Monster Planet

Chapter Six

They put her in a cage, a box almost perfectly sized to fit a human being. It was all quite efficient. The cage was a meter and a half wide, a meter tall, and two meters long. It gave her enough room to shift around in but not enough to sit up. They put a thin blanket under her and loaded her into a truck full of identical cages. The cages fit together perfectly, modular containers for human beings. They closed the door of the truck and left the prisoners in darkness. A very little light came in under the bottom of the truck’s door. In that little illumination Ayaan could tilt her head around carefully and see her neighbors on three sides. They kept their faces pressed into their blankets, their arms wrapped around their heads. The one on her left, a boy of maybe seventeen, was bleeding pretty badly from a gash in his chest. His ragged breathing echoed inside the steel cell of the truck like wind coming through a narrow cave.

When the truck moved the cages rattled against each other, clanged against the walls of the cab, vibrated crazily. Ayaan grasped the bars of her cage to keep herself from sliding around. The injured boy lacked the strength to do the same and he moaned pitiably every time the truck cab swayed or jounced or turned and he slid up hard against the limits of his cage, bruising his already injured flesh.

The enclosed air quickly took on the stench of unwashed bodies and shit—there were no sanitary facilities available in the cages. Ayaan needed to urinate a little herself but she swore she would wait and deny the Tsarevich that small indignity against her person.

She lacked the ability to tell time in the enclosed hell. Alone with her thoughts she could only measure the duration of her captivity in how much her anger had cooled and how badly she was failing her obligations. Of those there were many to think on. She had her unit to think of—the entire encampment, frankly, depended on her leadership. They would not have survived so long without her. She owed them her strength. She had a larger obligation to fight the khasiis, the liches—that was a duty she had accepted the day she shot Gary but forgot to make sure he was actually dead. The consequences of that careless moment had been paid for by others beside herself. She owed their ghosts a lifetime of service.

Now she had new ghosts, too. Mariam and Leyla were dead, half a dozen more of her soldiers were slaughtered by the fast ghouls in the desert. She owed them vengeance, assuming she ever got the opportunity.

Perhaps more painfully she was letting Sarah down. Dekalb, Sarah’s father, had saved Ayaan’s life many times. He had gone so far to refuse to let her martyr herself when it would have achieved nothing. In his final moments he had begged her to look after his daughter. Ayaan always had… until she let herself be captured by a strange new kind of ghoul.

As much as she tried to torture herself with thoughts of Sarah alone and defenseless out in the desert boredom eventually trumped guilt. Thirst and hunger helped as well. The pressure on her bladder built and refused to go away and the darkness settled on her like a heavy weight on her stomach. She was used to being able to see things. She needed to see things so that she could shoot them. With no gun and no light she was out of her element.

She had completely stopped trying to measure time when the boy started to rattle deep in his throat. She’d heard the sound before and she didn’t like what it boded. “Hey—are you alright?” Ayaan asked him. “Hey. Hey!”

He turned with a horrible slowness. Not an unwillingness to talk to her—he appeared quite grateful for the human contact. No, he was moving so slowly because human time was behind him. He moved at the rate of the eternity he was about to join. He looked at her and uttered something in a language she didn’t know. His eyes were wild, uncontrolled, and sweat sheened his face.

“I don’t understand,” Ayaan said. She tried the languages she had—Somali, Arabic, English, her smatterings of Italian and Russian. None of them got an intelligible response.

“He says he’s hungry,” a woman’s voice said, speaking Arabic. It came from the cage atop hers. She couldn’t see who it belonged to—the woman up there was hidden by her own blanket. “It’s Turkish,” the woman said, answer Ayaan’s next question. “Turkish, we’re from Turkiye. Where did they… get you?”

“Egypt,” Ayaan answered. “He sounds like he might—“

The woman clearly didn’t want to hear it. “Egypt, they drag us that far? I don’t know where they’ll go next with us. They take us out into the light once a day, give us a mouthful of rice to eat. I don’t know who they are, though a body hears tales, of course.”

“Listen,” Ayaan said, “this child—he’s not going to make it.” His rattling had grown into a sustained droning croak. He was dying, there was no better way to say it. “We have to let them know, they have to take him out of here.”

“They won’t,” an old man coughed from somewhere near. Ayaan got a sense of the bodies around her as if they were hovering in empty space with no bars between them, bodies lined up perfectly in meter-and-a-half wide rows, stacked a meter above and below, extending into infinity. She fought the sudden vertigo.

The boy spasmed, his forearms clanging against the bars of his cage. His legs jerked and the smell of fresh excrement blossomed in the darkness.

“They have to, when he says he’s hungry—that’s one of the signs, maybe you’ve never seen it before, but—“

“Everyone’s seen it.” The old man again. “We’ve all seen it too many times. They like it, this bunch. They like for us all to be dead, it’s holy to them. They rejoice when one dies. Now you be quiet. When you talk, it makes the time drag.”

“But he’s going to change! He’s going to change and we’ll be trapped in here with him!” Ayaan was panicking. She fought to control herself. This was not how a soldier acted. Slowly, with a real effort of will, she turned her face to the side, to look at the boy.

A ghoul stared back.

Ayaan grunted and shoved herself backward, away from him. The dead boy reached for her, his fingers jammed between the bars, his nails pale in the bruised flesh. His face swam towards her in the darkness, his teeth chewing at the metal, his eyes perfectly dead. It was the first time in years she’d actually looked into the face of a ghoul. She had forgotten how they changed, how the animation left the features. The skin went slack. Like a mask it hung on the skull—there was no mistaking an animate corpse for a living human being.

The face slammed against the bars hard enough to crack bone. Ayaan let out another grunt. The fingers kept striving, pushing through the bars. A broken hand burst through, reached for her—couldn’t quite get her. She crammed herself into a corner of her cage, as tight as she could. The hand moved around inside her cage like it had no bones, like a tentacle reaching for her soft flesh.

Fear touched her, if the boy couldn’t. She was far enough back from the bars to be safe—the dead weren’t particularly strong, though they could push their bodies far harder than the living could bear. The boy couldn’t get through the bars. She was safe, as long as she could hold herself up against the far side of her cage. As long as her arms didn’t get tired. As long as she didn’t collapse. If those fingers ever touched her, she knew, the nails would sink into her flesh. The teeth would get her, somehow, through the cage. If he so much as scratched her, broke her skin, infection was almost inevitable. Infection and death. She was safe, until she wasn’t anymore.

She managed, somehow, to hold on until the truck stopped and burning light washed over them and they were pulled out of their cages. Their captors took the dead boy away and slammed his empty cage back into the grid of bodies. Finally Ayaan could relax, let herself fall against the hard bars. Her arms ached and complained. Her body felt wasted, wrung out. Her mind raced faster than ever.

By the time they reached their destination Ayaan had at least one thing figured out. There was no way to meet her obligation to Sarah if she was dead. If she died in captivity the Tsarevich would use her, would make her one of his soldiers. If she wanted to help Sarah she was going to have to stay alive. No matter what it took.

Chapter Seven

Of course, Jack said, Sarah would want to rescue Ayaan. Along the way Sarah could liberate Ptolemy’s captive mummies. Simple.

Hardly, she thought as she clambered over the razor wire and back into the camp. There was nothing simple in the proposition.

For one thing Ayaan herself would hate it. Her policy had always been that those who fell behind were left behind. There were no exceptions, could be no exceptions, because exceptions endangered other people. Ayaan would expect no special treatment.

Then there was Fathia's wrath to consider.

Ayaan had saved Sarah's life a thousand times, though, often putting herself in risk to do it. And the thought of one of the greatest warriors ever to fight the dead ending up as food for ghouls--or worse, becoming a ghoul herself--was untenable.

Sarah knew she would have to at least make the effort to save Ayaan, but she also knew she couldn’t do it alone.

Dawn was dragging blood-stained fingers across the eastern hills as she slipped into the helicopter pool and found Osman sleeping in his hammock. She only had a few minutes to pull off one of the stupidest plans she’d ever imagined. Trying to be gentle she put a hand over the old man’s mouth and pinched his nose. He awoke in a panic, his eyes rolling wildly as he tried to figure out what was happening. When he saw Sarah the look on his face downgraded to one of wary confusion.

“Ayaan is alive,” she said. “If we go right now we can still rescue her.” She told Osman everything—even the secret she’d kept for so many years.

“Jack? The American soldier? He's a ghost now and he talks to you? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Sarah shrugged. “He killed my father. He’s been trying to make up for that. Listen, we don’t have time to argue. The camp is going to wake up soon. If they find out what we’re up to—“

Osman barked a small laugh. “You’re assuming I’ll go along with this lunacy. In the old time I would accuse you of doing drugs. Now I just wish you would share. Listen, girl, Ayaan has done well by me. She has saved my skin many, many times. But she knew a bad proposition when she heard it. The second we leave, Fathia will brand us traitors. She would never let us come back.”

“If we have Ayaan with us when we return it won’t matter what Fathia says.”

Osman accepted that with a gesture of both hands. He wasn’t fully convinced, though. “Jack?”

“You need to get past that. It’s Jack. He’s given me enough information to make a plan, and I trust him. He’s also arranged some help for us.” In the end she had to fall back on the near terror most people felt when they knew about her power. “Come on, Osman. You say Ayaan has done well by you. Haven’t I? You’ve seen my power. It has gotten you out of scrapes, you know it’s real. Why are you doubting me now?”

Together they fueled up the better of the two Mi-8s. Working in the half light they unbolted the external fuel pods from the carcass of the third helicopter and mounted them in the Mi-8’s cargo area. They tried to stay quiet but there was no way to silence the noise of the aircraft’s engine starting up. Its pulsing roar would wake the entire camp.

