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“Y OU UNDERSTAND THAT every second we stay here, you’re a target?”
L. Gray Matheson, CEO of Schaeffer-Yeager International and master of all he surveyed, shrugged off Miller’s concerns with a gentle raise of the palm. “In a minute, Alex. I’m on the phone with the President.”
At least, Miller thought, Gray wasn’t calling the President ‘Huck’ again.
“Now then, Huck. Like I said, I’m having trouble with one of your boys...”
Miller slapped his palm over his face.
Gray ignored Miller, and turned to face the queues of unhappy civilians waiting for their turn at the aid truck. He put on a patrician smile, and waved. “Uh-huh. Well, I know Major General Stockman isn’t following orders, Huck, but I need you to make that clear to what’s left of the media.” Somehow, and Miller didn’t know how he did it, Gray could smile without any hint of it reaching his voice.
Downtown Brooklyn, just south of Trinity Park and east of Cadman Plaza, had a liberal sprinkling of what could almost have been normality.
There was a media team following Gray around with cameras, and Miller was back in his suit playing at being the Armani while the cameras were streaming footage over anaemic satellite links back to what was left of the rest of the country.
There were un-Infected civilians, looking like a considerably expanded population of the city’s homeless, queuing for soup and aid packages provided by the generous corporation Schaeffer-Yeager, who’d even managed to restore electric power to the region.
Of course, the power was off the local solar grid, and with air conditioning growling away wherever anyone had it, there wouldn’t be enough juice in the grid’s fuel cells to last more than a few hours into the evening—but the press didn’t need to know that.
In fact, there was a lot they hoped the media detail wouldn’t notice. For one thing, du Trieux and Morland stood to one side with Miller’s combat gear, ready for him to shrug off his suit the moment the cameras were out of sight. For another, before the cameras had started filming, Miller and the others had cleared the dead off the surrounding streets.
Emaciated corpses, literally skin and bones, where the starved had fallen in search for a morsel to eat, had lain scattered and rotting across the entire city block.
Some only looked dead, and were simply too weak to move. Volunteers had pulled them to a make-shift triage tent and were treating them with little packets of gloopy processed food that had been developed by WellBeechBeck for saving Ethiopian orphans, but the volunteers were hungry enough that some were shamelessly sucking a mouthful from the packets before serving the starving.
Further down the street, titan-birds had gorged themselves on bodies too mutilated for the troops to even try to move without a shovel. Doyle was blasting the bastard creatures every time one landed in search of a meal, in hopes of keeping them out of sight of the cameras. But the stench of the dead remained in the air.
The titan-birds, New York’s newest residents, were hanging in the thermals between Brooklyn’s towers, stretched out, their leathery wings ready to catch any slight breeze allowing the colossal birds to glide and swoop down in search of prey.
At this distance they looked a little like pale eagles. Close in, they were more like half-feathered pterosaurs—some kind of failed and archaic evolutionary off-shoot locked into the hibernation cycles of the Archaeobiome. They’d followed the dust storms into the city, and couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Better for them, that is.
The flying monstrosities were intellectually on par with sauerkraut, Miller’d noticed, and didn’t seem to understand that flapping into low-flying helicopters was a quick way to get slashed to pieces by the rotors. Unfortunately, the beasts ranged from a twenty- to a sixty-foot wingspan and helicopters didn’t survive the encounters any
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