Monster Island

by David Wellington

  Gary looked down into the water. He could see Faceless, illuminated by the sparkling flare, struggle to pull the incendiary out of her midriff. “She’ll be fine,” Gary said, as much menace as he could get dripping from his voice. “You, on the other hand…”

  “You are dead.” The sailor’s face went blank. “But you can talk. Listen. Come belowdecks. We’ll, we’ll discuss this like rational people. Please.”

  Gary felt like laughing but he just nodded. He went down into the belly of the ship, leaving Noseless to help Faceless get back onboard when she could. Gary ducked his head to get through a low galley and followed his guide into a cramped cabin at the fore of the boat. “You want some coffee?” the sailor asked, pouring himself a mug from a tiny electric coffee maker. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. I’m Phil, by the way, Phil Chambers from, from Albany originally. Things were bad there. We came down the river hoping to find a safe place… Saugerties was on fire and now, New York City, this is it, I mean there’s no place else to go but out into the Atlantic. This is the end of the line.”

  “Yes,” Gary said. It would only take a moment to kill this man. One quick bite on the throat. A deep laceration on the carotid artery.

  Chambers pulled some charts out of a pigeonhole and spread them across a table. He stared hard into his mug as if he had discovered an insect inside. He didn’t seem able to drink. “Please don’t do this,” he said. “My kids are in the stern. They’ve got nobody else. Oh, Jesus, no. No, you won’t take my kids too. Please.”

  Gary stepped closer until he could feel the man’s body heat. Chambers was shaking and he stank of bad sweat. Gary grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head.

  “I’m begging you, guy, I’m begging. I’m begging.”

  Real tears rolled down the man’s cheek. Gary could taste them on his neck when he bit in to the yielding flesh.

  He’d thought it would be difficult when they pleaded for their lives. He had dreaded the moment when the old woman started blubbering.

  It turned out to make no difference at all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jack looked at me over his shoulder as I approached. He had the girl—the one who had called the cat and been bitten by an undead feline for her trouble—behind a locked steel gate at the bottom of a stairwell. She looked more sullen then afraid. “Hold on, Dekalb,” Jack said. “I’ve got to see to her first.”

  I nodded and sat down on a crate. We were at the last safe barrier on the Seven Train Platform, according to a sign written in sharpie and taped to the wall. The tunnels themselves couldn’t be closed off so the survivors had simply sealed off all the platforms, sticking to the concourses and their connecting passageways where they could be assured of their safety. Shailesh had told me that they had never actually seen one of the undead down on the tracks but that Jack refused to take the chance.

  The girl—her nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS Carly—had been put out on the platform to see if she died or not. If she didn’t, she could come back in. If she did Jack would put a bullet in her head. Either way he would be spending the night sitting next to her. He did what he could, passing a first aid kit through the bars. She dabbed mercurochrome on her arms until they turned bright orange.

  “Did you forget what I taught you?” Jack asked in a flat voice. As if he was simply asking for basic data. “You never touch anything that’s been outside. Not until it’s cleared.”

  “It looked so scared and I just wanted…” Carly shrugged. “It’s not like it matters. We’re all going to die anyway.”

  “You can’t give in to that attitude now. Especially not now, when we’ve actually got a chance to get out of here. You haven’t heard about his boat?”

  The girl stared at me. There was nothing but naked antipathy in her eyes, a complete refusal to connect with me. “Yeah? Well, thanks for making my death extra ironic, grandpa.”

  “You don’t talk like that to your elders,” Jack said. He didn’t raise his voice but his tone made my skin crawl. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, sir. I just don’t give a fuck, sir.” She turned around and started walking away from the gate. “Enough of this,” she shouted back. “I’m going to Brooklyn.” Only a single fluorescent tube still burned out there and she was quickly swallowed up by shadows.

  Jack didn’t call after her. Instead he slumped down on the tiled floor, his back to a wall so he could keep an eye on the gate. He picked up his SPAS-12 again and laid it across his knees. Reaching into his pocket he took out a shell—a two and a half inch tungsten slug, unless I missed my guess.

