Then time started up again and I tried to fight back. I lunged forward, my hands grabbing at the rotten fingers that dug into my ankles. The dead men dropped me and I rolled up to a sitting position before they could kick me to death. They tried, believe me. I managed to get my legs underneath me, to stand up. Then five of them just sort of leaned into me, their shoulders connecting with my chest and back. They slammed me up against a wall with just the weight of their decaying bodies. The smell was horrifying, especially mixed with the oily stink of Jack’s blood all over my shirt.
They didn’t tie my hands-they lacked the coordination to do so. Instead they just pushed me ahead of them with their hands and feet like kids playing kick the can. Every time I turned to attack them they would just thrust me up against a wall again until I settled down.
They had all the time in the world. They weren’t about to get tired. Eventually I just let them herd me on. We came to a place where the corridor opened up into a larger room and then they knocked me down onto my hands and knees. I looked up.
Six dead men stood in a ring along the walls of the chamber. Circular and tall, the room was not as big as I might have expected. It was made smaller by the fact that most of its floor had been hollowed out and turned into an enormous basin, a tub. A bathtub. This depression was full of some kind of foul-smelling liquid. I recognized the stench of formalin-it’s a precursor chemical, an ingredient in a number of chemical weapons. I would know that smell anywhere. Something the size of a large cabbage floated on the surface but I couldn’t see it so well-actual daylight was streaming down through the open ceiling and I was blinded by real illumination after spending so long in the tunnel and the pumphouse.
A mummy-an actual Egyptian mummy, with filthy bandages dangling from its limbs-picked up Jack by one foot and wrapped a pair of police handcuffs around his ankle while he hung in mid-air. I made a mental note-mummies were very, very strong. The other end of the handcuffs was attached to a hook hanging from a chain that stretched away up into the light. The chain was retracted a few feet and Jack was left dangling like a side of beef on a meathook. He wasn’t moving at all. Blood fell from him in a thick rivulet that ran down his left arm and splashed on the floor. I couldn’t look at him. If he was still alive he must be in agony. If he was dead he wouldn’t be for long.
I looked back down at the cabbage-sized thing in the pool. It opened up a pair of very bloodshot eyes. It smiled at me. It was Gary’s head. “Hi,” he said.
I looked to my left and my right. The dead had stepped back away from me-as if they were presenting a meal to their master. I pitched myself forward, my hands like claws, intending to dig out Gary’s eyes or something. Just hurt him, anyway I could. I had come a long way from the cowardly civil servant he’d met in Union Square. He was about to find out just how far.
Gary stood up in his bathtub with a noise like breakers on the beach and reached out one hand to slap me to the floor. My breath exploded out of my lungs and spots swam before my eyes. I looked up and saw the hand that brought me down. It was like one of those over-sized foam hands you get at sporting events. It was enormous, the individual fingers as thick as saplings. Gary was naked, his body a rippling mass of fat and dead veins. Corpse-flavored gelatin stuffed into lumpy sausage casings that threatened to split open at any moment.
He was seven and a half feet tall. He was six feet wide. He must have weighed a thousand pounds. His head hadn’t grown at all. It looked tiny on his shoulders, his neck submerged under rolls of fat. He glanced down at himself.
“Between meal snacks,” he explained.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Sixteen
The infamous Jack hung from the galleries, his motionless body twisting this way, now that. The blood that had spurted from his arteries was barely trickling out now. In his mind’s eye Gary could see the golden energy of his life, once fierce and self-contained, turning to wisps of wan smoke, his body barely warmer than the air around him.