Monster Island

by David Wellington

  Finally they emerged into a wide open room with one whole wall made of glass that let in grey sunlight. On a raised platform stood the Temple of Dendur—a square structure carved with hieroglyphics, a massive monumental arch standing before it. A low bench ran before the arch and on this platform someone had laid out three of the writhing mummies. Their golden masks had been torn off and lay in a heap nearby, priceless artifacts just tossed away. Crouched above them a brown form worked with a feeble hand at picking apart the cloth that bound the dead. It was the Benefactor, Gary knew it at once. He raised his head and gestured for Gary to approach.

  See me as I am, Gary. I am Mael Mag Och, and I need your eyes.

  He was nothing like the apparition that had come to Gary in the megastore. His skin was hard leather, tanned to a uniform deep brown, hairless and wrinkled in some places, in others stretched smooth and tight over bones that stuck out from him like sharp points. His head lolled on his shoulder as if he could not lift it, and indeed, his neck was clearly broken, fragments of the uppermost vertebra of his spin exposed at his nape. He had only one arm and his legs were horribly mismatched. One looked strong and muscular, the other withered and skeletal. He wore no clothing except a rope tied tight around his neck—a noose, Gary saw now—and a band of matted fur around his arm.

  “You’re not… like them,” Gary said, staring down at the twitching mummies.

  Not half so old, nor as wise. Come, come here. No, I was never in Egypt, lad. I hail from an island off of what you would know as Scotland. Please, look here. This is one reason I called you, to help me see this.

  Gary had no idea what the other meant—and then he saw. Mael Mag Och had no eyes in his head, just gaping sockets.

  I can see what you see, through the eididh that makes us one. I had no idea how ugly I had become. Here.

  Gary looked where Mael Mag Och pointed. “The eididh?” he asked.

  What you call the network, though it is so much more than that. A thick wad of stained wrappings came away from the mummy and an arm was revealed, a thin arm terminating in five bony fingers. The hand snatched at Mael Mag Och’s face but lacked the vitality to do any damage. The eyeless corpse reached for another strip of linen and started peeling it back, his fingers fumbling with the rotten cloth. We must get them free. They were promised paradise, Gary. These wretches believed they would wake in a field of reeds. I cannot bear their shock. Help me.

  The gentleness, the compassion of the act moved Gary in a way he had no longer thought possible. He knelt down to help remove the bandages and called Faceless and Noseless to do the same. With so many hands they soon had the mummy free of her constraints. She rose slowly from the bench, a skeletal form shrouded in tatters of her linen. A glinting golden brooch sat just above her heart in the shape of a scarab beetle while other amulets and charms dangled from her side or hung from cords around her neck.

  Her face remained hidden by the wrappings except for a ragged hole where her mouth had once been. Their final ritual made that—the wpt-r, the “Opening of the Mouth”. It was done with a chisel and a hammer. The cloth around the wound was stained brown and yellow by long-dried fluids. Fucking barbarians, Mael Mag Och muttered. She moved on unsteady feet away from them, hobbling to the arch where she slouched against the weathered sandstone as if reading the hieroglyphs with her body. Gary would have crushed her, smashed her head to pieces if he had found her in a glass case still wrapped so tightly as she had been. Mael Mag Och had seen the animate creature, the humanity, below the bandages.

  “What are you?” Gary asked.

  A humble Draoidh. The way Mael Mag Och pronounced it sounded like “Druid”.

  “Well, okay, then who are you?” Gary asked.

  Well, now, that’s an easy one. I’m the fellow who turns off the lights when the world ends.

  Chapter Ten

  The undead man stared at my bared hand as if uncertain what it could possibly be. I backed away cautiously but he came right after me, his nose wrinkling in his bluish face. His mouth opened wide and I could see his broken teeth slick with drool and then he pounced, his arms swinging shut like a pincers to grab me around the waist. I tried shaking him off but the hazmat suit limited my mobility. I tried bringing my knee up and caught him directly under the chin but if I connected with enough force to hurt him he showed no sign. His teeth snapped shut on a fold of my suit and he shook his head violently trying to rip it away. I was in danger of falling backwards, which would almost surely mean my death—with the heavy SCBA unit on my back it would take me far too long to get back on my feet. The other two dead men from the dumpster were approaching. If I lost my footing now I would have three of the things pinning me down.

