Monster Island(21)

“Wacan… kurta…”Ifiyah said softly. Something about head shots, if I can trust my shoddy Somali vocabulary. She seemed to lack the strength to issue a real order. Her leg was bleeding badly, so I calledGary over and told him to tend to it. He’d been a doctor, once, he'd said. I put a hand over my eyes and scanned the far eastern side of the park, looking for any movement.

I found it quickly enough. There was plenty to be seen-dozens, maybe fifty corpses converging on us while we just waited for them to show up. But what could we do? We were pinned down. We had a horde of the undead coming up behind us-not moving much faster than we could walk but they didn’t need to rest and they would eventually catch up. There were a lot less of them in front of us. We would just have to fight our way through.

“Fathia,” I said, summoning the soldier to stand next to me. “There, do you see them? Are they in range? Every shot has to count.”

She nodded and raised her rifle to her eye. A shot echoed around the park and a branch fell out of a tree in the distance. She took another shot and I could see one of the dead men flinch. He kept coming, though. Ayaan took her turn next but had no better results. I would have given a lot for a pair of binoculars just then.

They came out into the open near the statue ofLafayette. Big guys with bald heads-no, helmets, they were wearing helmets of some kind. Motorcyclists? One of them had either a big stick or a rifle in his hand and for a bad second I considered the possibility of dead men with guns. He dropped it, though, whatever it was, to free his hand so that he could reach for us even if he was a hundred yards away. These things were like meat-seeking missiles, incapable of guile or subterfuge. They just wanted us so badly they could do nothing elsebut want. That had been Ifiyah's bad mistake. She had known they weren't terribly bright but she'd thought they were like animals, that they could learn to leave you alone if you butchered enough of them. She couldn't seem to look at something that had once been human and understand that now it was an unthinking machine. She was too young, I guess. Maybe she'd never met a junkie. Then she might have understood better.

“That one.” I pointed at the foremost and three shots rang out in quick succession. One of the shots must have connected-we could see sparks leap up from the helmet. He barely flinched, though. Then I realized what we were looking at. Riot police.

Sure. There had been widespread looting in the early days of the Epidemic. Lots of public panic. Of course they would have called out the riot cops to keep order. And of course some of them would have succumbed to chaos on the scale of the Epidemic. “Try again,” I said, and they both fired at once. The ex-policeman spun around in a circle as the bullets pelted his head. He collapsed to the ground and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then he slowly got back up.

“The helmet-it must be made of Kevlar,” Ayaan said. Jesus, she had to be right. Only a head shot could destroy the walking dead and these particular corpses had bulletproof helmets on.

What the hell could we do? The girls kept firing. I knew they were wasting ammunition but what else could we do? They were trying for face shots now but the helmets had visors to protect against that.

“Give the orders,” one of the girls said, looking up at me. “You in commander now. So give the orders.”

I rubbed my cheek furiously as I looked around. There was a Virgin Megastore on the southern side of the park. I remembered going there when I was last inNew York and I seemed to recall it only had a couple of entrances. It would take time, though, to get inside and barricade the place. Time we didn’t have if we couldn’t stop thesexaaraan. “Shoot for the legs,” I suggested, “if they can’t walk…” But of course riot cops would be wearing body armor too.

The horde of the dead coming up Fourteenth were still getting closer. The former riot cops were maybe fifty yards away.

“Give the orders,” the girl insisted. I stood there as still as a block of stone without a thought in my head.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Seventeen


The dead riot police were only forty yards away. We could see them clearly now-their padded armor, their helmets with their clear plastic visors showing the cyanotic skin underneath. They moved haltingly as if their muscles had stiffened to pliability of dry wood. Their feet slipped along the ground, looking for equilibrium that seemed in short supply.

“They won’t stop,”Gary told me. “They won’t ever stop.”