Monster Island Read online

  The big guy’s jaw stretched wider as if he would swallow Gary like a snake swallowing an egg. Still no sound came out of him, no sound at all. He took a wobbling step forward on his bad leg, nearly fell. Corrected himself. His hands came up in fists.

  “No,” Gary said, scrabbling to get to his feet but slipping in the spill of cans, “get away from me.” The big guy kept coming. “Don’t you dare!” Gary shrieked, sounding absurd even to his own ears but it just came out. “Stop!”

  The big guy stopped in mid-stride. The expression on his face changed from hungry anger to just plain confusion. He looked around for a minute and Gary could feel the guy’s cold form looming over him, a dead shadow in the air ready to come down like a ton of bricks, to smash him, to pummel him into mush.

  He just stood there, coming no closer.

  “Fuck off and die!” Gary screamed, terrified.

  Without a sound the big guy turned on his good heel and walked out of the bodega. He didn’t look back.

  Gary watched him go then pulled himself back up to his feet. He was feeling shaky again. Almost nauseous. He finished the patty in his hand but it didn’t help as much as his first one had. The fight with the big guy had taken something out of him. He ran a hand through his hair, looked back at the freezer section. It was empty now. He bent down and gathered up all the slim-jims the big guy had knocked over. Those were meat too, he thought. Maybe they would help.

  As he shambled out of the bodega into the daylight the ringing in his ears came back with no warning and louder than ever. He knew he had to move, to get away from the area before the big guy came back for more but he could barely stand upright. He clutched his head as the world reeled around him and leaned against the cool plate glass of the store window. A burst of white noise shot through his head like an icy jet of water and he staggered out into the street—what the hell was happening? He felt his legs moving under him, felt himself propelled through space but he couldn’t see anything, couldn’t make his eyes focus.

  What was going on? Aneurysm? Ischemic event? His brain felt like it was shrinking in his head—was this all he got for his hard work, half a day’s worth of intellect? Was he going to lose it now?

  He felt something hard and metallic collide with his thighs and he forced himself to stop moving. He reached down and felt a railing, a metal railing that he clutched to as he sank down to his knees. With great effort he forced his eyes open and knelt there staring, staring with a desperate intensity at the Hudson in front of him. If he had taken another three steps he would have fallen in.

  Everything was so vivid, clearer than it had ever been in life. Gary looked up at New Jersey across the water, at the hills there and saw the ground shake. He clutched hard at the railing as the earth rolled beneath him and cracks ran through the rock, cracks spouting noxious black fumes that filled the whole world with their smoke.

  Behind him at the bodega the big guy’s trucker hat rolled off his head as he collapsed to the pavement. His hands spasmed as the spark of animation flowed out of him and his eyes fluttered closed.

  Chapter Eight

  “That one is too active,” Ayaan said, scanning the wharf with her binoculars. The dead man in question wore nothing but a pair of tight jeans that overflowed with his bloated flesh. He clutched to a wooden piling with one arm while the other snatched at the air. His hungry face followed the boat as we steamed past.

  On top of the wheelhouse Mariam called down for her Dragunov and one of the other girls passed it up. Mariam steadied herself against the Arawelo’s radar dome and peered through the scope of the sniper rifle. I put my fingers in my ears a moment before she fired. The dead man on the pier spun around in a cloud of exploding brain matter and fell into the water.

  Sixteen years old and Mariam was already an expert sniper. When did the girl soldiers have time to train?

  Osman cleared his throat and I looked back at the map. “Here,” I said, pointing at a blue letter H on the map, just a few blocks in from the Hudson. I looked up at the line of buildings on the shore and pointed at a spot between two of them. “St. Vincent Medical Center. They have an HIV care facility.” I shrugged. “It’s more dangerous because we’ll be out of sight of the ship but it’s my second best option.”

  The captain rubbed his face and nodded. He yelled at Yusuf to bring the ship in at an empty pier and the girls surged across the deck, shouldering their weapons and checking their actions. Osman and I struggled with a piece of corrugated tin ten feet long and just as wide that served the trawler in the place of a gangplank.

