Monster Planet(42)

At the top of the ladder five men with assault rifles waited for them. Only one man had his weapon ready and aimed at them, but that was more than enough. They were lead without a word into one of the buildings that fronted the shoreline, a low, modernist structure of concrete and glass, some of which had been boarded over. The honor guard lead them into a dim room lit only by the sunlight streaming in through high windows. A woman with a boy at her side stood at the far side of the room. She had a pistol in her hand. So did the boy, who might be twelve years old or eight'he was a scrawny little child and the lighting was terrible.

The woman stepped forward, into a patch of light. She was beautiful, astoundingly so, with just a hint of age in her face. Her caramel-colored skin was flawless and her hair, tied back in an explosive ponytail, glimmered in the half-light. She had a broad sash across a homespun black sweater. It read MAYOR, picked out in crystals and sequins.

She should have been a movie star. She had been, if Sarah remembered Marisol's story correctly. She'd already had some success in z-grade genre films, there had already been some buzz about her, whisperings of a career to come, of a lifestyle never to be matched again. There weren't any more movies, though, nor any Hollywood parties or private yachts or any Greek billionaires with ten carat diamond engagement rings. She'd had to settle.

'Osman,' she said, her face melting into joy as she recognized the pilot. 'Oh my God, it's you, Jesus f*ck, it's really you. Wow, that's a whole lot of bad memories to have to relive at once.' She rushed forward to kiss him all over her face. 'Here, here, I want you to meet Jackie,' she said, and ushered her boy over with wild hand gestures. Happiness split the woman's face, made wrinkles appear in her brow and around her mouth. She was nearly jumping up and down. 'Jesus shit! How have you been? What are you doing these days? Who's your friend? Is this your daughter?' Marisol asked.

Osman laughed. 'No, no. This is Sarah. Dekalb's daughter.'

'Dekalb.' Marisol said. 'Dekalb's daughter.' Emotions erased themselves from her face.

Silence rushed into the room like a cold flood.

'Oh. Hi,' Marisol said.





Monster Planet





Chapter Three


'They had pudding in these tiny plastic cups. You would peel back the foil on top and the pudding was in there already made,' a fortyish man with grey hair and squinting eyes said. He mimed the action of pulling back on a piece of foil, his fingertip and thumb pressed very close together, and a light bloomed in his face that didn't come from the bonfire. 'There was always a little dollop of pudding on the foil, that was the best part, it tasted the best anyway.'

A younger woman in a shapeless sweater poked at the fire with a long branch. There wasn't much firewood on Governors Island but an enormous amount lay just four hundred yards away in Brooklyn. A boat went over every day to retrieve great bundles of sticks and logs from the trees that choked the old city streets. It had been a dangerous occupation once, the survivors told Sarah, but in recent months it was rare to even spot a ghoul, much less be attacked by one. The city had largely emptied out. 'Then you could just throw the cup away, right? I kind of remember that,' the woman said. She stared into the fire. 'You didn't have to wash it out.'

'Yeah,' the squinting man agreed, nodding happily. 'They had coffee you could just pour boiling water on, and it was ready. They had orange juice that came frozen in a tube and you just let it melt in some water and you could drink it.'

One of the children, a skinny girl of maybe fourteen years, laughed heartily. 'Why freeze it in the first place if you were just going to let it melt?'

The old man smiled and laughed but without the girl's abandon. 'Sure.'

'Where did they go?' Sarah asked. She drew a lot of blank stares. 'Where did the ghouls go?'

The old man shrugged. 'West. Jersey, I guess. It's not like they migrated or something. They just started wandering away, one by one, maybe looking for food. Over the bridges, the GWB is still standing.'

Sarah hugged herself. The night had come on colder than she expected and her hooded sweatshirt, so perfect for desert evenings, couldn't keep out the damp of the Island. 'But why to the west, why did they go into New Jersey?'

'Well,' the old man said, 'if they went east they'd get stuck on the L.I.E.'

That elicited more than a few snorting laughs from the older survivors. Sarah had no idea what it meant, or why he had spelled out 'lie'. She stood up and watched the fire for a second. She didn't want to leave its warmth but the clustered survivors sitting in a circle around the blaze were confusing her more than anything else. All they wanted to talk about was what they'd lost, what the world used to have in it. For Sarah, who knew nothing except apocalypse, such talk was just wasted breath.