Monster Island

by David Wellington

  Jack nodded. “Sure. And if the wind is just right they won’t smell us. And if we take off our shoes we can walk silently. Sure. We’d make it one or two blocks before something changed and they realized where we were.”

  I stared out through the doors, looked between the buildings. I couldn’t see the Secretariat Building of the UN from here, not quite. But I could almost feel it, no more than ten minutes away by foot. We were so close.

  Fate made up our minds for us. The Iridium cell phone in my back pocket rang, a strident pulsing chime that annoyed me so much I grabbed at it and answered the call. “Dekalb here,” I said.

  I expected to hear Marisol’s voice but it was a man who answered me. “No shit? Dekalb? I just found this phone and hit star sixty-nine. I must have just missed you. This is awesome! Is Ayaan there with you?”

  “She is—who is this?” I asked. Osman? Shailesh? It didn’t sound like either of them but I knew I recognized the voice. Then I had it and my back rippled with icy fear.

  “Who am I? I’m the guy who just ate the President of Times Square.”

  “Hello, Gary,” I said.

  I hurriedly hit END as if he could come through the satellites and get at me. “Jack,” I said, trying to sort it out, “there’s a problem at the station. The dead—”

  He didn’t wait for me to finish the sentence. He turned on his heel and bolted back toward the subway entrance as fast as he could go. I called after him and Ayaan ran a few steps but then she turned and looked at me. Her face was a question I didn’t want to answer.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sorry about the delay--I was out of town longer than expected. I'm back now and ready to post again. Thanks to everyone for your patience. I hope you enjoy this one. Part Three begins tomorrow!

  --David Wellington

  Gary climbed up the side of the Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Times Square and steadied himself on the roof. A wandering breeze snatched at his hair and his clothes. He looked up and saw the darkened signs, just as Dekalb had done but for him the dead neon wasn’t so much a shocking portent as a monument to what the world, and by extension himself, had become. Dead but still standing. A reflection in a distorted mirror.

  He let his gaze fall to the street level. To his troops. He had brought hundreds of the undead with him and though they wore no uniform nor carried any weapons they were an army. They awaited his command, still and passionless. He looked across the ranks of their slack faces and their hanging limbs and thought about how to begin.

  From behind the steel gate of the subway station living faces peered out at the army. A rifle barrel poked through the bars and a shot snapped out. One of Gary’s soldiers collapsed backwards onto an abandoned car, rocking it on its tires. Gary just laughed. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “You in there—why don’t you come out and play?”

  The faces at the gate drew back into the shadows. “You’ll never get through,” one of the living warned. If they were surprised to hear a dead man talking they made no sign. The rifle cracked again and another walking corpse slumped to the pavement.

  Gary reached out with his mind and the ground began to shake. The giant from the Central Park Zoo—tamed now, and under Gary’s control—came shambling around a corner and grabbed at the bars of the gate with his massive hands. The rifle barrel disappeared. With a shriek of metal fatigue the gate warped in its hinges, then released with a reverberating clang that sent the giant stumbling backwards.

  Hordes of the undead surged forward and into the station. Gary could see through their eyes as they tumbled down the stairs, pushing each other out of the way in their hurry to get to the living meat inside. There were animals down there, living animals. A big dog sank its fangs into the thigh of one of Gary’s soldiers but three more just tore the animal away and devoured it.

  The mob poured into the main concourse of the station, flowing over and under the turnstiles. The humans had fled, though they’d left behind some strange emblems of their occupation. Half a dozen translucent garbage bags hung from the ceiling like industrial egg sacs. Visible through the thin plastic were thousands of nails and bits of gravel and random pieces of hardware—screws, nuts, bolts, washers. Mixed in with the scrap metal was a coarse black powder. Gary figured it out but only a moment too late.

  Old blankets and empty cans had been strewn around the floor by the living. Among the refuse was a single brown paper bag, just another crumpled piece of trash unless you noticed the wires emerging from its open end. One of the dead stepped on the bag without so much as glancing at it.

