Monster Island

by David Wellington

  “I can get the drugs for you, Dekalb. I can get you out of here!”

  I could feel Ayaan staring at the back of my head. Waiting for an order. In a second she would make a decision for herself and lift her flashlight to point it in the corner, where we’d left Ifiyah unconscious in an office chair.

  I could feel Gary’s body spasming in dread, only inches away. “You can’t do it without me! Dekalb!”

  The cone of light drifted up and over. The three of us must all have seen the trail of blood on the floor. I remembered the pool of sticky liquid I’d woken up in and my throat squirmed.

  “Dekalb! Save me!”

  As revealed by the flashlight Ifiyah’s body had undergone a sea change. Her jacket and shirt had been removed. As had most of her torso. I could see yellow ribs glinting in the dim light. I couldn’t see her face or her left arm—they might have been lost in the shadows. They might have been.

  “Ayaan,” I said, softly, “let’s think before—”

  I heard the bullet snap through the air. I heard it splinter Gary’s skull. I felt something dry and powdery splatter across my face and chest as Gary’s body slumped away from me, spinning down to collapse on its side. I reached down and picked up my own flashlight. Switched it on and pointed it at him.

  The smartest dead man in the world had a finger-wide hole in his right temple. There was no blood but something grey oozed from the wound—brains, I would imagine. His body flexed and twisted spasmodically for a while, then it stopped.

  Together Ayaan and I picked up his rubbery form and threw him over the railing into the pit of darkness below, down into the DVD section of the megastore. Neither of us could stand to look at the dead thing, the twice dead thing that had moved and talked but didn't anymore.

  END OF PART ONE OF MONSTER ISLAND

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  The gunshot woke the girls, of course. Ayaan rushed to throw her blazer over Ifiyah’s ravaged form so the others wouldn’t see what Gary had done to her. I tried to explain as calmly as I could that she was gone, and Gary too. There was some wailing and crying and a few of the girls offered up prayers for Ifiyah. None of us slept after that.

  Whatever Gary had done to Ifiyah, she didn’t reanimate. Either he ate her brain or… hell. I didn’t understand how the Epidemic worked. All I knew was that she didn’t get up again.

  In the first light of day I heard a tiny sound, a tinny sound like a bell ringing somewhere. “What was that?” I whispered, thinking of the bells that rang when you walked into a bodega in this city. This was the Virgin Megastore, though, and the doors were locked up tight—we checked. The sound was not repeated.

  I couldn’t relax, couldn’t get comfortable, though fatigue softened my head and made my thoughts slow and cold as glaciers moving through an ice age, growing a few inches a year it felt like. I stood and watched the dead outside pressing up against the windows and didn’t have the mental energy to plan or consider options. I barely noticed when one of the dead men slumped to the ground and others surged in to take his place.

  A woman with a long open wound on her arm and an Yves-St.-Laurent bag still dangling from the crook of her elbow slapped the glass with a greasy palm and then fell, her body held up for a moment by the crowd behind her. She slid down the glass, her flabby cheek rippling where it pressed up against the window until she landed on the sidewalk outside. A teenage boy in a white t-shirt climbed on top of her but then he too collapsed.

  Here and there others fell—singly at first, then in great clumps that rolled backwards like waves receding from a shoreline. I grabbed my rifle, thinking this must be some trick. But that had been Ifiyah’s mistake, of course, to think the dead were capable of subterfuge. As far as I could tell they functioned automatically with no art or thought required. As they fell away from the megastore sunlight streaked in through the windows and lit up the faces of the girls.

  “They dhimasha, commander,” Fathia said, as if she were giving me a report from the front. They are dying, is my best translation.

  I could see that for myself. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of dead people who had mobbed the megastore trying to get at us only a few were still standing and they were clutching their heads and wandering aimlessly around Union Square. They seemed less interested in us than in whatever had claimed the rest. Almost certainly that was giving them too much credit but that’s what it looked like.

  Leadership, I was told once by a Regional Field Head for the Disarmament Project in Sudan, has less to do with making the best decision than making a decision. “Get your things, we’re leaving,” I told the girls.

