Monster Island

by David Wellington

  Climbing the escalator took a couple of tries. Gary’s brain continued to heal itself but his motor control was the slowest in coming back. Lucidity had returned like walking into air conditioning on a scorcher of a day but the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other was still mostly beyond him. The seizures that racked his body and left his brain fizzing like a well-shaken seltzer bottle didn’t help either. He would progress a few yards only to find himself lying on the floor with no explanation how he’d gotten there, his hands clenched like claws and his ankles twisted beneath him.

  In time he reached the ground floor of the megastore, taking the last few steps on his hands and knees. He rose shakily and lurched for the door only to be stricken by the sight of what lay outside.

  Bodies—hundreds of bodies—in an advanced state of decay, clogging up the sidewalks and slumped at random over the abandoned cars. Putrefying flesh lay in heaps under the mid-morning sun, not all of it recognizably human anymore.

  Jesus, Gary thought. Had he really done all this damage himself?

  These weren’t like the undead he’d seen before. These were just… rotting meat, yellow bones pointing out of deliquescing flesh with the consistency of runny cheese.

  Something stirred in the Square to the north and he dodged behind a Jeep, not wanting to get shot in the head again. He needn’t have worried, though. It was one of the dead. A dead woman in a print dress stained with old blood and darker fluids. She came closer, waddling as if she couldn’t bend at the knees and he saw she was badly damaged. Most of the skin was gone from her face and a clump of maggots perched in the hollow of her clavicles like a writhing scarf. Good god, how could she let that happen? Disgusting as they might be the maggots were alive. They could have given her the energy to repair her body. Instead they were feeding on her.

  Two others appeared behind her, both of them men. They too had seen better days. The walking dead of New York tended to have a few wounds on their bodies, sure, and maybe their skin tone was a shade paler and bluer than necessary—Gary thought furthermore of the dead veins that lined his own face—but never had they let themselves go this badly. One of these newcomers had no nose at all, just a dark inverted V in the middle of his face. The other had lost his eyelids so he seemed to be constantly staring in horrified wonder.

  Gary reached out across the network of death that connected him to these shambling messes. The effort made his brain wriggle in his head and a searing white pain flashed down his back but the contact was made. He could feel the dark energy fuming out of these wretches and he understood a little of what must have happened. In his desperation he had sucked the energy out of the crowd around the megastore to save his own unlife and in the process had accelerated the decay of his victims. In the new order of things the dead ate the living in a vain attempt to prop up their own sagging existence, to fuel their unlife. Gary had undone all that striving and hard work and now the rotting piles of corpses outside looked like they had been dead all along, dead and decomposing since the Epidemic began. There was no cheating death, Gary realized, only delaying it—and when it finally caught up it did so with a vengeance.

  The noseless one reached out and touched Gary’s face with an unfeeling hand. The fingers draped lifelessly across his cheek. Gary didn’t flinch. How could he? There was no malice in the gesture. It had all the emotional resonance of a muscular twitch.

  Most of the undead had lost the battle with death when Gary stole their essence. Those few strong enough to survive were left with only the barest tatters of energy remaining. Hence the broken and rigid undead he saw before him. Perhaps worse than their physical condition was their mental state. He had stolen from them the remnant of intellect that kept them hunting for food. Their hunger remained—he could feel it yawning inside of them, burning more fiercely than ever—but he had stolen from them the knowledge (no matter how vestigial) of how to slake it. He had taken what little mind they had so now they no longer remembered how to eat. They could only wander aimlessly as their bodies fell to pieces.

  Gary felt no guilt. It had been necessary. He had been dying for a second and final time and only their stolen energy had been able to keep his consciousness going. Why, then, did he identify so strongly with them, why did he feel so much empathy? He was tied to them, he realized. He was one of them. He was part of the network of death. His ability to reach out and steal their energy defined him. There was no real line of division, no watershed between himself and these near-lifeless hulks that wobbled without purpose up and down Fourteenth street. If he missed a few meals, if he didn’t keep feeding himself he would become just like them.

