Monster Island

by David Wellington

  I tried to bluff. “We were just looking for the drugs. Scoping out hospitals, looking for a way in to complete the original mission.”

  “Nice try. My brain is dead, not damaged. You want to kill me. I know I would do the same thing in your place. I’m a threat, a serious threat, and you want to neutralize me. Obviously I don’t want that. I’m willing to make a deal.”

  I sat down hard on the lawn. “Talk to me. The survivors—”

  “Are mine now,” he interrupted. “There’s no room for negotiation there. What I will give you is safe passage. I know you had some trouble with pigeons the other day. They’re gone now. I’m going to let you enter Manhattan just long enough to get to the UN building, get your pills, and leave. Nobody will come close to you—I can keep them back. I can protect you. You do this and then you get on your boat and you leave here forever. Sound doable?”

  “And if we try to take back the prisoners anyway?”

  “Then you get to find out why a million dead men can’t all be wrong. This is what I’m offering, Dekalb, and nothing else. Get the drugs and leave. Oh, and one other thing. Ayaan.”

  I looked over at the girl in question. She was posing for pictures—Fathia had found a Polaroid camera in one of the barracks and all the girls wanted a souvenir of their visit to New York City. She turned to look at me and smiled.

  Gary purred in my ear. “Ayaan stays here. I want to cut the skin off her in little pieces and eat them one by one. I want to have some quality time with her viscera. She shot me in the head. Nobody gets a free ride after that.”

  I put a hand over my mouth to hold in what I wanted to say to that. Not going to fucking happen, asshole. Instead I waited a moment and said “I’ll have to get back to you.” I hit END and put away the phone.

  “Dekalb,” Kreutzer said from the door of the trailer. “We’ve got image.” I followed him back into the stuffy enclosed space to see what Jack had found.

  Chapter Seven

  Gary flew with the undead pigeons on First Avenue. Through their eyes he watched as they fell, whole flocks at a time, tumbling through the air, their wingtips spinning lifelessly. Gary was a man of his word—if Dekalb wanted to take him up on his generous offer the way to the UN building would be clear. Gary wasn’t so much afraid of Dekalb as concerned. While the weapons inspector and his team of Somali killers could hardly make a dent in Gary’s defenses, they could conceivably do something so random it would endanger Gary’s breeding stock. If they were to fire missiles at the broch, for instance, Gary would almost certainly survive but Marisol’s people could be hurt in the ensuing chaos and debris. A thousand such scenarios had gone through Gary’s mind and he didn’t relish any of them. Getting Dekalb out of New York as quickly as possible was just good common sense.

  Gary sucked the life out of the birds until only one remained, banking unconcernedly over the great piles of its former wingmates, the greasy iridescent blue feathered masses of them clogging the streets. Gary spilled air across a pair of fluttering wings and wheeled toward the river and Long Island. He dug deep with the bird’s pinions and soared until he could see Jamaica Bay burnished by the sun, until he thought he could see the earth curving away beneath him but… enough. He gave the bird a hard squeeze and its vision dimmed. A barely-noticeable spark of dark energy flowed into Gary’s being.

  In a soft and shadowed place he shifted in his king-sized bathtub and fluid seeped into the hollow of his collarbone. He reared up, the briny liquid falling away from him in torrents, and grabbed his bathrobe. There was work to be done.

  Marisol vomited noisily across the brick floor. “Morning sickness?” Gary asked, lifting the living woman to her feet by one elbow.

  She shook him away. “I’m suffocating in here. What is that stuff, pickle juice?”

  “Formalin,” Gary responded, looking down at the pool of straw-colored liquid he’d just clambered out of. “I’m preserving myself for future generations. You should be grateful. The more I protect myself from bacterial decay, the fewer of your people I have to eat. Let’s go get some air if it bothers you so much.”

