Monster Island(12)

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.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Ten


Garyshook his head hard and slowly rose to his feet. Looking across atHoboken 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 Yorkwas 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.

Garypicked 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.

Not a virus-a virus needed living cells to replicate itself. A bacterium might have done it or even more likely some kind of fungal infection, sure, a fungus spread by airborne spores Spores that just happened along at the exact second ofGary ’s dark epiphany? It made no sense.Gary had told the guy to f*ck off and die. To think that some fungus that just happened to counteract the effects of the Epidemic had wafted by at thatexact moment was ludicrous. Something had wasted Trucker Cap, though, something had happened right afterGary told him to Garymight have contemplated this more if he hadn’t heard gunfire nearby. Guns meant survivors. The dead lacked the muscular coordination to use firearms. Some desperate lone living survivor must have been making his last stand somewhere to the north. Up in the meatpacking district by the sound of it.

It wouldn’t last.

Garyshould just ignore it, go home to his apartment and think about what his newfound ability to control the undead meant and where it might come from. Walking into a firefight was the best way to get shot in the head which was the most certain way-the only way-that his new existence could end.

He’d never been able to resist his own curiosity, though. It was what got him into med school in the first place, his desire to know what made things tick.

Despite his best interests he found himself running northward toward the noise of the shots. They stopped abruptly when he was halfway there but he’d figured out by then they were coming from near the river, maybe on one of the piers.

Advancing carefully he nearly got himself shot. A black girl in a school uniform with a scarf around her head was pointing a rifle right in his direction. He slid down behind an abandoned car and screwed his eyes shut, his arms clutched around his knees, trying hard to make himself small and insignificant. She’d looked pretty serious about her weapon. Like a soldier or a policeman or something. Absurd… but this was a day for absurdities, it seemed.

There were others with her. A whole team of them judging by the noise they made. Their weapons jangled as they moved. He heard one of them talking-a hard, cold voice with an accent to it. She must be fromBrooklyn. “I saw movement in there,” she said.

No. No no no no no.

“If you shoot now the noise might draw others,” another of them said-a man.