  A dust storm erupted in the concourse, Gary’s vision turning to blue murk that howled and rattled as the hardware in the plastic bags shot out in every possible direction, nails and screws gouging the white tile walls, washers and nuts tearing through the dried-out brains of the dead. When the smoke had turned to billowing dust and Gary could see again his army lay twitching and broken on the floor.

  Clearly the living had planned for this invasion. They had studied the dead for weeks, learning their weaknesses—hence the improvised fragmentation grenades hung from the ceiling, at head height, where land mines would have been far less effective. This wasn’t going to be as easy as Gary had thought.

  No matter. He called up another wave of troops and sent them deeper into the labyrinth, climbing over the bodies of the twice-dead on their decomposing hands and knees. Gary closed his eyes and listened through their ears, smelled through their noses—there. Under the reek of homemade gunpowder and the shit stink of torn-open intestines he smelled something fainter but far more appetizing. Sweat, fear sweat—the perspiration of the living. He sent out a command along the network, the eididh, and his dead warriors shambled forward into a long hall ending in a ramp.

  The secondary concourse which served the A, C and E trains had once been a shopping arcade. The boutiques and gift shops had been pillaged long hence and transformed into simple dormitories. They lay empty and pathetic now under the fluorescent lights, rows of cots stripped of their sheets, piles of expensive luggage abandoned in the haste of the living. Gary sent his troops deeper, streaming toward the stairwells that lead to the platforms. He completely missed the second trap.

  Near the entrance to the concourse stood a simple, unmarked doorway, formerly closing off a janitorial supplies closet. The dead had passed right by it and had their backs to it when it opened on oiled hinges. Three men bearing power tools on extension cords leapt out and opened fire.

  Undead fell like wheat before a scythe, dropped from behind by projectiles that made a chugging pneumatic hiss every time they fired. Gary had his troops wheel around to face the assailants and saw they were wielding nail guns—heavy-duty roofing models that fired like automatic rifles. The nails they spat out were hardly as damaging as bullets but they didn’t need to be. Even one puncture wound in an undead skull was too much. Gary sent his troops stumbling forward into their own destruction, intent on taking out this threat as quickly as possible.

  More of the living emerged from the stairwells then, rifles and pistols in their hands. The dead who had turned to attack the nail gunners were easy marks for the more heavily armed survivors behind them. The dead couldn’t move quickly enough to overrun their attackers so they were sitting ducks for the crossfire.

  It looked bad—the living had created a perfect kill zone—but Gary simply called up reinforcements and sent them hurrying as fast as they could shamble toward the fight. It was a matter of simple mathematics, in the end. Each of the living might destroy ten of their enemies, but there were ten more right behind. The last of the defenders to die was an elderly man in a torn suit and a bow tie. He had a nametag on his lapel—Gary remembered the adhesive tags that Paul and Kev had worn—that read HELLO MY NAME IS Mr. President.

  “I will not negotiate with the undead!” the survivor screamed, brandishing his nail gun.

  No matter. Gary had his soldiers tear the leader of the living apart and move on. The dead marc
hed steadily onward down the stairway to the platform where their noses told him the living had fled. No survivors presented themselves—they must have moved into the actual tunnels. Gary directed his troops to leap down onto the tracks and got a nasty surprise that made his scalp itch. The living had powered up the third rail.

  It seemed like a worthless sort of trap—only a couple of his soldiers had actually touched the current-bearing rail. Their flesh sizzled and their bodies shook wildly but only a fraction of the dead were affected. In short order smoke from their burning flesh rose to the ceiling and the sprinkler system kicked in, dropping hundreds of gallons of liquid on the heads of Gary’s army until it dribbled down their faces and soaked their filthy clothes. Of course the living had taken the time to replace the water in the sprinkler system with gasoline. Fumes that rose from the dead like steam reached the third rail and in an instant the undead soldiers lit up like so many Roman candles. Gary blinked wildly as he watched them burn through their own melting eyes.