  They snapped to it. Prayer mats were rolled up, weapons were checked and thrown over shoulders. Fathia and Leyla, the youngest girl, moved to collect Ifiyah’s body, rolling her up in their mats.

  I unlocked the door but Ayaan was the first one out, her weapon swinging wildly as she tried to cover each of the stragglers in turn. They didn’t react to her presence at all. I shuffled the rest of the girls out the door and then took up the rear. I caught myself about to yell out an order and stopped myself—the noise might have broken the dead out of their spell—and instead jogged forward to tap Ayaan’s shoulder. I pointed in the direction of the river.

  It was all she needed. She threw three quick hand signals at the girls and we broke into a run, not so much a sprint (we were each carrying twenty pounds of gear at the least) as a loping jog but there was urgency there, believe me. At first we had to leap over piles of bodies (or just step on them in a couple of places) but beyond the periphery of the Square the sidewalks were clear. Sixth avenue passed. Seventh. I slowed momentarily outside of Western Beef, wondering if this was where our luck ended but the dead had deserted the place. Every walking corpse in the Village must have been there at the megastore because we saw only a handful on our way back to the Hudson and those were easily dodged. Once we were past Sixth Avenue the spell wore off—they came at us as determined as ever, but just as slowly, too.

  As we ran past their rotten clutching hands I felt a certain real relief that we were back on familiar ground again. Maybe we were running for our lives and being chased by the dead but that was better than what we were leaving behind. Whatever had slain the dead in Union Square had to be big and powerful and I didn’t relish finding out what it wanted from me.

  The thought that it might be benevolent, this unseen force that claimed the dead for its own, never even occurred to me. Ever since the Epidemic started there was nothing truly good or clean left in this world. Anything that seemed that way had to come with strings attached.

  At the river we stopped on the dock and waved our arms. The Arawelo stood out in the water about a hundred yards with no one visible on deck but we were too out of breath to think the worst. After a minute or two Mariam came up on deck, her blazer off and Osman’s fishing hat perched low over her eyes. She made some frantic gesture toward the hatches and the two sailors emerged from below decks, looking as if they’d been caught at something salacious.

  I didn’t give a damn what they’d been up to. They brought the boat in to the dock and threw us lines so we could tie it up. In a minute we were on board and we cast off again.

  I guess leaving the megastore in such a hurry really had been the right decision.

  When I finally sat down I found I was ravenous. I called for canjeero, a flat Somali bread that was our staple food on the boat. Osman rubbed his head and squinted at me for a while before he decided what he was going to say.

  “You in charge now, Dekalb? You’re the weyn nin?” He glanced around at the girls. “Ifiyah didn’t come back, I see.”

  I made no comment. Osman and I had possessed a sort of easy camaraderie on the voyage to New York. Two grown men on a ship full of children—it would have been hard not to bond. Now I was changed, though, in some subtle but very real way. I had fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a crowd of my enemies. I had ordered soldiers to shoot to kill. I had lead the gir
ls to safety—and I had also let one of the dead eat their commanding officer. It made it hard to fall in with his breezy laissez-faire attitude. I wanted to order him to shut up, to leave me alone. I didn't, though. I guess I hadn't changed that much.

  “At least tell me you got the drugs and we can go home!” He raised both hands in the air, surrendering to his disbelief. My silence left him high and dry and slowly he lowered his arms. We both knew we couldn’t return to Somalia without the medical supplies. We had failed to find them and in the process we lost four of our number. I had nothing to add to that so I kept quiet.

  “Well that is just fucked up, sir, yes, sir!” Osman said and flipped me a one-finger salute.

  I didn't bother to respond. Why argue with the obvious?

  Chapter Two

  fingers digging, twisting, pressing open wound smell of frying bacon laughing dark dark dark cold hungry fingers digging, grabbing, tearing—

  Gary was losing. Dying. His spark, his animating force was draining out of him, out of the hole in his head.

  do better

  A voice... a voice out of the silence, mocking him. Shut up, Gary thought. Just shut up and let me die in peace.

