Now Eggsy sat on the floor of his kitchenette, surrounded by wrappers and boxes - all of them empty. He licked the inside of a wrapper that used to hold a granola bar, dug out the tiny crumbs with his tongue. All gone. He was hungrier than ever. He could feel his stomach distend. He knew he was full, fuller than he'd ever been in life. It didn't seem to matter. Being among the dead meant always being hungry, obviously. It meant this gnawing inside of you that you could never quench. It explained so much. He had wondered - in his old life - why they had attacked people, even people they knew, people they loved. Maybe they had tried to stop themselves. The hunger was just too great. The need to eat, to consume, was awesome and frightening. Was this what he had consigned himself to? Even as he considered this he was rising to his feet, his hands reaching for the cupboard. His fingers were clumsy with hunger but they obeyed him enough to get the door open. The cupboard was almost empt

Back in the freezer section of the little bodega, back in the dark Eggsy finally found what he'd been looking for behind smooth clear glass. He took the box of hamburger patties up to the front and laid them out on the plastic counter by the display of disposable lighters and the lotto machine. They'd been cool to the touch in the freezer - completely thawed out and with a little fuzzy white mold on top but still good he thought. He contemplated different ways to cook them until he got up the nerve to just bite into one raw and take his chances. His mouth flooded with saliva and he forced himself to chew, to savor the meat even though his eyes were watering up. The tension in his stomach, the crawling hunger, began to subside and he leaned on the counter with both hands. It had taken him all of the morning to find any scrap of meat at all. He'd wandered far afield from his apartment, north into the West Village. But at every butcher's shop and grocery store he'd found only empty wa

Fanning out across the street the girls threw hand signals at one another. The barrels of their Kalashnikovs swept the street corners, the recessed doorways, the hundreds of cars abandoned on the cobble stones. I had expected - well, I guess I had hoped - that the roads would be clear. We could have commandeered some transport and driven to the hospital. Not a chance. In the panic of the Epidemic the usual Manhattan gridlock must have turned into a death trap. There were cars everywhere, many of them dented or damaged. They lined every side-street we passed, crowded every intersection. I saw a Hummer 2 up on the sidewalk, its shiny front bumper wedged permanently between a mailbox and the broken wood front of a deserted bistro. On the other side of the street Fathia clambered up on top of a taxi with four flat tires and scanned the road ahead with her rifle at her eye. "This way," I told Ifiyah and she gestured for her troops to follow us. I led her down a short block of Horatio str

I took a step forward and my hip connected with something hard and square that shot away from me. I heard Ayaan's rifle swing around with a clatter and I brought my light up fast but the thing I'd collided with in the dark was just a rolling cabinet. The halls were full of them. It drifted for a few more feet and then stopped in the middle of the hall. Sheepishly I pushed it out of the way. I could sense the girls behind me - Ayaan and her three squadmates - uncoil as they came down from a tense alert. For myself I just couldn't relax. I'd never liked hospitals - well, who does? The chemical stink of the disinfectant they use. The desolate utilitarianism of their furnishings. The lingering sense of decay and dissolution. I felt like something was crawling around on my shoulders, one of those long, wet-looking millipedes covered in hairs as fine and curved as eyelashes. I kicked over a pile of bloody linens, half-expecting something underneath to jump up and bite my leg. Nothing. Aya

A bullet panged off the passenger-side door and the car rocked on its tires. The Volkswagen's windshield had a long silver crack running across its width but it hadn't broken yet. Gary assumed a fetal position in the leg well of the driver's seat and tried not to make a sound. The demented girl scouts or whatever they were had spotted him and opened fire before he could say a word. He'd tried to run away but he was pinned between two hazards: the boat on the river with its sniper ready to shoot anything that moved, and these heavily-armed schoolgirls who had taken over half of the West Village. It was inevitable that he would be spotted and so he had. He'd barely had time to take cover in the abandoned car before they started spraying the neighborhood down with lead. He was pretty sure they didn't have a fix on him, though, that they were just firing blind. He was pretty sure they would eventually leave, if he could stay perfectly still and not give himself away. Which, considering h