“Diyaar!”Ifiyah screamed and the girls let loose, one rifle after another jumping upward with a cracking noise that left another corpse spinning down to smack the pier. I saw one get caught right in the teeth-enamel danced in the air. Another with shoulder-length hair clutched at his stomach but kept moving toward us, not running so much as flopping on uncertain feet, flopping toward us with an inexorability that terrified me. A woman in a jeans jacket and high black boots pushed past him and came right for me, the wind ruffling back her hair to show that both of her cheeks had been eaten away. Her jaw snapped in anticipation as she raised her arms to grapple me. A puff of smoke burst from her stomach and she fell back but others pushed to take her place.
“Madaxa!”Ifiyah ordered-shoot for the head. I saw a few of the younger girls shift their stance nervously and raise the barrels of their rifles a hair. They fired again and the dead fell away, dropping to the pier with a thud or spinning down to the water or falling backward into the crowd which just surged around them and came faster. Had they been waiting for us? There were so many-even with the noise we were making I couldn’t imagine us drawing so many of them without warning. Unless maybeNew York, the perennially crowded city, just hadthat many walking dead in it. If so we were doomed. It would be impossible to complete our mission.
“Iminka,”Ifiyah breathed. Now. In my horror I had barely noticed the most horrifying thing of all-that the dead were gaining on us. Only a few meters separated us from their oncoming tide. The girls didn’t panic (though I know I did, hyperventilating and coming very close to shitting my pants). As one they adjusted their rifles with a ringing clack and opened up in full automatic.
If I had thought the carnage was bad before… I had no idea. I had seen assault rifles fired in full automatic before. In my job as a weapon inspector there had been plenty of times when some local chieftain or hetman wanted to impress me with the sight of his firepower. I’d never seen automatic assault weapons turned against Americans though. It didn’t seem to matter if they were already dead. The line of them in front of me just exploded, their heads pulped, their necks and torsos torn to fibrous shreds. The ones behind them just shook and shook like they were seizing wildly as the bullets rattled around inside of them.
The noise of twenty-four Kalashnikovs rocking and rolling cannot be described so I won’t try. It shakes you up, literally-the vibration makes your heart feel like its going to stop and can damage your internal organs with prolonged exposure.
When it was done we were standing before a pile of unmoving bodies. One woman in an I Love New York shirt with the sleeves ripped off struggled out from under the heap and came clawing at us but one of the girls-Fathia-just stepped forward and stabbed the dead woman in the head with her bayonet. The corpse went down. After that we all listened to the ringing in our ears for a while. We studied the shore end of the pier waiting for another wave but it didn’t come.
”Nadiif,”Ifiyah announced. The pier was clean. The girls visibly relaxed and shouldered their rifles. A few laughed boisterously and kicked at the slaughtered bodies on the wooden pier. Fathia and Ifiyah traded a high-five. All of the girls smiled-except Ayaan.
Her face hard she reached up and grabbed the muzzle break of my Kalashnikov. I winced, thinking she was intentionally burning herself for some reason-the AK-47 was notorious for overheating after prolonged firing-but then she pulled her hand away and showed me her unblemished palm.
“You did not discharge it,” Ayaan said. The disgust in her face was withering.
It came to me that I hadn’t fired my weapon at all, no. I had been too busy watching the girls. “I’m not a trained killer like you,” I protested.
She shook her head bitterly. “Nor are you one of thexaaraan. So whatdoes that make you?"
The girls spread out down the pier, Commander Ifiyah taking the van as they swept the shore for any sign of movement. Ayaan ran to her position in the front of the wedge. I turned and looked back at theArawelo. Osman flashed me an “okay” sign with one hand. “You go after them now, Dekalb,” he said, smiling broadly. “We’ll stay here and guard the ship.”
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Nine