Monster Island(72)

He bent close and let her smell his fetid breath. “Or I can eat your face off right now. Don’t answer yet, though, there’s more! I’ll make it painless. You won’t feel a thing. I’ll even make sure you don’t come back. You’ll just be dead.” He grabbed the handholds of her wheelchair and spun her around and around. He was enjoying this. “Dead, dead dead forever and ever and ever and ever and your body will rot away on the ground until the flies come and lay their maggot eggs in your cute little cheeks.”

When he stopped she was breathing hard. Her body shook visibly as if she were very cold and he could smell something stale and sharp rising from her pores. Nothing special, really. Just fear.

“So what’ll it be, hmm?” he asked. “Do I get an early lunch today-or should I start referring to you as Ms. Mayor?”

Her eyes were thin lines of hatred. “You bastard. I want the biggest silkiest sash that says MAYOR on it in rhinestones. I want people to know who sold them out.”

Gary smiled real big so she could see his teeth.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Five


Kreutzer lead us through a tiny development of yellow clapboard houses and down tree-lined avenues-the old officers’ quarters back when Governors Island was a military base. The Coast Guard logo was everywhere, on monuments and plaques and chain link fences, even on the street signs.

The DHS Agent swore the houses were empty and that he’d checked them out himself. “Honest, there’s not even a stick of furniture in there and no goddamned food at all.”

Unconvinced I sent squads of girls into every building we passed. “There must have been other people here,” I said. “Nobody posts a field agent to a place like this if there’s nothing for him to do.”

“There were more,” Kreutzer said, clutching at his bandaged hand. “There was a garrison. When the Epidemic broke out we needed a hardened location for emergency management ops. We reactivated the base here and staffed it with Operations Directorate irregulars. People used to flying in and out of air fields with little or no notice. Some useless f*cking moron in the Pentagon thought you could fight dead f*cks with helicopters and law enforcement aircraft.”

I looked around at the trees rattling in the wind, at the yellow houses. “That would take some pretty serious infrastructure.”

Kreutzer tilted his head toward the western part of the island. “Over that way. This is all touristy crap. When the city took over in 2003 they spruced up here and started letting visitors in. They kept the real stuff out of sight.”

I nodded and signaled for the girls to regroup. We headed across a lush green lawn past the star-shaped stone edifice of Fort Jay.

“So like I was saying-me and Morrison, my partner, we got detailed here to run sigint and systems while the Guard guys ran their flyovers. We were Systems Directorate before we got rolled up into Homeland Security. At first I was pissed to get stuck in this latrine while guys I outranked were doing a real man’s job in the city. Then the choppers started turning up missing-whole crews never came back-and I figured maybe I had it okay after all. Finally we got a call from Washington, they needed all our units for a tactical event along the Potomac. Morrison and me stayed behind to keep the site maintained for when they came back.”

Kreutzer had brought us to the side of Liggett Hall, an enormous brick dormitory building that cut the island in half. A line of trees behind the structure hid a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire. A gate stood open, revealing a dirt pathway to the other side. “I’m guessing they never did,” I said.

“Well two points for you, shithead. They got slaughtered, from what we could hear on the blower. They were useless up in the air and when they put down they got f*cked, royally f*cked.” Kreutzer stopped before entering the gate. “I don’t know about this. This is a restricted area.”

I pushed past him and entered the real base. A broad central lawn ran most of the way to the far shore, dotted here and there with baseball diamonds. A concrete airstrip had been laid down across this lawn, which was flanked with dilapidated prefab buildings of the kind I associated with American military bases. Time and rust had been unkind to most of the structures but I could see a few hangars that still looked operational as well as an air traffic control tower.

“We held on the best we could. Occasionally one of those dead *s would climb out of the ventilation tower but we took ‘em down by the numbers. We managed to close off the louvers eventually so that’s not a problem anymore.”