Unless, of course, they could talk. The thought made me wince. I’d made a bad mistake in trustingGary. I didn’t stick around to even look at the Guardsmen. We walked on past the playhouses of Theater Row, past their colorful blandishments for entertainments that hardly made sense any more. Beneath the marquees the dead scrabbled and hunted for food. We saw an elderly woman with blue hair and a colorful scarf around her neck lying face down on the sidewalk. Her bony arms were stuffed down inside a sewer grating snatching up spiders out of the darkness below. Every dumpster rattled with the dead people inside rummaging for one last morsel of food.
Most pathetic of all were the weak ones. For one reason or other they couldn’t compete for the small supply of food available. Some lacked limbs or were too small or too scrawny to strive with the others. Many had been children. They were recognizable by the mottled pulpy skin on their faces, by the receding lips that had dried up and left their teeth permanently bared in broken grimaces. They did what they could to keep themselves fed but this never amounted to much. We saw a girl Ayaan’s age scraping at the green lichen growing on a brick wall. Others gnawed desultorily at the bark of dead trees or chewed clumps of dry grass until green paste leaked from their grinding jaws. It was only a matter of time, I knew, before even the strongest of the dead would be reduced to these measures. There was a limited supply of food in the city, no matter how broadly you interpreted the term. They didn’t eat each other for whatever unknown reason so this was what remained to them.
This was the future, then. The rest of history in a new paraphrase: a human face chewing on a leather boot, forever. I kept my head down and Ayaan did the same. Neither of us stopped to reflect further as we trudged eastward breathing canned air and listening to the creaking of our suits.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Seven
Central Parkhad become a shambles. A sea of mud broken here and there by a pool of stagnant water slick with the rainbow sheen of chemical pollution. Shards of bone, inedible even by the loose standards of the undead had gathered in these ditch-like depressions in the earth. No grass anywhere-the dead would have devoured it by the handful. Countless broken and sagging trees raised dark supplicant limbs to an overcast sky, pulpy and white where the bark had been gnawed right off the wood. Without the root systems of living plants to hold it together the very earth underCentral Park had rebelled, surging forward as mud every time it rained. The broad traverses had turned to rivers full of murky, billowing water. The fences that had divided the park into discrete zones of leisure had been overcome by the sweeping power of the water and mud and now lay twisted like long lines of barbed wire rusting in the sun. Here and there there a streetlamp poked out of the dirt at a skewed angle like the gravestones in an old abandoned cemetery. The paved or graveled paths that had once woven in and out of pleasant glades had disappeared completely. A tidal wave of mud that had swept out intoSixth Avenue. It had clotted in the gutters and left broad streaks of brown in elaborately ramified fan shapes down the street, carrying away cars to smash them up against buildings a block away in clumps of filthy broken metal and shivered glass.