Monster Island

by David Wellington

  “If it’s still possible we need to be afforded communication with our various consulates. We need—”

  “Your daughter is black.” She hadn’t been looking at me at all. She’d been looking at Sarah. My mouth filled with a bitter taste. “But you’re white. Her mother?”

  I breathed hard through my nose for a minute. “Kenyan. Dead.” She looked me in the eyes then and it just came out. “We found her, I mean, I found her rooting in our garbage one night, she’d had a fever but we thought she would make it, I brought her inside but I didn’t let her out of my sight, I couldn’t—”

  “You knew she was one of the dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you dispose of her properly?”

  My whole body twitched at the thought. “We—I locked her in the bathroom. We left, then. The servants had already gone, the block was half-deserted. The police—even the army couldn’t hold out much longer.”

  “They didn’t. Nairobi was overrun two days after you left, according to my intelligence.” The woman sighed, a horribly human sound. I could understand this woman as a deadly bureaucrat. I could understand her as a soldier. I couldn’t handle it if she expressed any sympathy. I begged her silently not to pity me.

  Lucky me.

  “We can’t feed you and this installation isn’t defensible so we can’t let you stay here, either,” she said. “And I don’t have time to argue about your list of demands. The unit is decamping tonight as part of a tactical retreat. If you want to come with us you have five minutes to justify your keep. You’re with the UN. A relief worker? We need food, more than anything.”

  “No. I was a weapons inspector. What about Sarah?”

  “Your daughter? We’ll take her. Mama Halima loves all the orphan girls of Africa.” It sounded like a political slogan. The fact that Sarah wasn’t an orphan didn’t need to be clarified—if I failed now she would be.

  It was at that moment I realized what being one of the living meant. It meant doing whatever it took not to be one of the dead.

  “There’s a cache of weapons—small arms, mostly, some light anti-tank weapons—just over the border—I can take you there, show you where to dig.” We’d put the guns there in hopes of destroying them one day. Stupid us.

  “Weapons,” she said. She glanced at the pile of rifles on the floor by my feet. “Weapons we have. We are in no danger of running short on ammunition.”

  I clutched Sarah hard enough to wake her, then. She wiped her nose on my shirt and looked up at me but she kept quiet. Good kid.

  “She’ll be protected. Fed, educated.”

  “In a madrassa?” She nodded. As far as I knew that was the limit of the Somali educational system. Daily recitation of the Koran and endless prayers. At least she would learn to read. There was something impacted in my heart just then, something so tight I couldn’t relax it ever. The knowledge that this was the best Sarah could hope for, that any protests I made, any suggestion that maybe this wasn’t enough was unrealistic and counter-productive.

  In five years when she was old enough to hold a gun my daughter was going to become a child soldier and that was the best I could give her.

  “The prisoners,” I said, done with that train of thought. I had to be hard now. “You have to leave us some weapons when you go. Give us a fighting chance.”

  “For them, yes. But I’m not done with you.” She glanced at her sheet of paper again. “You have lived in America.” Here it comes, I thought. The Somalis had no reason to help out an American, not after Operation Restore Hope turned to shit back in ’94. I was a Gaal, a foreigner—a foreign devil. This is where they take me out in the yard and put a bullet in the back of my head. “I need a volunteer. An American volunteer for something quite dangerous. In exchange you could have full citizenship.” She kept talking then but for a while I couldn’t hear anything, I was too busy imagining my own death. When I realized she wasn’t going to kill me I snapped back to attention. “It’s Mama Halima, you see.” She put down her paper and looked at me, really looked at me. Not like I was an unpleasant task she had to deal with but like I was a human being. “She has succumbed to a condition all too prevalent in Africa. She has become dependent on certain chemicals. Chemicals we are dangerously short of.”

  Drugs. The Warlady had a habit and she needed a mule to go pick up her supply of dope. Somebody desperate enough to go to America and get her fix for her. I would do it, of course. No question.

  “What kind of ‘chemicals’ are we talking about? Heroin? Cocaine?”