“Straight up,” Sarah shouted as Osman lifted the vehicle from its pad, barely waiting for the rotor to spin up to speed. “Get out of rifle range, hurry!”

She had known what would happen when they were discovered, and she had not been wrong. Women came running out of tents half-dressed, rifles in their arms. They would have slept with their weapons, waiting for some sign of the Tsarevich’s army. When they saw that it was one of their own vehicles taking off most of them lowered their weapons but one or two lined up shots and started firing.

“This is Fathia!” the helicopter’s radio squealed. “I do not understand what madness has taken you, but if you do not put down this minute—“

Sarah switched off the radio. The content of the threat didn’t matter—they already knew they were in trouble.

Once they were past rifle range the next threat came from the other helicopter. Though the weapons that came with the aircraft were long ago used up another pilot could follow them to their destination and then just shoot them there. Sarah rushed back into the cargo area and stared down at the airfield they’d just abandoned. She positively willed the other helicopter to stay on the ground. This was the one great weakness of her plan, this first desperate flight. It could all be over then and there.

Then she saw what she most feared. “They’re powering up the other copter,” she shouted into her headset. “Osman, we have a major problem.”

“With a minor solution. The next time I do something stupid, Sarah, please keep this in mind.”

Sarah didn’t understand—until she saw puffs of fire blast from the dual turbines on top of the grounded helicopter. “You sabotaged it!”

“I disconnected a fuel line. It will take them but a moment to repair the damage, but it may take most of the day to find it.”

Sarah wanted to rush forward and hug him. You didn’t embrace the pilot of a military helicopter in mid-flight, though. “We’re safe,” she trumpeted, and he snorted one of his sarcastic laughs.

“Safe to fly into certain death, yes,” he chortled. “Alright, commander. Where to first?”

“Nekropolis,” she told him.

“Never heard of it.”

She hadn’t either. “There’s a good reason for that. Head northeast, toward the sea. We’re looking for a salt pan just this side of the canal. It’s surrounded on most sides by slickrock.”

They found it with relative ease. From the air the salt pan looked like a sheet of ice in the middle of the desert. Osman set down on the solid rock just off the edge of the pan—such features were notorious for their poor stability—and together they jumped out, their nerves still buzzing with adrenaline. “This is where we pick up our reinforcements?” Osman asked.

Sarah could understand his skepticism. On the far side of the pan a city had been constructed but it was like no city either of them had ever seen. Its main feature was a massive slab-walled temple set into the rocky cliffs, a structure of thick columns crowned with carved lotus blossoms and huge, thin statues of serene-faced men. On either side of the temple entrance stood a sphinx, one with the face of a pharaoh, the other with the head of an ancient Roman woman. Nearby stood both a pyramid and a mastaba. There were ruins like this all over Egypt—they had both seen dozens—but none so eclectic. Nor any so new. Precarious scaffolding covered the pyramid. Across the pan they could see tiny figures moving up and down on the scaffolding, some carrying blocks of sandstone on their backs that must have weighed half a ton. Osman glared at her. “I’m not going to like this,” he said.

“No.” She lead him across the pan, their feet breaking the crust of salt that rimed its surface and made it glisten from the air. From the ground it just looked white, a featureless white that caught the glare of the sun and made Sarah feel as if she were moving through pure light. As she climbed the steps to the temple she saw the darkness inside its square entrance and wondered how nice it would be to go in there where it would be cool and the air wouldn’t burn her lungs. She didn’t get the chance to find out. Ptolemaeus Canopus emerged first, his painted face bobbing toward her from the shadows. Other mummies followed him. One looked a hundred times as old and her wrappings were badly tattered but gold glistened from underneath here and there. Another wore a wooden mask in the shape of a ram’s head painted red and green and white.

As Ptolemy stepped down to meet her there was a great silent commotion on the pyramid. The work there stopped and the mummies who were building the giant tomb fell to their knees with their arms in the air. Jack had mentioned that Ptolemy had been an important man in his day—just what had he been, Sarah wondered, to evince such respect?

He came closer and Osman stepped backwards, down the steps. Sarah held her ground. Ptolemy came close enough to touch her, close enough that she could smell him: cinnamon and nutmeg with an undernote of road tar. The ram-headed mummy held something out to her and she took it—a scarab carved out of soapstone. The same one she’d seen Jack give to Ptolemy the night before.

“Thank you,” she said, uncertain of protocol, but then she shrieked and nearly dropped the thing. It had come alive in her hand—she could feel it squirming and buzzing. She managed not to let go somehow and when she looked down she saw it hadn’t changed at all. It was energy, pure life energy neither light nor dark that was pulsing against her skin.

scarab this is heart this is my scarab my heart scarab it said to her, the words piling up and resonating off each other, looping around and around in her head until dizziness swept over her. She could feel the words instead of hearing them—they raced up her arms to her throat and she felt them there as if she’d said them herself. you only heart scarab you only can hear you only you can scarab hear me. This chosen is why hear you heart were chosen.

The female mummy, the ancient one, pressed her body against Ptolemy. Her hands clutched at him and her linen-wrapped face buried itself in the crook of his neck.

wife my alone this is my wife alone she will gone rule in my place she will be alone when rule i am gone, Ptolemy told Sarah. Sarah just looked away and cleared her throat. He let the female nuzzle him a moment longer then stepped forward, closer to Sarah.

you family have no mate do family you have family

“Just... just the woman I’m looking to rescue,” Sarah told him.

those alike i seek triumph are my family together we are seek alike we will triumph together

“Yeah,” she said, when the vibrations from the scarab had calmed down, “great.” She cocked one thumb over her shoulder at the helicopter. Should we get started?”

Osman grabbed her arm after the mummy had walked past. "They are very, very strong," he said. There was something in his eyes. A basic mistrust. "And they are not human. You know what that means."

Sarah was pretty sure that she did.

“Was no accident, of course. We target you. You’re quite celebrity famous in some circles.” The scarred woman palmed the wheel and threw the Hummer H-2 into second gear to get up a rugged hill. “We were in neighborhood anyway.” The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever want. No one else was using it.

In the passenger seat Ayaan grabbed a handhold mounted above the glove compartment and tried not to bounce around too violently as the big vehicle rumbled up a goat track. She still wasn’t sure what was going on. She had been sleeping in a hammock in a part of the refinery reserved for new recruits when the scarred woman had woken her by calling her name. Dawn hadn’t broken when they left the compound to head up into the dusty hills. “Do you have a name, or is that part of the big mystery?” Ayaan asked.

“They call me Cicatrix. I am very close with Tsarevich. I could be good friend to you, do you understand? Us two ladies, we could be friends. Or maybe you want to kill me, hmm? Maybe I will always be enemy to you, well, that is okay also. That can also be made to use. Now is time to make up your mind.”

Ayaan grasped a little of what was happening, then. She was being given the option of serving the Tsarevich alive or serving him undead. This unscheduled joyride up into the mountains was some kind of test. Either she would prove herself to the lich of liches or she would go face down in a bath tub. If she chose the later option she would stand up a minute later and proclaim that she served the Tsarevich in eternal life. She remembered her decision when she’d been locked in a cage in darkness and fear. She remembered that she wanted to stay alive as long as possible so that maybe she could eventually meet all of her commitments, avenge all of her ghosts. “I want to be your friend, obviously. Who do I have to fuck?”

Cicatrix—if that was her real name—laughed happily. “Around here,” she said, looking over at her new friend with a crooked smile, “our kicks are never so simple.”

She wheeled the car around to a stop with a plume of dust that rose up around the windows and obscured the view. From the back seat Cicatrix grabbed a sheer, see-through violet coat lined with fox fur and struggled into it. The fur danced around her bald head like a replacement mane when she jumped down from the Hummer’s footboard. Clearly the coat wasn’t meant to keep her warm. Even up in the hills with a meager breeze feathering over her skin Ayaan was warm enough to start sweating the moment she stepped down from the car.

Cicatrix lead her between two lines of semi-permanent tents toward a concrete bunker half sunk into the grassy hill-side. Whoever had lived in the tents was long gone—the wind had torn holes in their fabric and some of their stakes were coming up. Ayaan looked in through the flap of one tent and was mystified by what she saw: a card table surrounded by folding chairs, the table’s top covered by dozens of Ouija boards. A deck of cards lay scattered on the floor, some water-stained and others bleached to blankness by the sun. They weren’t playing cards, though, but endless repetitions of the same five symbols, a cross, a circle, a star, a square and three wavy lines.

Ayaan looked up and saw Cicatrix smiling at her. She was waiting for Ayaan to get a good long look. Ayaan smiled back and dashed to catch up with the scarred woman. Together they entered the bunker. It went a long way back into the hillside and was lit up with naked incandescent bulbs every three meters. Arabic graffiti had faded on the walls but time had failed to erase it entirely. As they pushed deeper into the bunker Ayaan began to get a very strange feeling. There was a smell in the air, a smell like burnt cake, and she felt as if there must be a large number of people nearby but if so they were preternaturally silent.

Doors opened off the bunker’s main corridor. One of them stood open. Cicatrix lead her through and into a large room, maybe ten meters on a side. The floor was carpeted in dead bodies, each hidden underneath a rough blanket. At the near end of the room a table and chairs had been set up. Standing next to the table the green-robed phantom awaited them. The lich who captured her in Egypt. Ayaan did her best not to flinch as he turned to look at the two living women. He looked almost more skeletal close up than he had from a distance but his very human eyes kept him from appearing too monstrous. “You, of course, are Ayaan,” he said in English, his voice only slightly accented. He was a European—maybe German or Dutch. “Allow me to introduce myself.”