  He sank to his knees with the realization of his true nature. The ravaged dead came, drawn by some flickering instinct to gather together, and stood around him until their corrupted faces swam in his vision. They did not frighten him anymore.

  He was undead. He was one of them. As their hands reached for him he knew they weren’t attacking him—they no longer possessed the brainpower necessary for aggression. They were reaching for him as a gesture of solidarity. They knew what he was.

  Gary was a monster, too.

  The dead man with no eyelids stared at him with an openness, an innocence that Gary was astounded he'd never seen before. There was no evil there, no horror. Just simple need. Their faces were no more than inches away from each other. Gary leaned his head forward and touched his forehead to the slack, papery skin of the other’s cheek.

  When he had recovered himself he commanded the faceless woman to help him to his feet, and she did. Come, he told them, summoning them just as his mysterious benefactor had summoned him. Together the small band of them, Gary and the mindless dead, headed north toward Midtown. It felt so very good, Gary decided, not to be alone anymore.

  Gary had life once more, and now he also had a purpose. He would find this strange tattooed man and learn what he knew. Gary had so many questions and for some reason he was convinced the benefactor would have some answers. He kept his little band heading resolutely northward, up into Midtown. They would enter the park soon enough. Was that their destination? In a way it didn't matter. In some zen fashion the journey was enough.

  When he saw the vision again the benefactor's face was furrowed with concern. "You're getting closer but be careful. I think you are about to be attacked."

  "Huh?" Gary asked but the blue tattooed man was gone. Gary turned to look at the noseless man on his right, wondering if the other dead had seen the apparition or if it was just some glitch in Gary's personal nervous system.

  The man with no eyelids stared hard at something in the middle distance. Before Gary could speak he slumped lifelessly to the ground. Gary looked down and saw the bullet wound in the back of the dead man's head long before he heard the gunshot.

  The next round hit the sidewalk and sent chips of concrete rolling across Gary's feet. He was being shot at. "Not fucking again," he whined.

  Chapter Four

  I shaved with an electric razor plugged into a junction box in the wheelhouse. Every time I turned the razor on or off I got a little shock but it was safer than trying to use a straight razor on a rocking boat and when I was done I felt infinitely better about myself and the mission’s chances.

  Which is not to say, I thought as I rinsed out the razor with water from the Hudson, that I thought anything would be easy. Just that we might not all die.

  When I’d finished I called for my maps of New York. I studied them for a long time, thinking there had to be a better way. There were hospitals all over the city. Most of them were on the East Side, which meant they were impossible to get to due to the raft of human corpses clogging the East River. All of them, I knew, would have been looted during the evacuation.

  I still knew one place where we could find the drugs we needed. The UN building—my first choice. It was also impossible to access from the east.

  “Osman,” I shouted, standing up, “come look at this.” I showed him my map and indicated our
next stop—Forty-Second Street in Midtown. He studied the West Side, reading the names of the buildings.

  “‘The Theater District,’” he read aloud. “Dekalb, you want to take in a show?”

  I ran a finger along Forty-Second, from west all the way to east. To the southern end of the UN complex. “It’s a big street—wide sidewalks, less chance of getting stuck. It was one of the busiest streets in the world, before the Epidemic, so it might even be clear of stalled cars. The authorities would have tried to keep it moving when they evacuated the survivors.”

  The captain just stared at me. He didn’t understand, or he didn’t believe I was willing to do this. But until I had those drugs in my possession I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t see my little Sarah again, couldn’t see she was okay with my own eyes. I would do anything for that.

  “We can walk from here to the UN in a couple of hours. Get the drugs and walk back. It’ll take less than a day.”

  “You are forgetting,” Osman said, “that the dead are risen. In their millions. This was a busy street, once? I tell you it still will be.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I have an idea of what we can do about that.” Now that Gary was dead. Now that we could once more count on the undead all being stupid. Stupid enough. I looked back at the city but not at the buildings or the haunted streets. There. I pointed. “Our first stop is the Department of Sanitation pier. They’ll have what we need.”