  She pursed her lips like she was wondering whether she’d made a mistake in picking me for this mission. “No. More like AZT.”

  Chapter Five

  Now

  Gary sat on the floor of his kitchenette, surrounded by wrappers and boxes—all of them empty. He licked the inside of a wrapper that used to hold a granola bar, dug out the tiny crumbs with his tongue. All gone.

  He was hungrier than ever.

  He could feel his stomach distend. He knew he was full, fuller than he’d ever been in life. It didn’t seem to matter. Being among the dead meant always being hungry, obviously. It meant this gnawing inside of you that you could never quench. It explained so much. He had wondered—in his old life—why they had attacked people, even people they knew, people they loved. Maybe they had tried to stop themselves. The hunger was just too great. The need to eat, to consume, was awesome and frightening. Was this what he had consigned himself to?

  Even as he considered this he was rising to his feet, his hands reaching for the cupboard. His fingers were clumsy with hunger but they obeyed him enough to get the door open. The cupboard was almost empty and he felt a gulf open inside him, a desperate dark place that needed to be filled. Food. He needed food.

  He’d thought he was done with the things of life. That had been the point. The age of humanity was over and the time of Homo mortis had come… the hospital had been in chaos, dying patients rising to wound the healthy, policemen discharging their weapons in the halls, the lights flickering as the generators ran down. He had walked out the emergency room doors with a laundry cart full of expensive equipment and nobody had even tried to stop him.

  He found a box of rigatoni, took it down from the shelf. The stove didn’t work. How was he going to cook it? His thumbnail dug into the carton’s flap anyway. Wishful thinking.

  There had been no other option. You either joined them or you fed them—and they didn’t stop coming, you could run and hide but they were everywhere. There were more of them every day and less places to turn to, fewer sections of the city that the National Guard could claim were safely quarantined. Martial law. Vans cruising the street picking up bodies, the horrible penalties for hygiene offenses, for refusing to give up your dead. It kept getting worse. The Mayor had given up, they said. Certainly he had left the public eye. The only thing on television was a public service announcement from the CDC about the proper way to trepan your loved ones. Fires burning everywhere outside the police lines. Smoke and screaming. Like September 11th but on every block of the city at once.

  Gary pried a noodle out of the box and stuffed it between his lips. Maybe he’d suck on it until it got soft.

  Maybe it didn’t have to be so bad, Gary had thought. If you were going to die anyway, die and come back… the worst part was losing your intellect, your brainpower. Everything else he could do without but he couldn’t handle being a mindless corpse wandering the earth forever. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way. The stupidity of the dead had to be from organic brain damage, right, brought on by anoxia. The time between when you stopped breathing and you woke up again, that was when it must happen, with every second more brain cells would suffocate and die, the critical juncture between thinking rational human and dumb dead animal. If you could keep yourself oxygenated, a respirator in your lungs, a dialysis machine to keep your blood moving, carrying that critical oxygen to your head… everything on battery power in case the grid went down…


  His teeth bit down hard, unwilling to wait for saliva to break the noodle down. He chewed vigorously, crunching the rigatoni into fragments as hard and sharp as little knives. Put another noodle in his mouth. Another.

  One day he’d watched a government helicopter, the first one he’d seen in a week, come down with a noise like a car crash somewhere in the park. For hours he watched the black smoke rise from the site, watched the tips of orange flames dancing above the skyline. Nobody went to the rescue. Nobody went to put out the fire. He knew the time had come.

  With a start he realized what he was doing and spat the noodle fragments in the dry sink. With probing fingers he dug around inside his lips, feeling a hundred tiny lacerations there. He could have really injured himself—but there’d been no pain.

  He needed to get out of his apartment. He needed to find more food. Real food.

  Meat.

  Chapter Six

  "Epivir. Ziagen. Retrovir." Osman went down the list shaking his head. "These are anti-AIDS medicines."

  I nodded but I was barely listening. Yusuf brought the good ship Arawelo around a few points and Manhattan appeared out of the clearing fog. It looked like a cubist mountain range hovering over the water. Like a crumbling fortress. But then it had always looked like that. I expected to see some kind of obvious damage, some scar left by the Epidemic. There was nothing. Only the silence, the perfect quiet on the water told you something bad had happened here.

