Monster Island

by David Wellington

  Then he saw the back of his own head.

  He was looking through the eyes of his minions, seeing what they saw—even as he continued to be able to use his own eyes. He turned to look at the Latina and felt the connection that bound them together, the unity of death. He could feel thoughts and memories bubbling around her—information she herself could not access any more because her brain had suffocated when she died.

  His hadn’t. He saw at once what Mael had wanted him to find. Something she’d seen while scavenging for food, something important. A street—a square—a doorway, a steel gate. Human hands, living hands clutching the bars. White noise hissed and crackled around him, he tasted metal in his mouth but he fought it back. More living humans, more on top of more of them—hundreds. He saw their eyes peering out of darkness, their frightened eyes. Hundreds?

  Hundreds. Their bright energy seared him. He wanted to take it from them.

  When he returned to himself he was down on all fours and a long string of shiny drool ran from his lower lip to the mud below. “Now?” he asked.

  Aye.

  Gary pointed and dead workmen came down from their ladders to gather before him. He reached out with his mind and summoned others—an army of them—from as far away as the Reservoir. It was easy when he had the knack down. He didn’t need to give them detailed instructions as he had with Faceless and Noseless. He didn’t need to micromanage. He simply told them what he wanted and they did it without question. It felt good. It felt amazing. He called on more of them, as many as he could reach.

  Leave me a few to put a roof over my head, eh, lad?

  Gary nodded but he was too busy assembling his army to pay much attention to the Druid. “So many of them,” he said, unsure if he was referring to the living or the dead.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jack handed me a cell phone that looked like something from the early nineties. A real brick—two inches thick with rubberized grips on the sides. The antenna was almost bigger than the phone itself, eight inches long and as thick as my index finger. “Motorola 9505,” I said, trying to impress him. “Sweet.” Most cell phones would be useless in New York—the towers that dotted the city’s rooftops were unpowered now—but this beast could tap into the Iridium satellite network. It would work anywhere on earth as long as it had a charge. The UN used Iridiums but only sparingly, handing them out to field operatives like they were Faberge eggs. In America they were standard issue for military units, and in fact Jack had retrieved them from an abandoned National Guard checkpoint a few blocks away.

  Two more phones sat in a multi-unit charger which had been built to hold six. The rest had gone out with scavenging parties and had never returned. I made a quick call to Osman, letting him know we were still alive.

  “That is too bad, Dekalb,” he said, the signal degraded through the thick ceiling of the station but still audible. “If you were dead I could go home.”

  I rang off to save the phone’s charge.

  “Next stop is the armory,” Jack said. He unlocked the door of the station’s 24 hour token both. Behind the bulletproof glass sat rack after rack of long-barreled rifles, some of them still in their boxes. Too bad they were just toys. Paintball rifles, bee bee guns, pellet shooters guaranteed not to penetrate human skin. “There are more toy stores in New York than gun shops,” Jack explained. It didn’t sound like an apology. “We took what we could get. They’re useful as distraction weapons. You hit a corpse with one of these and he’ll feel it. He’ll come looking for you, which gives your partner enough time to take him down.”

  Your partner, theoretically, would be holding a single action hunting rifle, of which there were exactly three in the booth, or a pistol—there were dozens of those though only a couple of cardboard boxes of ammunition for them. There were plenty of knives, though, and sledgehammers and riot control batons. “I’m guessing you’re not much with a firearm anyway,” Jack said, looking over his arsenal. He settled on a machete with an eighteen inch blade—originally a gardening implement. It felt well-balanced in my hand and the grip was rubberized for comfort but I didn’t relish using it.

  “You’re kidding,” I hoped.

  “Sharpened it myself. Let me do the fighting, alright? You can be the radioman.” He locked the booth up again and we went off to find Ayaan. She was with Marisol, who was painting her fingernails. The girl soldier snapped to attention when she saw Jack but she couldn’t stop from bubbling when she addressed me.