  As he lead her up the spiraling staircase hidden in the tower’s double wall he summoned one of the mummies to clean up the sick. It gave him a real if petty pleasure to make Mael’s former honor guard do janitorial work but honestly, somebody had to clean the broch and only the mummies retained the necessary manual dexterity. Gary’s own hands acted like they were encased in fur-lined mittens—he couldn’t even button his own shirt. The Ptolemies from the museum could use simple tools, at least.

  “How are your people settling in?” Gary asked. The dead were still hard at work constructing the wall around the prison village but the living had already been moved into their simple houses. Gary had provided as much help as he could with books from the Public Library down on Forty-Second street and archaic tools taken from the Museum of the City of New York (known for its period rooms) but it couldn’t be easy for twenty-first century people to suddenly be forced into an eighteenth century existence. Gary had no way to provide electricity or running water, much less television and online shopping. Rude survival was all that he offered. Still, it beat the alternative.

  “They’re scared, of course. They don’t trust you.”

  Gary frowned. “I’m a ghoul of my word. Anyway it’s in my best interest to keep them safe.”

  Marisol gave him something approaching a defiant smile. “They didn’t trust Dekalb and he had a boat in the harbor. Jesus, do you even know what you look like these days? It’s not a logic thing, okay? They see a dead guy who smells like pickles and who still has scraps of skin in his teeth, they want to run the other way. Give them a break. In time, I guess… I guess you can get used to anything but for now... They’ve been herded into a corral in the middle of an army of bloodthirsty monsters and now they’re being lorded over by a cannibal in a bathrobe. They’re scared. Most of them. A couple still think they’re going to rescued.”

  Gary scratched himself. “Rescued? What, by Dekalb? If he wants to do the smart thing he’ll leave me the fuck alone.”

  It was a hard walk to the top of the broch, probably too much for a pregnant woman with a bad stomach (she did seem to be panting a lot when they reached the top) but Gary took the steep stairs easily, nearly running up two steps at a time. “Of course, he won’t do the smart thing,” he told Marisol. Noseless and Faceless were waiting for them on the unfinished tower’s ramparts. Noseless brought forward a silver tray with a dozen sticks of beef jerky fanned out for Gary’s pleasure. He took one and chewed vigorously. Grudgingly Marisol took another, staring at it in her hand for a long while before biting into it, perhaps wondering if it was dried human meat. It wasn’t—Gary was no savage. “Dekalb is an idealist. He’ll come here, even if he has to come alone, even if it means his death.”

  “Maybe he’ll have some help,” Marisol suggested. “You haven’t met my Jack yet.”

  Gary gestured for her to look over the park. Below them, arrayed in their thousands, stood the dead—their shoulders slumped, their bodies wasted but there were so many of them. They covered the ground like locusts, their constant movement like the waves of a sea.

  He reached into the eididh, seized the throats and diaphragms of thousands of the dead in his spectral fist. The air sighed with their spasms as for the first time in weeks or months their esophagi opened and air flowed into them. Gary let it out like air spilling from the neck of a balloon.

  “Hell… o…” the dead moaned. The noise was like tectonic plates shifting, like an ocean draining away through a crack in the world. A real dead-end sound, a symphony for solo apocalypse. Gary’s lips split open he was smiling so hard. “Hello… Marisol…”

  “I don’t need any more males,” Gary told her. “If they come here they’ll die.”

  Chapter Eight

  The thirty-foot trailer barely had room for a crew of three. With the girls all struggling to get in and have a look at the monitors the air inside qu
ickly became too muggy and close to be breathable. I mopped sweat away from my forehead and nodded when Kreutzer asked if I was ready. Jack still had the Predator in the air, making wide circles around Manhattan at about twenty thousand feet but even he couldn’t help his curiosity. We all wanted to know what the spy plane had seen.

  I blinked rapidly as the display shot images rapid-fire at me of buildings passing far too close and fast on either side. I nearly lurched forward in my chair as the view opened up dramatically, the Predator gliding over the head of the Columbus statue at 59th street. Beyond the barrier of Central Park South the view changed again, and dramatically, into a landscape of mud laced with junk. The park had become unrecognizable, even the green grass torn away by the changes of the Epidemic. I hadn’t even considered at that point that the dead might converge on the plants there and I felt my head shaking from side to side in doubt and distaste to see what had come of one my favorite places in the world.

