“The prisoners,” I said, done with that train of thought. I had to be hard now. “You have to leave us some weapons when you go. Give us a fighting chance.”
“For them, yes. But I’m not done with you.” She glanced at her sheet of paper again. “You have lived inAmerica.” Here it comes, I thought. The Somalis had no reason to help out an American, not after Operation Restore Hope turned to shit back in ’94. I was aGaal, a foreigner-a foreign devil. This is where they take me out in the yard and put a bullet in the back of my head. “I need a volunteer. An American volunteer for something quite dangerous. In exchange you could have full citizenship.” She kept talking then but for a while I couldn’t hear anything, I was too busy imagining my own death. When I realized she wasn’t going to kill me I snapped back to attention. “It’s Mama Halima, you see.” She put down her paper and looked at me, really looked at me. Not like I was an unpleasant task she had to deal with but like I was a human being. “She has succumbed to a condition all too prevalent inAfrica. She has become dependent on certain chemicals. Chemicals we are dangerously short of.”
Drugs. The Warlady had a habit and she needed a mule to go pick up her supply of dope. Somebody desperate enough to go toAmerica and get her fix for her. I would do it, of course. No question.
“What kind of ‘chemicals’ are we talking about? Heroin? Cocaine?”
She pursed her lips like she was wondering whether she’d made a mistake in picking me for this mission. “No. More like AZT.”
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Five
Now
Garysat on the floor of his kitchenette, surrounded by wrappers and boxes-all of them empty. He licked the inside of a wrapper that used to hold a granola bar, dug out the tiny crumbs with his tongue. All gone.
He was hungrier than ever.
He could feel his stomach distend. He knew he was full, fuller than he’d ever been in life. It didn’t seem to matter. Being among the dead meant always being hungry, obviously. It meant this gnawing inside of you that you could never quench. It explained so much. He had wondered-in his old life-why they had attacked people, even people they knew, people they loved. Maybe they had tried to stop themselves. The hunger was just too great. The need to eat, to consume, was awesome and frightening. Was this what he had consigned himself to?
Even as he considered this he was rising to his feet, his hands reaching for the cupboard. His fingers were clumsy with hunger but they obeyed him enough to get the door open. The cupboard was almost empty and he felt a gulf open inside him, a desperate dark place that needed to be filled. Food. He needed food.
He’d thought he was done with the things of life. That had been the point. The age of humanity was over and the time ofHomo mortishad come… the hospital had been in chaos, dying patients rising to wound the healthy, policemen discharging their weapons in the halls, the lights flickering as the generators ran down. He had walked out the emergency room doors with a laundry cart full of expensive equipment and nobody had even tried to stop him.
He found a box of rigatoni, took it down from the shelf. The stove didn’t work. How was he going to cook it? His thumbnail dug into the carton’s flap anyway. Wishful thinking.