  Osman might have been confused by this but he bent over his controls and got the trawler moving. We pulled in alongside a half-full garbage barge, the girls in position at the rail, their rifles sticking out like oars from the side of the ship. On top of the wheelhouse Mariam called down that she saw no sign of movement anywhere on the pier.

  “This is where they used to collect the city’s refuse,” I told Ayaan as we secured the trawler to the side of the barge. “Easy enough to get to by water but from the land side it’s a fortress. They didn’t want anyone getting in here and getting sick—talk about potential lawsuits—so it should still be secure.”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. We both knew it had been a long time since there had been any authorities in this city. The dead could get anywhere if they were persistent enough. They could have jumped in the water and then climbed up the side of the barge. They could have climbed over the fence from the shore side. The undead aren’t great climbers from what I’ve seen but if there had been something alive on the pier, something they could eat, they would have found a way.

  Five of the girls jumped down onto the barge and then across its stern to the pier beyond. They watched each other, one moving forward while the others covered her back. I followed behind, as always, a little creeped out but not too worried. Most of the pier was open to the air, a zone of filthy cranes and winches and massive dented steel dumpsters. Rusted metal everywhere. I told the girls to be careful—it was unlikely that they’d had the proper immunizations. They acknowledged me but they were too young to worry about tetanus. At the shore end of the pier we found a pre-fabricated shed with a padlocked door. SAFETY EQUIPMENT had been stenciled next to the door in dripping silver spray paint. Just what I was looking for.

  I found a piece of metal rebar about as long as my arm and fitted it through the loop of the cheap padlock. A couple of heaves and it gave, sending vibrations rattling up my arm as pieces the lock went flying. They glittered in the sunlight at my feet.

  Inside a stripe of sunlight lay draped across the floor. Dust motes twirled in the air. I spotted a desk with a small reading lamp, strewn with half-completed forms. An eyewash station and a big first aid kit. Fathia grabbed that and carried it back to the boat. We might just need it before this was over. At the far end of the shed stood a row of three freshly-painted lockers. I pulled on the latch of the nearest one and the girls started screaming. Leyla lifted her rifle and fired half a dozen rounds into the human shape that came tumbling out of the locker.

  “Stop!” I shouted, knowing it was too late. I picked up the bright yellow suit off the ground and poked a finger through the bullet hole in its faceshield. LEVEL A/FULL ENCAPSULATION, I read from a tag attached to the HazMat suit’s zipper. LIQUIDPROOF AND VAPORPROOF, it assured me. Well, not anymore.

  “I’m going to open another locker. Don’t shoot this time, okay?” I asked. The girls nodded in chorus. They looked terrified, as if the next locker might reveal some magical bird that would flap out and peck at their eyes. Instead it held a duplicate of the first suit, as did the third locker. I tossed one to Ayaan and she just stared at me. “Now there are only two suits. Guess who just got volunteered for this mission?” I asked her.

  Cruel, I know. She hadn’t exactly been the soul of warmth to me, though. She was also one of the few girls I trusted to not panic when we walked right into a crowd of the undead protected by only three layers of military grade Tyvek. Tyvek, of course, being a very high-tech kind of paper.

  “Normally,” I explained to her, “these suits keep out contaminants. This time they’ll hold in our smell. The dead won’t attack something that smells like plastic and looks like a Teletubby.”

  “You think this, or you know it?” she asked, holding the bulky yellow suit at arm’s length.

  “I’m counting on it.” That was the best I could offer.

  We took the suits back to the boat and had Osman steam north for Forty-Second street. There was plenty to do. We had to sterilize the outsides of the suits, read instruction manuals and then run drills on how to put on and use the SCBA air recirculator units, teach each other how to put on the suits (a two-person job) without contaminating the surface. We had to practice talking to each other through the mylar faceshields and even how to walk so we didn’t trip over the baggy legs of the suits.