  Osman laughed. "But Mama Halima doesn’t have AIDS. You must be mistaken."

  I’d figured that as we approached the city I owed it to Osman to explain why we’d crossed half the planet only to come to a haunted city. He and Yusuf—and of course the girl soldiers—were about to risk their lives. They deserved to know. "These are my orders. Read them however you want." Mama Halima was the only thing standing between Osman’s family and a horde of the undead. If he wanted to think she was beyond the reach of the retrovirus I was ready to let him. I wished I could just ignore the facts myself—Sarah was living under the same condition as well. If the Warlady died there would be nothing to hold the Women’s Republic of Somaliland together. Clan factions would tear it apart. How long could a country in the middle of a civil war resist the dead?

  Yusuf brought us up alongside Battery Park, past the Staten Island Ferry docks. All the boats were gone now—most likely they’d been commandeered by refugees. We cruised by a hundred yards out from the docks and headed northeast, up into the East River, passing Governor’s Island on our right. Brooklyn was a brown shadow to the east.

  "This is madness, though. These drugs can be found anywhere. Let me take you somewhere else," Osman suggested, sounding infinitely reasonable.

  "Can’t." I sighed. "This has to be quick—get in, get the drugs, get out. I know this town—I grew up here, that’s why they picked me for this job. Any place else I’d just get lost." Mama Halima’s agents had seemed to think you could get AIDS drugs over the counter in any Duane Reade in New York. As far as I knew, though, there was only one place I could be guaranteed of finding everything on the list. The fifth floor of the UN Secretariat Building, in the Medical Offices. And the Secretariat was right on the water.

  Yusuf poured on a little steam as we turned northward and entered the main channel of the East River. He steered right for the dark solid mass of the Brooklyn Bridge, still wrapped in mist. Osman rubbed at his clean-shaven face and looked like he was about to have a great idea any time now.

  "I think I know," he said, finally. "I think I know it now."

  I stared at him, expectantly.

  "She wants the drugs to give them to other people. People who are infected with AIDS. She is a very generous woman, Mama Halima."

  I just shrugged and moved to the bow of the trawler where some of the girls were clustered, pointing out the buildings we passed as if they were tourists looking for the Empire State and the Chrysler Building. I kept my eye on the shore, on the masses of pilings and docks that made up the South Street Seaport. They were abandoned, stripped clean of anything that might float. Here and there I could see people moving on the piers. Dead people, I knew, but in the mist I could pretend. Otherwise I would jump every time one of them moved.

  This would all be over in a couple of hours, I told myself. Get in, get the drugs, get out. Then I could go back and see Sarah again. Start my life over somehow, I guess.

  My abdomen kept hitching up, like I was sucking in my gut but I couldn’t relax the muscles.

  The girls started chattering excitedly and I followed their eyes as they leaned out over the bow. It was nothing, just a yellow buoy. Someone had painted something on it black, a crude design I knew I recognized… oh, yeah. The international symbol for biohazards. Osman came up behind me and grabbed my bicep. He saw it too and yelled back for Yusuf to ease up on the throttle.

  "It’s nothing," I told him. "Just a warning. We already know this place is dangerous."

  He shook his head but didn’t say anything. I supposed he knew more about maritime signage than I did. He pointed at a shadow out on the water and told Yusuf to stop the propellers altogether.

  "It’s nothing," I said again. Maybe I was susceptible to denial myself. The trawler rolled north, quiet now, so quiet we could hear the water slapping against the hull. The shadow on the water started to resolve itself. It formed a line across the estuary, a dark smudge edged with tiny white breakers. There was some kind of big building on a pier that stuck way out and beyond that the water just changed texture. We drew steadily closer on momentum alone until Osman had to order the engines thrown into reverse. We were getting too close if it was some kind of obstruction. The smudge took shape as we coasted, turning into piles, heaps of something dumped in the water, lots of little things dumped in heaps.

  Bodies.

