I grabbed Ayaan’s arm and we ran north onto Broadway but they were there, as well, the weakened kind, the kind we had seen licking mold off of stucco walls. Their clothes dangled from their emaciated frames, their withered necks and sparse hair horrible to see. They looked far less pathetic now that we were unprotected. From the south came a dead woman with long black hair in a full bridal gown with a train, her hands covered in blood-stained gloves, her veil back to show us the long sharp teeth exposed by her withered lips. We would have to take our chances, I decided, we would have to gun down the bride and hope there were no more of the dead behind her. I didn’t relish meeting the rest of the wedding party.
Ayaan had her rifle up and was merely waiting for my order to shoot when a blur of orange light shot past our feet and straight into the biggest pack of undead with a yowling noise. It was a cat-a tabby, a mangy, half-starved rabid-looking cat. Aliving cat.
On reflection I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a live animal. Not so much as a stray dog or even a squirrel loose in the streets of New York. This couldn’t be a coincidence but to me it was a startling mystery.
The cat’s effect on the undead was electric. Ignoring us completely they turned as one to reach for the running feline, their hands stretching down to grab at its patchwork fur. It dodged left, feinted right and the dead fell over each other-literally-trying to get a handful of the orange streak.
Whether they were successful or not I didn’t find out till later. As I stood there mesmerized by the sight Shailesh, one of the survivors from the subway station, came up behind me and grabbed my arm. I shrieked like a child. “Come on already,” he said, “we don’t have a lot of bait to spare, you know?”
“Bait?” I asked. Sure. The cat. The survivors must have let it loose specifically to distract the undead long enough for Ayaan and myself to get inside. Following hard on the heels of our guide we bolted past the iron gate at the entrance to the station-I heard it clang shut behind us-and down a flight of murky stairs. In the gloom I saw litter boxes everywhere and a few angry-looking cats and dogs sleeping in ungainly heaps. A single incandescent bulb lit up the turnstiles which we proceeded to clamber over, since Shailesh assured us they had frozen in place when the trains stopped running.
Beyond the turnstiles we were met by an earnest-looking survivor wearing a pair of faded but immaculately clean jeans and wire-framed glasses. He held a military shotgun in his hands, the barrel pointed away from us in such a way I knew he had to be Armed Forces. No one else would be that disciplined with a firearm. There was a sticker on his white buttoned-down shirt, one of the increasingly familiar HELLO MY NAME IS labels but the white space below had been left blank.
He turned to Shailesh. “Are we secure?” he asked.
Shailesh laughed. “Dude, it’s the first rule of staying alive. They go for the fastest moving object they can see. The faster it goes the more excited they get! You should have seen them, Jack. It was like a Jim Carey movie out there.”
Jack didn’t raise his voice but what he said next made Shailesh break eye contact. “I asked if we were secure or not,” he repeated.
Our guide nodded obediently. “Listen,” Shailesh said to me, “Jack will take you inside. I have to, you know, watch the gate. Welcome to the Republic, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, not fully understanding. “Thanks.”
Jack looked at me for a moment and I knew he was sizing me up. He gave Ayaan the same inspection but said nothing to either of us except, “This way.”
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Eleven
One of the mummies-a Ptolemy and a cousin of Cleopatra, according to Mael-ran his partially unwrapped hands over the glass of a display case and then started beating on it with his palms. Mael hobbled toward him but couldn’t stop him from shattering the glass. It cascaded down his bandaged legs in a torrent of tiny green cubes. Long shards of it stuck into his arms and his hands but he ignored them as he bent to retrieve a clay jar from the exhibit. Hieroglyphs covered its surface and the stopper was carved wood in the shape of a falcon’s head. Mael tried to pull the mummy away from the jagged glass but the undead Egyptian refused to be lead. He was far too intent on cradling the jar against his chest.
It was the first time Gary had seen a dead man motivated by anything but hunger. “What’s in that thing that’s so important?” he asked.