  The engines whined and water churned as Yusuf brought us in to a bumping stop. The girls started jumping across even before we had the plank down—Commander Ifiyah at the fore, calling all her kumayo sisters to join her. They roared like lions as they raced to take up their assigned positions in two ranks of twelve on the wooden pier (Mariam was still up on the wheelhouse with her Dragunov). I shouldered my pack, shook Osman’s hand, and picked my way carefully across the plank as if afraid I was going to fall in the water. I felt calm, far calmer than when we’d tried the East River. Ayaan had taught me a trick, to force myself to vomit before the battle so I wouldn’t feel the need afterward. It hadn’t been hard. The smell of death and decay rolling off Manhattan added to my general seasickness and left me feeling queasy ever since we’d spotted the Statue of Liberty.

  The sounds of my footsteps on the pier echoed in the stillness. I moved to crouch behind Ayaan, who paid no attention to me whatsoever. She was so focused, so completely at peace in this madness. I lifted my own AK-47 and tried to copy her firing stance but I knew by the way the stock felt on my shoulder that I had it wrong.

  “Xaaraan,” she said softly but not to me. The word meant “ritually unclean”, or more literally “improperly butchered meat.” I’d never heard a more apropos description of the men and women who came at us then up the pier. Grotesque twisted faces on top of swollen bloody bodies that bent at unnatural angles—the hands reaching for us with fingers crooked like talons—the broken teeth—the rolling eyes—the silence of them.

  “Diyaar!” Ifiyah screamed and the girls let loose, one rifle after another jumping upward with a cracking noise that left another corpse spinning down to smack the pier. I saw one get caught right in the teeth—enamel danced in the air. Another with shoulder-length hair clutched at his stomach but kept moving toward us, not running so much as flopping on uncertain feet, flopping toward us with an inexorability that terrified me. A woman in a jeans jacket and high black boots pushed past him and came right for me, the wind ruffling back her hair to show that both of her cheeks had been eaten away. Her jaw snapped in anticipation as she raised her arms to grapple me. A puff of smoke burst from her stomach and she fell back but others pushed to take her place.

  “Madaxa!”Ifiyah ordered—shoot for the head. I saw a few of the younger girls shift their stance nervously and raise the barrels of their rifles a hair. They fired again and the dead fell away, dropping to the pier with a thud or spinning down to the water or falling backward into the crowd which just surged around them and came faster. Had they been waiting for us? There were so many—even with the noise we were making I couldn’t imagine us drawing so many of them without warning. Unless maybe New York, the perennially crowded city, just had that many walking dead in it. If so we were doomed. It would be impossible to complete our mission.

  “Iminka,”Ifiyah breathed. Now. In my horror I had barely noticed the most horrifying thing of all—that the dead were gaining on us. Only a few meters separated us from their oncoming tide. The girls didn’t panic (though I know I did, hyperventilating and coming very close to shitting my pants). As one they adjusted their rifles with a ringing clack and opened up in full automatic.

  If I had thought the carnage was bad before… I had no idea. I had seen assault rifles fired in full automatic before. In my job as a weapon inspector there had been plenty of times when some local chieftain or hetman wanted to impress me with the si
ght of his firepower. I’d never seen automatic assault weapons turned against Americans though. It didn’t seem to matter if they were already dead. The line of them in front of me just exploded, their heads pulped, their necks and torsos torn to fibrous shreds. The ones behind them just shook and shook like they were seizing wildly as the bullets rattled around inside of them.

  The noise of twenty-four Kalashnikovs rocking and rolling cannot be described so I won’t try. It shakes you up, literally—the vibration makes your heart feel like its going to stop and can damage your internal organs with prolonged exposure.

