The construction has begun. I must have abroch from whence to issue my orders.
Which wasn’t exactly helpful, but Gary soon understood. The crowd rippled at its edges and then the movement drew closer. The dead were passing bricks forward, hand to hand. Clumps of mortar stuck to the bricks, some of which were ornamented with fragments of graffiti. The dead must have pulled down a building-that was the crash-and now they intended to use the liberated building materials for Mael’s headquarters. One by one the bricks were laid down, the dead pushing them deep into the mud with clumsy hands. They swarmed around the spot where Mael stood like a hive of ants, totally focused on their task. This was far beyond what the dead were capable of in Gary’s experience, not without an intelligence organizing them from afar. Could Mael actually be controlling them all at the same time? The Druid’s power must be enormous.
Give me a chance, Gary. Work with me for one day. Maybe you’ll like it. Maybe you’ll feel at home being who you really are.
He had felt so much guilt over eating Ifiyah, because he had tried to live up to the standards of living men-in spite of what he had become. The euphoria that had followed his devouring of Kev had been the most natural thing he’d ever experienced.
Gary started to refuse but he couldn’t. In the face of so much concerted effort, not to mention Mael’s certainty, it seemed impossible to deny what was happening. “One day,” he said, the most defiant thing he could force out of his mouth.
Mael nodded, careful not to put too much strain on his broken neck.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Fourteen
Shailesh lead us to a good spot where we could lean against one of the station’s pillars. It was the best place to watch the speech, he said. I still had very little idea of what was going on. The lights dipped and the buzz of conversations around us dropped to a low murmur. We were seated looking at an empty patch of station floor. Above our heads we had a good view of the famous Roy Lichtenstein mural. In primary colors and thick comic book lines it showed a New York of the Future: finned subway trains blasting on rockets past a city of spires and air bridges. At the far right an earnest looking man in a radio helmet supervised the trains with glowing pride.
From underneath the mural a man appeared, smiling and waving at people in the crowd. Applause broke out and somewhere a violin started playing “Hail to the Chief.”
The man was probably sixty years old. He had a scruffy gray beard and a few wisps of hair on his head. He wore a charcoal grey suit with a tear on one sleeve and a nametag that read HELLO MY NAME IS Mr. President. A discrete American flag pin gleamed on his lapel.
Marisol stood up from one side of the room and bellowed out an announcement. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the man of the hour, my beloved husband and your President of the United States of America: Montclair Wilson!”
The crowd went wild. Wilson clasped his hands above his head and beamed like a searchlight. “Thank you, thank you,” he shouted over the roar of the crowd. When they finally calmed down he cleared his throat and crossed his arms behind his back. “My fellow Americans,” he said, “it has been a hard month. Yet we must remember that spring has come and with it the promise of a new morning in America.”
I grabbed Shailesh’s arm. He had to forcibly break himself away from looking at Wilson. “Is this serious?” I asked.
He shook his head to try to shut me up but then he sighed and said, “Without strong leadership we’d be doomed.”
“But who is this guy?”
“He was a professor of political economics at Columbia before the, the you-know. Now can I please listen? This is important!”