  “What are her chances?” I asked.

  “About eighty-twenty, based on what I’ve seen. Talk to me, Dekalb. Tell me why you keep chasing after me while I’m just trying to do my job.” The words were too open and vulnerable to belong to this man. He was clearly under immense stress. I thought about leaving him alone and coming back the next day but I had a feeling all of his days were like this.

  “You sent out two people a couple of days ago. Paul and Kev, I think.”

  He nodded and pressed the magazine cut-off of his weapon and opened the slide. He snapped the slug into the barrel and closed it back up again. “Yes,” he confirmed.

  “So you’re not trapped in here. You can send people out when you need to—to get supplies, say, or whatever. I’m not saying it isn’t dangerous but it can be done. You must know some tricks to staying alive here that we don’t.”

  Without moving his gaze away from the barred gate in front of him he raised the corners of his mouth. I wouldn’t call it a smile. “Sure. We know one great trick. It’s called desperation. When we get hungry enough somebody always volunteers to go out and get more food. Sometimes people just get bored and go up on their own. Some of them even come back. We’re running short of everything, Dekalb. I don’t know if you noticed but one resource we’re low on is single men, eighteen to thirty-five. They’re the ones who volunteer first.”

  “Wow,” I said. I had thought there must be some secret.

  “There’s nothing to do down here but wait. Some people can’t take that.”

  I understood, kind of. “I have an idea but it’s dangerous. Very dangerous. We need to get your people to the river. There’s an APC just west of Port Authority.”

  Jack nodded. “I’ve seen it. I’ve even thought of that myself. It would still run, assuming the fuel hasn’t evaporated and the battery still has a charge and none of the belts in the engine have rotted away. Sure, we could back it up to one of the gates and load people onboard hassle-free. We’d have to make a bunch of trips but yeah, it would get us to your boat just fine.”

  Warming to the idea I pointed out the flaw. “Somebody would have to go out there, get it started, and drive it back here, though. If the engine didn’t work on the first try they’d have to try to repair it. The dead would be on them the entire time. I have some soldiers I can bring in—Somalis—but they don’t know how to maintain an American armored personnel carrier. I’m thinking that maybe you do.”

  “Correct.”

  Okay. We were getting somewhere. “There’s just one hitch. None of this can happen until I complete my original mission.” He looked over sharply and I held up my hands for patience. “Look, there are political issues. Somalia’s in the hands of a warlord. I need a good reason to convince her to accept a bunch of white refugees who aren’t soldiers, who are going to be a drain on her resources. We need to be realistic.”

  If I wanted to manipulate him that was the word to use. This was a man who had stripped himself of all pretense, all sentiment. Realism was his only philosophy. He nodded, once. I tried talking to him about what I needed to do and how he could help but he was done with that conversation. He just shut down, conserving energy maybe. He was the hardest man I ever met. It gave me hope, though. If anybody could get me to the UN building it was Jack.

  We sat in silence for quite a while. I thought about heading back up to the concourse, to Ayaan and the other
survivors but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t handle the way they looked at me—as if I was a tasteless joke, their fondest hope dangled before them after weeks and months of being told that nothing good could ever happen again. I couldn’t face their weird games based on a popular culture that had ceased to exist.

  The silence was just starting to really get to me—I was ready to start talking to myself, just to hear something—when it was broken by Carly. We couldn’t see her, she stayed to the shadows but we heard her footsteps echoing on the deserted platform. Jack raised his shotgun to track the sound. That felt callous to me but then we both knew that she might be coming back changed.

  “I threw up,” she said from the darkness. “That’s bad, right?”

  “Probably. It might just be nerves.” Jack rose slowly to his feet, the weapon still in his hands but not necessarily pointing at her anymore. “Come here. You’re probably cold and hungry. I can help with that.”