  “She used to be a movie star,” Ayaan told me, and I had to fight the urge to laugh. “She was in the ‘Runaway Bride’, with Julia Roberts but her scenes were cut out in post-production. I think she is the most beautiful woman in the world, now.”

  Ayaan was sixteen years old. When I was her age I dressed like Kurt Cobain and memorized all the words to “Lithium”. I guess we take our heroes where we find them. “We’re going for the drugs,” I told her. That broke the spell. She immediately set about cleaning and checking her weapon and gathering up her pack.

  I tried to be discrete as Jack and Marisol said goodbye but I was itching to get started. Jack had a plan, and while he hadn’t let me in on it yet I knew it would be good.

  “If you don’t come back,” Marisol said, pushing Jack’s glasses back up his nose. She couldn’t seem to finish her sentence.

  “Then you’re all screwed.” Jack put his arm around her hips.

  “Dekalb,” she said to my turned back, “do you begin to see why I had to marry a politician? At least Montclair knows how to lie. Get out of here. I’ll be listening on this end. Not that I can do anything if you get into trouble, but at least I’ll be able to hear your dying screams.”

  Jack actually laughed at that, something that had seemed impossible the night before. He gave Marisol a final probing kiss and then lead us deep into the bowels of the subway station… and right to the S Train Platform. The gaping twin mouths of the tunnels like the business end of a double-barreled shotgun lay just beyond a steel gate.

  He expected our shock, of course, and he tried to explain as he fished a mammoth set of keys out of his pocket. “The tunnel runs all the way to Grand Central, nonstop. The power’s off so we don’t need to worry about the third rail. Yes, it will be dark in there but it’s also unpopulated, as far as we can tell. We’ve never seen a stray corpse come out of that tunnel.”

  “It’s a deserted subway tunnel and the dead have come back to life,” I said, as if he might have missed the obvious.

  “It’ll take us halfway across the city,” Jack insisted, unlocking the gate. “Almost right to the UN and it’s a closed environment the whole way.”

  “Have you never seen any horror movie?” Ayaan demanded, but she filed through the gate like the rest of us.

  Jack locked the gate behind him and started off down the platform at a steady clip. I rushed to keep up. Electric lights shone from the ceiling and the white tiles of the walls were no more dirty than the ones in the concourse but the platform felt tangibly different—colder, less inviting. There was no protection here from the city at large.

  When we entered the right-hand tunnel the feeling grew into a creeping dread. Jack stopped to peel open a chemical light for each of us. He bent them in the middle and shook them until they started to glow, then snapped them to our shirts so we could keep track of each other in the blackness of the tunnel. He had a halogen flashlight duct-taped to his SPAS-12 and he switched it on, revealing railroad tracks that marched off in a perfectly straight line—a depiction of infinity straight out of seventh grade geometry class, if your Junior High happened to convene in Hell.

  Time pretty much lost all meaning as we moved down the tunnel. We walked on the tracks, our feet settling into a rhythm of stepping on every other railroad tie. I tried counting my steps for a while but got bored with that quickly. I looked over my shoulder from time to time, watching the glaring light of the station behind me shrink, wishing I could go back, but soon it had become no brighter than a bright sta
r. We made no more noise than we could help, trying not to even breathe too hard.

  The tunnel revealed by Jack’s flashlight was uniformly black, or even more than that. A dull dusty color that absorbed the light and gave back little to focus on. Now and again we would come across an electrical junction box on the wall or a signal light but these seemed to float in space, unmoored from reality. Reality was the tracks and the third rail that ran along side us and countless alcoves and recesses and emergency doorways built into walls pierced with Roman arches to cross-ventilate the twin tunnels. Holes where anything at all could be hiding.

  Jack stopped abruptly ahead of us, his yellow-green chemical light nearly smacking my nose. I moved around him to see what had brought him up short.

