Monster Island(89)

Gary stood up in his bathtub with a noise like breakers on the beach and reached out one hand to slap me to the floor. My breath exploded out of my lungs and spots swam before my eyes. I looked up and saw the hand that brought me down. It was like one of those over-sized foam hands you get at sporting events. It was enormous, the individual fingers as thick as saplings. Gary was naked, his body a rippling mass of fat and dead veins. Corpse-flavored gelatin stuffed into lumpy sausage casings that threatened to split open at any moment.

He was seven and a half feet tall. He was six feet wide. He must have weighed a thousand pounds. His head hadn’t grown at all. It looked tiny on his shoulders, his neck submerged under rolls of fat. He glanced down at himself.

“Between meal snacks,” he explained.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Sixteen


The infamous Jack hung from the galleries, his motionless body twisting this way, now that. The blood that had spurted from his arteries was barely trickling out now. In his mind’s eye Gary could see the golden energy of his life, once fierce and self-contained, turning to wisps of wan smoke, his body barely warmer than the air around him.

A drop of blood fell from his dangling left hand and struck the flagstones with a soft spattering sound.

“So… I win,” Gary said, not really sure what that meant. He sloshed backward into the welcoming embrace of his bath. His weight had become an issue of late-his bones complained when he stood up and forced them to accommodate all that extra fat tissue. It felt far better to just lie back in the formalin and let his natural buoyancy hold him up. “It’s over.” It had been fifteen minutes since the last rocket-propelled grenade struck thebroch. Ayaan must be out of ammunition. Dekalb and Jack were accounted for. The prisoners, according to Noseless, were scared but calm. In the entirety of New York City no one remained to challenge him. “I win,” he said again.

Another drop of blood fell. Drip.

Dekalb’s jaw shook as he opened his mouth to speak. He visibly forced the words out. “I suppose you do. So just finish me already. Eat me now and put me out of my misery.”

Gary grinned and rested his hands across his swollen belly. “No,” he said.

“…no?”

“No.” Gary nodded at Jack where the Army Ranger had turned as pale as a sheet. Drip. Drip. “He’s about to die. When he does he’ll come back-as one of mine. Then I’m going to lethim eat you. It’ll be awesome.”

Drip.

Dekalb’s stomach quaked, the muscles under his blood-soaked shirt moving violently as his chest heaved with fear. He would be having trouble controlling his bowels, Gary thought. He might shit himself. That would be amusing. Dekalb ran his hands down his front, trying to smooth away the shaking maybe or perhaps he was trying to wipe the sweat off his palms. He pushed his hands across his pockets and seemed to find something there. His wallet? His house keys? Something safe, comfortable, reassuring. Some false hope. His eyes were slits, though, hurt, lost and impotent. “You… you don’t have to do that. You didn’t have to do any of this-Gary, there’s still a chance. You can turn this around. Save the day.”

“Oh, really?” Gary sneered.

“Yeah.” Dekalb sat down cross-legged on the lip of Gary’s tub and rubbed at his face. “You could… you control the dead. You could march them all into the ocean if you wanted. You could save us. You could save the human race.” drip.

Gary drew his head under the preserving fluid for a moment. Felt it fill his mouth, his nose, the labyrinth of his sinus cavity. He reared upward again and let the liquid drip out of his face before he went on. “The human race. The living, you mean-the people who hate me. Who can’t stand to look at me. Why is that, Dekalb? Why do I disgust you so much? Give me an honest answer to that, at least.”

The enemy at least thought before answering. “Because you’re just like us. You can talk, you can think-the restless dead out there, your army, we can look at them and think they’re just animals. They don’t know what they’re doing. But you chose this.”

“I chose it,” Gary repeated. He hadn’t considered that-he’d always seen himself as a victim of circumstance. Pushed along by events until he ended up on top of them.

“You’re human-you might as well be human. And you eat other humans. There’s nothing complex about it. It’s the oldest taboo in the book. You’re a cannibal.”