She waited patiently to hear his name, wondering if she would be expected to shake his dead hand. Then a wave of exhaustion passed over and through her. She felt like she’d been hit by a truck. Another wave enveloped her and she sat down hard in one of the chairs. “I’m sorry, I—” she began but couldn’t finish. She was so. So tired, so. The life was... was draining out of...

In a moment it was over and she looked up, horrified. It felt like she was about to faint.

“I could have killed you then. Just switched you off. You don’t need to know my name, because you will never address me,” the green phantom told her. She realized that she had just felt his power—his gift. Most liches had some kind of special ability, some new sense or talent to compensate for the decay of their bodies. This one could slow down her metabolism from a distance. It occurred to her that his power might also work in the other direction. That he could speed her body’s natural processes up as well. He could make her faster—just as he had made the ghouls in the desert so fast she couldn’t effectively fight them.

“If I want something from you, I’ll take it,” the phantom told her. “I don’t trust you and I never will. He,” and Ayaan knew he meant the Tsarevich, “believes you can be useful to us but he wants you kept on a short leash. Do you understand? You’re like a dog to me. A dog that has to be controlled.”

He moved away from the table, his robe swishing around his ankles, his femur staff clicking on the hard floor. Ayaan stayed seated and waited for him to talk himself out. Men of his type always did, eventually.

“This place is where I work. I have a very simple job: I am supposed to find a ghost.” He glared at her, challenging her to deny the existence of such things. Ayaan had good reason not to so she kept quiet. “I’ve been here for years and so far I’ve had no success whatsoever. Oh, I’ve raised some spirits. I’ve experimented with psychics—with mind readers, with mediums and table rappers and spoon benders of every type, both living and dead, and I’ve even found a few people who had real power. They couldn’t do what I asked them to do, however. They couldn’t find my ghost.”

Ayaan nodded in what she hoped was a pleasant manner. Cicatrix acted like someone who’d heard all this before, many times. She leaned against one wall and lit a cigarette. The mentholated smoke quickly filled the underground room.

“Now, after years of my best ideas not working, my master came up with a plan of his own and we’re going to try it out. We know a very few things about this ghost. We know it used to be a friend of the Tsarevich, at a time when he very much needed a friend. It used to come and talk to him and it taught him many things. Then one day it stopped coming by. We don’t know why, but we do know that our liege lord was quite upset by this. We know the ghost still has many things to teach us. We also know this ghost has a fond spot in his heart for certain types of the undead. Namely, mummies.”

The phantom bent to pull the sheet away from one of the dead bodies on the floor. A bandage-wrapped dead man with a gold mask on his face lay there, his painted features staring vacantly at the ceiling. Iron staples held him to the floor, pinning his arms and legs so he couldn’t move at all except for a spastic kind of wriggling. He looked a great deal like a giant maggot.

The green phantom was standing behind her. She had no memory of him moving across the room. Like everything else she was being shown it was a clear message. He had a pistol in his hand, a cheap Hungarian FEG that would probably blow up in his hand if he tried to shoot her with it. She did her best not to show any fear, though probably fear was what he wanted.

“We have this theory, you see, that if we kill enough mummies the ghost will come back to try to protect them. We’re pretty sure it’s watching us, having a fine old time at our expense. Here.” He shoved the pistol at her, barrel first. “We also have a theory that whoever does the killing will be the target for some pretty heavy karmic retribution.” He pushed the pistol at her again, obviously intending for her to take it.

Surprised was not the word. Ayaan took it and calculated how quickly she could snap off a head shot. With the phantom dead she could easily overpower Cicatrix. As far as she knew they were alone in the bunker—she could escape into the hills and then over to the far side of the island, try to find a boat, make her way back to Port Said.

Or she could recognize that the phantom had just moved five meters across the room in the time it took her to blink. She could get the point of this whole exercise. She might very well think she was “assassin”, the “best with a rifle” as Cicatrix had put it, but in the company of liches she was severely outclassed. Before she could even aim with the pistol he could kill her. Just switch her off, like a light.

She had to stay alive if she ever wanted to see Sarah again.

There was no question as to what the phantom wanted her to do. She rose from the chair and stood over the gold mask of the mummy exposed on the floor. She kicked the mask away from his face with one boot. Underneath hieroglyphics had been painted on his line-wrapped face. No doubt a curse on anyone who disturbed his eternal rest.

Ayaan slipped off the FEG’s safety, lined up her shot, and blew his ancient Egyptian brains all over the room.

Chapter Twelve

Sarah tied the dead thing’s hands with a length of electrical cord. Ptolemy kept the lich in a sleeper hold as she lead the two of them carefully out of the shack and through the streets and passages of the refinery. “It’s alright, come out! You’ve been liberated,” she shouted as bleary faces looked down at her from the catwalks. The Russians looked confused and bewildered, mostly.

A rifle shot rang out and Sarah rolled under a massive pipe. Ptolemy pulled their captive into the partial cover. Sarah was the only one breathing, the only heart beating in that little space but she made up for the other two. “I guess they didn’t want to be liberated,” she said.

“Oh, you’re doing them such a favor, little filthy. Oh, ho ho,” the lich chortled. “The Tsarevich gave these little crumbs of humanity a real life. He gave them something to believe in, and now you’re going to take it away. He fed them, clothed them—”

Sarah stared at the lich. It had already told her what she needed to know and far too much besides. “Ptolemy,” she said, “keep that thing quiet so it doesn’t give away our position.”

The mummy got her drift. It tightened its hold on the lich until the evil thing’s neck crackled and popped. Its glinting eyes stood out a little further from their encrusted sockets and some of the boils on its cheeks popped open and spilled out a little pinkish fluid. Hopefully Ptolemy had crushed its larynx.

“Alright, I’m going to try again,” Sarah told the mummy. She slipped off the safety of her pistol and ducked back under the pipe. In the shadowy street she would be nearly invisible with the hood of her sweatshirt up.

The lich had explained to her, under certain prodding, that she had arrived too late. The Tsarevich—and Ayaan as his prisoner—had left the refinery behind. He had taken all of his undead minions with him, leaving only the rotting sexless lich as a protector for the living people he had abandoned. There wasn’t a ghoul in kilometers. Which should have made her job easier.

“Listen, you’ve all been duped,” she called out, and sidled toward the dubious cover of an enclosed control stand. “He’s been using you—using your bodies, using your souls! You don’t have to believe his lies any more!”

A grenade rolled out of the darkness and Sarah barely had time to get her head down and covered before it exploded, throwing vicious shrapnel all over the street. The pipes and towers rang with a million tiny impacts.

Sarah ducked back under the pipes where Ptolemy waited patiently for her. “It’s not working,” she told him. He touched his painted mouth.

She frowned in confusion, then nodded as realization dawned. She reached into the pocket of her sweatshirt and touched the soapstone.

perhaps speak they english don’t perhaps speak english

He had an excellent point.

Once she’d gotten her composure back she shoved the lich out into the street and ducked out behind him, moving it quickly into a well-lit alley. She shoved her pistol into its back and nearly retched. Where her Makarov had touched its hospital gown yellow fluid welled up and stained the cloth.

“Move,” she told it. The lich raised its hands and shuffled forward. Sarah kept close. The people living in the refinery wouldn’t dare shoot her if they might accidentally hit their overlord. She pushed it forward like an inhuman shield until she’d reached the refinery gates, only to find that someone had preceded her—they were locked tight.

Sarah nearly wet herself. She had no idea what to do next. The Russians, she had no doubt, were far less bewildered. They were probably gathering in the shadows even as she turned in slow circles, looking for them, they were probably setting up some kind of ambush. Her eyes darted back and forth as she looked for cover—she had no chance, she knew, if it came down to a protracted firefight but maybe she could—

Ptolemy came up out of the darkness and grabbed the chain link gates in his big hands. With a sound like linen tearing he strained and heaved until the fencing tore away from its uprights with a wild metallic squeal.

“Mumiyah,” someone said in the darkness. “Mumiyah!” Sarah could hear many feet scurrying away as the Russians nearly stampeded each other trying to escape.

Sarah turned to look at her undead partner as if he’d sprouted horns. What on earth had scared the refinery’s living so badly? She reached into her pocket.

we return should go before go they should return

“Yeah. I guess we should.” She held her gaze on him for a while, then turned and bent to pass under the gap he’d made in the fence.

They made their way into the dark interior of the island where Sarah slept while the mummy watched their prisoner. In the minutes she lay curled inside a blanket, watching his painted face motionless in the starlight, she wondered what exactly she was accomplishing that he couldn’t have done himself. They had failed to save his mummies—except for one, maybe, but there was no way to know. She imagined he was probably after vengeance and nothing else. Sarah had no problem using his wrath to help save Ayaan but she had to wonder—was she even helping Ptolemy? Was she just slowing him down?

Added to what she’d learned from the lich she wasn’t sure if she hadn’t made a terrible mistake. If someone was going to rescue Ayaan, what made her think she was qualified? Who was she trying to kid? She was twenty years old. She’d never lead so much as a squad into combat. Now she had one coward pilot and one insane and vengeful mummy and she had to tell them what to do, when even she had very little idea what to do next.

In the morning they made their way to the pick up down at an abandoned fishing village. Huddled around a decaying wharf the wrecks of boats stood mute in the water that slapped against their hulls. The helicopter stood in the town square, ready to go at a moment’s notice. They found Osman standing on the pier watching rotten sails flap in the morning wind, saw him tear pieces of weathered wood away from ruptured hulls. He nodded when she approached.

“Caught yourself a prize, I see,” he told her, glancing at the lich. Flies had gathered in one corner of its mouth and it twitched unhappily. With its hands bound there was nothing it could do but swallow as many of the insects as climbed inside of its lips. “I’ve seen fresher catches. What are you going to do with it?”

