I made no comment. Osman and I had possessed a sort of easy camaraderie on the voyage toNew York. Two grown men on a ship full of children-it would have been hard not to bond. Now I was changed, though, in some subtle but very real way. I had fired a rocket-propelled grenade into a crowd of my enemies. I had ordered soldiers to shoot to kill. I had lead the girls to safety-and I had also let one of the dead eat their commanding officer. It made it hard to fall in with his breezy laissez-faire attitude. I wanted to order him to shut up, to leave me alone. I didn't, though. I guess I hadn't changedthat much.
“At least tell me you got the drugs and we can go home!” He raised both hands in the air, surrendering to his disbelief. My silence left him high and dry and slowly he lowered his arms. We both knew we couldn’t return toSomalia without the medical supplies. We had failed to find them and in the process we lost four of our number. I had nothing to add to that so I kept quiet.
“Well that is just fucked up, sir, yes, sir!” Osman said and flipped me a one-finger salute.
I didn't bother to respond. Why argue with the obvious?
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Two
fingers digging, twisting, pressing open wound smell of frying bacon laughing dark dark dark cold hungry fingers digging, grabbing, tearing Garywas losing. Dying. His spark, his animating force was draining out of him, out of the hole in his head. do better
A voice… a voice out of the silence, mocking him. Shut up,Gary thought. Just shut up and let me die in peace.
Garywas falling.
Falling, free and weightless for just a moment in the darkness, even the yellow cones of the flashlights lost to him now in this comfortable quiet blindness he tumbled as he fell, tossed from the railing, ejected from paradise into the depths of the megastore. Colliding, his back striking the soft rubber handrail of an escalator but at this speed everything was hard, so hard and brittle and he could feel his vertebrae snapping one after the other, T6, then T7, T8 all gone, pulverized as his body folded like a spring-loaded pocketknife across the handrail, never walk again ha ha ha.
In the darkness, the darkness of blindness, there was this shape, though, this white tree shape like something burned into Gary’s retinas, the flash, the muzzle flash of an assault rifle the last thing he saw the last thing he would ever see, it looked kind of like a tree, maybe the branches were the veins in his eyes lit up as they exploded from the hydrostatic shock of the gunshot, maybe they weren’t branches, though, maybe Garyslid to the floor in an ungainly heap. fingers fingers fingers in the pie, dig around, wiggle it around
The energy he'd taken from Ifiyah's dying body could only go so far. Oozing out of him this unlife, this half light was flickering away.
Start again.
White and fat, fleshy almost the tree rose out of fertile ground to stretch bright leaves smeared across the sky, its fat fleshy trunk pulsing with life but no,FLASH shattered, the tree had been shattered by lightning or by rain, just a trunk now, Gary could see it, its limbs broken and scattered around its base, just a trunk sticking up out of the ground, fractured, a big knot right in the middle of the tree like a surprised mouth open in an eternalO as if frozen in the moment of surprise, the moment when the news comes I'm sorry there were complications, she didn't suffer, the tree is just a stump.
All of this splattered across his vision. The only thing he could see. His muscles-his body, this rubbery doll kept moving underneath him. Spasms dragged his head across the floor, just die already, he could feel the bullet in his head so hot so hot and solid as it floated in the liquid, in the jelly of his brains. That was it, of course, the end,finito. The dead die but twice and this is it, this is, of course, it. Massive gunshot trauma to the head. Code blue. The end.
Just a stump. Still. Pulsing with life. Goddamn well throbbing with it.
He still had a little control. A trembling frail energy that was his, his to use even as it frittered away. His hand went up to his temple and found the wound, the entry hole. Dampness on his fingers.
God. Disgusting. The hole was wide enough to stick a finger inside. the sound a mop makes when it hits the floor