Monster Island(87)

“You don’t know that,” I demanded.

He blinked and looked away from me. “Dekalb,” he said, “what’s the crew carrying capacity of a Chinook helicopter with the seats taken out?”

My jaw opened and closed spasmodically. “You don’t-” But he did. He knew the answer. Maybe a hundred people if you’re not going very far. We could only rescue half the survivors, even if we made it that far.

Jack clearly didn’t want to have to choose which ones to leave behind.

“There’s nothing to be gained by us dying like that. Still we can do something for the survivors. We can keep them from being his lunch. Or rather I can.”

He tossed me one of the atropine injector kits. If I was exposed to nerve gas the only thing that could save me-the only thing-was jabbing the enclosed hypodermics into my buttocks or thigh. If I hadn’t been exposed to nerve gas but jabbed myself anyway, the atropine would kill me instead.

“You can get out of here. Go back the way we came. Meet up with Kreutzer and have him take you to the UN. Get the girls off of that rooftop. You can still complete your mission. You just have to let me complete mine.”

Which meant consigning two hundred men, women and children to their deaths.

“Dekalb-I only needed you to come this far because I couldn’t carry all of this gear on my own. Now let me do you a favor. Just turn around and go.”

I didn’t know what to say. I definitely didn’t know what to do. I most certainly had no idea what my next reaction was going to be. If I could have stepped out of my body and spoken with myself I would have advised against it.

It was a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing.

The Iridium cellphone buzzed with a small, unobtrusive sound. It vibrated against the flagstone stone floor, wobbling and dancing. It slid a few inches across the floor and stopped. It started up again a second later. This was Ayaan’s signal to us, the message that she had drawn Gary’s undead army to her position. Away from us. Jack and I both stared at the phone.

We looked up at the same moment. I had my combat knife in my hand, pointed at his stomach. He had the Glock in his hand, pointed at my heart.

I lunged.

He fired.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Fifteen


Jack’s best plan-the one he’d spent days dreaming up, planning for, imagining ways it could be implemented-was to kill every living person in Gary’s fortress. He would build eight bombs, each of them containing enough VX nerve gas to wipe out a city neighborhood. He would strap these bombs to his body. Then he would run through the fortress with a detonator in his hand. Either he would make it outside and into Gary’s farm, where the survivors were held-and perhaps in the process get one last look at Marisol-or he would be stopped by attacking ghouls along the route. Either way he would trigger the detonator. The resulting cloud of poison gas would spread throughout this part of the city. It would take hours to dissipate. Anyone who was exposed to it, even for just a few minutes, would die. There was no immunity to VX. You couldn’t even hold your breath and hope it would go away. Once it got on your skin you were dead. There would be no time to wash it off.

He believed that by using a nerve gas he would insure that the dead would not rise again. VX worked by short-circuiting the entire nervous system, making it impossible for the body to function. Maybe it would have prevented Marisol and the survivors from Times Square from reanimating. We’ll never know.

We tried to kill each other in that last ugly second, with everything we had. I stabbed him with a combat knife, throwing myself on top of him. He used every bit of skill he had with a firearm and tried to shoot me in the heart. Head shots, he would have told me, are difficult to make even at point blank range when you’re shooting from the hip with a pistol. Even if you connect you’re firing into the most bony part of the human anatomy, the part most likely to deflect a shot. You might just graze your target’s scalp, which is just going to make them angry. You might hit them in the jaw, which makes for an ugly wound but in the shock of impact most people won’t even feel it. A shot to the chest, however, will at the very least puncture a lung. In terms of stopping power you want to always aim for the torso.

I had no training in knife-fighting. I didn’t know any special moves. I certainly didn’t know how to effectively kill a living human being with a knife. I just jumped and stuck my knife out and hoped for the best.