Kreutzer lead us through a tiny development of yellow clapboard houses and down tree-lined avenues - the old officers' quarters back when Governors Island was a military base. The Coast Guard logo was everywhere, on monuments and plaques and chain link fences, even on the street signs.The DHS Agent swore the houses were empty and that he'd checked them out himself. "Honest, there's not even a stick of furniture in there and no goddamned food at all."Unconvinced I sent squads of girls into every building we passed. "There must have been other people here," I said. "Nobody posts a field agent to a place like this if there's nothing for him to do.""There were more," Kreutzer said, clutching at his bandaged hand. "There was a garrison. When the Epidemic broke out we needed a hardened location for emergency management ops. We reactivated the base here and staffed it with Operations Directorate irregulars. People used to flying in and out of air fields with little or no notice. Some usel

Eggsy 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. Eggsy 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. Eggsy 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 Eggsy’s defenses, they could conceivably do something so random it would endanger Gary's breeding stock. If they were to fire missiles at the broch, for instance, Eggsy would almost certainly survive but Marisol's people could be hurt in the ensuing chaos and debris. A thousand such scenarios had gone through Eggsy’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.Eggsy sucked the life out of the birds until only one remained, banking unconcernedly over the great piles of i

"Sure," Kreutzer said, scratching vigorously at his unkempt hair. "It makes sense. She's an A-rab, right? They actually want to become martyrs. It's a good deal for them - one quick death and then you're in fucking paradise with your seventy-two virgins." He considered that for a second. "Or maybe she gets to be one of somebody else's virgins. Face it, blowing themselves up is what they do best."I glared at him. "That's the most asinine thing I've ever heard." I waved my hands in the air. "She's a teenager, that's all. She doesn't understand what dying really means but she knows for a fact that life sucks. She's got all these hormones and energy and weird bad culturally created bullshit, fucked up sexuality projected into glamorous ideas of death as transcendence - ""She's a soldier." Jack peeled apart a blade of unmowed grass and put it to his lips. He blew hard and it made a reedy sound, like a mournful bassoon starting a dirge."She's a child." I said. But of course, she was much

Six hours earlier:Osman handed me a limp kif cigarette and a pack of matches before he jumped back onto the Arawelo and started belching orders at Yusuf. "It will calm your nerves," he told me. I guess I looked like a ghost - people had been telling me all morning how pale I was. I didn't think Osman's weak hashish was going to help so I shoved the joint in my pocket after waving him my gratitude.The boat pulled away from the Coast Guard dock with a rattling of pistons and a blast of hot exhaust from its diesels. Osman brought it around slowly, backing and filling with a series of slow-motion turns. The girls on the deck held to the rails or to lashed-down boxes of armaments and looked wistfully over the green grass of Governors Island. I had hoped not to see Ayaan before she left but there she was on top of the wheelhouse like a homecoming queen on a particularly rusty parade float. She looked down at me and I looked up at her. Our eyes met for perhaps the last time and we seemed t

The bodies arched and heaved, backs curling, heads pushed down by feet looking for purchase. A thousand moving corpses strained with their arms and legs, pushing each other upward, the limbs of the ones on the bottom snapping like dry sticks. The one on top, an Asian girl in a pair of blood-stained pink Sanryo overalls, reached up with one hand and touched the coping of the planetarium's roof. A Somali girl with a bayonet on the end of her rifle lunged forward and impaled the dead girl's head like a pineapple. When the bayonet retracted the Asian girl rolled down the side of the undead human pyramid to smack the asphalt of Central Park West. A man in an Armani suit with one leg hanging in tatters slumped forward to take her place. One of the Somalis opened up with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod and his body erupted in chunks of rotten meat that pelted the bodies below like foul rain.The pyramid wasn't going to work. Instead Eggsy turned to his original plan and looked