“That one is too active,” Ayaan said, scanning the wharf with her binoculars. The dead man in question wore nothing but a pair of tight jeans that overflowed with his bloated flesh. He clutched to a wooden piling with one arm while the other snatched at the air. His hungry face followed the boat as we steamed past.
On top of the wheelhouse Mariam called down for her Dragunov and one of the other girls passed it up. Mariam steadied herself against theArawelo’s radar dome and peered through the scope of the sniper rifle. I put my fingers in my ears a moment before she fired. The dead man on the pier spun around in a cloud of exploding brain matter and fell into the water.
Sixteen years old and Mariam was already an expert sniper. When did the girl soldiers have time to train?
Osman cleared his throat and I looked back at the map. “Here,” I said, pointing at a blue letterH on the map, just a few blocks in from theHudson. I looked up at the line of buildings on the shore and pointed at a spot between two of them. “St. VincentMedicalCenter. They have an HIV care facility.” I shrugged. “It’s more dangerous because we’ll be out of sight of the ship but it’s my second best option.”
The captain rubbed his face and nodded. He yelled at Yusuf to bring the ship in at an empty pier and the girls surged across the deck, shouldering their weapons and checking their actions. Osman and I struggled with a piece of corrugated tin ten feet long and just as wide that served the trawler in the place of a gangplank.
The engines whined and water churned as Yusuf brought us in to a bumping stop. The girls started jumping across even before we had the plank down-Commander Ifiyah at the fore, calling all herkumayo sisters to join her. They roared like lions as they raced to take up their assigned positions in two ranks of twelve on the wooden pier (Mariam was still up on the wheelhouse with her Dragunov). I shouldered my pack, shook Osman’s hand, and picked my way carefully across the plank as if afraid I was going to fall in the water. I felt calm, far calmer than when we’d tried theEast River. Ayaan had taught me a trick, to force myself to vomit before the battle so I wouldn’t feel the need afterward. It hadn’t been hard. The smell of death and decay rolling offManhattan added to my general seasickness and left me feeling queasy ever since we’d spotted the Statue of Liberty.
The sounds of my footsteps on the pier echoed in the stillness. I moved to crouch behind Ayaan, who paid no attention to me whatsoever. She was so focused, so completely at peace in this madness. I lifted my own AK-47 and tried to copy her firing stance but I knew by the way the stock felt on my shoulder that I had it wrong.
“Xaaraan,”she said softly but not to me. The word meant “ritually unclean”, or more literally “improperly butchered meat.” I’d never heard a more apropos description of the men and women who came at us then up the pier. Grotesque twisted faces on top of swollen bloody bodies that bent at unnatural angles-the hands reaching for us with fingers crooked like talons-the broken teeth-the rolling eyes-the silence of them.