Monster Island(92)

Marisol gave the mummy one quick glance and got over any surprise she might have felt at the Egyptian woman’s presence. I suppose she must have seen lots of dead people during her time of imprisonment.

“Where’s Jack?” Marisol asked.

Jack. Sure. Jack, who as far as I knew was at that moment hanging upside down by one foot in Gary’s tub room. Dead. Hungry. Unable to get down. “He didn’t make it,” I told her. No point in going into the details.

She slapped me hard across my cheek.

“Okay,” I said, sitting down hard on the patchy grass.

“That’s for getting him killed. Now. What the hell is going on? Is Gary dead? Please tell me that Gary is dead.”

I nodded.

“Good. What’s the plan?”

I thought about that for a while before answering. There had been a plan-then the plan fell apart. Except now maybe it might still work. “We have a helicopter coming. That fire should be all the signal our pilot needs-he’ll be here in ten minutes. Then we’ll get you out of here. There’s one problem, though.”

“There’s only one problem?” Marisol asked. “That makes this the best day ever!”

“Calm down, alright?” I stood up and handed the tea cup back to her, having caught my breath for the moment. “There’s not enough room in the helicopter for all of us to go at once. But look-we’re protected by this wall.” I pointed at the fifteen foot tall brick wall that ran all the way around the stockyards. It butted up securely against the side of the fortress and was clearly designed to protect against undead attack. “We’ll take the women and children first, then come back and make a second trip for the men.”

Marisol bit her lip so hard it bled. I could see the blood. Then she nodded and grabbed me by one ear. She pulled hard and I could do nothing but follow her, protesting madly.

She took me all the way past one of the houses before releasing me. I stared at her, truly pissed off-I’d just risked everything to save her from Gary, after all. Then I looked up and saw what she was trying to communicate to me.

There was a fifteen foot wide gap in the wall-a place where Gary hadn’t quite finished his construction job. There were tidy piles of bricks lying around, ready to be put in place, but no work crew around to finish the task.

Meanwhile on the other side of that wall were perhaps a million dead people. A million dead people who hadn’t eaten in days.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Eighteen


The dead don’t run. They hobble. They limp. Some of them crawl. The faster ones trample those with fractured or missing legs. The stronger amongst them push the weaker to the side.

They make no noise when they walk, no noise at all.

They came at us like a wave, a wave of limbs and contorted faces, eyes wide, clouded and vacant, hands, fingers coming at us like the foam on the top of a breaker, fingers, claws, nails. Visually they were hard to look at, their details hard to discern, one dead thing difficult to tell from another. Their mouths were open, every one of them. They were too human and dispassionate to see as a herd of panicked animals, too animalistic and insatiable to think of as a crowd of people. They all wanted one thing, which was us.

When a mob is coming for you there is no emotion except fear.

There was one of them-a woman in a dress that had been soiled and stained with blood and even burned, it looked like-a woman who was faster than the others. She strode boldly ahead of them and as she got close we saw there was no skin on her face or neck, just the twanging elastic bands of her facial muscles that snagged on her vicious-looking exposed teeth. Her eyes were dark pits under a thick gel of clotted blood like cold spaghetti sauce. Her hands reached for us, the fingers clenching again and again, her hair flowed out behind her in great tangled ropes.

Marisol picked up a broken piece of brick. She squeezed it in her hand a couple of times and then with a little yell, “Hyah!” she flung it as hard as she could at the dead woman’s face. It struck her square in the forehead, in the exposed skull. The dead woman collapsed into a heap, her head like broken pottery.

It broke the fear, a little. Enough.

Marisol and I began to grab bricks and shove them down in the dirt, trying to close the hole in the few minutes we had before the dead arrived. It was pointless busywork, of course, but it was better than panicking. “Marisol-go get-the rest-to help,” I gasped, between bricks. She nodded at me and turned around to head to the houses behind us. She didn’t get any further than a step or two, though. When I saw why I dropped the brick I was holding.