Monster Island(85)

Darkness hunched over the dinosaur exhibit but not total darkness. Gary tried to relax the corpse’s failing eyes and perceive where light was coming in. By trial and error he eventually managed to steer the dead man in the right direction-to a sizeable gap in the wall, a place where bricks had fallen away and plaster had crumbled until sunlight could thrust inside in a whorl of fresh air. Gary shoved his distant body into the hole andpushed. The dead man’s flesh snagged on broken pipes and wooden beams, snagged and tore away but he moved, inch by inch, closer to the outside. Finally his face emerged into the light and for a moment Gary could see nothing but white as his avatar’s degraded pupils tried desperately to constrict. When his vision finally cleared he looked down and saw just what he wanted to see-the roof of the planetarium, not three feet below, tarpaper and ventilation fans and Somali child soldiers. He had a way through! Gary immediately switched his attention to call up hundreds of his troops-no, thousands-and head them toward the Natural History Museum. He intended to exploit this weakness fully.

Then he dropped back into his scout’s damaged brain again, just to scope out the situation-and found himself staring into the face of a smiling teenaged girl. She had a small spherical green hand grenade in one hand. Gary tried to make the dead man snap at her fingers with his teeth but he couldn’t stop her from pushing her grenade into the dead man’s mouth. He could feel the roundness of it, the uncomfortable weight in his mouth. He could taste the metal.

He hardly needed to stick around for what came next. The gap in the wall would be useless, then-the girls would be aware of it and could easily cover any troops he tried to send through.

“Fuck!” he shouted, and turned away from the ramparts of thebroch. Back in his own body for the first time since the siege had begun he stamped down the stairs, the mummies following close behind him. He left Noseless on the top level to watch the ongoing battle. In a sort of half-hearted way he continued to pay attention to the struggle to the west where his troops were being picked off one by one but he wasn’t immediately interested in the details. Ayaan wasn’t going anywhere and neither was he. He just needed a little time to regroup, rethink.

He reached the main floor of the tower and slumped gratefully into his formalin bath. It was getting harder to move around on his own these days-perhaps he was spending so much time in theeididh that his muscles were atrophying. Something to worry about when PHWHAM. PHHHWHAM. PHHWHAM.

Brick dust sifted down from the galleries above and sprinkled across his bath like paprika. Gary sat up with a great sloshing and grabbed for information. The west side of thebroch was wreathed in smoke that hung motionless in great wreaths in the air. Noseless had fallen to the wooden planking of the top gallery, knocked clean off his feet by the impacts. Gary forced him to stand up again and take a look.

One of the girls had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher-the same weapon Dekalb had used on the dead riot cops. She was firing directly at thebroch, the rocket grenades coming at Gary’s vision like deadly footballs spinning through the intervening air, trailing behind them perfectly straight trails of white vapor.

David Wellington - Monster Island

PHHHHHHHHHWHAM.

Gary stewed in rage as he summoned up more of his troops-screw it, all of them!-and hurled them toward the Natural History Museum. He would end this now, any way he had to. If he had to knock down the entire planetarium with the sheer brute strength of a million dead men he would do it. If he had to tear the place down himself he would! He sent his giant striding forward through the undead tide, his long legs propelling him forward faster than the rest of them could walk. He sent Faceless out to be his eyes-she had eaten recently enough that her vision wasn’t clouded by rot. This wasn’t going to stand, goddamnit!

The army of the dead was surrounding the planetarium in ranks a hundred deep, their shoulders bent to pushing at the frame of the building until they were trampling one another, when Gary heard the gunshot. With his own, physical ears. His attention snapped back to his own senses at once.

That sound had come from inside thebroch.





Monster Island





Chapter Fourteen


Jack closed the door leading into Gary’s fortress and got to work by the illumination of a handful of chemical lights. We took off our hazmat suits to make it easier to work and I waited patiently for Jack’s instructions. He unzipped the big pack I had carried into Gary’s fortress and took out a couple foil packets covered in warning stickers and small print type. I peered into the pack myself and had no idea what I was looking at. Other than the metal gas cylinders there were neat stacks of electronic components and bricks of something soft-looking and off-white. I did notice what was missing: guns. There weren’t any firearms in there at all. No pistols, no assault rifles, no shotguns. No rocket launchers or sniper rifles or machine guns.