Monster Island

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.

"Good girl," Jack said.

He ran up a stairwell two steps at a time. We tried to keep up but in the thick air we lacked his urgency and we fell behind until we were abandoned in the near-perfect dark, only our glowsticks illuminating our way. Ayaan tossed hers to me so she could have both hands free for her Kalashnikov. I brandished the two sticks above my head like torches. We came to a place where the bodies were piled up like unliving barricades and I picked my way carefully through, terrified that one of the twice dead would rise up behind me and grab me around the neck. Ayaan let the barrel of her weapon swing from left to right, up and down, sighting on each punctured head in turn. In time we emerged into the main concourse where we'd seen Montclair Wilson give his State of the Union address. It was unrecognizable as a place where hundreds of people had once lived. The walls had been scraped bare, leaving chipped concrete behind. The ceiling had collapsed in places, dropping tons of plaster across the twenty-four hour token booth which sat twisted and abandoned. The dead there had been pushed rudely to the sides, making a wide aisle toward the stairwells that lead up to the street. The light up there beckoned and we didn't stick around.

At the street level we found Times Square deserted, emptied of its shambling corpses. Every undead thing in Midtown must have been in on the invasion of Times Square but they were long gone now. Only Jack was there, turning in circles looking for signs or clues or something. I could see no sign of the struggle at all but Jack bent and picked up a random piece of paper trash off the street. He handed it to me without a word. It had been a flyer for a Broadway show once but someone had scribbled notes in the margin with a ballpoint pen.

ALIVE  -  CAPTURED

DEAD = ORGANIZED!

LEADER = "GARY"

MOVING UPTOWN

"Jack," I said, holding on to the note because I didn't want to just throw it away, not when it might be Jack's last connection to the people he had helped lead. "There was nothing you could do. You couldn't save them."

He stared at me while his mouth worried at a grimace. "They're still alive," he said, finally, and waved away my protests. "If the dead just wanted to kill them, they would have done it here instead of dragging them half way across the city for it. They've been taken for a reason. Who is this 'Gary'?" he asked. "Is he a survivor?"

"He's - he's undead, but different from the others. He was a doctor and he knew how to avoid brain damage when he died, he... we met him a while back, I would have mentioned him, but - "

Jack stared deep into my eyes. "There was a threat I didn't know about and you forgot to tell me." He took the note out of my hands. "I'm too busy to kick your ass right now, but I'll get to it."

It was so unlike him to say such a thing I was rendered speechless. Luckily Ayaan could still talk.

"He is dead! Gary is dead! I put a bullet in his head. I did it myself. We watched him die. He is back now, though, and very dangerous."

"Yeah, I got that." Jack surveyed the empty square. He turned to the west, toward the river, and started walking at a good clip. I ran after him. He had questions. "It would have taken an army to get through the defenses we built. How he got through the gate - do you know how he could do that?"

I shook my head. "He couldn't hold things... he was a doctor, before he - well, before. He tried to help one of our wounded but he couldn't even wrap a bandage himself, his hands were too clumsy. I don't think he could have used power tools."

"Can he control the dead? Did you see him do that?"

"No," I said. "Nothing like that. He seemed harmless when we met him."

"They didn't organize themselves. It sounds to me like this guy has some tricks he didn't show you. Mind controlling the dead. Surviving a head shot. Tearing a carbon steel gate off its hinges with no tools. Now he has my people but apparently he's not going to just eat them or he would have done that here. He's creating facts on the ground and we've got no intel at all."

In no time we had reached the old National Guard barricade near Port Authority. Jack reached under the hood of the abandoned Armored Personnel Carrier there and popped a latch. He peered down into the big truck's engine and grunted. "They've got at least a half hour lead on us and it's getting longer while I talk to you. We're going to fix this, Dekalb. We're going to go after them and find them and I'm going to get Marisol back. You can help me with that or you can leave. Your choice." He reached deep into the engine and twisted something. His arm went stiff with effort for a second and then he let go in a hurry as the engine turned over and coughed. It sputtered to silence again.

"Jack - you're talking about suicide," I tried, knowing that if anyone knew better than to play cowboy against these kinds of odds it had to be the ex-Ranger.

"I'm not stupid, Dekalb. I'm talking about recon. We don't aggress on them until we know what the facts are - that's SOP. For now I'm just going up there to take a look." He popped open a repair kit mounted on the APC's nose and took out a long white fan belt. He had to climb up on top of the engine to install it, his arms deep in the mechanism. He tried the starter again and the vehicle roared and whined and finally settled down into a bone-rattling chug of life. He jumped down to the street again and then clambered up into the driver's position. I started to climb after him but he shook his head. "No. Just me. This thing'll get me close but it's hard to keep inconspicuous. Eventually I'll have to abandon it and then I'll be tracking them on foot. You'll be no help to me then."

That was fair enough. When it came to moving stealthily in an urban environment he'd had the best training in the world and I'd had none at all. He gunned the engine, flooding the street with black smoke, and put the APC in gear. He had to shout over the noise.

"Take Ayaan and get back to your boat. Go to Governors Island. If I'm not there in twenty-four hours you're on your own."

I nodded but he didn't wait for my reply. He engaged the vehicle's treads and headed north - toward the survivors.