  Where the hell was Ayaan? I swiveled at the waist and saw her fumbling with her rifle. She couldn’t seem to bring it to bear, the bulky suit’s shoulders being too thick to let her bring it up to her eye. She could probably shoot from the hip but if she did she’d be as likely to hit me as my attacker. I was on my own until she could figure it out.

  My breath made plumes of condensation on the inside of my faceshield, limiting my visibility as I twisted and tore at the undead man clutching my midriff. He held me in a grip of iron as I pried at his arms with my gloved hands. Every time I thought I had a good grip on him a layer of his dead skin would slough off and my hands would slide free. His teeth had failed to puncture the Tyvek of my suit—it was pretty tough stuff—but I knew eventually he would go for my bare hand with his teeth and then it would be over. Even if I got away after being bitten I would be prey for any number of secondary infections. I could still remember the panic in Ifiyah’s glassy eyes as her leg swelled up and her heart began to race.

  Desperation forced my fingers deep into the dead man’s armpit and finally I had some leverage. The bones in my hands felt like they would snap as I clawed him away from me, finally breaking his grapple. I lifted one clumsy leg and kicked him off me, his fingers flickering in the air like scuttling claws. He landed on his back and immediately rolled to all fours again, clearly intent on coming for me once more. Then the top of his head exploded in a powdery puff of vaporized grey matter.

  I turned, my lungs heaving, and saw Ayaan. She had managed to unzip her suit down to the waist, freeing her arms so she could use her AK-47 freely. As I stood there staring she lifted the weapon again and fired two quick shots, eliminating the pair of dead men that had been coming up right behind me.

  Hurriedly we shed ourselves of the now-useless suits. There were more of the dead coming, a loose crowd of them from the west moving as fast as the undead could. The one in front was missing both arms but his jaw worked hungrily as he advanced on us. There were too many of them to fight off—we had to run.

  I grabbed Ayaan’s arm and we ran north onto Broadway but they were there, as well, the weakened kind, the kind we had seen licking mold off of stucco walls. Their clothes dangled from their emaciated frames, their withered necks and sparse hair horrible to see. They looked far less pathetic now that we were unprotected. From the south came a dead woman with long black hair in a full bridal gown with a train, her hands covered in blood-stained gloves, her veil back to show us the long sharp teeth exposed by her withered lips. We would have to take our chances, I decided, we would have to gun down the bride and hope there were no more of the dead behind her. I didn’t relish meeting the rest of the wedding party.

  Ayaan had her rifle up and was merely waiting for my order to shoot when a blur of orange light shot past our feet and straight into the biggest pack of undead with a yowling noise. It was a cat—a tabby, a mangy, half-starved rabid-looking cat. A living cat.

  On reflection I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a live animal. Not so much as a stray dog or even a squirrel loose in the streets of New York. This couldn’t be a coincidence but to me it was a startling mystery.

  The cat’s effect on the undead was electric. Ignoring us completely they turned as one to reach for the running feline, their hands st
retching down to grab at its patchwork fur. It dodged left, feinted right and the dead fell over each other—literally—trying to get a handful of the orange streak.

  Whether they were successful or not I didn’t find out till later. As I stood there mesmerized by the sight Shailesh, one of the survivors from the subway station, came up behind me and grabbed my arm. I shrieked like a child. “Come on already,” he said, “we don’t have a lot of bait to spare, you know?”

  “Bait?” I asked. Sure. The cat. The survivors must have let it loose specifically to distract the undead long enough for Ayaan and myself to get inside. Following hard on the heels of our guide we bolted past the iron gate at the entrance to the station—I heard it clang shut behind us—and down a flight of murky stairs. In the gloom I saw litter boxes everywhere and a few angry-looking cats and dogs sleeping in ungainly heaps. A single incandescent bulb lit up the turnstiles which we proceeded to clamber over, since Shailesh assured us they had frozen in place when the trains stopped running.

