Monster Island(100)

Oh, and if you’re wondering-Alex and I were eating sushi at the time. We planned out everything from how the site would look to the plot to how I would post entries. All we needed was a title. I looked up and saw a plastic Godzilla statuette, part of the restaurant’s dйcor, and immediately said, “How about ‘Monster Island’?”

Thanks for everything, everybody. See you in a month!

–David Wellington

Teaser

Author's Note: Some time ago a few readers expressed an interest in hearing what happened to Dekalb's daughter Sarah. What follows is my answer to that request, set four years after the events of “Monster Island” when Sarah is eleven years old. It's also a bit of foreshadowing for the third book in the trilogy.

If this is your first visit to the site or if you have not read all of “Monster Island” be warned that this piece contains SPOILERS. Instead of reading this please go toPart One, Chapter One of “Monster Island” and do not pass Go.

–David Wellington

Dearest Daddy:

I haven’t written one of these letters in years… after Ayaan came back, after she told me you were dead I wrote you a lot. I still have those notes in the bottom of my kit bag. Weepy scrawlings, folded and tucked into careful little square packages, not really fit for re-reading but I take them out and touch them now and again as if they were something you had actually seen and held.

I don’t have anything else from you, not even a picture.

Why I’m writing this down now, I guess… I don’t know… I guess maybe you would understand, even if I don’t.

It was yesterday when it happened, a couple of kilometers outside of Oduur. We were riding in a half-ton truck we’d liberated from Ethiopian refugees. Fathia had the mounted gun, Ayaan was on the roof of the cab with a pair of binoculars. The rest of us kept our heads down mostly, out of the dust. We hadn’t seen any movement in days and we were pretty lax, bad form, sure I know that but if Ayaan was relaxed the rest of us tended to let our guard down. We drove right over a mine, an old Soviet model that had corroded and leaked with age but still it had some punch. The truck went right over on its side and two of the girls were dead before it stopped bouncing. Three more of them were injured. Fathia took them aside, letting them lean on her, looking for the bad news. If their skin was broken, if there was any chance of them catching something, something fatal, well.

We live in this world, not the old one. Ayaan tells us that all the time. One of the younger girls (only two years older than me) and I were given the task of sanitizing our dead. We did it with bayonets. The girl I did for had a blue tattoo on her cheek, three little skulls in a row, one for each confirmed kill. I did a good job on her, Daddy, you would have been proud.

Nobody complained about the work. We didn’t want to even think about what came next. With the truck compromised (one axle snapped, the wheel rolling off into the dust) we were alone and on foot and twenty kilometers from the nearest hardened encampment. There was nothing, truly nothing in sight from horizon to horizon: this was thedhaaqsin, great pasturage but to us it was just flat land covered in yellow grass and the occasional dead evergreen. There was nothing for it but to march to Oduur and hope to find a building we could harden for the night.

We stretched our water and kept moving, with six hours before nightfall we stood an actual chance. That’s what Ayaan said, anyway. When we first caught sight of the city, just shacks on the outskirts, we let up a warbling howl of gratitude to Mama Halima for our deliverance. We picked an old post office the Italians had built fifty years ago. Nice thick concrete walls and a flat roof, perfect for establishing kill zones. We hunkered down and shared out the last of the bread and waited for the dead to come.

It didn’t take long. I could tell you what happened that evening and night, Daddy, but I saw so little of it. They came in packs, as they sometimes do. I was kept busy carrying bags of ammunition up and down the stairs. I was so tired, my arms hurt and I wanted to go to bed but I never complained, I promise.

In the morning we went out to mop up. Ayaan kept her with me. She calls me “little good luck”. There were bodies everywhere, some of them heaped up near the doors of the Post Office, some a hundred meters away. We moved in teams of three and one of us would approach a body and then kick its foot and jump back. Kick a foot and jump back, over and over. Sometimes they can be hurt pretty bad but not be really gone and you can’t take chances, Ayaan says. I kicked some of the feet. One of the dead people twitched. It was probably nothing but Fathia fired half a clip into its head. The noise broke open the morning silence (we hunt without speaking, so they don’t hear us) and suddenly everyone was yelling and everything just felt different, like the air had changed. Like the sky had changed color. And then we heard something else.