“Joojin!”someone shouted. He heard booted footsteps running up behind him.“Joojin!” The rifle in front of him steadied in the girl’s hands. Was she receiving the order to fire or to not fire?Gary ’s forehead began to feel hot, anticipating the bullet.
Another girl came up in front of him. She barked orders at the others andGary felt the bayonet yank backwards out of his body. The girls argued amongst themselves-he kept hearing the word“xaaraan” -but clearly their orders were to stand down.
“You talks,” the girl who’d given the orders said. She studied his face, obviously confused by the dead veins in his cheeks.
“I talk,”Gary confirmed.
“Youfekar?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She nodded and threw a complicated hand gesture at her soldiers.Gary gathered by the gold epaulets on the shoulders of her navy jacket that she must be an officer of some kind, though that made no sense. What army in the world had officers who were teenage girls?Gary couldn’t shake the idea that he had been captured by a school field trip gone horribly, horribly awry.
“We kills you, if you says any wrong thing,” the officer suggested. She shook her rifle at him. “We kills you, if you dos any wrong thing. You do only right thing, maybe we kills you anyway because of the smell of you.”
“Fair enough,”Gary said, slowly lowering his hands.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Fourteen
I wedged myself through the spring-loaded emergency room doors and ran down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk, half-expecting to find myself alone. Commander Ifiyah and her company were there waiting for me, though. It looked like they'd taken a prisoner. They had somebody kneeling on the ground with a rope around his neck.
It didn’t matter-I had to tell Ifiyah what had happened. It had been stupid of us to think we could actually find the medical supplies we needed in this haunted city. We had to leave, and now, before anyone else died.
“Ifiyah,” I shouted, waving her over. I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and tried to get my wind back. “Ifiyah! At least one of your soldiers is dead. The enemy is in there, and they are coming for us!”
The commander turned to face me with a look of passionately studied disinterest. “Three, is more,” she said. I saw then that Ayaan stood next to her. Oh, thank God, I thought, at least one of the girls survived. “Three is dead. Ayaan keeps her head on and made slaughter with your enemies, Dekalb. They are no more.”
I headed over to where they stood looking down at the prisoner. “Great-but still, there’s no reason for us to stay here. There were no drugs in there. The place had been looted,” I told Ifiyah. She just nodded distractedly-of course Ayaan would have told her as much. A cold pang went through me as I thought of what else Ayaan might have told her commanding officer. How I ran at the first sign of trouble, for one thing (although surely they would understand-we were talking about theliving dead here), abandoning my team-mates.
It was while pondering the fact that not only would Ayaan be within her rights to give such a report she would be duty bound to do so and that I was, in fact, pretty derelict in my duty back in that hospital that I finally spared the time to glance down at the prisoner and see he was one of the dead.
Jesus fucking Christ they’ve got one of those things on a leash My brain sputtered to a stop even as my feet danced backward, carrying me away from the animated corpse. For one of his kind he didn’t look so bad-you could see the dark veins under his pasty white face and his eyes looked kind of yellow but otherwise his flesh was intact. He showed me his teeth though and I gave out a startled yelp until I realized he was smiling at me.
“Thank God, an American,” he said.