Monster Island(23)

The smoke cleared and I saw a three foot crater in the ground surrounded by mangled bodies, limbs torn away, exposed bones pointing accusingly up at the air. A couple of the former cops were still moving, twitching mostly but still hauling themselves toward us with fingers that bent all wrong. More of them lay motionless on the Square, victims of shrapnel and hydrostatic shock.

“Xariif,”Ayaan muttered. It meant “clever” and it was the nicest thing she’d ever said to me.

I slung the empty tube, still dribbling smoke from both ends, over my shoulder and waved for our scout to come join us. Time was still very much an issue. Once we had regrouped I lead the girls in a desperate run downFourteenth Street to the east-toward the Virgin Megastore there. The main entrance, a triangular shaped lobby of glass doors was locked up tight but that was a good thing since it would help keep out the dead. A second entrance near the store’s cafй opened when I yanked on the chrome handle of the door. I ushered the girls inside, telling them to fan out and secure the place.Gary brought up the end of the line. I held my arm across the opening before he could go in. We were spooked, tired, and still in a lot of danger. It wasn’t going to do much for morale if the girls had to watch Ifiyah die. I wanted to talk to him about what could be done and what our options might be.

“She doesn't have a chance, does she?” I tried, but he was ready for me.

“Let me look at her. Maybe I can save her.”

We both knew the likelihood of that. Nobody ever survived being bitten by the undead. The mouth of the dead woman who attacked Ifiyah would have been swimming with microbes-gangrene, septicemia, typhus would have been injected right into her wound. Add in shock and the massive loss of blood and Ifiyah barely stood more of a chance inside with us than outside with the dead.

Still. She was alive, for now. I may have just fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a crowd but it hadn’t completely changed who I was. If there was a chance for Ifiyah to make it I had to give her that much.

I sighed but I held the door open for him. He mumbled thanks as he stepped into the gloomy megastore. I followed right on his heels and pulled the door shut behind me.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Eighteen


We spread out to cover the first floor of the megastore, moving quietly through the rows of display racks, pointing rifles behind counters and into closets. The afternoon daylight lit up the main floor pretty well but the lower level was lost in darkness. I sent Ayaan and a squad of girls down there with flashlights to scope it out. They returned in a few minutes looking scared but with nothing to report. Good.

The first order of business was to secure the cafй door. We found the keys to the store in a manager’s office and locked it, then pushed tables and chairs up against it to form a barricade. Some of the girls did likewise with the front doors. By this point the dead had already arrived. They pressed up against the windows and for a bad ten minutes or so I thought the glass might break just from the pressure of their bodies but it held. They were terrible to look at-their faces bloated or congested with dead blood, their vacant eyes rolling wildly, their hands cut and broken as they impotently pummeled the glass. I told the girls to move away from the windows, into the shadowy back of the store, just for morale’s sake.

We got Ifiyah propped up in the manager’s leather chair and the undead guy, Gary, used a first aid kit from the cafй to bandage her wound. The skin around the bite looked bloody and swollen. I didn’t hold out a lot of hope. Commander Ifiyah could still talk at that point and Fathia, her bayonet expert, held her hand and asked her a series of quiet questions I didn’t fully understand.

“See tahay?”Fathia asked.

“Waan xanuunsanahay,”was the reply.“Biyo?”

Fathia handed her commander a canteen and the wounded girl drank greedily, spilling water all down the front of her blazer. I turned away and saw Ayaan coming toward me down the display aisles. “Dekalb. We are safe for now, yes? Some of the girls would like to pray. It has been too long.”

I nodded, surprised she would even ask. It seemed that in the power vacuum left by Ifiyah’s debilitation, as the only adult present I had become the absolute authority of the team. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I didn’t think I really wanted that kind of responsibility though as a Westerner it was a relief to not have anyone else barking orders atme.

The girls laid down handwovenderin mats on the floor of the megastore and pointed them toward the east, my best guess for the direction ofMecca. I listened to them chanting sonorously in Arabic while I watched the other girls-the less devout ones I suppose. Mostly they stared out the windows at the dead outside. Were they wondering what we were going to do next? I know I was.