Monster Island

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.

"You're kidding," I hoped.

"Sharpened it myself. Let me do the fighting, alright? You can be the radioman." He locked the booth up again and we went off to find Ayaan. She was with Marisol, who was painting her fingernails. The girl soldier snapped to attention when she saw Jack but she couldn't stop from bubbling when she addressed me.

"She used to be a movie star," Ayaan told me, and I had to fight the urge to laugh. "She was in the 'Runaway Bride', with Julia Roberts but her scenes were cut out in post-production. I think she is the most beautiful woman in the world, now."

Ayaan was sixteen years old. When I was her age I dressed like Kurt Cobain and memorized all the words to "Lithium". I guess we take our heroes where we find them. "We're going for the drugs," I told her. That broke the spell. She immediately set about cleaning and checking her weapon and gathering up her pack.

I tried to be discrete as Jack and Marisol said goodbye but I was itching to get started. Jack had a plan, and while he hadn't let me in on it yet I knew it would be good.

"If you don't come back," Marisol said, pushing Jack's glasses back up his nose. She couldn't seem to finish her sentence.

"Then you're all screwed." Jack put his arm around her hips.

"Dekalb," she said to my turned back, "do you begin to see why I had to marry a politician? At least Montclair knows how to lie. Get out of here. I'll be listening on this end. Not that I can do anything if you get into trouble, but at least I'll be able to hear your dying screams."

Jack actually laughed at that, something that had seemed impossible the night before. He gave Marisol a final probing kiss and then lead us deep into the bowels of the subway station... and right to the S Train Platform. The gaping twin mouths of the tunnels like the business end of a double-barreled shotgun lay just beyond a steel gate.

He expected our shock, of course, and he tried to explain as he fished a mammoth set of keys out of his pocket. "The tunnel runs all the way to Grand Central, nonstop. The power's off so we don't need to worry about the third rail. Yes, it will be dark in there but it's also unpopulated, as far as we can tell. We've never seen a stray corpse come out of that tunnel."

"It's a deserted subway tunnel and the dead have come back to life," I said, as if he might have missed the obvious.

"It'll take us halfway across the city," Jack insisted, unlocking the gate. "Almost right to the UN and it's a closed environment the whole way."

"Have you never seen any horror movie?" Ayaan demanded, but she filed through the gate like the rest of us.

Jack locked the gate behind him and started off down the platform at a steady clip. I rushed to keep up. Electric lights shone from the ceiling and the white tiles of the walls were no more dirty than the ones in the concourse but the platform felt tangibly different - colder, less inviting. There was no protection here from the city at large.

When we entered the right-hand tunnel the feeling grew into a creeping dread. Jack stopped to peel open a chemical light for each of us. He bent them in the middle and shook them until they started to glow, then snapped them to our shirts so we could keep track of each other in the blackness of the tunnel. He had a halogen flashlight duct-taped to his SPAS-12 and he switched it on, revealing railroad tracks that marched off in a perfectly straight line - a depiction of infinity straight out of seventh grade geometry class, if your Junior High happened to convene in Hell.

Time pretty much lost all meaning as we moved down the tunnel. We walked on the tracks, our feet settling into a rhythm of stepping on every other railroad tie. I tried counting my steps for a while but got bored with that quickly. I looked over my shoulder from time to time, watching the glaring light of the station behind me shrink, wishing I could go back, but soon it had become no brighter than a bright star. We made no more noise than we could help, trying not to even breathe too hard.

The tunnel revealed by Jack's flashlight was uniformly black, or even more than that. A dull dusty color that absorbed the light and gave back little to focus on. Now and again we would come across an electrical junction box on the wall or a signal light but these seemed to float in space, unmoored from reality. Reality was the tracks and the third rail that ran along side us and countless alcoves and recesses and emergency doorways built into walls pierced with Roman arches to cross-ventilate the twin tunnels. Holes where anything at all could be hiding.

Jack stopped abruptly ahead of us, his yellow-green chemical light nearly smacking my nose. I moved around him to see what had brought him up short.

A dead woman down on all fours on the tracks, scooping cockroaches into her mouth. When she looked up her cloudy eyes were like perfect mirrors, dazzling us with reflected light. Most of her upper lip was missing, giving her a permanent sneer. She climbed to her feet and started stumping toward us, the bullseye pattern of Jack's light making strange watery shadows in her faded dress.

She was nearly on us before I realized that neither Jack nor Ayaan was going to shoot her. I stared at them and saw he was holding the barrel of her AK-47, pointing it at the ceiling. He looked back at me with an expression of indifferent curiosity.

One of the dead woman's arms was bent up painfully under her breasts but the other stretched out to snatch at us. Her mouth was open wide as if she wanted to swallow us whole.

"Just like a baseball bat, Dekalb," Jack said, reminding me of the machete in my hand.

She was so close her stink was on me, permeating my clothes. "Jesus," I shrieked, and lunged forward, swinging with both hands, putting my weight into it. I felt her bony frame collide with my chest as the blade went right through her head, all resistance taking the form of a bad shock in my shoulder as if I'd been hit by a car but then she was lifeless, a rattling inanimate heap that slid down my pantleg and I was gasping, wheezing for breath, bending forward to see by the light of Jack's flashlight that I had taken off the top of the dead woman's head in a big diagonal slice that included one eye. She wasn't getting back up.

"Why?" I asked.

Jack bent down beside me and put an arm around my shoulders. "I had to know if I was going to be carrying you. Now I know you can hold your mud."

"And that's a good thing?" I spat out everything in my mouth - my fear, her stink, the look on Ayaan's face that showed real approval for the first time. Approval I fucking didn't need, if that's what it took to get it. I had just been hazed, of all things.

Jack squeezed my bicep and headed down the tunnel. I watched his chemical light recede for a moment, then jogged to catch up.