Monster Island(81)

From behind ventilation hoods and elevator shaft heads the rest of Ayaan’s company emerged, a dozen, two dozen girls with heavy packs on their backs and assault rifles in their hands. Some of them held large cardboard boxes. These girls ran to the edge of the planetarium roof and upturned their loads over the heads of the encroaching ghoul army.

The boxes had been full of live hand grenades. They fell like fruit from an orchard in a thunderstorm, tumbling through fifty feet of air to bounce around the feet of Gary’s soldiers. They went off in rhythmic fountains of pale smoke that hid the army from Noseless’s view and made Gary wince as he felt the distant pain of each dead man to be blown apart.

“Goddamnit,” Gary howled. He headed back to thebroch, calling the mummies to follow him. It looked like Dekalb still had some surprises for him after all.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Eleven


Six hours earlier:

Osman handed me a limpkif cigarette and a pack of matches before he jumped back onto theArawelo and started belching orders at Yusuf. “It will calm your nerves,” he told me. I guess I looked like a ghost-people had been telling me all morning how pale I was. I didn’t think Osman’s weak hashish was going to help so I shoved the joint in my pocket after waving him my gratitude.

The boat pulled away from the Coast Guard dock with a rattling of pistons and a blast of hot exhaust from its diesels. Osman brought it around slowly, backing and filling with a series of slow-motion turns. The girls on the deck held to the rails or to lashed-down boxes of armaments and looked wistfully over the green grass of Governors Island. I had hoped not to see Ayaan before she left but there she was on top of the wheelhouse like a homecoming queen on a particularly rusty parade float. She looked down at me and I looked up at her. Our eyes met for perhaps the last time and we seemed to communicate on some non-verbal level, some wavelength of respect I couldn’t really define. Finally she shot me a smile that made me queasy and then she turned to face the harbor.

I headed back toward the aircraft hangars at a jog-timing was a big part of Jack’s plan and I wouldn’t be the one to screw it up. The big tubular Chinook helicopter-a CH-47SD, the newest and fanciest cargo helicopter the Armed Forces have-sat on the lawn waiting for me. I dashed up the rear loading ramp and hit the switch to close it behind me, then jogged forward through the cabin, cavernous now that we’d torn out all the seats and rattling like the inside of a concrete mixer. Kreutzer already had the Super-D’s tandem rotors spun up to speed and he was ready to get airborne. He had protested of course when we asked him to fly us out to Central Park but Jack had certain powers of persuasion. Namely he told Kreutzer that if he didn’t volunteer for the job we would just leave him on Governors Island to starve. When Jack says something like that people tend to assume he’s not bluffing.

As soon as I reached the cockpit Kreutzer took us straight up a hundred feet and then pushed forward so hard I toppled backward and landed on my ass. He looked down at me from his pilot’s seat as if he might start laughing.

“How many flight hours do you have on this thing?” I shouted over the roar of the engines.

Kreutzer snarled back, “More than you, *.” Fair enough.

Carefully I climbed up into the navigator’s seat. Jack, in the co-pilot’s seat, handed me a stick of gum to help pop my ears.

We streaked across the harbor and into Brooklyn airspace, keeping low and moving fast. We were taking the first of many dumb risks this mission would require. While we were certain that Brooklyn was swarming with the dead and that some of them would see us we could only hope that Gary’s ability to use the dead as spies didn’t extend to that kind of range… or, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be paying attention to the outlying boroughs.

The position of my seat kept me from seeing down to street level so I was thankfully spared the sight of any surprised-looking dead who might have spotted us. All I saw was the occasional building flashing by right outside my window-the courthouse, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank clock tower, the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters. As we passed into Queens Kreutzer brought us up another hundred feet and banked toward the river. “Last chance,” he said.

I frowned in confusion-then looked out the canopy at the ground below. We were even with the UN complex, the Secretariat building as white and shiny as a tombstone where it towered over the corpse-choked East River. My brain did a reversal of perspectives and I realized what he was saying. We could just fly over there right now and get the drugs and leave. I could call Ayaan and abort this suicide mission. I didn’t see any pigeons-maybe Gary had actually kept his word and cleared the way for us.