  In silence we watched as the plane sped uptown. Jack had kept it low so we could get a better view—maybe five hundred feet off the ground. At that height when we saw the first of the dead people in the park they looked like pieces of popcorn scattered on a dark tabletop. Kreutzer froze the frame and ran an image enhancement algorithm to zoom in on one and we saw its hair had fallen away in patches and its skin had turned a kind of soft and creamy white. Its clothes hung in tatters from its twisted limbs. We couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.

  Kreutzer, who had seen only a handful of the dead, had to turn away for a moment. The rest of us just ignored the corpse and studied the background—looking for places to entrench, fortifiable positions from which to stage an assault.

  Then the Predator’s nose camera swung forward to show us the skyline and our eyes went wide.

  The dead filled half the park. They were close enough to one another to have trouble swinging their arms as they pressed closer and closer to something round and grey in the middle of the Park. They filled what had been the Great Lawn, and the Ramble, and the Pinetum. They covered the ground like a writhing sea of whitecaps. No. That was far too pleasant an image. They looked more like a maggot mass. Disgusting as it might be that was the only analogy I could think of—their colorless, pulpy flesh and their constant mindless motion could only call up images of fly larvae seething across the stretched dry skin of a dead animal.

  There was no way to estimate how many of them there were. Thousands, easily. Hundreds of thousands I guess. I went to a peace rally in Midtown just before the first Gulf War. My war-hating colleagues and I had numbered, according to the media, at least two hundred thousand and we only filled up a few dozen blocks of First and Second Avenues. To completely cover half of Central Park like that…

  Gary had mentioned a million dead men. It looked like he wasn’t far off.

  “What’s this feature?” Jack asked, scraping his chair across the floor of the trailer as he moved in for a closer look. He tapped his finger against the monitor with a soft, dull sound that shook me out of myself again. He was indicating the round grey shape at the very center of the crowd.

  Kreutzer’s fingers flickered over his keyboard as he called up a three-dimensional rendering of the object, extrapolating details from hundreds of frames of two-dimensional video footage. The trailer’s hard drives chunked and rumbled for a minute and then he put his product up for display. What we saw was a sort of squat tower, a circular structure rising with tapering walls to a ragged top. It must have been unfinished. It rose a good thirty yards in the air and was wider than the Met that sat next to it. What Gary could possibly want with such a structure was a mystery.

  Its outbuildings made a little more sense. The dead had erected a wall maybe four meters high that surrounded a space the size of the Great Lawn. The wall attached directly to the main structure, forming a kind of corral. Inside this enclosed area was what looked like a tiny village of stone buildings with red terra cotta roofs. It looked like something from Europe in the middle ages. The only way in or out of the village was through the main structure.

  “Why did Gary want to rebuild Colonial Williamsburg here?” I asked, very confused. Ayaan stared at me curiously. “Those houses,” I said, pointing them out for her. “I guess that’s where he keeps the prisoners, but they hardly look like jail cells.”

  “No, they don’t,” Jack said. “They look like barns.”

  Barns—where you keep your cattle. I got what he was saying. Gary needed to keep the prisoners alive and healthy, perhaps even happy, over the extreme long term. How long he could survive on the meat locked up in that corral was anybody’s guess but clearly he meant to drag it out as long as possible.

  I got up from my chair and headed outside for some fresh air. On the way out I squeezed Ayaan’s shoulder. She followed me out onto the grass and out of earshot.

  “There’s something,” I tried, not knowing quite what to say. “Something you should know. I intend to go after him. I can’t go back to Africa until he’s dead. Dead for real. That means going inside of that tower. In the process I’m going to try to free the prisoners but my main goal is to separate his brain from his body in the most thorough fashion possible.”

  She inhaled noisily. “That is impossible.”

