Gary flew with the undead pigeons on First Avenue. Through their eyes he watched as they fell, whole flocks at a time, tumbling through the air, their wingtips spinning lifelessly. Gary was a man of his word-if Dekalb wanted to take him up on his generous offer the way to the UN building would be clear. Gary wasn’t so much afraid of Dekalb as concerned. While the weapons inspector and his team of Somali killers could hardly make a dent in Gary’s defenses, they could conceivably do something so random it would endanger Gary’s breeding stock. If they were to fire missiles at thebroch, for instance, Gary would almost certainly survive but Marisol’s people could be hurt in the ensuing chaos and debris. A thousand such scenarios had gone through Gary’s mind and he didn’t relish any of them. Getting Dekalb out of New York as quickly as possible was just good common sense.
Gary sucked the life out of the birds until only one remained, banking unconcernedly over the great piles of its former wingmates, the greasy iridescent blue feathered masses of them clogging the streets. Gary spilled air across a pair of fluttering wings and wheeled toward the river and Long Island. He dug deep with the bird’s pinions and soared until he could see Jamaica Bay burnished by the sun, until he thought he could see the earth curving away beneath him but… enough. He gave the bird a hard squeeze and its vision dimmed. A barely-noticeable spark of dark energy flowed into Gary’s being.
In a soft and shadowed place he shifted in his king-sized bathtub and fluid seeped into the hollow of his collarbone. He reared up, the briny liquid falling away from him in torrents, and grabbed his bathrobe. There was work to be done.
Marisol vomited noisily across the brick floor. “Morning sickness?” Gary asked, lifting the living woman to her feet by one elbow.
She shook him away. “I’m suffocating in here. What is that stuff, pickle juice?”
“Formalin,” Gary responded, looking down at the pool of straw-colored liquid he’d just clambered out of. “I’m preserving myself for future generations. You should be grateful. The more I protect myself from bacterial decay, the fewer of your people I have to eat. Let’s go get some air if it bothers you so much.”
As he lead her up the spiraling staircase hidden in the tower’s double wall he summoned one of the mummies to clean up the sick. It gave him a real if petty pleasure to make Mael’s former honor guard do janitorial work but honestly, somebody had to clean thebroch and only the mummies retained the necessary manual dexterity. Gary’s own hands acted like they were encased in fur-lined mittens-he couldn’t even button his own shirt. The Ptolemies from the museum could use simple tools, at least.
“How are your people settling in?” Gary asked. The dead were still hard at work constructing the wall around the prison village but the living had already been moved into their simple houses. Gary had provided as much help as he could with books from the Public Library down on Forty-Second street and archaic tools taken from the Museum of the City of New York (known for its period rooms) but it couldn’t be easy for twenty-first century people to suddenly be forced into an eighteenth century existence. Gary had no way to provide electricity or running water, much less television and online shopping. Rude survival was all that he offered. Still, it beat the alternative.
“They’re scared, of course. They don’t trust you.”