Shailesh lead us to a good spot where we could lean against one of the station's pillars. It was the best place to watch the speech, he said. I still had very little idea of what was going on. The lights dipped and the buzz of conversations around us dropped to a low murmur. We were seated looking at an empty patch of station floor. Above our heads we had a good view of the famous Roy Lichtenstein mural. In primary colors and thick comic book lines it showed a New York of the Future: finned subway trains blasting on rockets past a city of spires and air bridges. At the far right an earnest looking man in a radio helmet supervised the trains with glowing pride.From underneath the mural a man appeared, smiling and waving at people in the crowd. Applause broke out and somewhere a violin started playing "Hail to the Chief."The man was probably sixty years old. He had a scruffy gray beard and a few wisps of hair on his head. He wore a charcoal grey suit with a tear on one sleeve and a na

Jack looked at me over his shoulder as I approached. He had the girl - the one who had called the cat and been bitten by an undead feline for her trouble - behind a locked steel gate at the bottom of a stairwell. She looked more sullen then afraid. "Hold on, Dekalb," Jack said. "I've got to see to her first."I nodded and sat down on a crate. We were at the last safe barrier on the Seven Train Platform, according to a sign written in sharpie and taped to the wall. The tunnels themselves couldn't be closed off so the survivors had simply sealed off all the platforms, sticking to the concourses and their connecting passageways where they could be assured of their safety. Shailesh had told me that they had never actually seen one of the undead down on the tracks but that Jack refused to take the chance.The girl - her nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS Carly - had been put out on the platform to see if she died or not. If she didn't, she could come back in. If she did Jack would put a bullet

Jack handed me a cell phone that looked like something from the early nineties. A real brick - two inches thick with rubberized grips on the sides. The antenna was almost bigger than the phone itself, eight inches long and as thick as my index finger. "Motorola 9505," I said, trying to impress him. "Sweet." Most cell phones would be useless in New York - the towers that dotted the city's rooftops were unpowered now - but this beast could tap into the Iridium satellite network. It would work anywhere on earth as long as it had a charge. The UN used Iridiums but only sparingly, handing them out to field operatives like they were Faberge eggs. In America they were standard issue for military units, and in fact Jack had retrieved them from an abandoned National Guard checkpoint a few blocks away.Two more phones sat in a multi-unit charger which had been built to hold six. The rest had gone out with scavenging parties and had never returned. I made a quick call to Osman, letting him know

Eggsy climbed up the side of the Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Times Square and steadied himself on the roof. A wandering breeze snatched at his hair and his clothes. He looked up and saw the darkened signs, just as Dekalb had done but for him the dead neon wasn't so much a shocking portent as a monument to what the world, and by extension himself, had become. Dead but still standing. A reflection in a distorted mirror.He let his gaze fall to the street level. To his troops. He had brought hundreds of the undead with him and though they wore no uniform nor carried any weapons they were an army. They awaited his command, still and passionless. He looked across the ranks of their slack faces and their hanging limbs and thought about how to begin.From behind the steel gate of the subway station living faces peered out at the army. A rifle barrel poked through the bars and a shot snapped out. One of Gary's soldiers collapsed backwards onto an abandoned car, rocking it on its tires.

Two mummies awaited Eggsy when he returned to the broch. They gestured for him to follow them - alone.There would be trouble, of course. Mael already knew what had happened. As they entered the compound the workers on the walls of the big tower had turned to see the procession, their hands dropping to their sides, the bricks they carried put aside to watch as hundreds of living humans marched fearfully into the very midst of undead central. The dead on their own had no curiosity - for all the eyes turned on Gary and his raiding party there was only one intelligence looking through them.Gary could understand Mael's surprise. The dead army was under strict orders not to let a single living thing enter Central Park, much less a crowd of them. Gary was breaking a serious taboo.He commanded his army to guard the prisoners and then stepped inside the shadowed spaces of the construction site. The walls were rising steadily: the dead never rested and Mael had a multitude of them to draw on