Sarah grimaced. “I don’t know, tie it to a tree and leave it here or... something.” She shrugged. “Look, they’re gone,” she told the pilot, uninterested in his jokes. “At least two days ago. The Tsarevich got what he needed here—this piece of shit wasn’t sure what that might be, he knew it had something to do with a ghost.”

“A ghost?” Osman winced. “Like your Jack?”

Sarah raised her hands in dismay. “No idea. Look. They’re gone, they’re headed west. Maybe to Europe, maybe farther, the lich wasn’t privy to the exact destination There’s something out there—something the Tsarevich wants, and now he can get it. They loaded up all the ghouls and liches they could fit into an old tanker or something and set sail. At least two days ago. We need to catch them, Osman.”

He rubbed his chin. “Do we?”

“Yes. Look, this lich was left behind to kind of keep an eye on the place but even it had heard about Ayaan. She’s some kind of celebrity in the ghoul world, probably for killing Gary. There’s no telling what they’ll do to her. If she’s still alive it’s probably only because they want to make her suffer as long as possible before they kill her.”

“You know what she would say right now, don’t you? ‘It’s too damn bad.’ You can do what you like, Sarah, but I don’t plan on racing halfway across the world without a little more to go on.” He threw a piece of waterlogged wood out into the harbor, skipping it a couple of times.

Sarah couldn’t believe it. “Just like that?”

“Yeah, just like that. We gave it a good try. We got here too late. Now I’m going to go back and try my luck with Fathia.” He stood his ground, arms folded. He wasn’t headed for the helicopter but he wasn’t taking her orders, either. “This is a game for grown-ups now. You had a little fun playing the hero, girl, but the world doesn’t have room for that anymore.”

“I’m not a child,” Sarah said, her teeth grinding together.

“At sixteen years old Ayaan shot her first lich. She was a child. She was a smart child.”

Sarah nodded, understanding. He was willing to help her. He didn’t want to go back to Egypt—and he probably had a soft spot in his heart for Ayaan. But he needed to see what she was made of, first. Exactly what she’d wondered herself while she slept the night before and Ptolemy stood watch.

She took out her pistol and moved to stand over the sexless lich where Ptolemy had thrown it on the ground. It looked up at her with eyes that were very, very human. It didn’t fear death, she knew, it would welcome a bullet in its brains, but that only made it harder. She had killed before, she had even shot Mariam in the helicopter but that had been self defense. This was cold blood.

She thought of Ayaan. Ayaan had taught her to act, and not think.

She lined up the shot and squeezed the trigger. Skull fragments danced across the wharf. Gray brain matter oozed from the exit wound and slithered onto the rough wood of the pier.

“Ayaan shot Gary in the head. It didn’t take.” Osman handed Sarah a thick plank of wood. One end was covered in sharp white barnacle shells. She used the plank like a club and smashed the lich’s head into pulp. She lifted her arms again and again until they were sore, bringing the wood down on the diseased flesh as if she were winnowing grain.

“Alright,” Osman said when she was merely spreading the gore around. “Alright, enough. Good. Now.” He jerked his head a fraction of a centimeter in Ptolemy’s direction. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do.”

Chapter Thirteen

Everyone worked on the ship. The Pinega had been rated for ninety crewmen when she was launched and that had been for trained, veteran sailors. The hundred-odd living people on board the ship had their hands full since most of them had never left dry land before. Seasickness, the occasional midnight snack for the liches (everyone knew it was happening, nobody breathed a word) and the ship’s particular problems took their toll and on an average day only perhaps two-thirds of the women and men living on the main deck could be accurately described as able-bodied. So everyone worked.

They kept the most gruesome and repellent task for Ayaan. She got to carry the hand bucket.

“There are two hundred and six bones in human body,” a doctor told her, kneeling next to a patient who didn’t so much as flinch as he began to carve. “Twenty-seven of them are in each hand. That’s a quarter of the bones in body. There are more muscles, more, more…”

“Here,” she told him, and lifted away the inert piece of meat from the patient’s arm. The patient of course was already dead and it had no liquid blood to mop up, just a dry brownish powder that blew off the stern deck in a playful ocean breeze.

“Is more complex than any organ in body, except perhaps brain. Is evolution’s greatest miracle. But to them… to them is almost useless. They lack fine motor control. These hands might as well be lumps of… of meat.” His eyes, what she could see of them behind his scratched glasses, went very vacant for a moment. Then he leaned forward with a metal rasp and started to sharpen the exposed lengths of ulna and radius. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?” he asked, in a whisper.

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t whisper. They had powers she lacked, senses she didn’t have. If they were going to overhear her there was nothing she could do.

“Find me when you are ready,” he told her.

She gathered the excised meat from the neat piles the other doctors had made on the open-deck surgery (no need for sterile conditions with these patients). She watched the eyes of the dead men and women who lay stretched out on the deck, looked for the hunger in them. She had to give the Tsarevich some credit—he kept his charges under tight control.

To reach her next stop she had to pass one of the seven hold compartments of the Pinega. There were a couple of reasons to wish she could avoid that part of her route. For one thing there was the ship’s original mission, and the residue of its old cargo that remained. The Pinega had been built by the Soviets to ferry nuclear waste to containment facilities near the north pole. It could hold a thousand tons of solid waste—spent fuel rods and entire disposable radiothermic generators, mostly—in two of its holds and eight hundred cubic meters of liquid toxins in the other five. It had been emptied out, of course, but on the first day of the voyage as the living and the dead were herded onboard the lich overseer of the deck had passed around a Geiger counter so they could all see just how little concern the Tsarevich had for their bodily safety. Ayaan had taken away her own lesson from that. The cultists—the faithful—had taken it in stride. If their deaths could be hastened on by service to their master, that was a reason to rejoice. They thought being dead was just the next phase of existence, and a better one at that, compared to the harsh life the living had after the world ended. Very few of them were allowed to see what happened in the surgeries at the stern, but Ayaan wondered if even the gore back there would dissuade them. These were true believers and they outnumbered the sane living people onboard considerably. For every doctor horrified at what he was asked to do there were five or six deckhands who scrubbed and scrubbed at the decks long past the limit of human endurance, who would rather scrub than eat just in case the Tsarevich walked by and wanted to see his reflection in the wood.

A few like that were painting the superstructure as she passed by. They were covered in grey paint, their faces and hands and torsos daubed with a redolent and probably toxic chemicals. Their eyes were flat and lifeless in their heads as if they were already practicing the traditional empty stare of the ghouls they hoped to become. They gave the heavy plastic buckets she hauled no more than a passing glance. Ayaan didn’t look at them, didn’t look at the deck ahead of her. She stared out to sea at the ever-changing, never-changing waves and tried not to think about what lay ahead.

She kept her cool even as the hatches she passed by jumped and flexed. She was pretty sure the liches just did that to spook her. The dead onboard, the vast majority of them stacked like driftwood in the ship’s holds, couldn't possibly sense her through the closed hatches. She was sure of it.

Still. As she passed a staircase leading down into gloom she could hear them straining against their confinement. She could feel the deck shake with their need.

Ayaan hurried past.

The buckets in her hands got truly heavy, her arms started complaining at the weight, anyway, as she moved forward to the main entrance to the superstructure. She paused and set them down, just for a moment, even though she knew it was a mistake. The Least would spot her. He always did.

Ayaan stood about crotch-high to the Least. He was maybe three times as broad as her through the shoulders. He stank of death, of musty, rancid fat and ancient sweat. His face dangled from his skull like a wax mask that had slipped down from its wearer’s true features. Of all the possible liches fit for the job the Least had been put in charge of maintaining order on the foredeck.

The Least was one of the Tsarevich’s first experiments in creating a new lich, an underling with the intelligence to command troops. It hadn’t quite taken. When Ayaan ducked into a shadow near the entrance to the above decks quarters he was busy stomping through the chaos of the main foredeck, a maze of winches and cranes and enormous battened hatches where the living had set up their bedrolls and their hammocks and their small tents. Dozens of wispy pillars of smoke rose from the tiny deckhouses where the living prepared their simple food. The Least made sure he got an unwholesome share of everything they made. He had five hundred kilos of bulk to maintain, after all. Ayaan watched him dip one enormous hand into a boiling rice pot and shove the grains in his mouth, the scalding water running down his chin and raising blisters in the roll of fat that ran around his neck like a goiter. She gagged at the thought of eating out of a pot he had touched but she knew she had probably done so many times.

She shouldn’t have stared. He caught her glance and returned it—with a horrific smile. He knew what she had in her buckets. He would want a taste of that, too.

He came stumping toward her on telephone pole-sized legs, his splayed toenails digging into the deck. “You know rules,” she told him, in Russian. They said the Least had been a gangster once, a Moscow Mafioso. Either it was true or his behavior was a result of brain damage post mortem—Ayaan would credit either hypothesis. “Is not for you.”

“Don’t waste, don’t waste one drop,” he bellowed, spit rolling out of his mouth. He was hungry alright. “Use all, honor all, sacred is all.” His eyes were very wide.

If she let even a drop of blood escape her buckets Ayaan would be beaten for her failure. There was no point arguing to the Least’s sense of reason. Her only chance was to outrun him. “Stay back, Tsarevich gave me my orders,” she shouted. She grabbed up her buckets in fingers that were red with the effort of carrying the weight, fingers that didn’t want to close. “Stay back,” she shouted, and dashed inside the superstructure. A two-story run up a steep metal staircase awaited her. She would make it, she would run faster than the Least. She always had before.

“To giving me,” the Least howled as if someone had stuck him with a straight pin. “You be to giving me!”

