“I put myself on a respirator and then submerged myself in a bathtub full of ice,”Gary explained. “It stopped my heart instantly but oxygen kept flowing to my brain. When I woke up I could still think for myself. I can still control myself. You can trust me, man, okay? Okay?”
I didn’t answer. The soldiers had stopped and Ifiyah was yelling orders I couldn’t understand. I looked up the street, trying to figure out what was going on. We were in front of Western Beef, the big meat market. Nothing on this Earth could have persuaded me to go inside. Right next door was another kind of meat market-a swank nightclub called Lotus. That’s the meatpacking district for you. You could cut the irony with a spork.
Ayaan dropped to one knee and brought up her gun. Had somebody heard something? I couldn’t see any movement amongst the piles of cardboard crates in front of Western Beef. The smell was god-awful but what did you expect of a warehouse full of meat when the power goes down?
It was the door of Lotus that opened first. A short squat man in a fashionably cut black suit stumbled out into the street. At this range he might just have been drunk, not dead. Ayaan lined up a shot with perfect slowness and precision and caved in his left temple.
“There must be more than one,” I said out loud. One of the more superfluous comments I’ve ever made. The shot made the air around us vibrate like a bell, the noise of it echoing off concrete storefronts and brick buildings long after the dead man fell. Summoned by the sound, others came.
Dozens of them, big burly guys in white aprons stumbling out of Western Beef, Eurotrash out of the club, not even stopping to acknowledge one another, sometimes crawling over each other in their frenzy to get at us. They piled through the doors, clawing and scrambling to be the first to reach us. Dozens turned into scores.
When you added the dead who came staggering out of the buildings on every side, well.
Scores turned into hundreds.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Fifteen
They filled the street ahead of us, a shambling horde with gaping jaws and rolling eyes. Some looked human except for a few sores or open wounds on their exposed faces and hands. Others lacked limbs or skin or sensory organs. Their clothes hung in tatters or in perfectly-creased folds and all of them, all of them, were coming for us and they wouldn’t stop until we were torn to pieces.
“We’ve got to go,” I shouted at Ifiyah. I tried to grab her arm but she shrugged me off. With short clipped words she ordered her girl soldiers into a firing formation-the same one she’d used back on the docks.
There were a lot more of them this time and their movements were less constrained. I just didn’t know if we could survive this.
“We can outrun them, head down a side street,” I suggested. The dead took another step toward us. And another. They would never slow down. “Ifiyah…”
“They have no guns, Dekalb,” the commander said as if she were brushing off an insect. “They are so stupid, to lie for us in wait here and they even have no guns.”
“This isn’t an ambush-they’re not capable of that level of planning,” I insisted. I looked atGary, the smartest dead man in the world, and he nodded a confirmation. Ifiyah waved me away. I turned to Ayaan, thinking she would understand that this was not a traditional military skirmish.
But Ayaan ignored me studiously. Unlike the others she had to know what was about to happen. She’d been there, in the hospital, when the girls died. I could see her breathing hard through her nose, her jaw clamped shut but she didn’t move from her firing crouch. Orders are orders, I guess. The girls opened up with their rifles, going for head shots only-just like they’d done back at the dock. Maybe, I thought, maybe Ifiyah was right. Maybe I was just a coward. The girls were trained soldiers and they weren’t panicking. Maybe making a stand here was exactly the right thing to do.