Monster Island(61)

The tunnel revealed by Jack’s flashlight was uniformly black, or even more than that. A dull dusty color that absorbed the light and gave back little to focus on. Now and again we would come across an electrical junction box on the wall or a signal light but these seemed to float in space, unmoored from reality. Reality was the tracks and the third rail that ran along side us and countless alcoves and recesses and emergency doorways built into walls pierced with Roman arches to cross-ventilate the twin tunnels. Holes where anything at all could be hiding.

Jack stopped abruptly ahead of us, his yellow-green chemical light nearly smacking my nose. I moved around him to see what had brought him up short.

A dead woman down on all fours on the tracks, scooping cockroaches into her mouth. When she looked up her cloudy eyes were like perfect mirrors, dazzling us with reflected light. Most of her upper lip was missing, giving her a permanent sneer. She climbed to her feet and started stumping toward us, the bullseye pattern of Jack’s light making strange watery shadows in her faded dress.

She was nearly on us before I realized that neither Jack nor Ayaan was going to shoot her. I stared at them and saw he was holding the barrel of her AK-47, pointing it at the ceiling. He looked back at me with an expression of indifferent curiosity.

One of the dead woman’s arms was bent up painfully under her breasts but the other stretched out to snatch at us. Her mouth was open wide as if she wanted to swallow us whole.

“Just like a baseball bat, Dekalb,” Jack said, reminding me of the machete in my hand.

She was so close her stink was on me, permeating my clothes. “Jesus,” I shrieked, and lunged forward, swinging with both hands, putting my weight into it. I felt her bony frame collide with my chest as the blade went right through her head, all resistance taking the form of a bad shock in my shoulder as if I’d been hit by a car but then she was lifeless, a rattling inanimate heap that slid down my pantleg and I was gasping, wheezing for breath, bending forward to see by the light of Jack’s flashlight that I had taken off the top of the dead woman’s head in a big diagonal slice that included one eye. She wasn’t getting back up.

“Why?” I asked.

Jack bent down beside me and put an arm around my shoulders. “I had to know if I was going to be carrying you. Now I know you can hold your mud.”

“And that’s a good thing?” I spat out everything in my mouth-my fear, her stink, the look on Ayaan’s face that showed real approval for the first time. Approval I f*cking didn’t need, if that’s what it took to get it. I had just been hazed, of all things.

Jack squeezed my bicep and headed down the tunnel. I watched his chemical light recede for a moment, then jogged to catch up.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Nineteen


We followed Jack’s flashlight up a never-ending series of stairs and stalled escalators. It got easier to see as we went along. I thought my eyes were adjusting to the darkness but in fact we had merely arrived at Grand Central and light-real sunlight-was streaming through the terminal’s high windows. When we emerged into the marble-lined corridors leading to the main concourse I could suddenly see everything again and I blinked rapidly, my eyes watering.

Ayaan dropped into a crouch and scanned the empty terminal from behind her rifle. Jack kept close to the walls but I was just so glad to be out of the tunnels that I couldn’t maintain that level of healthy paranoia. I lead them past empty newsstands, empty shops selling men’s shirts or CDs or flowers, past a deserted shoeshine stand until we entered the big main concourse and I could look up at the green-blue ceiling and the gold diagrams of the Zodiac, at the enormous windows through which streamed visible rays of yellow light. There was no sign of any life or movement anywhere.

The emptiness of Times Square had shocked me and this should have, too. Grand Central had never been anything but crowded in my experience. Yet something about the place-its cathedral scale or its gleaming marble, perhaps-lent itself to a kind of somber peace. I didn’t have time to sight-see, really, but it was hard to tear myself away from the massive quietude of the terminal. This was a place built for sleeping giants and I longed to rest a while in its megalithic grace.

I lead them down the Graybar Passage to a row of glass doors. They were locked at the top and bottom but Jack had a police pick gun. It looked like a pistol grip with a thick needle sticking out where the barrel should have been. It could open any lock in the city. It used to be that only civil authorities could have such things but the internet had made them publicly available-Jack had got his from the same outfit that sold him the SPAS-12. “Check the street,” he said, as he crouched down to get at the bottom lock on the door. It was a tricky operation-you had to fire the gun to retract the cylinder pins at the same time you used a tension wrench to turn the plug.