  Gary was falling.

  Falling, free and weightless for just a moment in the darkness, even the yellow cones of the flashlights lost to him now in this comfortable quiet blindness he tumbled as he fell, tossed from the railing, ejected from paradise into the depths of the megastore. Colliding, his back striking the soft rubber handrail of an escalator but at this speed everything was hard, so hard and brittle and he could feel his vertebrae snapping one after the other, T6, then T7, T8 all gone, pulverized as his body folded like a spring-loaded pocketknife across the handrail, never walk again ha ha ha.

  In the darkness, the darkness of blindness, there was this shape, though, this white tree shape like something burned into Gary’s retinas, the flash, the muzzle flash of an assault rifle the last thing he saw the last thing he would ever see, it looked kind of like a tree, maybe the branches were the veins in his eyes lit up as they exploded from the hydrostatic shock of the gunshot, maybe they weren’t branches, though, maybe—

  Gary slid to the floor in an ungainly heap.

  fingers fingers fingers in the pie, dig around, wiggle it around

  The energy he'd taken from Ifiyah's dying body could only go so far. Oozing out of him this unlife, this half light was flickering away.

  Start again.

  White and fat, fleshy almost the tree rose out of fertile ground to stretch bright leaves smeared across the sky, its fat fleshy trunk pulsing with life but no, FLASH shattered, the tree had been shattered by lightning or by rain, just a trunk now, Gary could see it, its limbs broken and scattered around its base, just a trunk sticking up out of the ground, fractured, a big knot right in the middle of the tree like a surprised mouth open in an eternal O as if frozen in the moment of surprise, the moment when the news comes I'm sorry there were complications, she didn't suffer, the tree is just a stump.

  All of this splattered across his vision. The only thing he could see. His muscles—his body, this rubbery doll kept moving underneath him. Spasms dragged his head across the floor, just die already, he could feel the bullet in his head so hot so hot and solid as it floated in the liquid, in the jelly of his brains. That was it, of course, the end, finito. The dead die but twice and this is it, this is, of course, it. Massive gunshot trauma to the head. Code blue. The end.

  Just a stump. Still. Pulsing with life. Goddamn well throbbing with it.

  He still had a little control. A trembling frail energy that was his, his to use even as it frittered away. His hand went up to his temple and found the wound, the entry hole. Dampness on his fingers.

  God. Disgusting. The hole was wide enough to stick a finger inside.

  the sound a mop makes when it hits the floor

  …but that was a memory, not a real sound. Gary probed again with his finger and heard the same sound. Almost like pressing a key on a piano. He pressed again and this time… this time he felt something real. Hard metal that resisted his finger.

  The bullet.

  sucking life from somewhere, jesus you could see it move as it throbbed as the fluids flowed as the life moved under the fleshy white bark, inside the wet fibrous wood just a stump hear the creaking as its fibers crack open and apart but taking life from somewhere

  Almost over now. Why keep striving, when there was no hope?

  PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF.

  maybe they weren’t branches maybe they were roots

  Thought became mercurial, slippery as a fish in a stream as your fingers reach for it, silver and bright under the splashing water, silvery and hard in your head reaching for it, going to take two fingers have to open up just a little wider come on say ah, aaahhh very good, you are easily the bravest little boy it has ever been my pleasure to perform open brain surgery on tee hee two fingers in, does it hurt? Does it hurt? Nothing hurts right now, man, I am comfortably numb like the song goes and now I’ve got two fingers in but the visuals, man, like this tree, this TREE—

  Its roots go down forever. Up above in the sunlight there may be golden apples, tight little bundles of life force the color of… of… just such a lovely color nothing you could see with your eyes, though. None of the seven colors they teach you about in school. And up above, not here. Dekalb and the girls, sure, two dozen of them waiting, hunkering down in the dark so afraid and cold and hungry and alone but they didn’t know, they couldn’t know just how beautifully alive they were. Up there in the sunlight, metaphorical of course because certainly it’s still night up there it must be pitch dark in the megastore but in this metaphorical space, this place you’ve fled to because you’re literally trying to dig a bullet out of your head with your fingers and it's JUST NOT WORKING, in this metaphorical space Dekalb etc. are up there, up there in a summer day compared to what’s down here, down deep deep sixed eighty-sixed down in Davy Jones’ locker, down among the dead men, the dead men, the dead men

