“We have to assume one other thing. That he didn’t know this was here when he built his fortifications.”
That made me look up. Something Gary had overlooked? Something that would solve all of our problems? Jack was tapping the screen, indicating a featureless rectangular shape just inside the boundaries of the Park. It sat immediately downtown from the 79th Street transverse, formerly a well-paved road and now a ribbon of muddy water. I had no idea what it was.
When Jack told me I had to seriously think about what we were going to do. About how we were going to sneak inside Gary’s fortress and somehow make it back out alive with a couple of hundred living people in tow. It couldn’t be done.
We were going to do it. “How do we start?” I asked.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Ten
They were walking in the garden between the dormitory buildings, the mummies keeping a discrete distance from the living when something white and fast blurred across Gary’s vision and collided with his temple, making his eyes shiver in their sockets. His brain squirmed in his head as he sent out a dozen commands at once, drawing in clumps of soldiers to cover his blind spot, sending Noseless clambering up the stairs of thebroch to get a clear view, rushing Faceless out to where the wall of the enclosure wasn’t quite finished.
It was with his own eyes, however, that he solved the mystery. Looking down, still shaken by the blow, he saw the missile that had struck him so violently. It was a softball, soiled and dented from long use. Looking up again he saw a girl standing stock still a few dozen yards away, her eyes very wide. She wore a catcher’s glove and her nose was running unheeded. Her bright energy thrummed inside her with the adrenaline coursing through her veins.
Gary knelt down before the terrified eight year-old and tried to smile. Considering the state of his teeth maybe that wasn’t the best idea. The girl trembled visibly, waves of fear rippling through her gooseflesh.
“Come here, baby. I’m not going to bite.” Not this one, anyway. She had plenty more years ahead of her as a breeder before she would be culled. If she was a threat he might have to eat her father or something as an object lesson.
At his side he could feel Marisol barely able to control herself. She wanted to hurt him, he knew. Violence had been done to his person and she felt as if she should take it as a sign to begin a violent rebellion against her captivity. He also knew she wasn’t that stupid. The others who stood around him in a wide circle looked ready to run away at the slightest provocation. There would be no mutiny today.
“Did you throw this?” he asked, holding up the softball. It took both of his hands to keep a grip on it. “Did you throw it at me on purpose? Don’t worry, I’m not angry. Did you throw it on purpose?”
Perhaps too quickly the girl’s head swiveled right and left in negation. Gary smiled again.
“Playing ball is fun but we have to be careful,” he said. “Maybe you remember how there used to be doctors and hospitals but they’re gone now. If one of us gets hurt or sick there’s nobody to look after them. Do you-”
He stopped in mid-thought. His death-numbed senses had picked up something, something distant and faint, a kind of rumbling that he felt more than heard. Like an over-loaded tractor trailer rumbling by on a highway blocks away. Gary queried thetaibhsears hanging from thebroch’s walls and his own scouts out in the park. There was a generalized sense of agitation from the crowd of dead outside but no real information to be had.