At the top of the stairs, her body heaving with the effort, Ayaan ducked into a companionway and kicked the hatch shut behind her. She had made it.

The rest was easy. She passed through the flying bridge where the navigators stood watch, keeping the ship on course. Most of them turned up their noses at her as she passed, not wanting to associate with anyone so uncouth as to pull hand bucket duty. One junior navigator, though, a girl from a fishing village in Turkiye who had come into the Tsarevich’s service at the same time as Ayaan, did give her a glance. As she passed the girl shoved a scrap of paper in her back pocket. Ayaan made no acknowledgement.

Down another corridor and up to the door. Ayaan rolled her shoulders and tried not to think about the pain in her arms. Almost done. She hit an automatic hatch release with her hip and stepped into the Officer’s Mess, a low room lined with clean windows, the walls and floor draped with Persian rugs. On couches before her the liches lay in wait. One of them—she didn’t know his name but he was covered everywhere in thick fur like an ape—came up and politely offered to take the buckets from her but she politely declined. Another squatted down on the floor and showed her a wide, lipless smile. The Green Phantom scowled at her, while Cicatrix smiled disinterestedly and reburied herself in an issue of French Vogue so old the lamination had worn off the cover. The living woman had a bright new scar on her cheek. It was healing well.

With a grunt Ayaan emptied her buckets into a tub full of ice. She tried not to look at the hands as they slithered out, the fingers lacing together, the dry blood running out in a fine sift. She tried not to let the powder get into her mouth or nose.

When the buckets were empty she turned to go. She knew it was futile but she moved steadily, purposely toward the door.

“There’s one more thing,” the green phantom said. She felt her body surge as he toyed with her metabolism. Would he wear her out, make her exhausted even though her shift was half over? Would he give her a goose, make her hyper until her jaw ached from grinding? His possibilities for amusement at her expense seemed endless.

“Yes, sir,” she said, wondering what demeaning errand he would have this time, and turned around.

Chapter Fourteen

A human brain. In a jar.

Cyrillic characters ran around the top and bottom of the glass container, etched in a looping cursive hand. Inside the jar the brain floated in yellowish liquid, dangling from a web of silver chains. It was a human brain, most definitely, and most certainly it was dead. Ayaan lacked the sensory sensitivity of a lich but even she could tell that something had taken up residence in the disembodied organ. It didn’t pulse or glow but then again, it sort of did.

A mummy carried the jar. Not just any mummy. The fiftieth mummy, the former high priestess of Sobk who had crocodiles painted like a print on her ragged linen. The last mummy, the one Ayaan had been about to slaughter when the ghost had appeared.

“Enough, enough, enough,” the ghost had chanted then, rushing into the room, possessing the crumbling flesh of a Cypriot ghoul in order to steal its voice. True intelligence had shown in its borrowed eyes and Ayaan remembered the story Dekalb, Sarah’s father, had told her, of a creature that could inscribe its personality over the blank slates of the undead. A creature that had helped him in the final mad rush of corpses in Central Park. A creature that had a special affinity for mummies.

It had to be the same intelligence, the same spirit. The ghost which the Tsarevich so desperately wanted to contact had to be the thing that saved New York from Gary’s final, horrible revenge. Ayaan had looked around the bunker and seen for the first time just what they had made her do and it gave her gooseflesh.

“Enough. Spare her and… I’ll do as the lad wants,” the ghost had said. Its face fell—not with the torpor of the undead but with genuine sadness. “Tell him he has me, you lot. Go and tell him now!” With its temporary hands the ghost had thrown over the bunker’s table, smashed to kindling one of the chairs. Ayaan had been afraid, truly afraid that it would seek vengeance on her for what she had done.

If it was planning revenge it was taking its time.

“This is our beloved leader’s friend. The ghost,” the green phantom told her, a week later in the officer’s mess of the nuclear waste freighter Pinega. He waved a few bony fingers at the thing in the jar. “We had to take steps to make sure he didn’t run out on us again. He’s shown himself a very slippery fish. Supposedly he has something he wants to tell you.”

“Me,” Ayaan said, rubbing her suddenly moist palms on her pants. “Well, I suppose that makes sense. Um. Hello,” she tried.

Neither the brain nor the mummy so much as twitched. Across the room Cicatrix put down her magazine to watch. The green phantom rose and went to the icy trough where Ayaan had unloaded her grisly haul. He made no attempt at nicety, digging in to the bony meat in the trough like a starving animal. Between bites he managed to choke out, “He says he wants you to know there are no hard feelings. He would have done the same in your position.”

“That’s… I mean, tell him I’m grateful for his… his…”

“’Magnanimity’ is the word that leaps to mind.” The phantom wiped clotted blood from his cheeks and lips with a silk napkin. “He can hear you, you know. I don’t have to translate for him.”

Ayaan nodded. “So, well, thank you. And I am sorry. So truly, truly sorry.”

“He had something else for you—a message. I don’t claim to understand it. He says she’s just fine, and closer to your heart than ever.”

“She?” Ayaan asked. “She who?”

“That’s what he said. Listen, I can barely understand him myself. I won’t be arsed to play twenty questions with him just to appease your curiosity. I’m sure it’s just talking about its mummy friend. Get back to work.”

Ayaan nodded agreeably and backed out of the room. With a moment’s thought she had answered her own question and she didn’t feel like sharing. “She” had to be Sarah, the only female person in the world Ayaan wanted to be alright. The brain’s other statement wasn’t so easy to decipher. Had it claimed that Ayaan was closer to Sarah’s heart than ever it would have made perfect sense, though it would have conveyed nothing she didn't already know. It was possible the ghost lacked a grasp of the finer nuances of English idiom.

She didn’t think so, though. She thought the ghost knew exactly what it was saying. Sarah was closer to Ayaan’s heart—did it mean—could it mean that Sarah was nearby? Physically close to Ayaan’s heart? But how, and more importantly, why?

She had a feeling the brain was quite genuine in its forgiveness. She had a feeling it knew exactly what had happened, and that it saw her not as a butcher of mummies but as an ally against a common enemy. She could use whatever help it might offer but she didn’t worry too much about whether to trust it or not.

She had a mutiny to pull off, after all, and there were going to be casualties. If the brain or its attending mummy got in the way it wouldn’t hold her back.

On her return trip to the stern surgeries she passed around a side of the rear superstructure, a four-story structure that tapered to a spacious suite of officers’ quarters with a magnificent view of the surrounding ocean. Only the radar tower stood higher. There was a reason for putting the officers’ quarters up so high—it kept the ship’s most important personnel as far as possible from the depleted fuel rods in the forward compartments. The liches were hardly bothered by the stray gust of ionizing radiation—it probably did them good, actually, because it would sterilize their putrid flesh of microbes and slow down their decay. They had taken the tower for themselves simply because it afforded the best view.

On the lowest level of the tower Ayaan passed the zealots she’d seen earlier laying down a second coat of marine paint on the hull plates. They didn’t so much as glance up at her.

They didn’t have to. One of them, an old man with a Russian accent but the Asian features of a Siberian, stood up with one hand holding his back and stepped into the shadows of the tower entrance. Ayaan passed the hatchway by, then doubled back once she was out of sight of the cultists and stepped in through an emergency exit. The Siberian was busy in the darkness inside, shoving bits of torn-up, paint-stained rag into a crawlspace near the floor. Ayaan bent down to help him. “You know the sign we’re looking for,” she said to him.

He didn’t nod. He didn’t stop what he was doing. He had been a librarian in another universe, a better one, and a closeted homosexual. His partner, a colonel in the Russian air force, had convinced him to join up with the Tsarevich, had been one of the most fervent recruits when the call first came. He swore up and down that they would not be persecuted in the new life, and to be fair, they hadn’t been. When the liches carried the colonel off to satisfy their appetites they hadn’t even considered his sexual orientation. They were equal opportunity devourers.

“When all of them are inside, that’s when you set the fire,” Ayaan repeated, just in case. Perfect timing would be the only way to carry this off. Even then she would need a great deal of luck.

It would be impossible to foment a revolution on the Pinega, she knew. There were too many true believers on the ship and far too many animated corpses. With the help of her friend in the navigation room however she had learned of a way to cut those odds in half. When the Soviets fabricated the nuclear waste hauler they had built a special feature into the holds. By throwing certain unmarked switches on the flying bridge anyone could open hatches on the bottom of the ship, hatches meant to dump the enclosed wastes into the ocean at large. It had been standard practice to take the fuel rods and radiothermic generators and depleted uranium cargo out into international waters and just let them go. According to Ayaan’s informant, there never had been a containment facility near the North Pole—it would have been prohibitively expensive to build it, at least compared to the cost of open-sea dumping. The bankrupt bureaucrats at the end of the Soviet empire had little concern for the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and even less for Greenpeace.

Now, if Ayaan could get those hatches open, the undead stored in the compartments would be flushed away like so much toxic waste. The tepid waters of the Mediterranean might not kill them but she really didn’t care. They could wander around the bottom of the sea forever, spearing whatever fish were stupid enough to wander by with their sharpened forearms. She would have bigger problems to deal with—namely the liches. As soon as they realized something was up they would retreat to their tower. The green phantom could kill from a distance. Other liches could turn their own powers against Ayaan and her tiny cadre of rebels.

If the tower was set on fire once they were inside, however, she imagined they would be too distracted to put up much resistance. The doctor, who had access to bonesaws, fire axes and hammers (his surgery was neither precise nor delicate) would stop anyone from trying to get out of the tower—or anyone living from trying to rescue the liches trapped within. It would take some time for the tower to burn down but the Siberian’s hard work secreting inflammables in its various nooks and crannies meant the blaze would get off to a good start.