  When it was done we were standing before a pile of unmoving bodies. One woman in an I Love New York shirt with the sleeves ripped off struggled out from under the heap and came clawing at us but one of the girls—Fathia—just stepped forward and stabbed the dead woman in the head with her bayonet. The corpse went down. After that we all listened to the ringing in our ears for a while. We studied the shore end of the pier waiting for another wave but it didn’t come.

  ”Nadiif,” Ifiyah announced. The pier was clean. The girls visibly relaxed and shouldered their rifles. A few laughed boisterously and kicked at the slaughtered bodies on the wooden pier. Fathia and Ifiyah traded a high-five. All of the girls smiled—except Ayaan.

  Her face hard she reached up and grabbed the muzzle break of my Kalashnikov. I winced, thinking she was intentionally burning herself for some reason—the AK-47 was notorious for overheating after prolonged firing—but then she pulled her hand away and showed me her unblemished palm.

  “You did not discharge it,” Ayaan said. The disgust in her face was withering.

  It came to me that I hadn’t fired my weapon at all, no. I had been too busy watching the girls. “I’m not a trained killer like you,” I protested.

  She shook her head bitterly. “Nor are you one of the xaaraan. So what does that make you?"

  The girls spread out down the pier, Commander Ifiyah taking the van as they swept the shore for any sign of movement. Ayaan ran to her position in the front of the wedge. I turned and looked back at the Arawelo. Osman flashed me an “okay” sign with one hand. “You go after them now, Dekalb,” he said, smiling broadly. “We’ll stay here and guard the ship.”

  Chapter Nine

  Fanning out across the street the girls threw hand signals at one another. The barrels of their Kalashnikovs swept the street corners, the recessed doorways, the hundreds of cars abandoned on the cobble stones. I had expected—well, I guess I had hoped—that the roads would be clear. We could have commandeered some transport and driven to the hospital.

  Not a chance. In the panic of the Epidemic the usual Manhattan gridlock must have turned into a death trap. There were cars everywhere, many of them dented or damaged. They lined every side-street we passed, crowded every intersection. I saw a Hummer 2 up on the sidewalk, its shiny front bumper wedged permanently between a mailbox and the broken wood front of a deserted bistro. On the other side of the street Fathia clambered up on top of a taxi with four flat tires and scanned the road ahead with her rifle at her eye.

  “This way,” I told Ifiyah and she gestured for her troops to follow us. I led her down a short block of Horatio street, past a gas station with shuttered windows. Paper signs had been wrapped around the pumps and secured with duct tape: “NO GAS, NO MONEY, NO EMPLOYEE. GOD BLESS YOU.” Around the corner was a storefront psychic (the garish neon tubes visible in the window were dead now) and a little boutique that must have sold women’s clothing. The front window showed three cheerily dressed mannequins and a bunch of billowing green cloth.

  Ayaan stopped in front of the window and peered inside.

  “Thinking of a new look for summer?” I asked, wanting her to hurry up. It was understandable, of course—Ayaan had probably never seen real women’s fashions before. She had spent most of her life in a uniform and the lure of Western dress must—

  “I saw movement in there,” she insisted.

  Oh.

  The soldiers pressed in, some of them walking backwards with their rifles facing out as others lead them with a hand on their shoulders. Their discipline was heartening. In another life I might have found it creepy, the way these girls worked together but now it meant I might survive this ludicrous mission.

  Without warning a dead woman pushed through the folds of green in the window and slammed up against the glass from the inside. She was willowy and blonde with thin refined features. Her face was pockmarked only here and there with tiny sores that looked almost like sequins. She wore a flowing maroon sleeveless dress and for a heartbeat we were all transfixed by the sight of her elegance.

  Then her thin arms came up and her tiny fists started bashing at the glass. Her face thrust forward and her jaw opened against the window as if she were trying to chew her way through it with her yellow teeth. The black hole of her mouth made a perfect seal on the glass as she hungered for us.

  Fathia raised her rifle but I shook my head. “That’s tempered glass—shatterproof. She’ll never get through it. If you shoot now the noise might draw others, though.”

