Monster Island Read online

  There was a deep-seated, urgent, and entirely unbearable need in Gary’s soul to get this fly, somehow, into his mouth.

  A bullet hit one of the VW’s tires and the car sagged to one side with a popping noise that echoed off the brick facades of the surrounding townhouses. Gary, whose hand had been creeping toward the fly, pulled himself into an even tighter ball on the floor of the car and tried not to think about anything at all. It didn’t work.

  The fly landed on a seat belt latch and fanned its wings briefly in the sunlight. Its whole body seemed to glow with the light of its health. It rubbed its hands together like a cartoon character about to sit down to a satisfying hamburger—all it needed was a tiny little bib. How cute would that be? Oh god, Gary wanted so much to eat the fly. His fly, he had decided. It was his.

  The fly leapt into the air again with a flourish of wings and Gary’s hand shot out for it. The fly evaded him and he lunged upward, catching it between two cupped palms. In a moment he had shoveled it into his maw and he felt its wings brush frantically against the roof of his mouth. He bit down and felt its juices burst across his dry tongue. Energy surged through him even before he’d swallowed the morsel, an electric jolt of well-being that burned in him like a white flame that nourished him instead of consuming him. If the hamburger patties he’d eaten earlier had calmed his hunger the fly instead sated him fully, suffusing him with a euphoria the insect’s tiny mass could not possibly account for. He felt good, he felt warm and dry and satisfied, he felt so good.

  The feeling had barely begun to recede when he realized with a start that he was sitting up, perched on the front seats of the car and clearly visible through the windows. He heard gunshots and knew he’d been discovered. Desperate but feeling safe and potent now Gary pushed open the driver’s side door and rolled out of the car. He got his feet on the asphalt and started loping away from the Volkswagen, certain he could reach safety if he just hurried up a little, if his legs would just move a little faster—

  A bayonet blade slid through his back and right into his heart.

  Good thing he wasn’t using it.

  He tried to turn but found himself transfixed—literally—by the bayonet. He raised his hands in the air, the universal signal of surrender. “Don’t shoot,” he shouted, “I’m not one of them!”

  “Kumaad tahay?”One of the girls came around into his field of vision and raised her rifle. She panted with exertion or fear perhaps, her weapon bobbing up and down. He could see the dark O of its muzzle waggling at him, the gap between a bullet and his brain. She yanked on a latch on the side of the weapon and flexed her trigger finger.

  “Please!” Gary shouted. “Please! I’m not like them!”

  “Joojin!” someone shouted. He heard booted footsteps running up behind him. “Joojin!” The rifle in front of him steadied in the girl’s hands. Was she receiving the order to fire or to not fire? Gary’s forehead began to feel hot, anticipating the bullet.

  Another girl came up in front of him. She barked orders at the others and Gary felt the bayonet yank backwards out of his body. The girls argued amongst themselves—he kept hearing the word “xaaraan”—but clearly their orders were to stand down.

  “You talks,” the girl who’d given the orders said. She studied his face, obviously confused by the dead veins in his cheeks.

  “I talk,” Gary confirmed.

  “You fekar?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  She nodded and threw a complicated hand gesture at her soldiers. Gary gathered by the gold epaulets on the shoulders of her navy jacket that she must be an officer of some kind, though that made no sense. What army in the world had officers who were teenage girls? Gary couldn’t shake the idea that he had been captured by a school field trip gone horribly, horribly awry.

  “We kills you, if you says any wrong thing,” the officer suggested. She shook her rifle at him. “We kills you, if you dos any wrong thing. You do only right thing, maybe we kills you anyway because of the smell of you.”

  “Fair enough,” Gary said, slowly lowering his hands.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I wedged myself through the spring-loaded emergency room doors and ran down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk, half-expecting to find myself alone. Commander Ifiyah and her company were there waiting for me, though. It looked like they'd taken a prisoner. They had somebody kneeling on the ground with a rope around his neck.

