He was looking through the eyes of his minions, seeing what they saw-even as he continued to be able to use his own eyes. He turned to look at the Latina and felt the connection that bound them together, the unity of death. He could feel thoughts and memories bubbling around her-information she herself could not access any more because her brain had suffocated when she died.
His hadn’t. He saw at once what Mael had wanted him to find. Something she’d seen while scavenging for food, something important. A street-a square-a doorway, a steel gate. Human hands, living hands clutching the bars. White noise hissed and crackled around him, he tasted metal in his mouth but he fought it back. More living humans, more on top of more of them-hundreds. He saw their eyes peering out of darkness, their frightened eyes. Hundreds?
Hundreds. Their bright energy seared him. He wanted to take it from them.
When he returned to himself he was down on all fours and a long string of shiny drool ran from his lower lip to the mud below. “Now?” he asked.
Aye.
Gary pointed and dead workmen came down from their ladders to gather before him. He reached out with his mind and summoned others-an army of them-from as far away as the Reservoir. It was easy when he had the knack down. He didn’t need to give them detailed instructions as he had with Faceless and Noseless. He didn’t need to micromanage. He simply told them what he wanted and they did it without question. It felt good. It felt amazing. He called on more of them, as many as he could reach.
Leave me a few to put a roof over my head, eh, lad?
Gary nodded but he was too busy assembling his army to pay much attention to the Druid. “So many of them,” he said, unsure if he was referring to the living or the dead.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Eighteen
Jack handed me a cell phone that looked like something from the early nineties. A real brick-two inches thick with rubberized grips on the sides. The antenna was almost bigger than the phone itself, eight inches long and as thick as my index finger. “Motorola 9505,” I said, trying to impress him. “Sweet.” Most cell phones would be useless in New York-the towers that dotted the city’s rooftops were unpowered now-but this beast could tap into the Iridium satellite network. It would work anywhere on earth as long as it had a charge. The UN used Iridiums but only sparingly, handing them out to field operatives like they were Faberge eggs. In America they were standard issue for military units, and in fact Jack had retrieved them from an abandoned National Guard checkpoint a few blocks away.
Two more phones sat in a multi-unit charger which had been built to hold six. The rest had gone out with scavenging parties and had never returned. I made a quick call to Osman, letting him know we were still alive.
“That is too bad, Dekalb,” he said, the signal degraded through the thick ceiling of the station but still audible. “If you were dead I could go home.”
I rang off to save the phone’s charge.
“Next stop is the armory,” Jack said. He unlocked the door of the station’s 24 hour token both. Behind the bulletproof glass sat rack after rack of long-barreled rifles, some of them still in their boxes. Too bad they were just toys. Paintball rifles, bee bee guns, pellet shooters guaranteed not to penetrate human skin. “There are more toy stores in New York than gun shops,” Jack explained. It didn’t sound like an apology. “We took what we could get. They’re useful as distraction weapons. You hit a corpse with one of these and he’ll feel it. He’ll come looking for you, which gives your partner enough time to take him down.”
Your partner, theoretically, would be holding a single action hunting rifle, of which there were exactly three in the booth, or a pistol-there were dozens of those though only a couple of cardboard boxes of ammunition for them. There were plenty of knives, though, and sledgehammers and riot control batons. “I’m guessing you’re not much with a firearm anyway,” Jack said, looking over his arsenal. He settled on a machete with an eighteen inch blade-originally a gardening implement. It felt well-balanced in my hand and the grip was rubberized for comfort but I didn’t relish using it.