“Dekalb. TheArawelo is cramped even now, with only twenty-seven of us. It is not possible to take two hundred refugees onboard.” She kept her voice low so the survivors wouldn’t hear us arguing.
I followed suit. “So we’ll make multiple trips… or, I don’t know, maybe Osman will get his wish-maybe we’ll find some way to get theIntrepid free. God damn it, Ayaan! We can’t just abandon them.”
“Dekalb,” she said, much louder, and I turned to shush her but she had a different topic of discussion in mind. The side door of a dumpster had slid open and a naked dead man had wriggled out. Moving on all fours he came right up to us, his nose wriggling.
“He must smell the survivors,” I hissed at Ayaan. “Stay perfectly still.”
The dead man crawled closer and pulled himself stiffly up to his feet. In life he had suffered from male pattern baldness. He had tiny, beady eyes. He wavered before me for a long uncomfortable minute before bending forward at the waist and craning his neck out to give me a big snuffling sniff. He seemed to find my right hand fascinating.
It was only natural to look down and see what had excited him so. That was when I noticed the sheen of dampness on my palm. Sweat, on the outside of my glove.
Two more dead men slithered out of the dumpster. From down the street I saw movement-lots of movement.
“You shook the living one’s hand! You’re contaminated!” Ayaan screamed, her rifle strap getting tangled as she tried to get to the weapon. I looked from her back to the dead man as his talon-like fingers slashed down at me. They slid harmlessly off the Tyvek suit-I could feel the four hard points of contact (one for each of his fingernails) glance along my ribs-and then they caught on the seal of my glove.
At this point I tried to get away. Instead I got my legs tangled up in the baggy fabric of the hazmat suit and nearly fell down. The dead man gave a quick tug and my glove came off altogether, exposing my bare hand to the air.
My vaporproof integrity been compromised.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Nine
Long mylar banners flapped wildly between the columns of the faзade, their promotional messages bleached to illegibility by the sun. Snapping, snarling as the wind tore at them they were the only moving thing in sight. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stood high and alone in the mud of the Park, its massive doors wide open.
“I’ve got better things to do,” Gary said out loud. Afraid to go in. Noseless and Faceless made no reply to his assertion. “I need to find the girl who shot me. I’m hungry, too.” He didn’t turn away, though. Too many questions stacked up in his head.
Gary lead Noseless and Faceless up the long flight of steps to the doors and peered in for a moment, wondering if he really wanted to do this. The massive lobby soared upwards to three filthy skylights that provided a trace of illumination. Enough to see that the place was empty. Gary stepped into the cool dead air of the Museum and stared up at its arched and vaulted ceiling, at the grand staircase that lead upward from the far end of the lobby, at the gates that lead to the various exhibit rooms. This was hardly his first visit but without crowds of living tourists and patrons, without the squealing of bored children or the weary shouting of tour guides it seemed that every step he took made the entire stone edifice of the museum reverberate like a tomb.