  “Shit,” he said, with a sudden realization. The trail lead down off the platform and into the downtown tunnel. Of course. Whoever had designed the traps had been one step ahead of Gary all along.

  The station’s defenses had been designed not to stop the dead but simply to slow them down while the survivors escaped through the tunnels. Directly to the south lay Penn Station—a perfect fallback position should Times Square be compromised.

  Gary lead his final wave of soldiers from the rear, pushing them onward through the ruined station, urging them forward into the Stygian tunnel. The dead could see no better in the dark than the living and they stumbled and fell as they tripped on rails and railroad ties but enough of them kept moving forward. Soon enough Gary could see dancing light ahead—a greenish radiance that came from hundreds of glowsticks.

  “Keep moving!” he heard a woman shout. “We can outrun them!”

  Oh, they could have indeed—if Gary had let them. Instead he sent a command forward to 34th street. There were plenty of the undead there. It was easy to mobilize them and send them down into the subway tunnels. Soon Gary had the survivors trapped between two hordes of hungry dead. The survivors closed ranks and tried to fight—they had, after all, nothing to lose—but their pistols quickly ran out of ammunition. Knives and hammers and other hand to hand weapons came out but they were lost and they knew it.

  Gary moved through the undead crowd and came before the survivors to look over his victory. There were hundreds of them, as promised. Mostly women and children and old men, wearing backpacks or shoulder bags. They huddled together in their terror, some of them sobbing, one or two of them actually wailing. One of them stood apart from the crowd. A woman dressed in expensive-looking clothes. Her nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS fuck you. She was very, very pregnant and rested her hands on her belly.

  “You win, motherfucker,” she said. “Now come on. Eat me. Do me a favor!”

  Gary came closer. He looked down and placed a hand lined with dead veins on her belly. The life force thrummed in her, bright energy radiating outward from the center of her being like a warm fire. He could see it glowing through his fingers, tinging them red as if he held his hand up to the sun.

  “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got a better idea.”

  END OF PART TWO OF MONSTER ISLAND

  PART THREE

  Chapter One

  Smoke and acrid fumes swirled across the surface of the scorched platform. The tiles from the walls had cracked and fallen during the inferno and lay in piles of shards that clinked against my shoes. Jack’s light stabbed out in a wan cone that couldn’t penetrate the dust and soot suspended in the air. Bodies—grey piles of sacking, mostly, but with a telltale hand here or a charred tuft of hair there had been shoved onto the tracks in long untidy heaps.

  “Good girl,” Jack said.

  He ran up a stairwell two steps at a time. We tried to keep up but in the thick air we lacked his urgency and we fell behind until we were abandoned in the near-perfect dark, only our glowsticks illuminating our way. Ayaan tossed hers to me so she could have both hands free for her Kalashnikov. I brandished the two sticks above my head like torches. We came to a place where the bodies were piled up like unliving barricades and I picked my way carefully through, terrified that one of the twice dead would rise up behind me and grab me around the neck. Ayaan let the barrel of her weapon swing from left to right, up and down, sighting on each punctured head in turn. In time we emerged into the main concourse where we’d seen Montclair Wilson give his State of the Union address. It was unrecognizable as a place where hundreds of people had once lived. The walls had been scraped bare, leaving chipped concrete behind. The ceiling had collapsed in places, dropping tons of plaster across the twenty-four hour token booth which sat twisted and abandoned. The dead there had been pushed rudely to the sides, making a wide aisle toward the stairwells that lead up to the street. The light up there beckoned and we didn’t stick around.

  At the street level we found Times Square deserted, emptied of its shambling corpses. Every undead thing in Midtown must have been in on the invasion of Times Square but they were long gone now. Only Jack was there, turning in circles looking for signs or clues or something. I could see no sign of the struggle at all but Jack bent and picked up a random piece of paper trash off the street. He handed it to me without a word. It had been a flyer for a Broadway show once but someone had scribbled notes in the margin with a ballpoint pen.