The Tsarevich lived in the penthouse on the fourth floor. He would be the last to be incinerated, which was a bit of a risk. It would give him time to realize what was happening and maybe do something else about it.

Another risk was that she had no way to put out the fire once it started. The Pinega had a steel hull but much of its interior fittings were made of wood. It would burn like a torch for days, perhaps, and maybe kill everyone onboard. If the fire got into the vast tanks of diesel fuel at the bottom of the ship everything inside the hull would be incinerated.

Then there was the question of what the living faithful, the zealots who worshipped the Tsarevich, would do once they saw what was happening. Ayaan hoped they would listen to reason. With the Tsarevich dead they would be leaderless and their power would be cut down to a fraction. If they strung her up from the yardarm, well, at least she would have spared the rest of the world from whatever it was the Tsarevich had planned for his ship of fools.

She had only one certainty—that this was the best chance she would ever get. The Tsarevich was bent on something, some unknown scheme. Capturing the ghost had set his entire operation into motion. By the time they reached dry land it would be too late to stop him. She had to act with real haste or lose this opportunity forever.

“Get back to your station or someone will see,” the Siberian told her. He never looked at her eyes. He had lived as a gay man under Soviet rule long enough to know how these things were done. He’d been trained by the best—the KGB. Under their ever-present gaze, just to have a love life he had become a master conspirator.

Ayaan had little experience at plots and schemes. She’d always believed that the Avtomat Kalashnikov Model 1947 was the answer to every question life posed. She was learning so much. The girl navigator, the Siberian, the doctor cutting hands on the stern—they had been secret agents from the beginning. They needed her, too, though. None of them would ever have acted on their own. The Tsarevich’s power felt too great, too pervasive. They needed Ayaan’s leadership.

She headed out of the tower and back toward the stern, back toward her official duties. When the time came she knew she would be ready. She had no choice.

Chapter Eighteen

Bobbing before her the Least’s face looked like a huge bag of skin dangling in folds from his tiny skull, the eyeballs floating inside, the teeth lost in the great wet flapping curtain of his mouth. He tried to smile when she opened her eyes. It looked more like an exposed muscle jerking spasmodically.

“Mine, now,” he said, his voice dribbling out of him like syrup. “My blood, my meat, my bones.” He reached out one hand, the fingers swollen and torn like hot dogs cooked too long in a microwave, and touched her breasts, pushed them around, smeared them across her chest. There was no sex in his eyes. Just hunger.

“If you eat me,” she said, “at least I won’t end up a ghoul.”

It was the closest thing she could manage to real defiance. It was also a fond wish.

Ayaan’s clothes had been changed. She wore a white sleeveless t-shirt and a pair of drawstring pants. Surgical scrubs—most of the Tsarevich’s army, both living and dead, wore the same. They were easier to find than real uniforms. Her feet were bare. Her hands weren’t tied, which surprised her a little. She supposed the green phantom could put her back to sleep if she tried to get away.

“Where are my clothes?” she asked, figuring the Least would either answer her or eat her. Either way she would have one less thing to worry about.

It was Cicatrix who replied, however. “We had them to burn. You got little too close to Lady Amanita so they went to mildew.”

Ayaan looked up and saw a small crowd made up of living zealots and most of the liches had gathered around to watch her die. The werewolf, the lipless wonder, the green phantom were there. Amanita was conspicuously absent but the Tsarevich himself stood in a place of honor, directly behind the Least. His pale, pale skin and hair, his dark enameled armor held her gaze. She figured it was probably another projection. He didn’t seem the type to take the risk of being near an unbound prisoner even when she had no weapons but her bare hands.

“Mine,” the Least said, his mouth chewing on the word like a horse chewing cud.

“Yes, very soon now,” the green phantom crowed. He looked like he could barely contain his excitement. He waved his arms around and everyone moved back, clearing a wide space on the deck leaving Ayaan and the Least alone in the middle. Ayaan’s heart sank. She knew exactly what came next.

“Your highness,” the green phantom said, and bowed in the Tsarevich’s direction. “Ladies, gentlemen, creatures out of perdition and loyal drones. I give you the event you’ve all been waiting for. Hark back with me to the days of most ancient Rome, to the thrills, the spills, the kills of the Coliseum. To the day of the gladiator, who lived—and died—by the pleasure of his Emperor. To the days when blood was spilled, when bodies were butchered, when lives were thrown away all for one brief round of applause. The greatest show on this earth! Shall we try to regain some of that glory? Shall we celebrate the ritual of death once more? Shall we begin?”

There was a roar of agreement. Ayaan remembered what Cicatrix had told her, once upon a time. “Our kicks are never so simple.” Apparently she’d been incorrect. This was the simplest kind of entertainment there was, and one of the oldest. A battle to the death. Public execution made public sport.

The Least outweighed her by a factor of five to one. He was a lot stronger and she could only kill him by destroying his brain. He only needed to snap her neck or cut her with his ragged giant fingernails until she bled out. She couldn’t outlast him either—the undead never got tired, never needed to rest. The good news was that he was an idiot, a slow idiot.

She really, really, really wished she still had her AK-47.

Wishing didn’t make things happen—she needed to get her head on straight. Rubbing her hands together to get her blood pumping she fell into a fighter’s crouch, her center of gravity low to the ground, her knees unlocked. She prepared herself for his first attack. It would come hard and as fast as he could make it, she knew. He didn’t have the brains to try anything fancy.

“Ooh, I think she’s in the mood, folks,” the green phantom announced, and the zealots all laughed. She was pretty sure most of them didn’t speak English but if they had enough faith it didn’t matter. “There’s one more thing, though, one thing she didn’t count on!”

The crowd parted behind him and someone stepped slowly out onto the deck with what looked like a very painful gait. Not surprising. It was a ghoul, a shirtless dead man, and he had been impaled on something huge and sharp. It had a handle on one end, a curved grip big enough for the Least to hold. As he came closer she saw it was a chainsaw nearly as long as Ayaan was tall.

The Least grabbed the handle and pulled it free in a red gout of decomposing flesh and dried up blood. The ghoul who had carried the weapon split neatly in half, from his throat to his groin, his head hanging from his neck by a flap of skin. Ayaan swore in the Prophet’s name. What perverse pleasure they took, these liches, in distorting the human frame. The shirtless ghoul existed for one purpose only: to be a walking scabbard.

Ayaan didn’t have time for blasphemies, though. She needed to focus on the weapon. Hand weapons ought to be useless to the undead, even to liches. They couldn’t muster the motor skills to slash or lunge properly. It seemed that the Tsarevich’s armorers had considered that possibility and found for the Least a weapon that required only a minimum of finesse. A cord dangled from the end of the handle. The Least pulled on it and the chainsaw roared with the noise of a gasoline engine starting up.

“Good luck,” the green phantom said, sneering at her. Then it began.

Chapter Nineteen

The chainsaw came for her with a scream and raised sparks from the deck plates, gouging a bright silver wound in the fresh paint. Ayaan stepped aside, tried to circle around the Least. She ducked as the chainsaw bounced off the deck and back into the air, then lunged forward and slammed both fists against the Least’s knee.

Nothing. She might have punched Jello for the same effect. The Least’s enormous body was covered in a thick layer of fat that absorbed all the energy she put into her swing.

While she was absorbing that information the lich wound up for another pass. The audience went wild as he whirled the chainsaw over his head and brought it down in a swinging arc that missed Ayaan’s chest by centimeters. She staggered back, away from the howling metal—she could feel the friction heat of the blade. Too close, much too close for comfort. She jumped back, tried to get away. The chainsaw bit down again, light glaring off the polished blade. She pivoted on one foot, tried to slip under the attack—and pain exploded all down her arm.

Ayaan dropped to the deck, grabbing her arm high up near the shoulder, horrified. Had he gotten a vein, an artery? If he’d cut too deep, if he’d cut open a major blood vessel she would bleed to death in minutes. She had to know, had to assess the wound but she didn’t have a moment’s respite. The whining blade kept flashing down, left, right, center and all she could do was roll around on the deck.

The Least came at her again, looming over her, moving in for the kill. Ayaan struggled up into a crouch and ducked between his legs. Shrieking in confusion he swung the chainsaw around, tracking her, failing to watch his swing. As the blade flew around it cut right into the throat of one of the onlookers—a living cultist, a thirtyish man with a stubbled chin and thick rimless glasses. Blood flashed across the deck, stained everything as he went down in convulsions and horrible liquid grunting noises. Screams went up from the audience, screams of terror from one side, screams of bloodlust from the other.

Ayaan didn’t waste the diversion. Head down she bulled into the crowd, shoving some zealots aside, jumping at others as they shied away from her. Finally she had a chance to check her arm and her stomach went weightless for a moment as she brushed blood away from her wound. It wasn’t fatal—a lot more than just a scratch but the bleeding had mostly stopped on its own.

The Least shouted “Mine!” and plowed right into the crowd after her, his chainsaw held high to avoid any more accidents. She kept her head down and snaked through the bodies, shaking off the hands that grabbed at her, punching, slapping, clawing anyone who tried to get too close. She was looking for something, anything she could use as a weapon. There—on the deck—a smoldering cookfire. A pot of beans simmered in the coals. Her hands screamed in agony as she grabbed the hot metal pot but she ignored the pain. The Least came at her through the crowd, lunging forward, and she let him have it right in the face. Beans splattered his wobbling chins, boiling water splashed up his nose, his mouth, his eyes. His hands went reflexively to his face, to try to scrape the water away. The chainsaw drifted, forgotten, the tip of the blade bouncing up and down. It dropped to the deck with an endless clattering.

