"I'm sorry, Jack," Alex said. "But I think he saved your life by doing it. Maybe all our lives. The colloids were so surprised that it gave us those few seconds we needed."
Jack nodded. His father was dead, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had lived under combat conditions long enough to understand that bitter reality.
Ronnie joined them, looking very sad and concerned for Jack. "When we came into the tunnel they were waiting for us," she said. "They swarmed over us before we could do anything, and they dragged us down deeper into the tunnel. The colloids were just above, crawling around up on the ceiling as if they were pulling puppet strings. I thought they were gonna kill us, but they didn't. They just waited for you guys to show up."
"Yeah."
"But how did they know you'd come for us?" Ronnie asked. "How did they know you wouldn't just leave us in here with them?"
"They've analyzed enough human minds to know how we behave," Alex said. "Not always rationally, maybe, but somewhat predictably."
"Predictably in some cases, at least." It was Claire, wading toward them. "The colloids know we are here, and they must realize why we have come."
"Then we better get out of this tunnel before they organize another bunch of the infected to attack us," said Alex.
The guerrillas were ready to move. They made their way up the eastern slope of the tunnel, seeing daylight after ten or fifteen minutes.
"Let's be careful going outside," Alex said. "They probably haven't had time to get organized yet, but let's not take any chances."
"I'll go on point with the flamethrower," Riquelme said. "If there's any trouble, I'll be able to get away by laying down some fire."
Nobody could argue with Riquelme's logic, and so he walked the last few hundred yards of the tunnel by himself. Alex watched him go until he became a tiny silhouette framed by the tunnel walls, while the guerrillas followed him at a safe distance. Then he was out of sight. Somebody sneezed, but other than that the tunnel was silent except for their echoing footsteps. They were out of the deep water now, though their toes were still submerged. Alex found himself shivering, soaked to the waist and exposed to the cold autumnal air. Up ahead there was no more water, only the wet asphalt that gleamed more and more brightly in the increasing clarity of the light from the world outside.
Footsteps echoed from ahead.
"Nobody move," Alex said.
They waited. The footfalls were closer, and the guerrillas were clearly nervous. Had Riquelme been ambushed? It was a sobering thought, the very real possibility of losing such a dependable soldier. Not only that, but another battle might exhaust their supply of ammunition before they reached their destination. And if this was not Riquelme returning to them, there would surely be another battle starting in the next few seconds. In spite of the damp cold, Alex was sweating profusely.
"Hey!" Riquelme, easily identifiable even in shadow because of the tank on his back, came into view.
"
All right!
"
Ronnie said, laughing.
The others shared in her pleasure and relief to see Riquelme return unharmed. As they joined him, several people slapped him on the back.
"Come on," Riquelme said. "Wait till you see what's outside this tunnel."
They followed him up and out into the sunlight, blinking and gaping at the smashed buildings . . . and at something even more astonishing.
A rag-tag squad of gaunt people, some of them carrying guns, more of them carrying knives, and almost all of them carrying sticks and rocks, stood in a knot in front of the guerrillas.
"It's the New York resistance," Riquelme said.
They didn't look like much, but Alex reflected that the same might be said of his group of guerrillas.
"We're here to fight the colloids," he said. "Will you join us?"
A black woman, whose wild hair could not hide her exquisite features, stepped forward. "Whaddaya think we be doing?"
"Well, we need your help."
She appraised the guerrillas, now emerging with the birch log litter. "Look like you're packing a lot of firepower."
"Yeah, you could say that."
The woman nodded. "You must have come looking for a fight, because this is where they at."
"That's right. We're here to stop them."
"We saw 'em march down into the tunnel, and none of 'em marched back out," a wild-eyed man said. "Did they go over to Jersey?"
A few of the New York guerrillas permitted themselves to laugh at this facetious question.
"No, they went to a far better place than New Jersey," Alex said.
More of them laughed at his reply.
"We'd like to send them all there," Jo said.
"Sounds good to me," the black woman said, sticking out her hand. "I'm Shina."
Alex shook her hand and introduced himself and Jo. "We come from Philadelphia."
"I hear the weather's nice down there this time of year," the wild-eyed man said, eliciting more laughs.
"Very tropical," Alex replied.
"So when do we get started?" Shina asked.
"The sooner the better," said Jo.
The sun was already setting over the ruins of Manhattan. "Tonight?" asked Shina.
"We have to find out where they're making their baby," Alex said.
"
Baby!
"
several of the New York guerrillas chorused in surprise.
"That's right. They're making a new creature to rule the Earth when they're gone."
"Holy shit," an unwashed soul who could have been a man or a woman—or neither—croaked. Alex did not care to indulge in thinking about the reasons for the colloid's rejection of this person. An ally was an ally.
"They're making it out of the tissues of the people they've eaten," Alex said. "Out of themselves."
"What the fuck . . . ?" another of the New York guerrillas said. "How do you know this?"
"I found out the hard way," Alex said. He remembered the difficulty he had had with the New Jersey people, and said, "but there's no time to explain now. We have to get to this thing before it's too late."
"Are you with us?" Jo asked.
"I am," Shina assured her. "The rest of these dudes can make up their own minds."
"What do you say?" Alex asked them.
"I say all right," the androgynous person said.
"Me, too," said a woman.
"What have we got to lose?" the wild-eyed man said.
There were seventeen of them in all, and every one of them was willing to go along. Alex was grateful for that; even if these people were poorly armed, they were survivors.
"Did you see the colloids come out of the tunnel?" he asked.
"Yeah," Shina said. "Like a river of shit with a mind of its own."
"Which way did they go?"
"South."
"Toward the waterfront," Alex said. "Of course."
