Marisol bit her lip so hard it bled. I could see the blood. Then she nodded and grabbed me by one ear. She pulled hard and I could do nothing but follow her, protesting madly.
She took me all the way past one of the houses before releasing me. I stared at her, truly pissed off-I’d just risked everything to save her from Gary, after all. Then I looked up and saw what she was trying to communicate to me.
There was a fifteen foot wide gap in the wall-a place where Gary hadn’t quite finished his construction job. There were tidy piles of bricks lying around, ready to be put in place, but no work crew around to finish the task.
Meanwhile on the other side of that wall were perhaps a million dead people. A million dead people who hadn’t eaten in days.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Eighteen
The dead don’t run. They hobble. They limp. Some of them crawl. The faster ones trample those with fractured or missing legs. The stronger amongst them push the weaker to the side.
They make no noise when they walk, no noise at all.
They came at us like a wave, a wave of limbs and contorted faces, eyes wide, clouded and vacant, hands, fingers coming at us like the foam on the top of a breaker, fingers, claws, nails. Visually they were hard to look at, their details hard to discern, one dead thing difficult to tell from another. Their mouths were open, every one of them. They were too human and dispassionate to see as a herd of panicked animals, too animalistic and insatiable to think of as a crowd of people. They all wanted one thing, which was us.
When a mob is coming for you there is no emotion except fear.
There was one of them-a woman in a dress that had been soiled and stained with blood and even burned, it looked like-a woman who was faster than the others. She strode boldly ahead of them and as she got close we saw there was no skin on her face or neck, just the twanging elastic bands of her facial muscles that snagged on her vicious-looking exposed teeth. Her eyes were dark pits under a thick gel of clotted blood like cold spaghetti sauce. Her hands reached for us, the fingers clenching again and again, her hair flowed out behind her in great tangled ropes.
Marisol picked up a broken piece of brick. She squeezed it in her hand a couple of times and then with a little yell, “Hyah!” she flung it as hard as she could at the dead woman’s face. It struck her square in the forehead, in the exposed skull. The dead woman collapsed into a heap, her head like broken pottery.
It broke the fear, a little. Enough.
Marisol and I began to grab bricks and shove them down in the dirt, trying to close the hole in the few minutes we had before the dead arrived. It was pointless busywork, of course, but it was better than panicking. “Marisol-go get-the rest-to help,” I gasped, between bricks. She nodded at me and turned around to head to the houses behind us. She didn’t get any further than a step or two, though. When I saw why I dropped the brick I was holding.
The mummy was there-the one who lead me out of the fortress. She held the dead man with no nose on her lap like a mother tending a sick child.
“What do you want?” I demanded. “What are you?”
The voice that spoke to me gurgled out of the dead man’s throat, an affectless growl that belonged to neither him nor the mummy who clutched him. It belonged to Mael, of course, Gary’s teacher, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. He hardly bothered to introduce himself.What am I? Just bits and pieces, is all, odds and orts and not enough of them to add up. I’m no harm to you. Quite powerless on my own. Then again, I might be a help.