  I had been through a crash course in how to use a Level B suit back when I was investigating weaponized nuclear facilities in Libya. There had been a three hour seminar with PowerPoint presentations and a thirty-question quiz at the end. I had paid attention because a breach in that suit might have meant being exposed to carcinogens. This time the smallest tear in the suit would surely mean being surrounded and devoured by the hungry dead.

  I made sure we went through all of our drills twice.

  Chapter Five

  Author’s Note: “Monster Island” ran a contest last month in which we promised a part in the novel to whoever was the first to bring us two hundred hits. The judging was too close to call so we have two winners, Paul Ford of www.ftrain.com and DeadKev of www.allthingszombie.com. Our thanks go out to these two and also everyone who has linked to, reviewed, or read the site. I hope you all enjoy the following chapter. –David Wellington

  Gary stepped aside and the next shot missed him completely. He glanced at his companions—at the noseless man and the faceless woman and gestured for them to spread out and find cover. They communicated their inability to do so—they lacked the brainpower to identify what was covered and what wasn’t—so he wasted another second telling them mentally to duck down behind abandoned cars. The violence of the moment had sharpened him somehow, thrown everything into high contrast.

  “Kev—I’m reloading—get this one!” a living human shouted. Gary swiveled to track the voice and saw a big guy with short curly black hair standing under an awning. The living man worked nervously at the action of a long-barreled hunting rifle that looked like a stick in his enormous hands. He wore a rumpled tan shirt and a nametag that read HELLO MY NAME IS Paul. There were two of them, Gary inferred, this Paul and another one named Kev. Gary stepped closer to the shooter and sent instructions to his companions to spread out and try to flank the assailants.

  Something buzzed past Gary’s eyes. A mosquito, possibly, but when he followed its trajectory it ended in a crater in a plate glass window no wider than his pinky nail. Not a bullet, Gary decided, but some kind of projectile nonetheless.

  He realized for the first time that he himself was completely exposed. He stepped into the shadow of a building and s
canned the street for possibilities. He couldn’t run—his legs felt like pieces of dead wood every time he tried. He couldn’t shoot back. Even if he’d possessed a gun his hands shook too much for that. He would have to try to flank these survivors and cut them off. Reaching out along the wavelength of the dead Gary had his companions move farther up and down the street. He had to remind them to keep their heads down. He picked up an empty soda can from the street and threw it as hard as he could in the direction of the unseen shooter.

  It had the desired effect. The shooter—his nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS Kev—came dashing out from behind a mailbox as if he’d been stung by a bee. “Paul!” he shouted. “We have to get out of here!”

  Paul lifted his rifle and pointed it in Gary’s direction but didn’t shoot. “He’s over there somewhere. Do you see him?”

  “Forget him! They’re everywhere!” Kev rushed to the side of a derelict limousine and yanked open the door. He clambered inside the vehicle until Gary could see nothing but the long, thin barrel of a rifle sticking out. The weapon looked like a toy.

  It couldn’t possibly be a bee bee gun, could it? Gary suppressed the urge to laugh. He had a little protection there in the shadows but Paul looked ready to shoot anything that moved. The survivor wasn’t about to run—which meant Gary had worked his way into a stalemate. He pushed his consciousness outward, tapped into the nervous systems of his fellow dead. He could feel a group of them just a few blocks away, clustered around the twisted remains of a burnt-out hot dog stand. It was harder to maintain contact with these—unlike the faceless woman or the noseless man this new group had eaten recently and were therefore stronger—but he knew how to get their attention. Food, he whispered to them, food here. Come here for food.

  Paul fired his rifle and a window near Gary’s head collapsed in fragments. Gary thought the big guy must be firing blind but he couldn’t be sure. The reinforcements were still minutes away—too far to be of any help, probably. He would have to take a chance and strike out on his own.