Amaideach stуcach!the benefactor howled. The words meant nothing to Gary but they cut through him like a sword of fire.You let it get away! the Benefactor went on, this time in English. It was too much, this communication: it felt like the words were tearing through Gary's mind, as dangerous as bullets. He tumbled to the ground, his body convulsing wildly in the throes of a massive seizure.
When he was able to rise to his feet again he collected Noseless and Faceless (looking a little ragged after the fight with the giant but still mobile) and returned to his uptown course. He had to find his benefactor. He had to know what kind of power could hurt him so badly from such a distance.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Eight
We kept to the middle of the street as we approached Port Authority. This must have been the last part of the city to be evacuated. We saw piles of luggage-sometimes just trash bags sealed with masking tape, sometimes great heaps of Prada handbags or Tumi suitcases-stashed on the sidewalk and everywhere there were leaflets tacked up on the walls or skating along the streets like albino manta rays advising people to STAY TOGETHER and KNOW YOUR GROUP NUMBER BY HEART! The bus terminal must have been the only way out of town at the end. I had no great desire to go inside and see what had become of all those panicked refugees. It would be depressing at best, I thought, shocking at worst.
Then we passed by the bulk of the terminal and entered Times Square and I discovered a new definition for the word ‘shocking’.
It will sound ridiculous to some, I know, after all the devastation I’d witnessed, but Times Square was the most horrifying place I saw in this new New York. There were no piles of dead bodies, no signs of looting or panic. There was just one thing wrong with this Times Square.
It was dark.
There were no lights on anywhere, not a single bulb. I turned to Ayaan but she didn’t understand, of course, so I turned around again and stared up at the vast blank faces of the buildings around me. I wanted to explain to her-how there used to be television screens here six stories high, how the neon lights had glowed and shifted and shimmered so brightly the night had been transformed into a luminous blue haze unlike daylight, unlike moonlight, something wholly transcendent and localized. How there had been a law requiring every building to put out a certain amount of light so that even the police station and the subway entrances and the military recruiting center had blasted out illumination like the Vegas strip but how could she understand? She had no point of reference-she had never seen the big advertisements for Samsung and Reuters and Quiksilver and McDonald’s. She would never see them now. With my mouth open I turned in place, so shocked I couldn’t think. The heart of New York City-that was what all the tourist books called Times Square. The heart of New York City had stopped beating. The city like its inhabitants had perished and now existed only in a nightmarish half-state, an unliving undeath. Ayaan had to grab my hand and lead me away.
We passed between the movie theaters and then we saw Madame Tussaud’s on our right. Dozens of wax mannequins had been dragged out into the street, their paint washed off by rain and their half-melted white faces staring up at us in reproach. We could see the big ragged gouges in their throats and torsos where the hungry dead had ravaged them, obviously having mistaken them for real human beings. I was still staring at the broken forms when I heard someone speak. I looked up at Ayaan at the same moment she looked up at me. We had both heard it-which meant it had originated with neither of us.