a circular structure rising with tapering walls to a ragged top. It must have been unfinished. It rose a good thirty yards in the air and was wider than the Met that sat next to it. What Gary could possibly want with such a structure was a mystery.
Its outbuildings made a little more sense. The dead had erected a wall maybe four meters high that surrounded a space the size of the Great Lawn. The wall attached directly to the main structure, forming a kind of corral. Inside this enclosed area was what looked like a tiny village of stone buildings with red terra cotta roofs. It looked like something from Europe in the middle ages. The only way in or out of the village was through the main structure.
"Why did Gary want to rebuild Colonial Williamsburg here?" I asked, very confused. Ayaan stared at me curiously. "Those houses," I said, pointing them out for her. "I guess that's where he keeps the prisoners, but they hardly look like jail cells."
"No, they don't," Jack said. "They look like barns."
Barns - where you keep your cattle. I got what he was saying. Gary needed to keep the prisoners alive and healthy, perhaps even happy, over the extreme long term. How long he could survive on the meat locked up in that corral was anybody's guess but clearly he meant to drag it out as long as possible.
I got up from my chair and headed outside for some fresh air. On the way out I squeezed Ayaan's shoulder. She followed me out onto the grass and out of earshot.
"There's something," I tried, not knowing quite what to say. "Something you should know. I intend to go after him. I can't go back to Africa until he's dead. Dead for real. That means going inside of that tower. In the process I'm going to try to free the prisoners but my main goal is to separate his brain from his body in the most thorough fashion possible."
She inhaled noisily. "That is impossible."
I nodded. "I saw how many of the dead he has under his control. I'm still going to try. Will you help me?"
"Yes, of course." She gave me a strange smile. "There really is no choice, is there? He will not let us approach the United Nations building, not while he still has control. If we are to finish our mission then he must be removed."
Did I tell her? It could only disturb her - and frankly, she didn't need the pressure of knowing she actually had an option. In the end though I decided I knew Ayaan well enough that I knew she would want to know.
"He called me," I told her. "He said he would make the way clear for us. Give us free passage. There's a price, though. He wants to eat you personally. It's a revenge thing for the time you shot him."
Her eyes went very wide but only for a moment. Then she nodded. "Okay. When do I go?"
I stepped forward and put my hands on her shoulders. "I don't think you understand. He wants to torture you. To death. I won't let that happen, Ayaan."
She pushed me away. I'm pretty sure that my touching her like that had violated Sharia law but mostly she just didn't like my attitude. "Why do you deny me this? It is my right! So many others have died! Ifiyah died just so that we could learn a lesson. That girl, the one with the cat, she died for being stupid! You will not let me die for my country? You will not let me die the most honorable death possible? Even if it means our mission is a success? Even if it means you can see your daughter again?"
I opened my mouth but come on. There are no words after something like that. None at all.