  A dead woman down on all fours on the tracks, scooping cockroaches into her mouth. When she looked up her cloudy eyes were like perfect mirrors, dazzling us with reflected light. Most of her upper lip was missing, giving her a permanent sneer. She climbed to her feet and started stumping toward us, the bullseye pattern of Jack’s light making strange watery shadows in her faded dress.

  She was nearly on us before I realized that neither Jack nor Ayaan was going to shoot her. I stared at them and saw he was holding the barrel of her AK-47, pointing it at the ceiling. He looked back at me with an expression of indifferent curiosity.

  One of the dead woman’s arms was bent up painfully under her breasts but the other stretched out to snatch at us. Her mouth was open wide as if she wanted to swallow us whole.

  “Just like a baseball bat, Dekalb,” Jack said, reminding me of the machete in my hand.

  She was so close her stink was on me, permeating my clothes. “Jesus,” I shrieked, and lunged forward, swinging with both hands, putting my weight into it. I felt her bony frame collide with my chest as the blade went right through her head, all resistance taking the form of a bad shock in my shoulder as if I’d been hit by a car but then she was lifeless, a rattling inanimate heap that slid down my pantleg and I was gasping, wheezing for breath, bending forward to see by the light of Jack’s flashlight that I had taken off the top of the dead woman’s head in a big diagonal slice that included one eye. She wasn’t getting back up.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Jack bent down beside me and put an arm around my shoulders. “I had to know if I was going to be carrying you. Now I know you can hold your mud.”

  “And that’s a good thing?” I spat out everything in my mouth—my fear, her stink, the look on Ayaan’s face that showed real approval for the first time. Approval I fucking didn’t need, if that’s what it took to get it. I had just been hazed, of all things.

  Jack squeezed my bicep and headed down the tunnel. I watched his chemical light recede for a moment, then jogged to catch up.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We followed Jack’s flashlight up a never-ending series of stairs and stalled escalators. It got easier to see as we went along. I thought my eyes were adjusting to the darkness but in fact we had merely arrived at Grand Central and light—real sunlight—was streaming through the terminal’s high windows. When we emerged into the marble-lined corridors leading to the main concourse I could suddenly see everything again and I blinked rapidly, my eyes watering.

  Ayaan dropped into a crouch and scanned the empty terminal from behind her rifle. Jack kept close to the walls but I was just so glad to be out of the tunnels that I couldn’t maintain that level of healthy paranoia. I lead them past empty newsstands, empty shops selling men’s shirts or CDs or flowers, past a deserted shoeshine stand until we entered the big main concourse and I could look up at the green-blue ceiling and the gold diagrams of the Zodiac, at the enormous windows through which streamed visible rays of yellow light. There was no sign of any life or movement anywhere.

  The emptiness of Times Square had shocked me and this should have, too. Grand Central had never been anything but crowded in my experience. Yet something about the place—its cathedral scale or its gleaming marble, perhaps—lent itself to a kind of somber peace. I didn’t have time to sight-see, really, but it was hard to tear myself away from the massive quietude of the terminal. This was a place built for sleeping giants and I longed to rest a while in its megalithic grace.

  I lead them down the Graybar Passage to a row of glass doors. They were locked at the top and bottom but Jack had a police pick gun. It looked like a pistol grip with a thick needle sticking out where the barrel should have been. It could open any lock in the city. It used to be that only civil authorities could have such things but the internet had made them publicly available—Jack had got his from the same outfit that sold him the SPAS-12. “Check the street,” he said, as he crouched down to get at the bottom lock on the door. It was a tricky operation—you had to fire the gun to retract the cylinder pins at the same time you used a tension wrench to turn the plug.

  I peered out through the glass at Lexington Avenue and saw abandoned cars and dead buildings but nothing animate anywhere, just a flock of pigeons wheeling between the glass walls of a pair of deserted office towers. It looked like our luck was going to hold. From here it was just a few short blocks to the UN building. If we were quiet and didn’t draw any attention to ourselves we just might make it. It was almost as if something had cleared out this whole section of the city. Perhaps the National Guard had put up barricades to keep the dead out. Maybe they were even still there, living soldiers protecting this last bastion of New York.

