Monster Island(62)

I peered out through the glass at Lexington Avenue and saw abandoned cars and dead buildings but nothing animate anywhere, just a flock of pigeons wheeling between the glass walls of a pair of deserted office towers. It looked like our luck was going to hold. From here it was just a few short blocks to the UN building. If we were quiet and didn’t draw any attention to ourselves we just might make it. It was almost as if something had cleared out this whole section of the city. Perhaps the National Guard had put up barricades to keep the dead out. Maybe they were even still there, living soldiers protecting this last bastion of New York.

“Anything?” Jack asked. The lock released with a loud clang that startled the birds outside. They leapt into the air, their wings snapping out as they rode up into the sky, one after the other. Jack stood up and started working on the top lock.

“Negative,” Ayaan said. She watched the birds, entranced as I was, perhaps observing how they relied totally on each other, each animal mirroring the movements of its neighbor so that each time the flock changed its position a wave of motion seemed to go through them, as if they were a single entity with many bodies.

The second lock shot open and Jack put his tools away. He pushed on the door’s latch bar and it swung open, letting in a cool puff of air from outside.

Air that stank of decay and rot.

“Get down!” Jack shouted as the flock of pigeons swung through the air, pivoting to dive headlong through the open door. The ex-Ranger slammed the door shut as dozens more of the birds smacked up against the glass, their filmy eyes showing nothing but naked desire. Hunger. One of them lay twitching just inches from my face, separated from me by only a thin piece of safety glass and I saw the marks on its spine where it had been pecked to death, disarranging its iridescent feathers. Its beak snapped at me against the glass door, desperate for a bite of my flesh.

I heard wings flapping behind me and Jack rolled up into a sitting posture, his shotgun in his hands. He fired and the noise echoed wildly off the marble walls. Birds fell out of the air right and left as those pigeons that had made it inside doubled back for another go at us. He fired again, and again, and Ayaan opened up with a volley of fully automatic fire that blew the undead birds into clouds of blue feathers and wet gore. My ears ached with the noise and I worried they might start bleeding.

I felt pressure on my back and looked to see pigeons colliding with the door behind me, trying to bludgeon it open with their bodies. I put my shoulder against the door while Jack finished off the last of the intruders, stepping on the heads of the ones his shots had only crippled. Ayaan put her rifle over her shoulder and helped me as the birds outside redoubled their efforts.

“This is crazy!” she said. “Fucked up!”

Jack hurriedly re-locked the door with shaking hands. The attack had surprised even him. “Undead animals… you don’t see a lot of them. Most of the city’s wildlife got eaten in the first couple of weeks. I can’t remember the last time I saw a squirrel.”

“What do we do?” I asked, stepping away from the door as another pigeon smashed itself against the barrier. The glass was cloudy with the grease of their bodies. “This is ridiculous. What do we do?”

Jack shook his head. “So close. If we abort now-”

“No one is aborting this mission,” Ayaan said, scowling at us. “I have lost my commander to get here. I have lost my friends. Now is not the time to stop. There will be a way, if we look.”

In defiance of her words a shadow passed across the sidewalk outside. I looked up and saw a new flock of birds approaching. It was almost as if they were organized, as if they could plan their attacks. It was just instinct, though, something in the bones that they didn’t even need their tiny brains for. Pigeons were social animals, taking their cues from one another just as they always had. I could imagine how they had come to own this part of the city. One of them must have been bitten by a dead human looking for a quick meal. It had escaped but died of its injuries. Returning to its flock it would have attacked its fellows-who would attack the ones next to them, who would turn to do the same. The flock that flies together dies together, I suppose. The Epidemic must have spread through the avian population of New York even faster than it had through the humans.

I wondered for a moment what they were all doing here, so close to the East River. Then I understood and my blood went cold. Hungry things went where the food was. The dead humans had eaten pretty much everything on the land. The last big source of food was clogging the river as far south as the Brooklyn Bridge. I’d seen it from the deck of theArawelo.