  Beyond the turnstiles we were met by an earnest-looking survivor wearing a pair of faded but immaculately clean jeans and wire-framed glasses. He held a military shotgun in his hands, the barrel pointed away from us in such a way I knew he had to be Armed Forces. No one else would be that disciplined with a firearm. There was a sticker on his white buttoned-down shirt, one of the increasingly familiar HELLO MY NAME IS labels but the white space below had been left blank.

  He turned to Shailesh. “Are we secure?” he asked.

  Shailesh laughed. “Dude, it’s the first rule of staying alive. They go for the fastest moving object they can see. The faster it goes the more excited they get! You should have seen them, Jack. It was like a Jim Carey movie out there.”

  Jack didn’t raise his voice but what he said next made Shailesh break eye contact. “I asked if we were secure or not,” he repeated.

  Our guide nodded obediently. “Listen,” Shailesh said to me, “Jack will take you inside. I have to, you know, watch the gate. Welcome to the Republic, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, not fully understanding. “Thanks.”

  Jack looked at me for a moment and I knew he was sizing me up. He gave Ayaan the same inspection but said nothing to either of us except, “This way.”

  Chapter Eleven

  One of the mummies—a Ptolemy and a cousin of Cleopatra, according to Mael—ran his partially unwrapped hands over the glass of a display case and then started beating on it with his palms. Mael hobbled toward him but couldn’t stop him from shattering the glass. It cascaded down his bandaged legs in a torrent of tiny green cubes. Long shards of it stuck into his arms and his hands but he ignored them as he bent to retrieve a clay jar from the exhibit. Hieroglyphs covered its surface and the stopper was carved wood in the shape of a falcon’s head. Mael tried to pull the mummy away from the jagged glass but the undead Egyptian refused to be lead. He was far too intent on cradling the jar against his chest.

  It was the first time Gary had seen a dead man motivated by anything but hunger. “What’s in that thing that’s so important?” he asked.

  A spectral smile twitched across Mael’s leathery lips. His intestines.

  Gary could only grimace in revulsion.

  They don’t understand this place, Gary. So much has changed and so quickly. They think they’re in hell and they cling to the things they know and understand.

  “I imagine the same could be said of you.” It was a taunt but a half-hearted one.

  Perhaps. I am a little better off than them. I have access to the eididh. It’s how I learned your language and everything else I know about Manhattan. That flickering smile again.

  “I’ve only been able to see the energy, the life force. You can get information out of the network?”

  Oh, yes. Our memories go there when we drop, lad. Our personalities. What our elderly friends here would call the ba. It is the storehouse of our hopes and our fears. Indra’s net. The akashic record. The collected works of the human race, all available in one handy volume. You and I can read anything there, if we open ourselves to the possibility.

  “You and me. Because we can still think. You need to make a conscious effort to reach into the network and the others, the, the dead out there, they can’t make that leap, not with what they’ve got for brains.”

  Aye.

  “But there’s a difference between you and me, as well. I can feel it. You—your energy, it’s more compact. Like a living person almost but dark like mine. I can’t explain it so well…”

  You’re doing fine. The mummies and me, now, we don’t share your hunger. Our bodies are incorruptible, in the old palaver. Only natural preservatives used to maintain freshness. That twitchy smile again. Then there’s the fact that you chose this. You did it to yourself.

  “I can’t be the only one, though. You found me from a distance, you must know if there are others like us.”

  Mael nodded. A few. Mostly of my sort but you were not the only one to abuse yourself like this. There’s a boy in a place called Russia. Very promising. Struck down in a hit and run. He suffered for months with machines pumping his heart for him but his parents wouldn’t let the doctors pull the plug. Another one here in your country. In California, she calls it. A yoga teacher hiding out in an oxygen bar. I have no idea what that means. She had the same brilliant idea you did, but it didn’t work as well for her. Woke up with a bad headache and found she’d lost her multiplication tables and plenty more besides. Such as her name.

