Monster Island(65)

“Shit,” he said, with a sudden realization. The trail lead down off the platform and into the downtown tunnel. Of course. Whoever had designed the traps had been one step ahead of Gary all along.

The station’s defenses had been designed not to stop the dead but simply to slow them down while the survivors escaped through the tunnels. Directly to the south lay Penn Station-a perfect fallback position should Times Square be compromised.

Gary lead his final wave of soldiers from the rear, pushing them onward through the ruined station, urging them forward into the Stygian tunnel. The dead could see no better in the dark than the living and they stumbled and fell as they tripped on rails and railroad ties but enough of them kept moving forward. Soon enough Gary could see dancing light ahead-a greenish radiance that came from hundreds of glowsticks.

“Keep moving!” he heard a woman shout. “We can outrun them!”

Oh, they could have indeed-if Gary had let them. Instead he sent a command forward to 34th street. There were plenty of the undead there. It was easy to mobilize them and send them down into the subway tunnels. Soon Gary had the survivors trapped between two hordes of hungry dead. The survivors closed ranks and tried to fight-they had, after all, nothing to lose-but their pistols quickly ran out of ammunition. Knives and hammers and other hand to hand weapons came out but they were lost and they knew it.

Gary moved through the undead crowd and came before the survivors to look over his victory. There were hundreds of them, as promised. Mostly women and children and old men, wearing backpacks or shoulder bags. They huddled together in their terror, some of them sobbing, one or two of them actually wailing. One of them stood apart from the crowd. A woman dressed in expensive-looking clothes. Her nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS f*ck you. She was very, very pregnant and rested her hands on her belly.

“You win, motherf*cker,” she said. “Now come on. Eat me. Do me a favor!”

Gary came closer. He looked down and placed a hand lined with dead veins on her belly. The life force thrummed in her, bright energy radiating outward from the center of her being like a warm fire. He could see it glowing through his fingers, tinging them red as if he held his hand up to the sun.

“Actually,” he said, “I’ve got a better idea.”

David Wellington - Monster Island

END OF PART TWO





Monster Island





Chapter One


Smoke and acrid fumes swirled across the surface of the scorched platform. The tiles from the walls had cracked and fallen during the inferno and lay in piles of shards that clinked against my shoes. Jack’s light stabbed out in a wan cone that couldn’t penetrate the dust and soot suspended in the air. Bodies-grey piles of sacking, mostly, but with a telltale hand here or a charred tuft of hair there had been shoved onto the tracks in long untidy heaps.

“Good girl,” Jack said.

He ran up a stairwell two steps at a time. We tried to keep up but in the thick air we lacked his urgency and we fell behind until we were abandoned in the near-perfect dark, only our glowsticks illuminating our way. Ayaan tossed hers to me so she could have both hands free for her Kalashnikov. I brandished the two sticks above my head like torches. We came to a place where the bodies were piled up like unliving barricades and I picked my way carefully through, terrified that one of the twice dead would rise up behind me and grab me around the neck. Ayaan let the barrel of her weapon swing from left to right, up and down, sighting on each punctured head in turn. In time we emerged into the main concourse where we’d seen Montclair Wilson give his State of the Union address. It was unrecognizable as a place where hundreds of people had once lived. The walls had been scraped bare, leaving chipped concrete behind. The ceiling had collapsed in places, dropping tons of plaster across the twenty-four hour token booth which sat twisted and abandoned. The dead there had been pushed rudely to the sides, making a wide aisle toward the stairwells that lead up to the street. The light up there beckoned and we didn’t stick around.

At the street level we found Times Square deserted, emptied of its shambling corpses. Every undead thing in Midtown must have been in on the invasion of Times Square but they were long gone now. Only Jack was there, turning in circles looking for signs or clues or something. I could see no sign of the struggle at all but Jack bent and picked up a random piece of paper trash off the street. He handed it to me without a word. It had been a flyer for a Broadway show once but someone had scribbled notes in the margin with a ballpoint pen.