Monster Island(96)

(I would speak with Kreutzer later about how he knew to go and fetch the bus, that there wasn’t going to be enough room in the helicopter for everybody. “I was in the systems motherf*cking directorate of the USCG, you know?” he swore at me, as if that should explain everything. “The computer techs. We’re good at math!” He had figured out how many people could fit in an empty Chinook and decided that we would come up short. I never really liked the guy but I have to admit that was some excellent thinking on his part.)

I watched Marisol climb into the back of the helicopter and then I clambered into the bus, using the front entrance. There was barely room for me to stand on the steps. A truly nice couple of survivors offered to give up their space for me in the aisle but I declined. As the bus lifted into the air, its metal frame creaking alarmingly and its suspension falling apart and dropping from the undercarriage as if the floor might give way at any minute I wanted to be able to look outside.

I wanted one last look at the city, that’s all. I barely glanced at the mob of dead people below us as the mummies gave way and they surged into the fortress, two million hands raising to try to grab at us as we flew away. That wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted the water towers. I wanted the fire escapes and the overgrown rooftop gardens and the dovecotes and the ventilation hoods like spinning chef’s toques. I wanted the buildings, the great square solidity of them, their countless empty cubical rooms where no one would ever go again and I wanted the streets too, the streets clogged with cars with abandoned taxis sprouting everywhere like bright fungi. I wanted one long, meaningful look at New York City. My hometown.

It would be my last chance to get a good look, I knew.

My body was already burning with fever, my forehead slick with sweat though chills kept running down my back like ice cubes falling. My head was light, my tongue coated.

I was dying.

David Wellington - Monster Island





Monster Island





Chapter Twenty


Dear Sarah:

I guess I’m not coming back to you.

I guess I’ll never see you again. The thought is too big to deal with right now.

I may not have enough time left to finish this letter. Yesterday Ayaan hugged me on the roof of the Natural History Museum but I could feel the hesitation in her embrace. She could see in my eyes what was going to happen.

No matter, I told her. We were almost done.

My fever had abated. It came and went in waves and I was feeling pretty lucid. I had developed a new symptom, a kind of queasy rumbling in my guts but I could keep that to myself.

In the last minutes of the siege, just before Jack shot at me and Gary realized that he was being set up, the Museum of Natural History had been attacked by a million corpses with their bare hands. Many, many of them had been crushed as they put their shoulders to the metal frame of the building, their weight added to the pile. I didn’t bother to look over the side and thus see what trampled ghouls looked like. The dead had wreaked so much damage on the planetarium that the roof we stood on slanted to one side and Kreutzer could barely keep the Chinook from rolling over the edge. We wasted no time getting the girls onboard and getting out of there, even abandoning some of the heavier weapons and supplies. We were airborne in five minutes and headed straight for the United Nations complex on the far side of the city.

“Gary’s dead.” I said, filling in Ayaan on what had happened in her absence, shouting over the Chinook’s engines. I left out most of the grisly details. “I still don’t know if the mummies were leading me into Gary’s trap or if they were being sincere. Either way they saved the day. We took the survivors back to Governors Island-Marisol’s going to build something there, something safe and meaningful.” Ayaan nodded, not terribly interested in my story, and stared out one of the porthole-like windows. I wrapped my hand through a nylon loop sewn into the ceiling of the cabin to steady myself and moved closer so I didn’t have to yell. “So I’m sorry.”

“Why is that?” she asked. Her thoughts were elsewhere.

“You didn’t get to martyr yourself.”

That got a bright little grin out of her. “There are many ways to serve Allah,” she said. I’d like to remember Ayaan that way. The light from the porthole blasting across her shoulder. Sitting with her hands in her lap, one knee bouncing up and down in anticipation. When Ayaan got truly excited she couldn’t sit still. She thought it a weakness but to me it meant so much. It meant she was human, not a monster.