Sorry about the delay--I was out of town longer than expected. I'm back now and ready to post again. Thanks to everyone for your patience. I hope you enjoy this one. Part Three begins tomorrow!
--David Wellington
Gary climbed up the side of the Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Times Square and steadied himself on the roof. A wandering breeze snatched at his hair and his clothes. He looked up and saw the darkened signs, just as Dekalb had done but for him the dead neon wasn't so much a shocking portent as a monument to what the world, and by extension himself, had become. Dead but still standing. A reflection in a distorted mirror.
He let his gaze fall to the street level. To his troops. He had brought hundreds of the undead with him and though they wore no uniform nor carried any weapons they were an army. They awaited his command, still and passionless. He looked across the ranks of their slack faces and their hanging limbs and thought about how to begin.
From behind the steel gate of the subway station living faces peered out at the army. A rifle barrel poked through the bars and a shot snapped out. One of Gary's soldiers collapsed backwards onto an abandoned car, rocking it on its tires. Gary just laughed. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. "You in there - why don't you come out and play?"
The faces at the gate drew back into the shadows. "You'll never get through," one of the living warned. If they were surprised to hear a dead man talking they made no sign. The rifle cracked again and another walking corpse slumped to the pavement.
Gary reached out with his mind and the ground began to shake. The giant from the Central Park Zoo - tamed now, and under Gary's control - came shambling around a corner and grabbed at the bars of the gate with his massive hands. The rifle barrel disappeared. With a shriek of metal fatigue the gate warped in its hinges, then released with a reverberating clang that sent the giant stumbling backwards.
Hordes of the undead surged forward and into the station. Gary could see through their eyes as they tumbled down the stairs, pushing each other out of the way in their hurry to get to the living meat inside. There were animals down there, living animals. A big dog sank its fangs into the thigh of one of Gary's soldiers but three more just tore the animal away and devoured it.
The mob poured into the main concourse of the station, flowing over and under the turnstiles. The humans had fled, though they'd left behind some strange emblems of their occupation. Half a dozen translucent garbage bags hung from the ceiling like industrial egg sacs. Visible through the thin plastic were thousands of nails and bits of gravel and random pieces of hardware - screws, nuts, bolts, washers. Mixed in with the scrap metal was a coarse black powder. Gary figured it out but only a moment too late.
Old blankets and empty cans had been strewn around the floor by the living. Among the refuse was a single brown paper bag, just another crumpled piece of trash unless you noticed the wires emerging from its open end. One of the dead stepped on the bag without so much as glancing at it.
A dust storm erupted in the concourse, Gary's vision turning to blue murk that howled and rattled as the hardware in the plastic bags shot out in every possible direction, nails and screws gouging the white tile walls, washers and nuts tearing through the dried-out brains of the dead. When the smoke had turned to billowing dust and Gary could see again his army lay twitching and broken on the floor.
Clearly the living had planned for this invasion. They had studied the dead for weeks, learning their weaknesses - hence the improvised fragmentation grenades hung from the ceiling, at head height, where land mines would have been far less effective. This wasn't going to be as easy as Gary had thought.
No matter. He called up another wave of troops and sent them deeper into the labyrinth, climbing over the bodies of the twice-dead on their decomposing hands and knees. Gary closed his eyes and listened through their ears, smelled through their noses - there. Under the reek of homemade gunpowder and the shit stink of torn-open intestines he smelled something fainter but far more appetizing. Sweat, fear sweat - the perspiration of the living. He sent out a command along the network, the eididh, and his dead warriors shambled forward into a long hall ending in a ramp.
The secondary concourse which served the A, C and E trains had once been a shopping arcade. The boutiques and gift shops had been pillaged long hence and transformed into simple dormitories. They lay empty and pathetic now under the fluorescent lights, rows of cots stripped of their sheets, piles of expensive luggage abandoned in the haste of the living. Gary sent his troops deeper, streaming toward the stairwells that lead to the platforms. He completely missed the second trap.
Near the entrance to the concourse stood a simple, unmarked doorway, formerly closing off a janitorial supplies closet. The dead had passed right by it and had their backs to it when it opened on oiled hinges. Three men bearing power tools on extension cords leapt out and opened fire.
Undead fell like wheat before a scythe, dropped from behind by projectiles that made a chugging pneumatic hiss every time they fired. Gary had his troops wheel around to face the assailants and saw they were wielding nail guns - heavy-duty roofing models that fired like automatic rifles. The nails they spat out were hardly as damaging as bullets but they didn't need to be. Even one puncture wound in an undead skull was too much. Gary sent his troops stumbling forward into their own destruction, intent on taking out this threat as quickly as possible.
More of the living emerged from the stairwells then, rifles and pistols in their hands. The dead who had turned to attack the nail gunners were easy marks for the more heavily armed survivors behind them. The dead couldn't move quickly enough to overrun their attackers so they were sitting ducks for the crossfire.
It looked bad - the living had created a perfect kill zone - but Gary simply called up reinforcements and sent them hurrying as fast as they could shamble toward the fight. It was a matter of simple mathematics, in the end. Each of the living might destroy ten of their enemies, but there were ten more right behind. The last of the defenders to die was an elderly man in a torn suit and a bow tie. He had a nametag on his lapel - Gary remembered the adhesive tags that Paul and Kev had worn - that read HELLO MY NAME IS Mr. President.
"I will not negotiate with the undead!" the survivor screamed, brandishing his nail gun.
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."
END OF PART TWO OF MONSTER ISLAND