  The soldier looked to her commander. Ifiyah nodded once and we moved on, leaving the dead woman behind us. After we turned the block we couldn’t even hear the muffled thuds of her fists on the window.

  In the broader expanse of Greenwich Avenue we found a water truck still dripping from a splatter of gunshot holes and an incredibly long streamer of yellow police tape flapping in the breeze. I grabbed a handful and read “QUARANTINE AREA: TRESSPASSERS WILL BE MET WITH LETHAL FORCE” before letting it flutter away. We made a left on Twelfth and the girls spread out rapidly. We had arrived. Ifiyah called for her troops to establish fire zones and to designate a CCP—a Casualty Collection Point—where they would meet up if they got separated. I lead Ayaan up to the closed Emergency Room doors of St. Vincent and peered inside.

  “It’s dark in there,” I said. Well, of course it was. Did I expect the power to be on six months after the end of the world? “I don’t like it.”

  “It is not for you to decide,” Ayaan said but there was less anger in her voice than usual. She slipped her thin fingers into the crack between the two automatic doors and tugged. They moved an inch and then slipped back. Looking over at Ifiyah she held up three fingers and we were quickly joined by a trio of sixteen year olds. Between the five of us we pried the doors open wide enough for me to fit through.

  Ayaan handed me a flashlight from her dambiil bag and checked her own by switching it on and off rapidly. The three girls who had joined us ran through the same procedure. I glanced at Ifiyah for authorization to begin and then stepped inside. The lobby of the emergency room was a mess of overturned chairs and blank-screened television sets but at least a little light came in the glass doors and cut through the gloom.

  The admissions desk was half buried under a slurry of glossy pamphlets against heart disease and second hand smoke. I stepped on them being careful not to slip and found a photocopied directory taped to the wall. “This way,” I said, pointing at a pair of swinging doors leading off the main lobby. The HIV clinic was deep inside the building. It might take us ten minutes to get there in the dark and just as long to get back. Ifiyah had given us ninety minutes to complete the mission and exfiltrate back to the boat.

  I only had to do this once, I told myself. Just once and then I can go see Sarah. The thought of my seven year old daughter languishing in a Somalian religious school made my heart rattle in my suddenly airless chest.

  I kicked open the double doors and flashed my light down pitch darkness of the corridor beyond. The cone of illumination caught a couple hospital beds pushed up against the wall. A heap of stained linen on the floor. Two rows of doors, dozens of them, that could be hiding anything.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said. Ayaan pursed her lips as if rankled at being given an order by a civilian. She lifted her rifle to her shoulder, though, and stepped into the hallway.

  Chapter Ten

  Gary shook
his head hard and slowly rose to his feet. Looking across at Hoboken he saw nothing but empty buildings and quiet streets. The geysers of poisonous gas he’d seen erupt there were gone, had never been there. Just a hallucination.

  He flexed his hands, observed himself for a second. Everything intact and in working order. In fact he felt better than ever—the buzzing had left his head and his hands didn’t shake like they had before. Most importantly his hunger was gone. Not entirely—he could feel it looming at the horizon of his awareness, knew it would come back stronger than ever soon enough but for now at least his stomach felt at peace.

  He turned around slowly, uncertain how long this newfound sense of health might last or how fragile it might be. Behind him he saw that nothing else had changed—New York was the same as ever. Just as quiet. He saw a pair of boots on the ground by the bodega where he’d fought with the trucker cap guy and decided to investigate.

  What he found didn’t answer any questions. Trucker Cap was dead. Not kind of dead, not walking dead—just dead, lying there decomposing in the sun. Gary could find no damage to the guy’s head, no signs of trauma at all but for some reason the guy had just stopped. Fallen down and stopped, permanently by the look of it.

  Gary picked up the hat and turned it around in his hands. Then he dropped it with a start and scrabbled backwards on all fours away from the corpse. Whatever had done this to the big guy might still be around—and he would be vulnerable to it as well.