  YES.

  because they, the dead men, were there too, if only dimly perceptible. Down underneath in the soil in the dirt where the roots dug endlessly like blind worms searching, scratching, like fingers digging for the bullet because oh, yes, just grab for that brass ring, that lead sinker in the muddle, stop that, in the middle of your gelatin head.

  But, Gary thought, I digress. I was speaking of the dead men who feed the tree. Stinking little buggers, stinking of the life force because it was positively dripping from them, fuming up like steam off their backs as it evaporated away not the golden shiny life of Dekalb and friends, no, this was the shadow of that energy—lacking dimension, cold instead of hot, dark instead of bright—but it was still energy of a kind. Enough to feed the tree. Enough to feed anybody if you could tap it and yes, Gary could. Gary could. Because unlike the discrete packets of energy inside of Dekalb’s Angels, those ripe bursting fruits of life force, the dead men were all connected, interconnected, tied together in a web of fuming darkness. There were what, six, seven billion people before the Epidemic but now there was only one dead Humanity. The thing, the Epidemic, the disaster that brought the dead back joined them together, made them as one, like a swarm of locusts so thick they darken the sky or like a cloud, an infinite number of tiny droplets of water but where does one end and one begin there is no answer it’s a zen koan there is only one of us with many bodies and I am its consciousness. I am its commander.

  GOOD. NOW OPEN YOURSELF.

  That voice again...

  Remember Trucker Cap? Remember him, because Gary sure did remember how Trucker Cap had attacked him and Gary had told him to stop and he did. And Gary had told him to fuck off and die and lo and behold so it had come to pass because Gary, alone among the dead, could still think. He could still reach out. He alone had the brains (ha!) to hack into that network. He was connected to them all, he was one of them, but he alone could exploit that.

  He sucked dark energy f
rom the crowd that surrounded the megastore, sucked it out from a distance and felt it surge up through his arm, thrilling into his fingers and yes and yes and yes there it was god fucking damn you there he had it it slipped away but he grabbed it again broken nails sinking into the metal, digging in like talons and eureka he had it and he pulled, so much power in his hand he had to make a conscious act of will to keep from yanking the fucking thing out and then it was in his hand wet and hot and he clutched it, squeezed it, the goddamn bullet was out of his head. It was out of his head. The damage was done, brain tissue torn up like a wet wad of toilet paper skin bone and muscle pierced vertebrae broken, shattered but you know what? None of it mattered.

  The tree pulsed with life as it would forever. Fucking forever man I’m going to live forever and you cannot stop me, Gary thought, he wanted to scream it at fucking Ayaan and fucking Dekalb you cannot stop me I am billions strong.

  He dropped the bullet and it made a sound like a tiny bell ringing. From above he heard a tense whisper. “What was that?”

  He heard it. He could hear again.

  When dawn came and with it the light, he could see again. He was standing, standing in the shadows, looking at an Olsen Twins DVD in his hand and he could read the smallest text on the back of the jewel case. He could see. He could stand and walk. Life (of a sort, the dark sort) pulsed through him so furiously, so strongly he was surprised he wasn’t glowing.

  NOW. COME TO ME.

  That voice! Where did it come from?

  Chapter Three

  Fine blue tattoos covered him from head to toe. A rope tied tight around his neck and an armband made of fur were his only clothing but he stood there unashamed and looked down at Gary with a kind of haughty pride. A particularly stuck up teacher staring down at his best pupil.

  "Come to me," he said again, and then he was gone. In his place was an image of a temple or a library or something. Lots of steps leading up to a facade of columns. Gary knew the place but its name wouldn't come to him.