Monster Island(91)

Gary swung around, his arms extended like clubs, the light they gave off dazzling me as I slipped just under his grasp and came up with my back against the wall. He pulled back an arm and tried to punch me with an enormous burning fist but I managed to dodge. The punch collided with the wall and shattered the bricks there.

I had a moment of safety. Gary was blind-the fire had turned his eyeballs to cooked blobs of jelly. He cast about, this way and that trying to find me in his personal darkness. I decided not to give him the chance.

I turned and ran and slipped into a corridor leading out of the tub room-and found myself face to face with a dead man in scorched denim overalls. I had forgotten about Gary’s personal guards. This one didn’t seem pleased at all by what I’d done to his master. His broken hands grabbed at my shirt and his mouth came open, his teeth angling for my shoulder. I reared back, trying to break his grip but it was no use-he’d gotten his index finger tangled in one of my belt loops. The best strategy I could think of was to knock him into Gary’s bathtub, hopefully setting him alight, but if I had tried that I would have been pulled in right after him.

The dead man’s jaw stretched open wide, preparing for the bite, when something truly surprising happened. Whatever animating spark, whatever life force I could find in Overalls’ eyes (and there wasn’t much) drained out of him. His eyes rolled back in his head and his knees buckled. Lifeless, twice dead, he slid down beside me and nearly yanked me off my feet.

A dead woman with cornrows in her hair appeared to replace him but she dropped dead before she could even touch me. Good thing. I was still busy trying to untangle Overalls from my belt loop.

I got free and ran-just ran as fast as I could, with no idea where I was going. I came to the bottom of a flight of stairs and tried to remember whether the dead had dragged me down or up when they took me out of the pumphouse. I was still standing there in indecision, desperate to get out of the dark fortress, when I heard footsteps from above coming toward me. Two sets of footsteps. One slow, measured and rhythmic, the other jumbled and chaotic as if someone with no coordination at all was trying to keep pace. I’d heard footsteps like that before, in the hospital in the meatpacking district. That had not ended well.

There was no place to hide and I had no weapons. I would have died, no question, if the creatures coming down the stairs had wanted to take my life. Lucky for me they didn’t.

A mummy with a blue ceramic pendant dangling from his neck appeared out of the gloom. She-I could see rough angular shapes like breasts and hips under her tangled linen wrappings-lead one of the dead behind her, a man with no nose. Just a gaping red hole in the middle of his face.

Three steps above me they stopped in unison, in a way that suggested she was in control of the dead man. She placed her hands on opposite sides of his head and pressed hard as she leaned her forehead against his. The dead man made a strange dry sucking noise, raspy and painful-sounding, that had to be him drawing breath in through his wound. When he spoke it was clear to me somehow that it was not his own voice I heard but that of someone else, speaking through him.

You should go now,she told me.He’s not so much in his right mind anymore, our Gary. He can’t hold his end up, if you catch me right. This place’ll be crawling with the dead anytime now. I’m guessing you don’t want to be here then.

I licked my lips. “Well, yeah,” I said.

Come with me then, lad. I’ll show you the way out,she said, and stepped past me, dragging her pet dead man with his head under her arm. She moved quickly, far more quickly than any of the dead I’d seen so far, and it was difficult to keep up in some of the narrower passages we had to crawl through. I must have run in exactly the wrong direction when I left Gary’s tub room. If it wasn’t for my Egyptian guide I would never have found my way out.

We emerged eventually into bright daylight and fresh air. I didn’t realize until I got some clean air into my lungs just how much soot I had inhaled. Gary’s fortress was burning-the plume of smoke trailing from the top of his tower was shot through with sparks. I didn’t care too much about that. There was no point in going back inside.

I did care about the fact that the mummy had brought me out onto a lawn of scruffy-looking plants surrounded by quaint brick houses. Gary’s stockyards, where the prisoners lived. I called out Marisol’s name until I started coughing, my scorched esophagus protesting vigorously against any further speech.

Doors and windows opened in the houses and terrified faces looked out at me. As I stood there wondering what to say to these people Marisol came running up to me with a chipped tea cup. It was full of water that I gulped down with gratitude.