In a second—in less than a second—the lich would recover himself. He didn’t feel pain the way a living person did, would hardly notice the burns on his face and chest. He was probably more upset about getting wet. Ayaan didn’t have any opportunity to think. All she could do was act.

Using both hands she picked up the chainsaw—she could lift it, if she got her center of gravity under it, if she heaved with her back and her knees and all the muscles in her arms—and sliced the Least right in half. The chainsaw slid through his flesh like so much hamburger. It bucked when it hit his spine but she pushed, shoved, grunted her way through until his torso fell away from his abdomen and both big nasty chunks of meat hit the deck.

The Least howled in pain for real, then, but only once. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath for another scream. The noise of the chainsaw chugging and gasping and singing as it cut through empty air was the only sound.

Nothing happened for a long, long time. Long enough for Ayaan to gulp a single lungful of air. Long enough to shift the weight of the chainsaw onto her hip.

She had… won, she supposed. She had beaten the Least. He wasn’t going to get up, not from that wound, so it was over. She had saved herself.

A voice—her own voice—her mind’s voice—was screaming in the background:

Who’s next?

Time broke down into its component parts. Ayaan’s body moved through space. Her mind reeled at a very different speed. The crowd didn’t move at all.

The green phantom stood no more than six meters away, leaning on his staff. His eyes were on the Least. Ayaan couldn’t determine which half he was looking at.

If she could take him down. If she could. Her brain looked at it as a chess problem. If you could capture a bishop by sacrificing a pawn, then losing the pawn didn’t hurt at all. They would shoot her, they would keelhaul her, they would crush her but if she could cut down the green phantom it would mean the end of speeding ghouls. It was his power alone that drove those madly whizzing horrors. More than that: the green phantom was the Tsarevich’s right hand man. His most important general. If. If. If.

She lunged forward but she didn't get anywhere. A hand with fingers like bloated sausages closed around her ankle, pulled her foot back down to the deck. In the midst of rising horror she looked down. The Least had her in a death grip.

“Mine,” he mewled, like a dying kitten.

Rage pulsed through her body, she could feel the heat of it pumping through her capillaries. She raised the chainsaw in one savage motion and brought it down right between the Least’s eyes. His head liquefied as the metal teeth ground through bone and brain tissue like a flaming knife through rotten cheese.

They hit her then, the zealots, cultists large and small falling on her like a rain of bodies. The blade bit and chewed of its own volition—she didn't even know how to turn it off—but the bodies kept coming, kept piling on. Someone kicked and smashed at her wrist until she let go of the chainsaw. It became hard to breathe and her vision dimmed. Time stopped altogether.

Was the price of a pawn worth it, she wondered, if you only took a rook? It had to be. It had to be.

Chapter Twenty

They found their first trace of the Tsarevich’s ship a week out of Gibraltar, in the middle of the Atlantic. Osman turned to Sarah and asked what she wanted to do—storm the bigger ship in the middle of the ocean or wait to see where it made landfall? She bit her lip, unsure of what to think, and chose land to buy herself some time.

Crossing the Atlantic nearly killed them. The waves grew taller than the tug and when storms shot across their bows the water rose, and rose, and threatened to capsize the little boat. Osman got them through, with skill and the creativity born of self-preservation, but it was always a close thing.

They followed the Tsarevich long after they ran out of food. Sarah at least knew what to do in the face of hunger. Ptolemy took the lion’s share of the steering after that. Sarah and Osman spent a lot of time asleep. Eventually they saw seagulls again. Landfall turned out to be half a world away from where she started. A new continent, a new hemisphere, a place where they measured distances in miles, not kilometers.

For most of a day they hung back, keeping the Tsarevich in radar range but out of sight just over the horizon. He was looking for something. His ship hugged the coast line but cast back and forth as if her pilot were trying to remember where to put in to land. They passed north past a jungle, a riotous, overgrown beach where grass grew three meters tall. They passed dead villages and towns and resorts like empty tin cans strewn along the sand. Still they headed vaguely north, past a sandy spit that ran for miles, studded with the ruins of houses, crowned with an enormous, dark light house. Finally the larger ship came to a halt and Osman touched his controls, locked his wheel, cut the tug’s throttle. The Tsarevich’s ship had put in at Asbury Park, in New Jersey.

“You know we’re only about sixty kilometers from—” Osman began.

She grabbed the chart away from him. “Yeah. I know.” Sixty kilometers made about forty-five miles from New York City. She could read a map.

New York was where her father died. He’d been born there, too. He had fled it as a teenager, come back to it as a man and saved a lot of people and then he died. Sarah knew something about dealing with ghosts. She knew to stay away from them, if she could, that what they had to offer came with a steep price tag.

The tug boat stood at anchor in the water a kilometer out on the ocean swells, far enough not to be noticed if they kept quiet, close enough to watch the Tsarevich’s ship through Ayaan’s old field glasses. They waited for darkness to fall. A nearly perfectly straight boardwalk confronted them, a grey and linear extrusion of American decay. The buildings on the shore, an endless line of restaurants and gift shops and unrecognizable brick piles stood weathered and old in the twilight, the color of sandstone mesas in some desert eroded by memories, by secrets she didn’t share. This was the country of her ancestry but she knew none of its signs and meanings. They were forgotten now: the windows on the boardwalk were all broken out and blank or boarded over with rotting drift wood. Sunlight striped the insides of empty rooms, lit up places where roofs had fallen in over time. Some of the buildings were fronted with rusty gates like the bars of jail cells. Some of them had come down—lightning, rain, wind, who knew what had toppled them. Maybe the roots of the trees that choked the wide streets, maybe over a decade the root systems of so many trees could break down the foundation stones of pleasure palaces and arcades. Soot and smoke damage darkened the countenances of most of the structures that remained standing.

At the boardwalk a parade of monsters hurried down an improvised gangplank and into the forests of the unreal city, flopping, crawling things, things with no legs, monsters with bodies warped by death, monsters who had yet to die. They laughed and sang hymns and psalms that floated out over the water. In single or double file they headed into the foliage and out of sight.

Night fell, eventually. The Tsarevich’s ship blazed like an anglerfish in the black water, its lights the only illumination in the world except for cold and distant stars.

Sarah found herself paralyzed, unable to do a thing. What would Ayaan do in her place, she asked herself? She would try to learn more about what she faced. She would sit tight and send in a scouting team and try to get some sleep. The sleep part was right out, but maybe Sarah could take a lesson from the rest.

“You can see in the dark, right?” she asked Ptolemy.

my more vision was like yours was is vision more than yours it was, the soapstone told her.

“Just be careful,” she told the mummy. “This is simple reconnaissance. There’s one of yours on that ship, probably. Don’t go rushing in though or you’ll get us all killed.”

There was one of hers in that ship, too. Sarah’s special vision couldn’t let her see through the hull of a ship or the dense trees choking the streets of Asbury Park. She didn’t need it to know that Ayaan was still alive, though. She had to be. Otherwise this long trip had been for nothing. Otherwise Jack had lead her on a wild goose chase. She couldn’t believe that anyone—not even her cranky old ghost—would put her through so much if she couldn’t expect a reasonable chance of completing her mission.

Or maybe... maybe it didn't matter if Ayaan was still alive. Maybe the mission had changed. Jack had hinted at a new game, with higher stakes. Maybe this rescue mission that had consumed her for so long had always been about something she didn't understand.

They moved in close to the shore, running the engines just a touch though the diesels still grumbled and coughed and roared, well to the north of the Tsarevich’s landing zone. Sound travels far over water, especially at night. Sarah hoped the waves would cover their noise. The got as close as they dared and then Osman cut the engines and they drifted in until the tug’s flat bottom hissed on the bottom. Ptolemy scampered over the side and onto the beach in a spray of sand, then disappeared instantly into the blackness.

“Okay,” Sarah whispered, and Osman took them back out to sea. They needed help. Jack had told her as much—she couldn’t face down the Tsarevich on her own. They needed an army he said, or atom bombs, well, they weren’t going to get that. But maybe they could get some help. Farther up the coast, around the curve of New Jersey, past Raritan Bay and the Harbor. New York, the place she didn’t want to go. “Next stop Governors Island,” she whispered to Osman, and he nodded, didn’t even chance a verbal agreement.

END OF PART ONE OF MONSTER PLANET

Chapter One

It was hot, the air was dry. Ayaan could hear a constant thrumming, a rumbling, bass sound that tickled the bare soles of her feet. Her feet... her feet hurt. She could feel pain in her ankles, her legs, her toes. When she looked down at them they seemed too big, they seemed to swim up at her, swollen and very dark and bruised. Blisters surrounded her toenails, blisters that popped and wept a clear fluid.

Her arms... her armpits were numb, she couldn’t feel them at all. Her arms were replaced with twin bars of searing light. It was the only way to describe it. There were no arms there, just pain, and only an abstract kind of pain at that.

In the unmoving air of the engine compartment they kept her metabolism ticking over slowly, so very slowly. When a doctor came and asked her to lift her head, it took all the energy she possessed. She wanted very much to sit down.

“Come now, come, that’s better. Open this mouth.”

She let her jaw go slack. There were needles in her, needles she felt sliding through her flesh, impaling her. Hands touched her in places she could barely identify. Her body had become a vast country with a poor communications infrastructure. Information from her extremities took most of the day to reach her brain.

“Blood oxygen levels good, yes.”

The green phantom kept her alive, but just barely, while men came and went from the room, their hands on her, their eyes everywhere. They attached wires to her, they scraped samples of the scum between her teeth.

“Basal body temperature is being normal.”

Sometimes she could see them moving around her, their faces flat, their hands cold. Sometimes they were only blurs or the flickering of a moth’s wings against her skin.

