Monster Island(47)

A little of both, actually. Also a musician and an astronomer and a healer, when the need arose. Yes, Gary, I too was a physician in my day. You would probably consider my methods crude but I did more good than ill on the whole.

Gary squatted down to study the display. There was a recreation of how Mael would have looked in life-pretty much exactly like the apparitions that had appeared to him downtown. Next to this was a picture of Stonehenge, which the museum assured Gary was not built by the Celts but which they had used to predict solar eclipses. “How did you die?” he asked.

Now there’s a tale to tell.Mael sat down on a display case full of partially preserved skulls and ruminated for a while before continuing.We took turns, is how. The burnt bannock cake came to me in my twenty-third year. That’s how we chose the anointed ones, drawing bits of cake out of a bag. The summer had been too cool for the corn and my people were in danger of starvation. So they took me to the oaks above Mтin Boglach and hanged me until I gurgled for breath. When they cut me down and I plunged into the black water below the peat I had a prayer to Teutates on my lips. Oh, lord, please make the grains to grow. Something of the sort.

Gary noticed for the first time that the rope around Mael’s neck wasn’t for decoration. It was a noose. “Jesus,” Gary breathed. “That’s horrible.”

Mael came alive with anger as he responded, his head shaking so violently Gary worried it might fall off.It was glorious! I was the soul of my island in that moment, Gary, I was the hopes of my tribe made agonized flesh. I was born for that dying. It wasmagical.

Gary reached out and put a hand on Mael’s arm. “I’m truly sorry-but you wasted your death. Teutates, whoever that was. He couldn’t make the crops grow.”

Mael stood up hurriedly and hobbled out of the room.Maybe so, maybe so. Luckily for me then that’s not how the tale ended.

My world was a few score houses and a scrap of planted field. Beyond that lay only the forest-the place where the nasties roamed in the night. We had none of your technological advances but we knew things you’ve forgotten. Aye, true things-valuable things. We knew our place in the landscape. We knew what it meant to be part of something larger than ourselves.

When I woke here I was blind. Parts of me were missing. I didn’t understand the language of my captors nor why they would shut me up in a tiny glass coffin. I only knew my sacrifice had failed-they don’t work, you know, if you survive. It took me months before I opened myself to theeididh and finally understood. I had served one purpose in life. I would serve another in death.

I had become the nasty in the night.

Which brings us up to date, my boy, and to the time when I turn things around and ask you a question. I’ve work to do and you’d be a great help.

“Work? What kind?”

Ah, well. I’m going to butcher all the survivors.The Druid’s voice had taken on a melancholy weariness Gary could barely stand to have echoing in his head. This was not a task that he wanted, definitely not anything he’d asked for. It was a duty. Gary got all that from the Druid’s tone of voice.I spoke to you about judgment, well. I am the instrument of that judgment. I’m here to make it happen.

“Jesus. You’re talking about genocide.”

He shrugged.I’m talking about what we are. I’m talking about why we were brought back with brains in our head-to finish what’s begun. Now, lad.

Are you in or out?

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Twelve


Jack, the ex-military survivor with the blank nametag lead us down a long hallway lit only sporadically by light streaming down from gratings set into the ceiling. On the other side of those grates were thousands of undead and the light in the tunnel constantly changed as they wandered the sidewalks above us, their shadows occluding the sun. For someone who lived here, like Jack, the walk might not have been so unnerving. After a minute of it there was icy sweat pooling in the small of my back. I felt a little better about it whenever Ayaan would spot a dead man walking overhead and lift her rifle in a spasmodic reflex. Once one of the dead dropped to the ground and stared in at us through the grating, his fingernails scratching at the metal. I could feel the wiry tension in Ayaan’s body even though I was standing three feet away. It was all she could do not to fire off a shot, even though it would most likely ricochet off the grate and hit one of us.

We were rats in a cage. The dead had us trapped.