Monster Island(40)

There were no more elephants in the Elephant House, Gary realized, nor any giraffes, or hippopotami or rhinos or bears. He was looking at what was left of them.

The giant stamped toward Faceless and Gary sent her an urgent command to fall back. She couldn’t move quickly enough and the giant slapped her to the side. Noseless tried to get around behind the thing and the giant kicked out with one leg, throwing him into a brick wall with a meaty thud. The creature wanted Gary next and would brook no delays. It would tear him apart, Gary knew-not for food, since the dead never ate the dead-but for the sheer insult of invading the giant’s space.

Gary could hardly stand up to the giant physically. Instead he raised his hands before him and stroked the threads that connected the two of them in some etheric space. It hurt to touch the frenzied energy of the giant but Gary reached out and pulled hard, drawing deep until he began to siphon that mad heat away from the beast.

The giant couldn’t possibly understand what was happening but he felt it and it must have hurt like hell. He sucked a deep lungful of air, struggling against massive fat deposits to get the oxygen in and then blasted it out in a wail like an air horn. Gary covered his ears, severing his connection to the giant in the process and for a moment the world was silent again. Then the giant turned to the side and started climbing up over a high fence, digging his fingers deep into the metal lattice, pulling himself away from Gary as fast as he could.

Gary felt like slapping his hands together in self-congratulation as the giant hurried off into the muddy forest outside the Zoo. He nearly did-until the benefactor spoke to him, the words conveyed directly into his still-tender brain:

Amaideach stуcach!the benefactor howled. The words meant nothing to Gary but they cut through him like a sword of fire.You let it get away! the Benefactor went on, this time in English. It was too much, this communication: it felt like the words were tearing through Gary's mind, as dangerous as bullets. He tumbled to the ground, his body convulsing wildly in the throes of a massive seizure.

When he was able to rise to his feet again he collected Noseless and Faceless (looking a little ragged after the fight with the giant but still mobile) and returned to his uptown course. He had to find his benefactor. He had to know what kind of power could hurt him so badly from such a distance.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Eight


We kept to the middle of the street as we approached Port Authority. This must have been the last part of the city to be evacuated. We saw piles of luggage-sometimes just trash bags sealed with masking tape, sometimes great heaps of Prada handbags or Tumi suitcases-stashed on the sidewalk and everywhere there were leaflets tacked up on the walls or skating along the streets like albino manta rays advising people to STAY TOGETHER and KNOW YOUR GROUP NUMBER BY HEART! The bus terminal must have been the only way out of town at the end. I had no great desire to go inside and see what had become of all those panicked refugees. It would be depressing at best, I thought, shocking at worst.

Then we passed by the bulk of the terminal and entered Times Square and I discovered a new definition for the word ‘shocking’.

It will sound ridiculous to some, I know, after all the devastation I’d witnessed, but Times Square was the most horrifying place I saw in this new New York. There were no piles of dead bodies, no signs of looting or panic. There was just one thing wrong with this Times Square.

It was dark.

There were no lights on anywhere, not a single bulb. I turned to Ayaan but she didn’t understand, of course, so I turned around again and stared up at the vast blank faces of the buildings around me. I wanted to explain to her-how there used to be television screens here six stories high, how the neon lights had glowed and shifted and shimmered so brightly the night had been transformed into a luminous blue haze unlike daylight, unlike moonlight, something wholly transcendent and localized. How there had been a law requiring every building to put out a certain amount of light so that even the police station and the subway entrances and the military recruiting center had blasted out illumination like the Vegas strip but how could she understand? She had no point of reference-she had never seen the big advertisements for Samsung and Reuters and Quiksilver and McDonald’s. She would never see them now. With my mouth open I turned in place, so shocked I couldn’t think. The heart of New York City-that was what all the tourist books called Times Square. The heart of New York City had stopped beating. The city like its inhabitants had perished and now existed only in a nightmarish half-state, an unliving undeath. Ayaan had to grab my hand and lead me away.