  ALIVE – CAPTURED

  DEAD = ORGANIZED!

  LEADER = “GARY”

  MOVING UPTOWN

  “Jack,” I said, holding on to the note because I didn’t want to just throw it away, not when it might be Jack’s last connection to the people he had helped lead. “There was nothing you could do. You couldn’t save them.”

  He stared at me while his mouth worried at a grimace. “They’re still alive,” he said, finally, and waved away my protests. “If the dead just wanted to kill them, they would have done it here instead of dragging them half way across the city for it. They’ve been taken for a reason. Who is this ‘Gary’?” he asked. “Is he a survivor?”

  “He’s—he’s undead, but different from the others. He was a doctor and he knew how to avoid brain damage when he died, he… we met him a while back, I would have mentioned him, but—”

  Jack stared deep into my eyes. “There was a threat I didn’t know about and you forgot to tell me.” He took the note out of my hands. “I’m too busy to kick your ass right now, but I’ll get to it.”

  It was so unlike him to say such a thing I was rendered speechless. Luckily Ayaan could still talk.

  “He is dead! Gary is dead! I put a bullet in his head. I did it myself. We watched him die. He is back now, though, and very dangerous.”

  “Yeah, I got that.” Jack surveyed the empty square. He turned to the west, toward the river, and started walking at a good clip. I ran after him. He had questions. “It would have taken an army to get through the defenses we built. How he got through the gate—do you know how he could do that?”

  I shook my head. “He couldn’t hold things… he was a doctor, before he—well, before. He tried to help one of our wounded but he couldn’t even wrap a bandage himself, his hands were too clumsy. I don’t think he could have used power tools.”

  “Can he control the dead? Did you see him do that?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing like that. He seemed harmless when we met him.”

  “They didn’t organize themselves. It sounds to me like this guy has some tricks he didn’t show you. Mind controlling the dead. Surviving a head shot. Tearing a carbon steel gate off its hinges with no tools. Now he has my people but apparently he’s not going to just eat them or he would have done that here. He’s creating facts on the ground and we’ve got no intel at all.”

  In no time we had reached the old National Guard barricade near Port Authority. Jack reached under the hood of the abandoned Armored Personnel Carrier there and popped a l
atch. He peered down into the big truck’s engine and grunted. “They’ve got at least a half hour lead on us and it’s getting longer while I talk to you. We’re going to fix this, Dekalb. We’re going to go after them and find them and I’m going to get Marisol back. You can help me with that or you can leave. Your choice.” He reached deep into the engine and twisted something. His arm went stiff with effort for a second and then he let go in a hurry as the engine turned over and coughed. It sputtered to silence again.

  “Jack—you’re talking about suicide,” I tried, knowing that if anyone knew better than to play cowboy against these kinds of odds it had to be the ex-Ranger.

  “I’m not stupid, Dekalb. I’m talking about recon. We don’t aggress on them until we know what the facts are—that’s SOP. For now I’m just going up there to take a look.” He popped open a repair kit mounted on the APC’s nose and took out a long white fan belt. He had to climb up on top of the engine to install it, his arms deep in the mechanism. He tried the starter again and the vehicle roared and whined and finally settled down into a bone-rattling chug of life. He jumped down to the street again and then clambered up into the driver’s position. I started to climb after him but he shook his head. “No. Just me. This thing’ll get me close but it’s hard to keep inconspicuous. Eventually I’ll have to abandon it and then I’ll be tracking them on foot. You’ll be no help to me then.”

  That was fair enough. When it came to moving stealthily in an urban environment he’d had the best training in the world and I’d had none at all. He gunned the engine, flooding the street with black smoke, and put the APC in gear. He had to shout over the noise.