No matter. Gary had his soldiers tear the leader of the living apart and move on. The dead marched steadily onward down the stairway to the platform where their noses told him the living had fled. No survivors presented themselves-they must have moved into the actual tunnels. Gary directed his troops to leap down onto the tracks and got a nasty surprise that made his scalp itch. The living had powered up the third rail.
It seemed like a worthless sort of trap-only a couple of his soldiers had actually touched the current-bearing rail. Their flesh sizzled and their bodies shook wildly but only a fraction of the dead were affected. In short order smoke from their burning flesh rose to the ceiling and the sprinkler system kicked in, dropping hundreds of gallons of liquid on the heads of Gary’s army until it dribbled down their faces and soaked their filthy clothes. Of course the living had taken the time to replace the water in the sprinkler system with gasoline. Fumes that rose from the dead like steam reached the third rail and in an instant the undead soldiers lit up like so many Roman candles. Gary blinked wildly as he watched them burn through their own melting eyes.
“Shit,” he said, with a sudden realization. The trail lead down off the platform and into the downtown tunnel. Of course. Whoever had designed the traps had been one step ahead of Gary all along.
The station’s defenses had been designed not to stop the dead but simply to slow them down while the survivors escaped through the tunnels. Directly to the south lay Penn Station-a perfect fallback position should Times Square be compromised.
Gary lead his final wave of soldiers from the rear, pushing them onward through the ruined station, urging them forward into the Stygian tunnel. The dead could see no better in the dark than the living and they stumbled and fell as they tripped on rails and railroad ties but enough of them kept moving forward. Soon enough Gary could see dancing light ahead-a greenish radiance that came from hundreds of glowsticks.
“Keep moving!” he heard a woman shout. “We can outrun them!”
Oh, they could have indeed-if Gary had let them. Instead he sent a command forward to 34th street. There were plenty of the undead there. It was easy to mobilize them and send them down into the subway tunnels. Soon Gary had the survivors trapped between two hordes of hungry dead. The survivors closed ranks and tried to fight-they had, after all, nothing to lose-but their pistols quickly ran out of ammunition. Knives and hammers and other hand to hand weapons came out but they were lost and they knew it.
Gary moved through the undead crowd and came before the survivors to look over his victory. There were hundreds of them, as promised. Mostly women and children and old men, wearing backpacks or shoulder bags. They huddled together in their terror, some of them sobbing, one or two of them actually wailing. One of them stood apart from the crowd. A woman dressed in expensive-looking clothes. Her nametag read HELLO MY NAME IS fuck you. She was very, very pregnant and rested her hands on her belly.
“You win, motherfucker,” she said. “Now come on. Eat me. Do me a favor!”
Gary came closer. He looked down and placed a hand lined with dead veins on her belly. The life force thrummed in her, bright energy radiating outward from the center of her being like a warm fire. He could see it glowing through his fingers, tinging them red as if he held his hand up to the sun.
“Actually,” he said, “I’ve got a better idea.”
David Wellington - Monster Island
END OF PART TWO
Monster Island
Chapter One
Smoke and acrid fumes swirled across the surface of the scorched platform. The tiles from the walls had cracked and fallen during the inferno and lay in piles of shards that clinked against my shoes. Jack’s light stabbed out in a wan cone that couldn’t penetrate the dust and soot suspended in the air. Bodies-grey piles of sacking, mostly, but with a telltale hand here or a charred tuft of hair there had been shoved onto the tracks in long untidy heaps.