Monster Island(76)

“How are your people settling in?” Gary asked. The dead were still hard at work constructing the wall around the prison village but the living had already been moved into their simple houses. Gary had provided as much help as he could with books from the Public Library down on Forty-Second street and archaic tools taken from the Museum of the City of New York (known for its period rooms) but it couldn’t be easy for twenty-first century people to suddenly be forced into an eighteenth century existence. Gary had no way to provide electricity or running water, much less television and online shopping. Rude survival was all that he offered. Still, it beat the alternative.

“They’re scared, of course. They don’t trust you.”

Gary frowned. “I’m a ghoul of my word. Anyway it’s in my best interest to keep them safe.”

Marisol gave him something approaching a defiant smile. “They didn’t trust Dekalb and he had a boat in the harbor. Jesus, do you even know what you look like these days? It’s not a logic thing, okay? They see a dead guy who smells like pickles and who still has scraps of skin in his teeth, they want to run the other way. Give them a break. In time, I guess… I guess you can get used to anything but for now… They’ve been herded into a corral in the middle of an army of bloodthirsty monsters and now they’re being lorded over by a cannibal in a bathrobe. They’re scared. Most of them. A couple still think they’re going to rescued.”

Gary scratched himself. “Rescued? What, by Dekalb? If he wants to do the smart thing he’ll leave me the f*ck alone.”

It was a hard walk to the top of thebroch, probably too much for a pregnant woman with a bad stomach (she did seem to be panting a lot when they reached the top) but Gary took the steep stairs easily, nearly running up two steps at a time. “Of course, he won’t do the smart thing,” he told Marisol. Noseless and Faceless were waiting for them on the unfinished tower’s ramparts. Noseless brought forward a silver tray with a dozen sticks of beef jerky fanned out for Gary’s pleasure. He took one and chewed vigorously. Grudgingly Marisol took another, staring at it in her hand for a long while before biting into it, perhaps wondering if it was dried human meat. It wasn’t-Gary was no savage. “Dekalb is an idealist. He’ll come here, even if he has to come alone, even if it means his death.”

“Maybe he’ll have some help,” Marisol suggested. “You haven’t met my Jack yet.”

Gary gestured for her to look over the park. Below them, arrayed in their thousands, stood the dead-their shoulders slumped, their bodies wasted but there were so many of them. They covered the ground like locusts, their constant movement like the waves of a sea.

He reached into theeididh, seized the throats and diaphragms of thousands of the dead in his spectral fist. The air sighed with their spasms as for the first time in weeks or months their esophagi opened and air flowed into them. Gary let it out like air spilling from the neck of a balloon.

“Hell… o…” the dead moaned. The noise was like tectonic plates shifting, like an ocean draining away through a crack in the world. A real dead-end sound, a symphony for solo apocalypse. Gary’s lips split open he was smiling so hard. “Hello… Marisol…”

“I don’t need any more males,” Gary told her. “If they come here they’ll die.”

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Eight


The thirty-foot trailer barely had room for a crew of three. With the girls all struggling to get in and have a look at the monitors the air inside quickly became too muggy and close to be breathable. I mopped sweat away from my forehead and nodded when Kreutzer asked if I was ready. Jack still had the Predator in the air, making wide circles around Manhattan at about twenty thousand feet but even he couldn’t help his curiosity. We all wanted to know what the spy plane had seen.

I blinked rapidly as the display shot images rapid-fire at me of buildings passing far too close and fast on either side. I nearly lurched forward in my chair as the view opened up dramatically, the Predator gliding over the head of the Columbus statue at 59th street. Beyond the barrier of Central Park South the view changed again, and dramatically, into a landscape of mud laced with junk. The park had become unrecognizable, even the green grass torn away by the changes of the Epidemic. I hadn’t even considered at that point that the dead might converge on theplants there and I felt my head shaking from side to side in doubt and distaste to see what had come of one my favorite places in the world.