I couldn’t see them very well. I didn’t want to but Osman pushed a pair of binoculars at me and I took a look. TheEast River was clogged with human corpses. My mouth was dry but I forced myself to swallow and look again. On the forehead of each corpse (I checked a dozen or so to make sure) was a puckered red wound. Not a bullet wound. More like something you would make with an icepick.
They had known-the authorities inNew York, they had know what was happening to their dead. They must have known and they tried to stop it or at least slow it down. You destroy the brain and the corpse stays down, that was the lesson we’d all learned at so much cost. InSomalia they burned the bodies afterward and buried the remains in pits but here, in a city of millions, there just wouldn’t have been anywhere to put them. The authorities must have just dumped the bodies in the river hoping the current would wash them away but there had been too many dead for even the sea to accept.
Thousands of bodies. Tens of thousands and it hadn’t been enough, the work couldn’t be done fast enough maybe. It would have been dangerous nasty work and as often as not a body you went to dispose of would sit up and grab for your arm, your face and then you would be on the pile. Who had done it? The national guard? The firemen?
“Dekalb,” Osman said softly. “Dekalb. We can’t go through. There’s no way through.”
I stared north past the raft of corpses. It stretched as far as I could see, well past theBrooklynBridge. He was right. I couldn’t quite see the UN from there but I was so close. It was right there. My chest started to heave, with sobbing tears maybe, or maybe I wanted to throw up, I couldn’t tell. The drugs, my only chance to see Sarah again, were right there but they might as well be a million miles away.
Yusuf got theArawelo turned around and headed back toward the bay while Osman and I tried to figure out what to do next.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Seven
Back in the freezer section of the little bodega, back in the darkGary finally found what he’d been looking for behind smooth clear glass. He took the box of hamburger patties up to the front and laid them out on the plastic counter by the display of disposable lighters and the lotto machine. They’d been cool to the touch in the freezer-completely thawed out and with a little fuzzy white mold on top but still good he thought. He contemplated different ways to cook them until he got up the nerve to just bite into one raw and take his chances.
His mouth flooded with saliva and he forced himself to chew, to savor the meat even though his eyes were watering up. The tension in his stomach, the crawling hunger, began to subside and he leaned on the counter with both hands. It had taken him all of the morning to find any scrap of meat at all. He’d wandered far afield from his apartment, north into theWestVillage. But at every butcher’s shop and grocery store he’d found only empty walk-in freezers and vacant meat hooks swaying on their chains. Clearly he wasn’t the first one to be drawn to where the meat used to be. For the last hour he’d been combing all the little neighborhood convenience stores and the back pantries of shoebox-sized diners and this was all he’d found. Judging by the way his stomach was relaxing and his hands had stopped shaking it was worth it.