Monster Island

PART THREE Chapter Thirteen

The bodies arched and heaved, backs curling, heads pushed down by feet looking for purchase. A thousand moving corpses strained with their arms and legs, pushing each other upward, the limbs of the ones on the bottom snapping like dry sticks. The one on top, an Asian girl in a pair of blood-stained pink Sanryo overalls, reached up with one hand and touched the coping of the planetarium's roof. A Somali girl with a bayonet on the end of her rifle lunged forward and impaled the dead girl's head like a pineapple. When the bayonet retracted the Asian girl rolled down the side of the undead human pyramid to smack the asphalt of Central Park West. A man in an Armani suit with one leg hanging in tatters slumped forward to take her place. One of the Somalis opened up with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod and his body erupted in chunks of rotten meat that pelted the bodies below like foul rain.
The pyramid wasn't going to work. Instead Gary turned to his original plan and looked through the eyes of a dead man deep within the ruins of the Natural History Museum. A small squad requiring constant attention had found its way through some of the rubble, climbing clumsily over fallen statuary and through gaps in collapsed piles of shattered brick. Stained with red dust, their eyes drying up in their sockets, three of them had clambered up a length of twisted and broken track lighting to reach the fourth floor. Gary had left them to their own devices for only a minute or two while he tried to assemble the human pyramid but in that time two of his dead scouts had managed to walk right off of a balcony and fall back to the story below. One had a pair of broken legs and was useless - Gary snuffed the life out of it on principle. The other didn't need his attention. She had impaled her own head on an exposed shaft of rebar. The third, still functioning corpse had come up short, unable to proceed. He was standing quite motionless, his arms at his sides, his head moving back and forth as he tried to process what lay before him, a shadow looming out of the cool darkness of the museum - a skull big enough for him to climb inside with teeth like combat knives and eye sockets bigger than his head.
It was a Tyrranosaurus Rex skull. The dead man was trying to decide if it was food or an enemy or both. It was neither, of course - there wasn't even any marrow to suck out of the bone, since the skull was merely a replica made out of polymer resin. Gary snarled and seized direct control of the ghoul's arms and legs. His soldiers had always been stupid, of course, but they also hadn't been fed since the day Mael took control of them. As a result they were losing ground against the more insidious kinds of bodily decay. Their eyes were white with corruption, their fingers gnarled and contorted. By forcing the dead man to march at a brisk pace Gary was damaging his vital tissues beyond repair. In a matter of hours this particular vessel of his attention would fall apart completely. Irrelevant, he told himself. He only needed a few more minutes out of this one. According to the museum directory the hall of saurischian dinosaurs butted up against the top level of the planetarium. If there was a way to reach the roof it would be nearby.
Darkness hunched over the dinosaur exhibit but not total darkness. Gary tried to relax the corpse's failing eyes and perceive where light was coming in. By trial and error he eventually managed to steer the dead man in the right direction - to a sizeable gap in the wall, a place where bricks had fallen away and plaster had crumbled until sunlight could thrust inside in a whorl of fresh air. Gary shoved his distant body into the hole and pushed. The dead man's flesh snagged on broken pipes and wooden beams, snagged and tore away but he moved, inch by inch, closer to the outside. Finally his face emerged into the light and for a moment Gary could see nothing but white as his avatar's degraded pupils tried desperately to constrict. When his vision finally cleared he looked down and saw just what he wanted to see - the roof of the planetarium, not three feet below, tarpaper and ventilation fans and Somali child soldiers. He had a way through! Gary immediately switched his attention to call up hundreds of his troops - no, thousands - and head them toward the Natural History Museum. He intended to exploit this weakness fully.
Then he dropped back into his scout's damaged brain again, just to scope out the situation - and found himself staring into the face of a smiling teenaged girl. She had a small spherical green hand grenade in one hand. Gary tried to make the dead man snap at her fingers with his teeth but he couldn't stop her from pushing her grenade into the dead man's mouth. He could feel the roundness of it, the uncomfortable weight in his mouth. He could taste the metal.
He hardly needed to stick around for what came next. The gap in the wall would be useless, then - the girls would be aware of it and could easily cover any troops he tried to send through.
"Fuck!" he shouted, and turned away from the ramparts of the broch. Back in his own body for the first time since the siege had begun he stamped down the stairs, the mummies following close behind him. He left Noseless on the top level to watch the ongoing battle. In a sort of half-hearted way he continued to pay attention to the struggle to the west where his troops were being picked off one by one but he wasn't immediately interested in the details. Ayaan wasn't going anywhere and neither was he. He just needed a little time to regroup, rethink.
He reached the main floor of the tower and slumped gratefully into his formalin bath. It was getting harder to move around on his own these days - perhaps he was spending so much time in the eididh that his muscles were atrophying. Something to worry about when -
PHWHAM. PHHHWHAM. PHHWHAM.
Brick dust sifted down from the galleries above and sprinkled across his bath like paprika. Gary sat up with a great sloshing and grabbed for information. The west side of the broch was wreathed in smoke that hung motionless in great wreaths in the air. Noseless had fallen to the wooden planking of the top gallery, knocked clean off his feet by the impacts. Gary forced him to stand up again and take a look.
One of the girls had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher - the same weapon Dekalb had used on the dead riot cops. She was firing directly at the broch, the rocket grenades coming at Gary's vision like deadly footballs spinning through the intervening air, trailing behind them perfectly straight trails of white vapor.
PHHHHHHHHHWHAM.
Gary stewed in rage as he summoned up more of his troops - screw it, all of them! - and hurled them toward the Natural History Museum. He would end this now, any way he had to. If he had to knock down the entire planetarium with the sheer brute strength of a million dead men he would do it. If he had to tear the place down himself he would! He sent his giant striding forward through the undead tide, his long legs propelling him forward faster than the rest of them could walk. He sent Faceless out to be his eyes - she had eaten recently enough that her vision wasn't clouded by rot. This wasn't going to stand, goddamnit!
The army of the dead was surrounding the planetarium in ranks a hundred deep, their shoulders bent to pushing at the frame of the building until they were trampling one another, when Gary heard the gunshot. With his own, physical ears. His attention snapped back to his own senses at once.
That sound had come from inside the broch.