Slowly she stood up from where she’d been sitting on the tiles. Her legs were unsteady beneath her and her eyes were still closed.
“Look,” I said, “she’s okay.” I knew I was wrong but I said it anyway. She came for us hard and with all the strength she had, smashing her bloated hands and her sweat-damp face against the bars, smashing her shoulders and her hips against the steel. The cartilage in her nose snapped as she collided face-first with the barrier, her cheekbone broke and her features smeared across her face. I did step back, then. Jack raised his SPAS-12 and fired, the slug entering her left eye and coming out the back of her head with part of her skull. She stopped moving, then. The shotgun clicked as the gas-powered mechanism automatically loaded another round. He didn’t need it.
I was breathing hard and my body was buzzing with the chemistry of panic. Jack brought the weapon up to his chest and looked over at me. “Sometimes,” he said, slowly, quietly, “I think they’d be better off if they all died in their sleep one night. Then they wouldn’t be afraid any more. Some nights I stay awake and think about how to do it.”
He shook off the thought and when he spoke again it was with his usual confident tone. “We’ll commence with your mission tomorrow, after we’ve both had some sleep.” Then he turned and headed up the stairs.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Seventeen
Gary marched into the compound at Central Park like a returning hero. He felt like he should be wearing a cape. Behind him Noseless and Faceless kept easy pace with his stride.
The work on Mael’sbroch was coming along well. Two triangular support vanes rose a dozen yards in the air while one curtain wall was already higher than Gary’s head. The undead workers on the scaffolding looked unsteady at best but they lifted and carried their building materials as if they were precious relics and they placed the bricks so closely together Gary would have had a hard time getting a piece of paper between them. Groups of dead men sat in pits around the construction site, scraping the old mortar free of the bricks with their fingernails. Some used their teeth.
Other work parties erected the scaffolding, lattices of metal pipes torn off the facades of New York’s buildings. There had never been a shortage of the stuff. The ladders and platforms thrown up by the dead were rickety and precarious and accidents were common-in the short time Gary had spent on the building site he had more than once heard the sudden crump of an undead body falling thirty feet to the mud. Their bones often shattered and their limbs useless these victims would be put to work wherever it was possible-if they could still walk they could drag sledges full of bricks, while if they could still use their arms they would be put in the cleaning pits to scrape mortar.
Those few sorry wretches who were effectively paralyzed in accidents were still useful to Mael astaibhsear, or seers-in the most literal sense. Hoisted up and tied to the rising walls of thebroch their eyes scanned the Park for their master. Eyeless himself he depended on these assistants, without whom he would be blind. Dead men climbed up on ladders to feed bits of meat to these lookouts, keeping them fresh.
The Druid sat on a mound of piled rocks at the very center of the compound. His honor guard of mummies stood arrayed behind him, slumped against one another, clutching at their amulets and heart scarabs like a court of mentally deficient wizards. In front of Mael spread out on the ground lay a folding gas station map of the city with tokens marking the location of all known survivors. One of the mummies knelt over the map as Gary approached, removing tokens for the three locations he’d raided during the night.
Leaning forward on his sword the color of verdigris Mael shooed the mummy away and raised his head to greet his champion.
Mygowlach curaidh returns! You’re looking hale, lad. The Great Work must agree with you.