  I couldn’t see them very well. I didn’t want to but Osman pushed a pair of binoculars at me and I took a look. The East River was clogged with human corpses. My mouth was dry but I forced myself to swallow and look again. On the forehead of each corpse (I checked a dozen or so to make sure) was a puckered red wound. Not a bullet wound. More like something you would make with an icepick.

  They had known—the authorities in New York, they had know what was happening to their dead. They must have known and they tried to stop it or at least slow it down. You destroy the brain and the corpse stays down, that was the lesson we’d all learned at so much cost. In Somalia they burned the bodies afterward and buried the remains in pits but here, in a city of millions, there just wouldn’t have been anywhere to put them. The authorities must have just dumped the bodies in the river hoping the current would wash them away but there had been too many dead for even the sea to accept.

  Thousands of bodies. Tens of thousands and it hadn’t been enough, the work couldn’t be done fast enough maybe. It would have been dangerous nasty work and as often as not a body you went to dispose of would sit up and grab for your arm, your face and then you would be on the pile. Who had done it? The national guard? The firemen?

  "Dekalb," Osman said softly. "Dekalb. We can’t go through. There’s no way through."

  I stared north past the raft of corpses. It stretched as far as I could see, well past the Brooklyn Bridge. He was right. I couldn’t quite see the UN from there but I was so close. It was right there. My chest started to heave, with sobbing tears maybe, or maybe I wanted to throw up, I couldn’t tell. The drugs, my only chance to see Sarah again, were right there but they might as well be a million miles away.

  Yusuf got the Arawelo turned around and headed back toward the bay while Osman and I tried to figure out what to do next.

  Chapter Seven

  Back in the freezer section of the little bodega, back in the dark Gary finally found what he’d been looking for behind smooth clear glass. He took the box of hamburger patties up to the front and laid them out on the plastic counter by the display of disposable lighters and the lotto machine. They’d been cool to the touch in the freezer—complete
ly thawed out and with a little fuzzy white mold on top but still good he thought. He contemplated different ways to cook them until he got up the nerve to just bite into one raw and take his chances.

  His mouth flooded with saliva and he forced himself to chew, to savor the meat even though his eyes were watering up. The tension in his stomach, the crawling hunger, began to subside and he leaned on the counter with both hands. It had taken him all of the morning to find any scrap of meat at all. He’d wandered far afield from his apartment, north into the West Village. But at every butcher’s shop and grocery store he’d found only empty walk-in freezers and vacant meat hooks swaying on their chains. Clearly he wasn’t the first one to be drawn to where the meat used to be. For the last hour he’d been combing all the little neighborhood convenience stores and the back pantries of shoebox-sized diners and this was all he’d found. Judging by the way his stomach was relaxing and his hands had stopped shaking it was worth it.

  He was devouring his second burger patty when he heard a noise behind him and he turned around to find he wasn’t alone. The first of the walking dead that Gary had ever seen up close, a big guy in a trucker cap and sideburns had stumbled into the store and knocked over a rack of slim-jims. The intruder’s head rolled on his thick neck and drool slid from his slack lower lip as he stared at Gary with eyes that couldn’t quite seem to focus. He had the same dead veins and bluish pallor Gary had seen in the mirror but his face was slack and loose, the skin hanging in folds at his jowls and neck. He was missing a big chunk out of his left thigh. His jeans were caked with clotted blood and as he slouched forward the leg bent underneath him all wrong, threatening to tumble the big guy right into Gary’s chest.

  Without a word the dead man lurched forward and his hands went out, grabbing at the meat on the counter. Before Gary could stop him the big guy shoved one of the patties into his mouth and started reaching for another, the last of the four. Gary said “hey, come on, that’s mine” and grabbed the back of the guy’s flannel shirt to pull him away from the food but it was like trying to move a refrigerator. He tried to grab the guy’s arm and got swatted backward, knocking him into a display of clattering cans of Starkist tuna. Slowly the big guy turned to face Gary with those dull glassy eyes. Gary looked down and saw he still had part of a hamburger patty in his left hand.