Monster Island(56)

The girl stared at me. There was nothing but naked antipathy in her eyes, a complete refusal to connect with me. “Yeah? Well, thanks for making my death extra ironic, grandpa.”

“You don’t talk like that to your elders,” Jack said. He didn’t raise his voice but his tone mademy skin crawl. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, sir. I just don’t give a f*ck, sir.” She turned around and started walking away from the gate. “Enough of this,” she shouted back. “I’m going to Brooklyn.” Only a single fluorescent tube still burned out there and she was quickly swallowed up by shadows.

Jack didn’t call after her. Instead he slumped down on the tiled floor, his back to a wall so he could keep an eye on the gate. He picked up his SPAS-12 again and laid it across his knees. Reaching into his pocket he took out a shell-a two and a half inch tungsten slug, unless I missed my guess.

“What are her chances?” I asked.

“About eighty-twenty, based on what I’ve seen. Talk to me, Dekalb. Tell me why you keep chasing after me while I’m just trying to do my job.” The words were too open and vulnerable to belong to this man. He was clearly under immense stress. I thought about leaving him alone and coming back the next day but I had a feeling all of his days were like this.

“You sent out two people a couple of days ago. Paul and Kev, I think.”

He nodded and pressed the magazine cut-off of his weapon and opened the slide. He snapped the slug into the barrel and closed it back up again. “Yes,” he confirmed.

“So you’re not trapped in here. You can send people out when you need to-to get supplies, say, or whatever. I’m not saying it isn’t dangerous but it can be done. You must know some tricks to staying alive here that we don’t.”

Without moving his gaze away from the barred gate in front of him he raised the corners of his mouth. I wouldn’t call it a smile. “Sure. We know one great trick. It’s called desperation. When we get hungry enough somebody always volunteers to go out and get more food. Sometimes people just get bored and go up on their own. Some of them even come back. We’re running short of everything, Dekalb. I don’t know if you noticed but one resource we’re low on is single men, eighteen to thirty-five. They’re the ones who volunteer first.”

“Wow,” I said. I had thought there must be some secret.

“There’s nothing to do down here but wait. Some people can’t take that.”

I understood, kind of. “I have an idea but it’s dangerous. Very dangerous. We need to get your people to the river. There’s an APC just west of Port Authority.”

Jack nodded. “I’ve seen it. I’ve even thought of that myself. It would still run, assuming the fuel hasn’t evaporated and the battery still has a charge and none of the belts in the engine have rotted away. Sure, we could back it up to one of the gates and load people onboard hassle-free. We’d have to make a bunch of trips but yeah, it would get us to your boat just fine.”

Warming to the idea I pointed out the flaw. “Somebody would have to go out there, get it started, and drive it back here, though. If the engine didn’t work on the first try they’d have to try to repair it. The dead would be on them the entire time. I have some soldiers I can bring in-Somalis-but they don’t know how to maintain an American armored personnel carrier. I’m thinking that maybe you do.”

“Correct.”

Okay. We were getting somewhere. “There’s just one hitch. None of this can happen until I complete my original mission.” He looked over sharply and I held up my hands for patience. “Look, there are political issues. Somalia’s in the hands of a warlord. I need a good reason to convince her to accept a bunch of white refugees who aren’t soldiers, who are going to be a drain on her resources. We need to be realistic.”

If I wanted to manipulate him that was the word to use. This was a man who had stripped himself of all pretense, all sentiment. Realism was his only philosophy. He nodded, once. I tried talking to him about what I needed to do and how he could help but he was done with that conversation. He just shut down, conserving energy maybe. He was the hardest man I ever met. It gave me hope, though. If anybody could get me to the UN building it was Jack.

We sat in silence for quite a while. I thought about heading back up to the concourse, to Ayaan and the other survivors but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t handle the way they looked at me-as if I was a tasteless joke, their fondest hope dangled before them after weeks and months of being told that nothing good could ever happen again. I couldn’t face their weird games based on a popular culture that had ceased to exist.