  I nodded. “I saw how many of the dead he has under his control. I’m still going to try. Will you help me?”

  “Yes, of course.” She gave me a strange smile. “There really is no choice, is there? He will not let us approach the United Nations building, not while he still has control. If we are to finish our mission then he must be removed.”

  Did I tell her? It could only disturb her—and frankly, she didn’t need the pressure of knowing she actually had an option. In the end though I decided I knew Ayaan well enough that I knew she would want to know.

  “He called me,” I told her. “He said he would make the way clear for us. Give us free passage. There’s a price, though. He wants to eat you personally. It’s a revenge thing for the time you shot him.”

  Her eyes went very wide but only for a moment. Then she nodded. “Okay. When do I go?”

  I stepped forward and put my hands on her shoulders. “I don’t think you understand. He wants to torture you. To death. I won’t let that happen, Ayaan.”

  She pushed me away. I’m pretty sure that my touching her like that had violated Sharia law but mostly she just didn’t like my attitude. “Why do you deny me this? It is my right! So many others have died! Ifiyah died just so that we could learn a lesson. That girl, the one with the cat, she died for being stupid! You will not let me die for my country? You will not let me die the most honorable death possible? Even if it means our mission is a success? Even if it means you can see your daughter again?”

  I opened my mouth but come on. There are no words after something like that. None at all.

  Chapter Nine

  “Sure,” Kreutzer said, scratching vigorously at his unkempt hair. “It makes sense. She’s an A-rab, right? They actually want to become martyrs. It’s a good deal for them—one quick death and then you’re in fucking paradise with your seventy-two virgins.” He considered that for a second. “Or maybe she gets to be one of somebody else’s virgins. Face it, blowing themselves up is what they do best.”

  I glared at him. “That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.” I waved my hands in the air. “She’s a teenager, that’s all. She doesn’t understand what dying really means but she knows for a fact that life sucks. She’s got all these hormones and energy and weird bad culturally created bullshit, fucked up sexuality projected into glamorous ideas of death as transcendence—”

  “She’s a soldier.” Jack peeled apart a blade of unmowed grass and put it to his lips. He blew hard and it made a reedy sound, like a mournful bassoon starting a dirge.

  “She’s a child.” I said. But of course, she was much more than that. Jack understood her better than I did right then. She was a soldier. Which meant that she could submerge her own self into a lar
ger idea, a context of community that had to be served—her national identity as a Somali, her place as a kumayo warrior fighting for Mama Halima. The good of all humanity.

  It was a distinctly un-American sentiment but I had felt it myself. When we returned from the ill-fated raid on the hospital, dragging what was left of Ifiyah behind us, I had felt it. My own needs and wants and shortcoming no longer applied. When we got back to the boat and Osman started making wisecracks I had felt so disconnected from him and his selfish cowardice.

  It takes us years to learn that surrender to what is larger than ourselves. Jack had spent much of his life having it drilled into him. Parents were supposed to get it instinctually but some never really learned to put their families ahead of themselves.

  Ayaan had figured it out in grade school. It was insulting, not to mention pointless, to deny her the belief she held closest to her very soul.

  The girl herself must have heard us—I hardly kept my voice down after Kreutzer started spouting off—but she was busy and didn’t feel the need to break in to the conversation. She was preparing herself, you see. Preparing herself to be eaten alive.

  Of all the fucked up things I have seen since the dead came back to life and the world ended in grasping, hungering horror the very worst was a sixteen year-old girl touching her forehead to green grass on a sunny day and communing with her god. I could understand her motivation for throwing away her life—I could even go along with it, if I had to, by gritting my teeth—but I knew it would haunt me forever.

  This was it, though. All I could ever hope to achieve. I would get my drugs and I would go back to Africa and I would see Sarah, I would hold her in my arms and pray she never had to make decisions like this, never had to watch people annihilate themselves for the sake of corrupt politicians half the world away again. We would build some kind of life and I would make myself forget what had happened. For Sarah’s sake.