‘Paston,’ said Shark, ‘you’re out of your head. You can’t go out there.’
‘Give me the gun. Shark.’
Edgar bent over and caught hold of McManus’ wrist. Shark was too weak to resist him, and he gave up the .38 without a struggle.
‘Okay now,’ said Edgar, forcefully. ‘I’m going out there and I’m going to find you a doctor. Give me an hour. If I’m not back after that time – well…’
‘Can I die then?’ asked Shark McManus. ‘Am I allowed to?’
Edgar leaned over and patted him on the cheek.
‘You are not to die,’ he said tenderly.
Shark nodded. ‘Okay, then. I won’t.’
Edgar took the gun and left the office. He walked along the landing to the concrete staircase that led down to the street. As he reached the top step, he heard an unexpected scuffling noise, and he paused. He peered into the darkness, and he could have sworn that he saw something moving. He wished he had a torch.
Feeling his way down step by step, with his hand against the rough concrete wall, he came to the next turn in the stairs. He heard the noise again. There was a high-pitched squeaking, and the patter of feet.
‘Rats,’ he said to himself. ‘Oh, Jesus!’
He descended the next few stairs cautiously. The rats scuttled down ahead of him, and he could see their eyes reflecting the dim light from the open street door. He managed to reach the sidewalk, kicking a couple of rats aside, and it was only then that he realized how many there were. The office building was teeming with rats, and so were the streets. Disturbed by the chaotic violence and looting, frightened by fires, aroused by the smell of dead bodies, they were rising from the sewers and electrical conduits of Manhattan in a gray tide.
Edgar ran across Third Avenue and turned down 52nd Street. Now he was out in the open, his confidence was shaken. It was menacing and strange, and the fires that burned through the drizzling rain cast enormous shadows. He had no idea where he could find a doctor, and he peered hopelessly at all the signs and nameplates he saw.
From Third Avenue, he reached Lexington Avenue. Uptown, he could see immense fires blazing. Whole blocks were alight. Downtown, it was all darkness and savagery. He crossed the street and walked quickly towards Park Avenue, panting hard and clutching his pistol tight.
He didn’t see them until he had turned the corner. There were eight or nine of them – marauding black teenagers with clubs and knives and razors. They had raided three hotel bars on the East Side, and they were fiercely drunk. The day before, white hoodlums had come up to Harlem and thrown gasoline bombs in their neighborhood stores and their houses, and they were out to fix honkies and nothing else.
Edgar raised the .38.
‘Don’t you come a step nearer, or I’ll shoot!’
The black kids jeered and laughed. Edgar, holding the pistol in both hands, aimed directly at a silhouetted head.
It went through his mind like an action replay. The supermarket doorway. The laughter in the car park. The shot. One of the kids fell to the ground, without a sound. The rest of them scattered. ‘He’s dead all right. I got him in the head.’
And while his finger froze on the trigger, a tall black boy in green jeans ducked under his line of fire and stabbed him straight in the face with a broken gin bottle. The glass sliced into his cheeks and mouth, and he dropped the gun on to the sidewalk in a slow-motion twist of agony.
They cut his face up first. He felt knives in his eyes. Then one of them grappled his wet, petrified tongue, and they sliced it off with a razor. The last thing he felt before he died, in a hideous burst of agony, was the broken bottle they forced, laughing, into his rectum.
Shark McManus died that night, too. As he lay on the floor of the office, helpless and weak and soaked in diarrhoea, the rats came scampering in. He was so close to death that he scarcely felt them running over him, and at one moment he thought of the kitten his father had given him when he was six, and he opened his arms to embrace the scuttling gray tribe that bit at his flesh and turned his hands into raw bloody strings.
‘Paston?’ he said hoarsely.
There was no answer. He heard a squeaking, pattering noise that he didn’t understand.
‘Paston?’ he said again.
No answer.
‘Paston?’
*
After the hideous chaos of the night, the morning was gray and silent. The rain stopped, and a smeary sunlight filtered across the East River and into the broken streets. Uptown, fires still burned in Harlem, and the black carcasses of buses and cars were littered all over the streets of the midtown hotel district, smoldering and smashed. The sidewalks were glittering with powdered glass, and amongst it, like frozen explorers caught in a strange kind of snow, were the bodies of plague victims and riot casualties.
One or two police cars patroled the streets slowly and cautiously, driving over rubble and bricks and debris. The cops all wore respirators and goggles, and were heavily armed. There were still a few stray looters around, and they had orders to shoot to kill.
The rats were still in evidence – swarming into abandoned delicatessens and restaurants, and over the corpses that lay huddled up in every street.
Every office block and apartment building was locked and guarded and under siege. But even if the residents were able to keep out the looters and most of the rats, they couldn’t protect themselves from the plague. During Monday morning, the fast-breeding bacilli brought painful death to thousands of New Yorkers, transmitted by minute specks of infected saliva. It only took a word of encouragement to pass the plague on, or the touch of a hand in friendship.
Some people died slowly, in prolonged agony, while others succumbed
