Dear Sarah:
I guess I’m not coming back to you.
I guess I’ll never see you again. The thought is too big to deal with right now.
I may not have enough time left to finish this letter. Yesterday Ayaan hugged me on the roof of the Natural History Museum but I could feel the hesitation in her embrace. She could see in my eyes what was going to happen.
No matter, I told her. We were almost done.
My fever had abated. It came and went in waves and I was feeling pretty lucid. I had developed a new symptom, a kind of queasy rumbling in my guts but I could keep that to myself.
In the last minutes of the siege, just before Jack shot at me and Gary realized that he was being set up, the Museum of Natural History had been attacked by a million corpses with their bare hands. Many, many of them had been crushed as they put their shoulders to the metal frame of the building, their weight added to the pile. I didn’t bother to look over the side and thus see what trampled ghouls looked like. The dead had wreaked so much damage on the planetarium that the roof we stood on slanted to one side and Kreutzer could barely keep the Chinook from rolling over the edge. We wasted no time getting the girls onboard and getting out of there, even abandoning some of the heavier weapons and supplies. We were airborne in five minutes and headed straight for the United Nations complex on the far side of the city.
“Gary’s dead.” I said, filling in Ayaan on what had happened in her absence, shouting over the Chinook’s engines. I left out most of the grisly details. “I still don’t know if the mummies were leading me into Gary’s trap or if they were being sincere. Either way they saved the day. We took the survivors back to Governors Island-Marisol’s going to build something there, something safe and meaningful.” Ayaan nodded, not terribly interested in my story, and stared out one of the porthole-like windows. I wrapped my hand through a nylon loop sewn into the ceiling of the cabin to steady myself and moved closer so I didn’t have to yell. “So I’m sorry.”
“Why is that?” she asked. Her thoughts were elsewhere.
“You didn’t get to martyr yourself.”
That got a bright little grin out of her. “There are many ways to serve Allah,” she said. I’d like to remember Ayaan that way. The light from the porthole blasting across her shoulder. Sitting with her hands in her lap, one knee bouncing up and down in anticipation. When Ayaan got truly excited she couldn’t sit still. She thought it a weakness but to me it meant so much. It meant she was human, not a monster.
We set down in the North Garden of the UN, a patch of green just off First Avenue that had been closed to the public since September Eleventh. The girls deployed from the Chinook’s rear ramp in standard battle order but it looked like Gary had been true to his word, which surprised me a little. There weren’t even any undead pigeons to bother us. I lead the girls to the white security tent at the visitor’s entrance, past the “Non-Violence” sculpture which takes the form of an enormous pistol with its barrel tied in a knot. They didn’t know what to make of it. A world without guns to them is a world that can’t protect itself. Before the Epidemic began I used to fight that attitude. Now I can’t help but praise it.