  It didn’t matter—I had to tell Ifiyah what had happened. It had been stupid of us to think we could actually find the medical supplies we needed in this haunted city. We had to leave, and now, before anyone else died.

  “Ifiyah,” I shouted, waving her over. I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and tried to get my wind back. “Ifiyah! At least one of your soldiers is dead. The enemy is in there, and they are coming for us!”

  The commander turned to face me with a look of passionately studied disinterest. “Three, is more,” she said. I saw then that Ayaan stood next to her. Oh, thank God, I thought, at least one of the girls survived. “Three is dead. Ayaan keeps her head on and made slaughter with your enemies, Dekalb. They are no more.”

  I headed over to where they stood looking down at the prisoner. “Great—but still, there’s no reason for us to stay here. There were no drugs in there. The place had been looted,” I told Ifiyah. She just nodded distractedly—of course Ayaan would have told her as much. A cold pang went through me as I thought of what else Ayaan might have told her commanding officer. How I ran at the first sign of trouble, for one thing (although surely they would understand—we were talking about the living dead here), abandoning my team-mates.

  It was while pondering the fact that not only would Ayaan be within her rights to give such a report she would be duty bound to do so and that I was, in fact, pretty derelict in my duty back in that hospital that I finally spared the time to glance down at the prisoner and see he was one of the dead.

  Jesus fucking Christ they’ve got one of those things on a leash—

  My brain sputtered to a stop even as my feet danced backward, carrying me away from the animated corpse. For one of his kind he didn’t look so bad—you could see the dark veins under his pasty white face and his eyes looked kind of yellow but otherwise his flesh was intact. He showed me his teeth though and I gave out a startled yelp until I realized he was smiling at me.

  “Thank God, an American,” he said.

  That just made my brain hurt. The dead didn’t talk. They didn’t moan or howl or whimper. They certainly weren’t capable of distinguishing between people of different nationalities—true believers in diversity, the dead were equal opportunity devourers.

  “You have to help me,” the thing started but we heard a thumping sound then and looked back to see two of the dead—including the eyeless one who nearly got me by the stairwell—slamming up against the emergency room doors. There might have been more of them inside. It was too dark to tell.

  “Ifiyah, we need to head back to the boat now,” I said but the commander had got there before me. She threw hand signals to her squads and with only a couple of barked words we got moving. Ayaan fell in beside me. “I thought you said you got them all,” I told her, not feeling very generous at that moment.

  “I thought I had,” she countered. She squinted back at the hospital but the doors held—the dead lacked the mental power to figure out they needed to pry the doors open instead of just pushing at them. “The twelve that ate my kumayo sisters are no more. I did not hear you firing in our defense. You are not a warrior, Dekalb, are you? At least we know that much.”

  I grimaced and stepped up my pace to get away from her. I guessed correctly that she was too disciplined to break ranks. Moving ahead I caught up with the captive dead man and the girl soldier who held his leash—it was Fathia, the bayonet expert.

  “Listen, just talk to them for me,” the dead man pleaded when he saw me.

  As we turned onto Fourteenth Street I shook my head s
adly. “What the hell are you? You’re not one of them, not really—”

  “Yes, really,” he admitted, hanging his head. “I know what I am, you don’t need to humor me. That’s not all I am, though. I was a doctor, originally. Okay, okay, a med student. But I could help you guys—every army needs some doctors, right? Yeah, like on M*A*S*H! I can be your Hawkeye Pierce!”

  The massacre in the hospital had left my imagination stoked up. “A doctor. Did you—did one of your patients attack you? Somebody you thought was still alive?”

  “My name’s Gary, by the way,” he answered, looking away from me. He held out his hand but I couldn’t bring myself to shake it. “Fair enough,” he said. “No, it wasn’t one of my patients. I did it myself.”

  I must have blanched at that.

