Ayaan cleared her throat. I ran my flashlight over her face, making her eyes glow like glass marbles lit from within. She didn’t look scared, which I irrationally felt was some kind of insult to my orienteering skills.
I played the light over the color-coded signs again and then pointed it at the emergency stairwell. “This way,” I told them, and the girls stormed the fire door like they were assaulting an enemy fortress. Was I just a coward? I wondered. In my career I had purposefully gone into some of the worst places on Earth (at least they had been before the dead came back to life-now every place was alike in its badness), actively looking for war criminals and heavily-armed psychopaths so I could ask them to pretty please turn over their guns for destruction. I had never felt particularly afraid back then, though I had known when to duck and when to leave with or without what I’d come for. One time inSudan I’d been in a convoy full of food and sanitary supplies heading to a village in the extreme south of the country. That just happened to be the day the rebels decided to seize that particular road. A hundred men wearing green hospital gowns (they couldn’t afford uniforms-theycould afford plenty of guns, though) had stopped us and demanded that we just hand over the contents of our trucks. There was some discussion as to whether they should shoot us as well. Eventually they left us with one truck and all of our lives intact and we sped all the way back toKhartoum. I remember my heart beating a little faster then. It was nothing like this, this horripilating dread, this crawling fear.
Back then, no matter how bad things got, there was still some possibility of safety. There would always be a United Nations, and a Red Cross, and an Amnesty International. There were people somewhere who would work night and day to get you released from captivity or transferred to a clean well-run medical facility or airlifted out of harm’s way. Since the Epidemic all that was gone. Being a westerner got me nothing here, no help, no relief. Even in the middle ofNew York I was helpless.
Ayaan and her squad could have sympathized-that was the only kind of life they’d ever known. As we entered the stairwell and started up the stairs I tried not to hate them so much for being so calm.
Clang, clang. Clang, clang. Every step on the stairs rattled and banged with noise. The echoes rolled up and down the seemingly limitless vertical shaft of the stairwell, the sound shivering the cold air that we climbed through. It was loud enough to wake the dead, you know, if they hadn’t already been… damn, even dumb jokes couldn’t help.
I was scared shitless.
It was some kind of help to me, then, when we rushed the doorway to the second floor and I pointed my flashlight right at a sign that pointed us towards theHIVCareCenter. We’d made it. We had nearly reached our destination. Now we just had to grab the drugs and get back out the way we came.
We attacked another door and just like all the others there was nothing beyond it but more darkness and nasty-smelling hospital. More carts on casters and more piles of soiled linen. Nothing moving, nothing voicelessly screaming for our flesh. No sound at all. I took a step into the hallway and saw the reception desk for theCareCenter right ahead of me in the yellow stab of my flashlight. I took another step but I could tell the girls hadn’t followed. I spun around to demand why.
“Amus!”Ayaan hissed. I shut my mouth.
Nothing. Silence. An absolute lack of sound so distinct I could hear my own breath pulsing in and out of my chest. And underneath that something dull and atonal, and very, very distant. It was getting louder, though. Louder and more insistent.
Clang. Clang. Clang clang clang.
We heard silence for a while. None of us moved. Then we heard the noise come back. Slow, painfully slow but loud. Very loud. Clang, clang. Pause. Clang, clang. Clang, clang.
Something was coming up the stairs behind us.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Twelve