Monster Island(18)

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 ontoFourteenth Street I shook my head sadly. “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’sGary, 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 YorkFuckingCity 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 termunliving.” 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.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





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.