Monster Island(20)

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.

Her authority was gone. Her certainty had evaporated the moment those broken teeth broke her skin.

For a long sickening minute nobody fired a weapon and nobody moved, except the dead, who kept stepping closer.

“We need to find a secure CCP,” Ayaan finally said to me, breaking the spell, “and you’re our regional specialist.” So engrossed with what had happened to Ifiyah I didn’t see her come up and I yelped with startlement. “Get us out of here, Dekalb!”

I nodded and stared east on Fourteenth. Only a few of the dead staggered toward us from that direction. “Somebody untie him,” I said, pointing atGary. “He’s a doctor. Atakhtar. We need him.” They did as I said. The dead man claimed he couldn’t run so I detailed two of the girls to carry him. If they disliked this duty they were too well-trained to say so. I picked up Ifiyah myself-I was disturbed to find she weighed only a little more than my seven year old daughter Sarah-and then we were running, tearing down Fourteenth, our weapons clattering against our backs. We dodged around the dead there as they clawed at us. One of the girls got snared by a particularly dextrous corpse but she kicked him in the face and got free again.

Out of breath before we’d covered one avenue block I didn’t let myself slow down until we ran past a building covered in scaffolding and the street opened up into the tree-lined expanse ofUnion Square. I realized then I had no idea where I was going. We were headed away from the river and the safety of the ship. What kind of shelter could we possibly find from the dead?

I stopped and set Ifiyah down very carefully. Her eyes were wide as she stared up at me. I panted for air, oxygen bludgeoning my lungs as I stared at the storefronts and the trees and the statues all around me.

There was no sound at all.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Sixteen


I called for a stop and we clustered around the statue of Gandhi. I looked up at the smiling bronze face and issued a silent apology for surrounding him with heavily-armed child soldiers. I could remember when hippy kids would put garlands of flowers around the great pacifist’s neck but all I saw there now were loops of wire.

“They ate the flowers,”Gary pointed out, almost as if he'd heard my thoughts. I looked back down at him.

“Flowers?” I demanded.

“Anything living."

“Why, damnit? Why do they do this?”

Garyshrugged and sat down at the base of the tree.“It’s a compulsion.You can’t fight it for long-the hunger just takes over. I have a theory about it, but it's still pretty vague… I mean, they should have all rotted away by now. Human bodies decompose fast. They should be piles of bone and goo by now but they look pretty healthy to me.”

I glared at him.

“Okay, okay, that was a brain fart. By ‘healthy’ I mean ‘in one piece’. I think when they eat living meat they get some kind of life force or whatever out of it. Some energy that helps hold them together.”

“Horseshit,” I breathed. I looked at the girls to see if they agreed with me but they might have been statues themselves. They had shut down, unable to contemplate just how bad things had gotten. They needed someone to tell them what to do and now, with Commander Ifiyah out of action, they didn’t know where to look.

I was out of ideas. Where were we going to go? Our only escape route was cut off. We could take shelter in one of the buildings-maybe the Barnes and Noble on the north side of the Square. At least then we would have plenty of reading material while we starved to death. I had gotten this far on adrenaline but now…

We didn’t hear the dead coming for us. They made no sound. Through the trees in the park we could hardly see them either but somehow we knew we were being surrounded. Call it battlefield paranoia if you want. Maybe we were developing a sixth sense for the dead. I ordered the girls up the stone steps and intoUnion Square proper where maybe we could see things a little better. When we got to one of the pavilions over the subway entrances the girls raised their rifles out of sheer habit.