  Ifiyah had been cold and hungry after she got bit. I wondered how many times Jack had sat this horrible vigil. Carly came up to the bars and we saw at once she was going to die. Her face was covered in a sheen of sweat and her eyes were completely bloodshot. Her arms, where the cat had scratched her, were puffy and dark with congested blood. Jack offered her a blanket and a can of chipped beef. She took them both without comment. I watched her face as she ate. The braces shredded the sensitive inner skin of her lips as she wolfed the food down. She noticed me staring and stopped for a second. “Get a good look, perv,” she said. “I’m not going to get any prettier.”

  I looked away, flushing with embarrassment. I’d been thinking about Sarah, wondering if she was going to need an orthodontist soon. I couldn’t very well explain that to Carly, though. She wouldn’t have understood.

  We sat with her all through the night. I dozed off now and again but I would always wake to find Jack sitting perfectly still. The shotgun never strayed from its position athwart his knees. Each time I looked Carly had taken another turn for the worse. She started panting, her lungs struggling to keep up with her body’s demand for oxygen. Her fingers turned into painful-looking sausages, so thick the skin split around her nails and they bled dark blood. She started raving about four in the morning—begging for water and her mother and, more and more frequently, for meat.

  Twice Jack offered to end her suffering but both times she refused without a moment’s hesitation. “I think I’m feeling a little better,” she said, the second time. Her breathing had, in fact, calmed down. Her eyes fluttered closed and I thought maybe she would actually make it—maybe her immune system would win this fight.

  “Lay down if it’s more comfortable,” I told her. “Keep visualizing how much better you’ll feel tomorrow. If you can sleep, you probably should.”

  She didn’t respond to me. We waited a few minutes and then Jack kicked the steel gate, hard, with his boot. It clanged loud enough to hurt my ears but she didn’t so much as wince. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to do it. Stand back.”

  I shook my head. “No. No, she’s just tired—”

  Slowly she stood up from where she’d been sitting on the tiles. Her legs were unsteady beneath her and her eyes were still closed.

  “Look,” I said, “she’s okay.” I knew I was wrong but I said it anyway. She came for us hard and with all the strength she had, smashing her bloated hands and her sweat-damp face against the bars, smashing her shoulders and her hips against the steel. The cartilage in her nose snapped as she collided face-first with the barrier, her cheekbone broke and her features smeared across her face. I did step back, then. Jack raised his SPAS-12 and fired, the slug entering her left eye and coming out the back of her head with part of her skull. She stopped moving, then. The shotgun clicked as the gas-powered mechanism automatically loaded another round. He didn’t need it.

  I was breathing hard and my body was buzzing with the chemistry of panic. Jack brought the weapon up to his chest and looked over at me. “Sometimes,” he said, slowly, quietly, “I think they’d be better off if they all died in their sleep one night. Then they wouldn’t be afraid any more. Some nights I stay awake and think about how to do it.”

  He shook off the thought and when he spoke again it was with his usual confident tone. “We’ll commence with your mission tomorrow, after we’ve both had some sleep.” Then he turned and headed up the stairs.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Gary marched into the compound at Central Park like a returning hero. He felt like he should be wearing a cape. Behind him Noseless and Faceless kept easy pace with his stride.

  The work on Mael’s broch was coming along well. Two triangular support vanes rose a dozen yards in the air while one curtain wall was already higher than Gary’s head. The undead workers on the scaffolding looked unsteady at best but they lifted and carried their building materials as if they were precious relics and they placed the bricks so closely together Gary would have had a hard time getting a piece of paper between them. Groups of dead men sat in pits around the construction site, scraping the old mortar free of the bricks with their fingernails. Some used their teeth.

  Other work parties erected the scaffolding, lattices of metal pipes torn off the facades of New York’s buildings. There had never been a shortage of the stuff. The ladders and platforms thrown up by the dead were rickety and precarious and accidents were common—in the short time Gary had spent on the building site he had more than once heard the sudden crump of an undead body falling thirty feet to the mud. Their bones often shattered and their limbs useless these victims would be put to work wherever it was possible—if they could still walk they could drag sledges full of bricks, while if they could still use their arms they would be put in the cleaning pits to scrape mortar.

