I could see that for myself. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of dead people who had mobbed the megastore trying to get at us only a few were still standing and they were clutching their heads and wandering aimlessly aroundUnion Square. They seemed less interested in us than in whatever had claimed the rest. Almost certainly that was giving them too much credit but that’s what it looked like.
Leadership, I was told once by a Regional Field Head for the Disarmament Project inSudan, has less to do with making the best decision than makinga decision. “Get your things, we’re leaving,” I told the girls.
They snapped to it. Prayer mats were rolled up, weapons were checked and thrown over shoulders. Fathia and Leyla, the youngest girl, moved to collect Ifiyah’s body, rolling her up in their mats.
I unlocked the door but Ayaan was the first one out, her weapon swinging wildly as she tried to cover each of the stragglers in turn. They didn’t react to her presence at all. I shuffled the rest of the girls out the door and then took up the rear. I caught myself about to yell out an order and stopped myself-the noise might have broken the dead out of their spell-and instead jogged forward to tap Ayaan’s shoulder. I pointed in the direction of the river.
It was all she needed. She threw three quick hand signals at the girls and we broke into a run, not so much a sprint (we were each carrying twenty pounds of gear at the least) as a loping jog but there was urgency there, believe me. At first we had to leap over piles of bodies (or just step on them in a couple of places) but beyond the periphery of the Square the sidewalks were clear.Sixth avenue passed. Seventh. I slowed momentarily outside of Western Beef, wondering if this was where our luck ended but the dead had deserted the place. Every walking corpse in the Village must have been there at the megastore because we saw only a handful on our way back to theHudson and those were easily dodged. Once we were pastSixth Avenue the spell wore off-they came at us as determined as ever, but just as slowly, too.
As we ran past their rotten clutching hands I felt a certain real relief that we were back on familiar ground again. Maybe we were running for our lives and being chased by the dead but that was better than what we were leaving behind. Whatever had slain the dead inUnion Square had to be big and powerful and I didn’t relish finding out what it wanted fromme.
The thought that it might be benevolent, this unseen force that claimed the dead for its own, never even occurred to me. Ever since the Epidemic started there was nothing truly good or clean left in this world. Anything that seemed that way had to come with strings attached.
At the river we stopped on the dock and waved our arms. TheArawelo stood out in the water about a hundred yards with no one visible on deck but we were too out of breath to think the worst. After a minute or two Mariam came up on deck, her blazer off and Osman’s fishing hat perched low over her eyes. She made some frantic gesture toward the hatches and the two sailors emerged from below decks, looking as if they’d been caught at something salacious.
I didn’t give a damn what they’d been up to. They brought the boat in to the dock and threw us lines so we could tie it up. In a minute we were on board and we cast off again.
I guess leaving the megastore in such a hurry really had been the right decision.
When I finally sat down I found I was ravenous. I called forcanjeero, a flat Somali bread that was our staple food on the boat. Osman rubbed his head and squinted at me for a while before he decided what he was going to say.
“You in charge now, Dekalb? You’re theweyn nin?” He glanced around at the girls. “Ifiyah didn’t come back, I see.”