Moving through the ruins of Manhattan was not always easy. Like Philadelphia, the city had been devastated by the ineptitude of the Army. Nobody in the White House, Congress, or the military had suspected that the colloid "virus" was really an invasion from space. But it hadn't really mattered; no particle beam could have shot down mircroscopic viral cells from space, even if those in power had realized what was happening. The most heavily populated areas suffered rampant epidemics. Washington was no exception, and so the government had folded in a matter of months. The military had then taken over, declaring martial law and futilely attempting to wipe out the cities, which were perceived by military intelligence as the core—if not the cause—of the infestation.
As a result, the stone and concrete colossi of New York had fallen like dominos during the war.
Whatever the military strategy had been, there was a lot more rubble to contend with than in Center City Philadelphia. At times it seemed like mountain climbing, as they scaled huge mounds made up of limestone chunks, twisted steel girders, and crushed automobiles. Their progress was slow, especially with the arsenal lashed to the log litter, and the darkness was soon upon the silent city streets.
"Think we'll reach South Ferry by dawn?" Alex asked Shina as he helped her down from a particularly large block. "Maybe we can take the subway tunnels."
"No, they're flooded. We'll have to go above ground. When we get down toward the Village, things might not be so raggedy-ass."
"I hope you're right." It made sense, though. The buildings in Greenwich Village were not on the same cyclopean scale as those in midtown Manhattan, but who could guess what other obstacles they might encounter. After all, the colloids knew that the guerrillas were on the way.
"It might be wise to get some rest tonight," said Jo as she joined them.
"Can we risk it?" Alex said. "How can we know how close the colloids are to success? They might even have succeeded already."
"Well, if they have," Shina pointed out, "we can still kill the baby, can't we?"
"Maybe. We don't know. We're walking into this blind."
"Then we've got as good a chance tomorrow as we have tonight."
"Maybe so."
"Unless you can prove otherwise," Jo said, "then we should go ahead and get some rest, like I said before."
Alex nodded. His sense of urgency prevented him from being enthusiastic, but he had to admit that they weren't likely to function very well in the morning, exhausted as they were. Still, the residue of colloid memory made him believe that they should not hesitate even for a moment. "I know you're right, Jo, but I still want to keep moving."
Jo looked at him, the moonlight reflecting in her beautiful eyes. She understood his fear at that moment; Alex was certain of it. Was their telepathic bond working even while they were not making love? Only time would tell, he supposed, but he liked to think that it might be so. "You understand why we have to keep going, don't you, Jo?" he said.
"Of course." She smiled at him, but he knew that she was frightened. They were fighting for something so large that none of them could really grasp it, not fully. The human race, who had cast them out, now relied on these few losers to take the world back from the invaders. The skirmishes they had engaged in up to now would be as nothing to this final battle, he sensed. Would it be a futile gesture? Or would they salvage their world for future generations? Alex had a headache from thinking about it, and his limbs were heavy with exhaustion. Nevertheless, he pressed on through the night, praying that they would reach the tip of the island in time to stop the colloids.
They had
to.
The hard part was moving the boxes of ammunition, batteries, heavy weapons, and tanks of flammable fluids over the rubble. The people they had picked up in New Jersey and Manhattan made a great deal of difference; Alex was certain that the Philadelphia guerrillas would not have been able to carry the stuff half this far alone. He thanked God that they hadn't been forced to discard any of it. They would need every last round when push came to shove.
The moon rose high overhead as they struggled across the ruins of the city, Shina and her bunch showing Alex and the guerrillas the way. They were moving steadily toward South Ferry in spite of the constant obstacles; indeed, all of Manhattan seemed to conspire in an effort to prevent them from getting to their destination on time.
But Shina showed them some byways through the rubble that saved valuable time. She had moved around in the presence of the colloids without being captured or killed for three long years, and she seemed to know every last nook and cranny of the wrecked city. Alex had never been a religious man, but it almost made him believe in divine intervention. At least he could believe that they had all been very lucky in the past few hours—all except for poor Pat Crowley.
Alex glanced back at Jack, who walked next to Ronnie. The kid was still in a state of shock, but he was ready to avenge his father. Alex was convinced that Jack would fight like a demon when the time came. As for the other New Jersey people, well, they were still with the guerrillas. If any of them were infected, or any of the New York people or his own people for that matter, things could go very badly. Sabotage would be a simple matter for someone working on the inside. There was no way of telling if anyone was infected. Alex had never suspected Pat; in fact, he had not even known that
he
was infected when the thing inside his brain led Tony Chang to his death.
If there were infected among the guerrillas' numbers, they might very well not know it themselves until it was time to do the dirty work. It was a chance that Alex and his people had to take.
He was prepared to shoot the first person who appeared to be out of line . . . no matter who it was.
As Shina had predicted, the going got a lot easier after they had traveled further south. By the time they reached 8th Street, they were walking on a more or less flat surface. In spite of the strewn detritus, there were clearly defined streets. Their progress became much swifter.
"Have you noticed that there isn't anything moving around here?" Jo said as they walked through the once quaint neighborhood. "I mean, we haven't even seen a rat."
Alex allowed himself a smile. "Thousands of colloids streamed through here a few hours ago. All the rats probably left town after that gooey stampede."
"Why haven't the colloids sent another army of infected to meet us?"
"My guess is that they're going to use them to protect the neonate," Alex said. "It's hard for them to stop us while we're on the march. The best they can do is put as many of the infected between us and the neonate as they can manage, and hope that we don't get through."
"Yes," Claire said from behind them, "they didn't engage us in battle today for no reason. They want to make us use up our ammunition. They don't know how much we've got, but it probably exceeds their expectations."
"You mean they didn't expect us to get through the tunnel?" Alex said.
"Probably not, but now we're closing in on their breeding ground. They've got to do something to stop us. I think you're right. They'll put up hundreds of thousands of the infected as a shield if they have to."