Monster Planet(55)

'Yeah,' she said. 'It was great. Listen.' She shoved the tooth into her back pocket, not knowing what else to do with it. 'I'm a little tired. I think I'm going to back to, you know, the others. Get some sleep.'

'I'll be here when you wake up.' He smiled. 'I don't get to rest, pumpkin. I don't even get to sleep anymore.'

She put her hands on his cheeks, leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. She couldn't quite bring herself to kiss his rotting lips.

'It's going to be okay,' he said, and she wanted to sag into those words. She wanted to curl up in them and let everything go right for a while. Then she realized he wasn't talking to her. He was addressing himself. 'Now that you're here, everything's going to be okay. So where's Ayaan?' he asked.

She closed her eyes because she didn't want to look at him while she lied to him. 'Back in Somalia. She's fine, doing great, actually. She sent me to check up on Marisol, see if Governors Island was still thriving.'

'Oh. Is it? I don't get out much.'

She nodded. 'It's doing great.' Such a ludicrous idea'that anyone would launch such a dangerous expedition just to see how old friends were getting along'didn't seem to strike him as odd at all.

She left him in the tower with Gary and the mummies, unsure when she would come back. Jack had said to look for help, but what could one dried-up old lich and a skull with insect legs do against the Tsarevich? She wondered about what to do next as she headed back down the causeway and onto the Island. She noticed something strange about the buildings on the north side of the island, those that faced Manhattan, but she couldn't remember what they had looked like when she went in.

Dark stains seemed to creep across their facades. Patches of a very light green had grown in circular patterns on the bricks'lichens, she thought, like you would see on very old tombstones. The dark stains were moss or mold or mildew or something. Come to think of it she didn't believe the buildings had looked like that when she entered the ventilation tower.

Strange. And Ayaan had taught her never to ignore the strange. She scratched a sudden itch in her left armpit and pondered what to do next.

She made her way toward Building 109, the Island's former welcome center where she was supposed to sleep that night, keeping one eye on the water. She half expected an army of ghouls to come dribbling up out of the harbor. When Marisol's sickly little son Jackie grabbed her from behind she automatically reached for her pistol. She stopped herself in time, because she'd had proper training in who and whom not to shoot.

'What's up?' she said, and tousled Jackie's hair. It took her a second to realize something was wrong. He coughed and a cloud of black spores erupted from his throat. His skin looked patchy and even fuzzy in places. She grabbed his chin, trying to discover if he was choking, and her hand came away covered in musty-smelling powder.

The itch in her armpit got a lot worse, all of a sudden.





Monster Planet





Chapter Ten


'Stay away from the edge,' Marisol said, never taking the field glasses from her eyes.

Sarah danced backwards, away from the crumbling bricks at the top of the six-story dormitory building. Not the safest place on the island but it had the best view of the skeletal city across the channel. The building had been officer's quarters once but now it was about to fall down. The thick coating of white mildew like a coating of frost on the side of a leaky refrigerator was taking its toll, eating into the bricks on one side, chemically dissolving the mortar between them.

'I can't recognize half the buildings over there. Have you ever seen anything like this? No, nobody has. The Battery's turned green again. The dead ate every growing thing there was over there but now... Jesus, look at those shrubs'they must be fifteen feet high.' Marisol pivoted in place and adjusted her focus.

Not just Battery Park, Sarah saw, but the entire tip of lower Manhattan had transformed overnight into a deep and dark forest. Trees crowded the broad streets, their roots overturning the rusted soft shapes of abandoned cars. The sides of buildings were verdant with moss or dark with fungal growth. Flowers in a dozen different colors sprouted from broken windows and vines dangled from straining balconies.

Behind them, curled in a folding deck chair, little Jackie hacked up another lungful of spores. It was dangerous on top of the dormitory building but Marisol wouldn't let him out of her sight. She lowered the binoculars and looked at her son for a moment, perhaps assessing his condition. He wasn't getting any better.