In a second I was up and holding the rope while Jack followed me down. We unclipped the various lines and harnesses and waved at Kreutzer, but he was already slipping sideways in a wide turn that would take him well out of sight of Manhattan. In a few seconds he was hidden behind a row of buildings and the world was suddenly silent, only my breath and the creaking of my suit to keep me company. Jack had expressly forbidden speaking during this part of the mission, just in case. All it would take was one dead man to notice us and we would fail, and our lives would be forfeit.
The bridge rose away from us on either side, a tendril of concrete flanked by high iron towers. To the east lay Manhattan, the Upper East Side and then Central Park. We had a long walk ahead of us. We got started without a word.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Twelve
Our walk through the Upper East Side made my bones ache and sweat pool in the small of my back but we weren’t spotted, which was the main thing. The streets were deserted-presumably Gary had pulled all of the dead away from this area to join the ranks of his army. That didn’t mean we took a lot of chances. We moved through the streets of Manhattan using a cover strategy that Jack called “bounding overwatch,” which meant I would hide in a shadowy doorway, my eyes scanning a street corner while Jack crossed the open space as fast as he could. Then he would take up position behind some kind of cover and I would do what he had just done, though far more clumsily.
We saw a number of buildings that had been pulled down by brute force-presumably for the bricks that built Gary’s tower. Hands and feet stuck out of the resulting rubble piles. Clearly Gary hadn’t worried much about job site safety when he sent his troops out for building materials. We only saw one active dead man, which was just enough to give me heart palpitations. If Gary had been using his eyes at that moment we would have been screwed-and there was no way we would know, not until we got to the Park and found Gary waiting for us. Thinking about it made me want to panic, so I tried not thinking about it. Which didn’t work.
The dead guy was standing in the middle of Madison Avenue, a stretch mostly bare of cars. He had his back to us, staring at a storefront covered up by a hoarding that had been turned into one giant billboard. COMING 2005: LA PERLA, the ad assured us. Beneath was a blow up of a woman wearing nothing but bra and panties, her back arched, her face turned to the camera with a look of disinterest. Even enlarged ten times her normal size her skin looked flawless, poreless.
His skin was discolored and blotchy, riddled with sores and sloughing away from wounds on his hands and his back. His head moved back and forth, his neck making a wet click every time. What could he possibly be looking for in the advertisement? Did he think the giant woman was some kind of food? I had never seen any evidence that the dead were interested in sex.
Jack and I waited for fifteen minutes behind the side of a building, waiting for the corpse to move on but it became apparent he wasn’t going anywhere. Finally I looked over at Jack and took a combat knife from my pack. He nodded. I had intended to hand him the weapon but apparently it was my turn. He lifted a finger to his faceshield-be quiet about it, he was telling me.