  Those few sorry wretches who were effectively paralyzed in accidents were still useful to Mael as taibhsear, or seers—in the most literal sense. Hoisted up and tied to the rising walls of the broch their eyes scanned the Park for their master. Eyeless himself he depended on these assistants, without whom he would be blind. Dead men climbed up on ladders to feed bits of meat to these lookouts, keeping them fresh.

  The Druid sat on a mound of piled rocks at the very center of the compound. His honor guard of mummies stood arrayed behind him, slumped against one another, clutching at their amulets and heart scarabs like a court of mentally deficient wizards. In front of Mael spread out on the ground lay a folding gas station map of the city with tokens marking the location of all known survivors. One of the mummies knelt over the map as Gary approached, removing tokens for the three locations he’d raided during the night.

  Leaning forward on his sword the color of verdigris Mael shooed the mummy away and raised his head to greet his champion.

  My gowlach curaidh returns! You’re looking hale, lad. The Great Work must agree with you.

  “I have a right to exist,” Gary demurred. “Which means I have to feed.”

  Aye, and you’ve done well. The Druid’s head slumped against his chest. Maybe too well. Did you have to be so vicious with the wee bairns?

  Gary could only shrug. “You said yourself that we’re evil, and that we need to act like it. I was just following my orders.” Gary squatted down and studied the map. There were plenty of survivors left—hundreds. He could keep this up for months and not run out of food. Any compassion or sympathy he might have once had for the living was draining out of him, perhaps as a result of being shot at every time he met them or maybe he really was becoming the creature of absolutes Mael had asked him to be. “This is what I am, right? A monster. Don’t criticize me for being good at it.”

  Mael studied him for a long moment before agreeing. Aye. Forgive an old wizard for his sentimental maundering. I’ve another task for you, lad, one I imagine you’ll take to. It’s a big job and it’ll take a thoughtful man to pull it off.

  Gary nodded. He was ready, whatever it might be. Mael had promised him that he would feel at peace once he had accepted the role fate had cast hi
m for and as usual the Druid was right. He felt strong, so much stronger than when he had crawled out of the basement of the Virgin megastore with a hole in his head. Even stronger than when he’d first awoken in a bathtub full of ice.

  A dead woman in a stained pair of jeans and a low-cut halter top that showed off her withered blue breasts stumbled forward, nearly stepping on the map. She would have been pretty, once, a Latina with a massive mane of curling hair. Now her face showed blossoming sores and clouded eyes. She looked at Gary and then at Mael and finally let her gaze drift out of focus. Not particularly strange behavior for a walking corpse but to Gary she seemed more dazed than she should be. As if she’d been drugged or put into a trance.

  You’ll need more than your usual retinue for this job. You need to learn to read the eididh, and how to lead troops into battle. This one has knowledge I want to impart in her head, if you can get to it.

  Gary licked his lips, more than a little excited. Mael had powers beyond his own, far beyond, but so far the Druid had been stingy with teaching his attack dog any new tricks. “How do I…” he asked, but he knew what the answer would be.

  Open yourself, as I’ve told you before.

  Gary nodded and reached out to grab the dead woman by the back of the neck. He tried to do what he’d done before—stroking the network of death, just as he had when he took control of his companions, just as when he had summoned the crowd that devoured the survivor Paul. He pushed until his brain was throbbing and white daggers of light leaked in around the corners of his vision but only succeeded in gaining her attention. She stared at him wide-eyed, as if fascinated by the dead veins in his cheeks.

  You can do better than that, man, Mael mocked. It’s not something you see or hear or taste—forget those things and try again!

  A little annoyed Gary tried again—and only managed to develop a buzzing in his ears. He could feel the dead blood quivering in his head and he thought for sure he would give himself an aneurysm but then, finally, something snapped and roiling shadows blossomed in his mind, streaks of darkness, of dark death energy that resolved into rays, into threads. Strands of a web that linked him to everyone around him—the dead woman, Mael, the seers hanging from the walls. He could sense Faceless and Noseless behind him.