  “Anything?” Jack asked. The lock released with a loud clang that startled the birds outside. They leapt into the air, their wings snapping out as they rode up into the sky, one after the other. Jack stood up and started working on the top lock.

  “Negative,” Ayaan said. She watched the birds, entranced as I was, perhaps observing how they relied totally on each other, each animal mirroring the movements of its neighbor so that each time the flock changed its position a wave of motion seemed to go through them, as if they were a single entity with many bodies.

  The second lock shot open and Jack put his tools away. He pushed on the door’s latch bar and it swung open, letting in a cool puff of air from outside.

  Air that stank of decay and rot.

  “Get down!” Jack shouted as the flock of pigeons swung through the air, pivoting to dive headlong through the open door. The ex-Ranger slammed the door shut as dozens more of the birds smacked up against the glass, their filmy eyes showing nothing but naked desire. Hunger. One of them lay twitching just inches from my face, separated from me by only a thin piece of safety glass and I saw the marks on its spine where it had been pecked to death, disarranging its iridescent feathers. Its beak snapped at me against the glass door, desperate for a bite of my flesh.

  I heard wings flapping behind me and Jack rolled up into a sitting posture, his shotgun in his hands. He fired and the noise echoed wildly off the marble walls. Birds fell out of the air right and left as those pigeons that had made it inside doubled back for another go at us. He fired again, and again, and Ayaan opened up with a volley of fully automatic fire that blew the undead birds into clouds of blue feathers and wet gore. My ears ached with the noise and I worried they might start bleeding.

  I felt pressure on my back and looked to see pigeons colliding with the door behind me, trying to bludgeon it open with their bodies. I put my shoulder against the door while Jack finished off the last of the intruders, stepping on the heads of the ones his shots had only crippled. Ayaan put her rifle over her shoulder and helped me as the birds outside redoubled their efforts.

  “This is crazy!” she said. “Fucked up!”

  Jack hurriedly re-locked the door with shaking hands. The attack had surprised even him. “Undead animals… you don’t see a lot of them. Most of the city’s wildlife got eaten in the first couple of weeks. I can’t remember the last time I saw a squirrel.”

  “What do we do?” I asked, stepping away from the door as another pigeon smashed itself against the barrier. The glass was cloudy with the grease of th
eir bodies. “This is ridiculous. What do we do?”

  Jack shook his head. “So close. If we abort now—”

  “No one is aborting this mission,” Ayaan said, scowling at us. “I have lost my commander to get here. I have lost my friends. Now is not the time to stop. There will be a way, if we look.”

  In defiance of her words a shadow passed across the sidewalk outside. I looked up and saw a new flock of birds approaching. It was almost as if they were organized, as if they could plan their attacks. It was just instinct, though, something in the bones that they didn’t even need their tiny brains for. Pigeons were social animals, taking their cues from one another just as they always had. I could imagine how they had come to own this part of the city. One of them must have been bitten by a dead human looking for a quick meal. It had escaped but died of its injuries. Returning to its flock it would have attacked its fellows—who would attack the ones next to them, who would turn to do the same. The flock that flies together dies together, I suppose. The Epidemic must have spread through the avian population of New York even faster than it had through the humans.

  I wondered for a moment what they were all doing here, so close to the East River. Then I understood and my blood went cold. Hungry things went where the food was. The dead humans had eaten pretty much everything on the land. The last big source of food was clogging the river as far south as the Brooklyn Bridge. I’d seen it from the deck of the Arawelo.

  There had been hundreds of thousands of pigeons in the city before the Epidemic—now they had joined forces, an instinct stronger than death. “If we go out there,” I said, “we’ll be pecked to death in seconds.” It sounded hilarious but nobody laughed. “There are tunnels around here, though. There’s one that leads to the Chrysler Building, I know that. If we came out of the ground somewhere else, somewhere they weren’t expecting.”