Monster Island(78)

Did I tell her? It could only disturb her-and frankly, she didn’t need the pressure of knowing she actually had an option. In the end though I decided I knew Ayaan well enough that I knew she would want to know.

“He called me,” I told her. “He said he would make the way clear for us. Give us free passage. There’s a price, though. He wants to eat you personally. It’s a revenge thing for the time you shot him.”

Her eyes went very wide but only for a moment. Then she nodded. “Okay. When do I go?”

I stepped forward and put my hands on her shoulders. “I don’t think you understand. He wants totorture you. Todeath. I won’t let that happen, Ayaan.”

She pushed me away. I’m pretty sure that my touching her like that had violated Sharia law but mostly she just didn’t like my attitude. “Why do you deny me this? It is my right! So many others have died! Ifiyah died just so that we could learn a lesson. That girl, the one with the cat, she died for being stupid! You will not let me die for my country? You will not let me die the most honorable death possible? Even if it means our mission is a success? Even if it means you can see your daughter again?”

I opened my mouth but come on. There are no words after something like that. None at all.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Nine


“Sure,” Kreutzer said, scratching vigorously at his unkempt hair. “It makes sense. She’s an A-rab, right? They actuallywant to become martyrs. It’s a good deal for them-one quick death and then you’re in f*cking paradise with your seventy-two virgins.” He considered that for a second. “Or maybe she gets to be one of somebody else’s virgins. Face it, blowing themselves up is what they do best.”

I glared at him. “That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.” I waved my hands in the air. “She’s a teenager, that’s all. She doesn’t understand what dying really means but she knows for a fact that life sucks. She’s got all these hormones and energy and weird bad culturally created bullshit, f*cked up sexuality projected into glamorous ideas of death as transcendence-”

“She’s a soldier.” Jack peeled apart a blade of unmowed grass and put it to his lips. He blew hard and it made a reedy sound, like a mournful bassoon starting a dirge.

“She’s a child.” I said. But of course, she was much more than that. Jack understood her better than I did right then. She was a soldier. Which meant that she could submerge her own self into a larger idea, a context of community that had to be served-her national identity as a Somali, her place as akumayo warrior fighting for Mama Halima. The good of all humanity.

It was a distinctly un-American sentiment but I had felt it myself. When we returned from the ill-fated raid on the hospital, dragging what was left of Ifiyah behind us, I had felt it. My own needs and wants and shortcoming no longer applied. When we got back to the boat and Osman started making wisecracks I had felt so disconnected from him and his selfish cowardice.

It takes us years to learn that surrender to what is larger than ourselves. Jack had spent much of his life having it drilled into him. Parents were supposed to get it instinctually but some never really learned to put their families ahead of themselves.

Ayaan had figured it out in grade school. It was insulting, not to mention pointless, to deny her the belief she held closest to her very soul.

The girl herself must have heard us-I hardly kept my voice down after Kreutzer started spouting off-but she was busy and didn’t feel the need to break in to the conversation. She was preparing herself, you see. Preparing herself to be eaten alive.

Of all the f*cked up things I have seen since the dead came back to life and the world ended in grasping, hungering horror the very worst was a sixteen year-old girl touching her forehead to green grass on a sunny day and communing with her god. I could understand her motivation for throwing away her life-I could even go along with it, if I had to, by gritting my teeth-but I knew it would haunt me forever.

This was it, though. All I could ever hope to achieve. I would get my drugs and I would go back to Africa and I would see Sarah, I would hold her in my arms and pray she never had to make decisions like this, never had to watch people annihilate themselves for the sake of corrupt politicians half the world away again. We would build some kind of life and I would make myself forget what had happened. For Sarah’s sake.

“Dekalb,” Jack said. “You’re forgetting something.”