Monster Island(28)

The cone of light drifted up and over. The three of us must all have seen the trail of blood on the floor. I remembered the pool of sticky liquid I’d woken up in and my throat squirmed.

“Dekalb! Save me!”

As revealed by the flashlight Ifiyah’s body had undergone a sea change. Her jacket and shirt had been removed. As had most of her torso. I could see yellow ribs glinting in the dim light. I couldn’t see her face or her left arm-they might have been lost in the shadows. They might have been.

“Ayaan,” I said, softly, “let’s think before-”

I heard the bullet snap through the air. I heard it splinterGary ’s skull. I felt something dry and powdery splatter across my face and chest asGary ’s body slumped away from me, spinning down to collapse on its side. I reached down and picked up my own flashlight. Switched it on and pointed it at him.

The smartest dead man in the world had a finger-wide hole in his right temple. There was no blood but something grey oozed from the wound-brains, I would imagine. His body flexed and twisted spasmodically for a while, then it stopped.

Together Ayaan and I picked up his rubbery form and threw him over the railing into the pit of darkness below, down into the DVD section of the megastore. Neither of us could stand to look at the dead thing, the twice dead thing that had moved and talked but didn't anymore.

David Wellington - Monster Island

END OF PART ONE





Monster Island





Chapter One


The gunshot woke the girls, of course. Ayaan rushed to throw her blazer over Ifiyah’s ravaged form so the others wouldn’t see whatGary had done to her. I tried to explain as calmly as I could that she was gone, andGary too. There was some wailing and crying and a few of the girls offered up prayers for Ifiyah. None of us slept after that.

WhateverGary had done to Ifiyah, she didn’t reanimate. Either he ate her brain or… hell. I didn’t understand how the Epidemic worked. All I knew was that she didn’t get up again.

In the first light of day I heard a tiny sound, a tinny sound like a bell ringing somewhere. “What was that?” I whispered, thinking of the bells that rang when you walked into a bodega in this city. This was the Virgin Megastore, though, and the doors were locked up tight-we checked. The sound was not repeated.

I couldn’t relax, couldn’t get comfortable, though fatigue softened my head and made my thoughts slow and cold as glaciers moving through an ice age, growing a few inches a year it felt like. I stood and watched the dead outside pressing up against the windows and didn’t have the mental energy to plan or consider options. I barely noticed when one of the dead men slumped to the ground and others surged in to take his place.

A woman with a long open wound on her arm and an Yves-St.-Laurent bag still dangling from the crook of her elbow slapped the glass with a greasy palm and then fell, her body held up for a moment by the crowd behind her. She slid down the glass, her flabby cheek rippling where it pressed up against the window until she landed on the sidewalk outside. A teenage boy in a white t-shirt climbed on top of her but then he too collapsed.

Here and there others fell-singly at first, then in great clumps that rolled backwards like waves receding from a shoreline. I grabbed my rifle, thinking this must be some trick. But that had been Ifiyah’s mistake, of course, to think the dead were capable of subterfuge. As far as I could tell they functioned automatically with no art or thought required. As they fell away from the megastore sunlight streaked in through the windows and lit up the faces of the girls.

“Theydhimasha, commander,” Fathia said, as if she were giving me a report from the front. They are dying, is my best translation.

I could see that for myself. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of dead people who had mobbed the megastore trying to get at us only a few were still standing and they were clutching their heads and wandering aimlessly aroundUnion Square. They seemed less interested in us than in whatever had claimed the rest. Almost certainly that was giving them too much credit but that’s what it looked like.

Leadership, I was told once by a Regional Field Head for the Disarmament Project inSudan, has less to do with making the best decision than makinga decision. “Get your things, we’re leaving,” I told the girls.

They snapped to it. Prayer mats were rolled up, weapons were checked and thrown over shoulders. Fathia and Leyla, the youngest girl, moved to collect Ifiyah’s body, rolling her up in their mats.

I unlocked the door but Ayaan was the first one out, her weapon swinging wildly as she tried to cover each of the stragglers in turn. They didn’t react to her presence at all. I shuffled the rest of the girls out the door and then took up the rear. I caught myself about to yell out an order and stopped myself-the noise might have broken the dead out of their spell-and instead jogged forward to tap Ayaan’s shoulder. I pointed in the direction of the river.