  Gary nodded. “They might as well be on the moon. It’s funny. A couple of days ago I thought I was the only one and that was okay. Then you contacted me. It’s like I only got so lonely when I knew I wasn’t alone.” He reached into the broken display case and picked up a jewel in the shape of a jackal-headed god. It was beautiful—worked by loving hands. A made thing. All that was over now. “What happened to us, Mael? What caused the Epidemic?”

  The Druid scratched his chin. Thinking hard, the gesture said. Mael was a master of body language, even with just one arm. I know what you think it was. A disease same as the grippe or the pox. Can’t say as I agree but then I just learned about germ theory a day or two ago. In my time we would have talked in terms of retribution. Judgment.

  “For what?”

  Take your pick, lad. For what you’ve done to the earth, I might say, but then I’m just an old tree-hugger from way back. For what you did to each other, maybe. I know that sort of thing won’t sit easy with you. In your world things just happen, eh? Accidental, like. Random. We thought otherwise. For us everything happened for a reason.

  Walk with me, Gary. I have but a little time to converse with you. There’s dark work that needs doing. Fighting. Slaughtering, before this is through.

  “Huh?” Gary demanded. It was all he could think to say.

  We’ll get to that in proper time. Let me show you something first.

  Mael lead him through the Egyptian wing of the Met. The mummies had taken it over and Gary saw for the first time how morbid the place was. An inside-out graveyard where the dead were put on display for schoolchildren. Gary saw a mummy trying on jewelry in one room, the turquoise and gold necklaces glinting against the stained linen at her throat. In another room a truly ancient mummy who was little more than rags and bones was trying to pry open a massive sarcophagus with his splayed fingers. It looked like he was trying to return to the tomb.

  Mael stopped at a room partitioned off by a folding screen. The exhibit beyond was only half finished: clearly the curators had been working on it when they abandoned the museum during the Epidemic. The walls had been painted a sky blue and in white italic script above a row of empty display cases was written MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD. The bodies in this room were truly dead. SIBERIAN ICE MUMMIES were little more than incomplete skeletons with clumps of hair attached to their broken skulls; MOUNTAIN MUMMIES OF PERU showed hollow darkness through their sunken orbits, their brains having long since rotted away. At the back of the room sat a
long low case that had been shattered from the inside. Gary crunched glass underfoot as he approached it. A CELTIC BOG MUMMY FROM SCOTLAND, he read. This must have been Mael’s sepulcher.

  THE MUMMY IN THIS CASE LIVED IN THE TIME OF THE ROMANS. HE WAS MOST LIKELY A PRIEST OR A KING, Gary read.

  A little of both, actually. Also a musician and an astronomer and a healer, when the need arose. Yes, Gary, I too was a physician in my day. You would probably consider my methods crude but I did more good than ill on the whole.

  Gary squatted down to study the display. There was a recreation of how Mael would have looked in life—pretty much exactly like the apparitions that had appeared to him downtown. Next to this was a picture of Stonehenge, which the museum assured Gary was not built by the Celts but which they had used to predict solar eclipses. “How did you die?” he asked.

  Now there’s a tale to tell. Mael sat down on a display case full of partially preserved skulls and ruminated for a while before continuing. We took turns, is how. The burnt bannock cake came to me in my twenty-third year. That’s how we chose the anointed ones, drawing bits of cake out of a bag. The summer had been too cool for the corn and my people were in danger of starvation. So they took me to the oaks above Mòin Boglach and hanged me until I gurgled for breath. When they cut me down and I plunged into the black water below the peat I had a prayer to Teutates on my lips. Oh, lord, please make the grains to grow. Something of the sort.

  Gary noticed for the first time that the rope around Mael’s neck wasn’t for decoration. It was a noose. “Jesus,” Gary breathed. “That’s horrible.”

  Mael came alive with anger as he responded, his head shaking so violently Gary worried it might fall off. It was glorious! I was the soul of my island in that moment, Gary, I was the hopes of my tribe made agonized flesh. I was born for that dying. It was magical.