  “Look—there didn’t seem to be any choice. The city was burning. New York Fucking City was burning to the ground. Everybody else was dead. It was either join them or be their dinner. Okay?” When I didn’t answer he raised his voice. “Okay?”

  “Sure,” I mumbled. This didn’t make any sense… except that it did. I had done terrible things to survive the Epidemic. I had entrusted my seven year old daughter to a Fundamentalist warlord. I had locked up my dead wife and just abandoned her. All because it seemed like the logical choice at the time. What if it had been me, alone?

  “I’m a physician, like I said, so I knew what was going to happen to me. I knew my brain would start to die the second I stopped breathing. That's why they're so stupid, post-mortem degeneration of nervous tissue. But I could protect my brain. I had the equipment. Christ, I bet I’m the smartest one on the planet right now.”

  “The smartest of the undead,” I repeated.

  “If you don’t mind, I prefer the term unliving.” He shot me a grin to show he’d been joking but his posture betrayed his cheer. He seemed so desperate and lonely—I wanted to reach out to him but come on. Even for a bleeding heart like me this was a stretch.

  “I put myself on a respirator and then submerged myself in a bathtub full of ice,” Gary explained. “It stopped my heart instantly but oxygen kept flowing to my brain. When I woke up I could still think for myself. I can still control myself. You can trust me, man, okay? Okay?”

  I didn’t answer. The soldiers had stopped and Ifiyah was yelling orders I couldn’t understand. I looked up the street, trying to figure out what was going on. We were in front of Western Beef, the big meat market. Nothing on this Earth could have persuaded me to go inside. Right next door was another kind of meat market—a swank nightclub called Lotus. That’s the meatpacking district for you. You could cut the irony with a spork.

  Ayaan dropped to one knee and brought up her gun. Had somebody heard something? I couldn’t see any movement amongst the piles of cardboard crates in front of Western Beef. The smell was god-awful but what did you expect of a warehouse full of meat when the power goes down?

  It was the door of Lotus that opened first. A short squat man in a fashionably cut black suit stumbled out into the street. At this range he might just have been drunk, not dead. Ayaan lined up a shot with perfect slowness and precision and caved in his left temple.

  “There must be more than one,” I said out loud. One of the more superfluous comments I’ve ever made. The shot made the air around us vibrate like a bell, the noise of it echoing off concrete storefronts and brick buildings long after the dead man fell. Summoned by the sound, others came.

  Dozens of them, big burly guys in white aprons stumbling out of Western Beef, Eurotrash out of the club, not even stopping to acknowledge one another, sometimes crawling over each other in their frenzy to get at us. They piled through the doors, clawing and scrambling to be the first to reach us. Dozens turned into scores.

  When you added the dead who came staggering out of the buildings on every side, well.

  Scores turned into hundreds.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They filled the street ahead of us, a shambling horde with gaping jaws and rolling eyes. Some looked human except for a few sores or open wounds on their exposed faces and hands. Others lacked limbs or skin or sensory organs. Their clothes hung in tatters or in perfectly-creased folds and all of them, all of them, were coming for us and they wouldn’t stop until we were torn to pieces.

  “We’ve got to go,” I shouted at Ifiyah. I tried to grab her arm but she shrugged me off. With short clipped words she ordered her girl soldiers into a firing formation—the same one she’d used back on the docks.

  There were a lot more of them this time and their movements were less constrained. I just didn’t know if we could survive this.

  “We can outrun them, head down a side street,” I suggested. The dead took another step toward us. And another. They would never slow down. “Ifiyah…”

  “They have no guns, Dekalb,” the commander said as if she were brushing off an insect. “They are so stupid, to lie for us in wait here and they even have no guns.”

  “This isn’t an ambush—they’re not capable of that level of planning,” I insisted. I looked at Gary, the smartest dead man in the world, and he nodded a confirmation. Ifiyah waved me away. I turned to Ayaan, thinking she would understand that this was not a traditional military skirmish.

  But Ayaan ignored me studiously. Unlike the others she had to know what was about to happen. She’d been there, in the hospital, when the girls died. I could see her breathing hard through her nose, her jaw clamped shut but she didn’t move from her firing crouch. Orders are orders, I guess. The girls opened up with their rifles, going for head shots only—just like they’d done back at the dock. Maybe, I thought, maybe Ifiyah was right. Maybe I was just a coward. The girls were trained soldiers and they weren’t panicking. Maybe making a stand here was exactly the right thing to do.

  “We’re fucked,” Gary moaned, tugging at his leash. The other end had been securely tied to a fire hydrant.

  The dead fell one by one without a sound but others merely crawled over the inert bodies and continued with the advance. Ayaan and Fathia knelt together and spotted for one another, thinning out the ranks of those closest to us but even as their rifles snapped and spat more of the dead spilled out into the street. I could remember this place in happier times and just how crowded it had been then but it was nothing like this. The noise we made must have been drawing every animated corpse in the Village.

  “If I kill enough,” Ifiyah shouted, “they can learn, and inshallah they will runaway!” I don’t know who she was talking to—she certainly wasn’t looking at me.

  I moved back just to scout the side streets and saw that they were blocked as well—not with the solid wall of the dead that stood between us and the river but with dozens of straggling corpses moving toward us from every direction. To the east—away from the river and therefore farther from safety—the street looked relatively clear but who could know what we would find even if we ran now?

  Right next to me one of the girl soldiers—a skinny one with scrapes on her kneecaps—switched her rifle over to full auto and sprayed bullets at the oncoming horde. Panic had gripped her—at this range it would be impossible to get accurate head shots firing that quickly—and Ifiyah moved quickly to smack at her hands and make her stop. She was wasting bullets if nothing else.

  I could see the girl’s eyes as she felt the cold intensity of her commanding officer’s anger suffuse her. I had expected to see fear there but instead I found only shame. The soldiers were ready to die here if Ifiyah ordered it, certain that to die for a noble cause is better than to live without honor. They had never known anything else but this perfect discipline, this unquestioing subservience. They weren't old enough to understand that authority figures can be wrong, too.

  Personally I’d rather live even if it meant having the word COWARD tattooed on my forehead. When the dead emerged from the side streets and began to flank us I snatched at Ayaan’s arm and howled into her ear our need to retreat. I figured if anyone could talk some sense into Ifiyah it would be h
er.

  The air went out of me as the stock of her AK-47 slammed into my stomach. “You don’t give me my orders!” she shrieked over the noise of the company’s rifles. “You give no orders at all, gaal we’el! Sedex goor I tell you this, and still you chirp like a baby bird at me! Waad walantahay!”

  The dead came at us thick and fast while I tried to get my wind back. They came right for us, never deviating, never turning aside. The bullets weren’t even slowing them down. Ifiyah ran back and forth shouting encouragement or abuse at one or another of her kumayo sisters. A dead woman in a green cardigan and wingtip shoes came up on her left, somehow having slipped through the cracks in the girls’ defense. She reached for Ifiyah trying to get a handful of her jacket, her headscarf, her flesh and she cut the dead woman in half with automatic fire, literally separating her torso from her legs in a roiling haze of torn skin and bone fragments. “Sharmutaada ayaa ku dhashay was!” Ifiyah howled, her face lit up with exultation.

  The dead woman didn’t even pause. The second she hit the ground she began crawling toward Ifiyah again. The commander emptied the rest of her cartridge into the body but somehow missed the head. Before she had a chance to reload two skeletal arms were wrapped around her calf and broken teeth sank deep into her thigh.

  Two of the girl soldiers pulled the corpse free from Ifiyah’s leg. They stomped on the dead woman’s head with the heels of their combat boots until there was nothing left but grey pulp. It was too late, though. Ifiyah clutched at her wound, her rifle forgotten, and gazed up at her charges as if looking for ideas.