“You be interested to seeing this,” someone said, their hand on her lower belly, a latex glove in her pubic hair. She felt half a dozen people all around her look up, she could feel them paying attention. She could see Cicatrix across the room, the living woman in soft focus as her nostrils flared, her eyes fixed on Ayaan’s midriff. Her bald head flushed with shame. Something metal and cold touched her, spread her skin open.

“She’s still virgin,” the doctor said.

Ayaan kicked against her bonds but it was useless, her body barely rippled. It must have looked like a muscle spasm. Then time went blue...

...she wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew it was right, blue...

...and needles, there were needles on her skin. Pricking her. She felt a single drop of blood roll down her collarbone, smash apart against the papery collar of her paper gown. She looked down and watched the blood wick through the blue fabric, a spiky blossom as capillary action drew it away from her skin.

“You need to lift head,” someone told her. She listened—it felt like she could only use one sense at a time. Something buzzing, an insect, a horrible nasty wasp right next to her ear, climbing on her throat, dragging its sting through her flesh.

“I can’t... I can’t do this, not with head like this,” the voice said. She couldn’t see who it belonged to.

In front of her the Tsarevich faded into existence. Like a cloud passing in front of the sun. His very pale eyes looked up into hers. His voice... she’d never heard it before... it fit him perfectly. High, clear, a boy’s voice. The voice of a soloist in a boy’s choir. “Is called strappado, some time ago. Now, we call it stress positions. KGB make it perfect. Is very effective.”

“Hand me silver again,” the other voice said. Right behind her head. The wasp stuck its tail into the back of her neck.

“We tie hands, then tie to ceiling. You cannot sit down without tearing arms from sockets. Body won’t let you do that, even when unconscious. You have not sit down three days. Your arms are dying, no blood. All blood goes to feet, which swell, then crack. Used at Guantanamo Bay, and at Kabul. In Belfast and Mosul and Jerusalem. Roman Catholic church invent it for Inquisition, because no blood shed. But KGB make it perfect.”

Ayaan tried to lick her lips but her mouth stuck together as if it were full of glue. Concentrating, squinting her eyes she managed to get a drop of spit onto her soft palate. Our kicks are never so simple, Cicatrix had told her. “Torture,” she creaked. “Do you,” she said, and waited until she had more saliva to loosen her tongue, “come when you see me like this? Does it make you come?”

The Tsarevich smiled at her. The kind of smile a grandmother would keep on living for. “Is not for me, is for you. Such talent you have. Such talent I never waste. I have use for you, even now. Is sad, must hurt so much, is very sad, but also, is necessary. Must break down ignorance and fear. You see?”

You mean, she thought, lacking the energy to keep talking, you mean you have to wear down my psychological barriers. Ayaan knew exactly what they were doing to her. Even in her reduced state she could still think, if slowly. They were torturing her in preparation for brainwashing. No matter how much resistance she put up, they would just push her farther. No matter how long it took, they could wait for her to come around.

“Fuck, get mop! She wets self,” the rough voice said.

The Tsarevich frowned. “Kidneys shut down after three days. Is permanent, if you don’t sit down.” He took a handkerchief out of the sleeve of his armor and mopped at the front of her pants.

“What,” Ayaan stammered, “what do you really look like?”

His eyes sparkled. “You find out, and soon,” he told her. “Very soon now. You come stand at my side.” He put a hand over his mouth, catching himself in a faux pas. “I mean to say, sit, at my side, yes?”

The smile lit up his face and the cloud moved away from the sun.

Stay alive, she thought. Stay alive for Sarah. She needs you.

“You will to be mine,” he told her, patting her feet.

She knew better than to antagonize him. It would only get her another day on the strap. Still. She was still Ayaan, at least for the time being. “That’s what the Least said,” she told the Tsarevich. “And look at him now.”

Chapter Two

Hell Gate, the neck of water between Manhattan and the northern extent of Long Island, stretched out before them as placid as a sheet of glass. “This was impassible before,” Osman said. His haunted eyes told her this journey was dredging up old memories he’d long since sealed away in the back dark corners of his mind. She felt a bizarre communion with the old man, a place where their two very different lives had finally touched. She wondered if that was what growing up felt like.

“There were bodies. Thousands of them.” He moved to the bow and stared ahead through Ayaan’s old field glasses. The diesels chugged along just fine without him at the wheel. “And the birds. The pigeons, the seagulls—they were a carpet of white feathers.” He lowed the binoculars and looked back at her where she sat atop the wheelhouse. “A city’s worth of bodies. A raft of them.”

They were gone, the bodies he described. Gone for years probably. They had taken the long way round to Governors Island, a paranoid excursion that took most of a day as they headed back out to sea and then rounded the extensive coastline of Long Island, then coming down through the Sound and the East River. Osman had been convinced the bodies would still be in the way but Sarah was terrified that the Tsarevich might be watching them, that he had some way of knowing where they went and that he could follow them to their destination. Only by wasting a day’s good sailing could she relax and feel she had shaken off that hypothetical pursuit.

The city passed her by on the right like a series of eroded cliffs. Dramatic, startling sometimes in their size, the buildings didn’t connect with anything she’d ever seen before. The tree branches emerging from the windows, the fallen piles of concrete and steel looked like natural features. Even the occasional spill of glass where an entire skyscraper’s facade had collapsed down into the street might have been an outcropping of some glittering crystalline mineral. As they passed what her chart told her was called Roosevelt Island Osman rushed back to his controls to steer them around a twist of metal that slumped across the river like an elephant’s trunk drawing up water. It took her a while to realize it must be what was left of a bridge. Rust and metal fatigue had claimed most of it, leaving broken legs sticking up into a blue sky, rising hundreds of feet up into the air.

Osman pointed out the United Nations Secretariat building to her as they drifted past. The lower General Assembly building was almost complete screened from view by vibrant green foliage. Her father had worked there once, Sarah knew, but she couldn’t imagine it, not really. No more than she could imagine the state funerals of the pharaohs interred in the Pyramids.

The tallest spires stood in lower Manhattan, structures Sarah’s brain could only interpret as distant mountains. She could barely stand to look at the empty buildings, at their uppermost broken windows. Some of them she actually recognized from her children’s books—the Empire State building, its crowning needle broken off near the base. The Chrysler building, with long streamers of plant life draping from its triangular portholes, its famous gargoyles leering out of leafy bowers. She had an easier time watching the piers and warehouses of Brooklyn slide by on her left. They passed under the Brooklyn Bridge without serious incident, its Gothic pylons standing proud and unscathed, its endless stretches of cabling tangled but unbroken, but its roadway having fallen away completely to form dozens of new, ephemeral islands in the water below, concrete crags that proved a hazard to navigation. The river opened up, turned into a broad and quiet bay. Osman kept them close to Manhattan, to the long piers of the Lower East Side, then brought them around, out of the Buttermilk Channel and over toward the ferry dock of Governors Island.

Two broad slips, much larger than the tug required, formed the dock and were topped by elevated equipment shacks that Sarah’s militarily-trained mind identified immediately as perfect guard towers. Beyond lay a paved walkway that lead between two low buildings on the island’s shore. To the east stood a squat octagonal tower pierced with ventilation ducts and giant fans, its base surrounded by yellow and rusting construction equipment. On the other side of the dock, nearly around the corner of the island she could see a round structure that might have been a fort or a prison. These imposing structures, however, could not hide what lay in the island’s interior—pleasant Victorian houses in a park full of well-tended trees and what looked like a sprawling, immaculately-maintained garden.

A noise like a tree being hit by lightning made Sarah jump. A gun shot—it sounded like a sniper round, maybe, or just a high-powered rifle bullet. The sound bounced off the water, magnified, resonated for what felt like minutes. She slid down from the wheelhouse and dropped below the gunwale. At the throttle Osman just laughed.

“Just a shot across the bows.” He pulled on the cord that sounded the tug’s fog horn and Sarah stuffed her fingertips in her ears. “It’s an old tradition, baby girl, nothing to be afraid of.” He picked up the microphone of the tug’s radio set and hailed the island in English.

Slowly, carefully, Sarah uncurled herself and rose to peer over the side. The windows of the elevated equipment shacks were open to the breeze. She saw the barrels of rifles and even one machine gun poking out. Surely that was more than what was needed to repel the occasional ghoul, drawn by the scent of human flesh to dog-paddle across the bay. Maybe Governors Island had had living visitors before. Borderline personality types. Pirates.

Osman couldn’t get anyone on the radio. He took a megaphone from one of the tug’s lockers and handed over the wheel. With shaking hands she kept them on course, the diesels powered down until they were barely ticking over.

“Ahoy over there, friends,” Osman shouted through the megaphone. “Don’t you remember me? I’d think a face this handsome would stick with you. Where’s my Marisol? Last time I saw her she was out to here with a baby. Where’s Kreutzer, that old asshole? There must be some of you that remember my old boat, the Arawelo. You all sailed on her, after all.”

He set down the megaphone and shrugged. “If that doesn’t convince them we’re friends, they were destined to shoot us anyways,” he told Sarah. He took the wheel back from her and steered them into one of the ferry slips. The tug sat lower in the water than the ferries had by a considerable margin. Inside the slip they were penned in by high walls lined in shock-absorbing plastic. They couldn’t see up onto the island at all. If anyone wanted to kill them it would be like shooting fish in a plastic tub.

When they bounced to a halt against the slip walls he ran forward and threw a line up onto the dock. Unseen hands took it, tied it off, made it secure. A ladder appeared over the edge and dipped down to smack the tug’s deck. Osman went up first, unarmed. Sarah came after with her Makarov in her pocket, loaded and ready. When Osman left Governors Island the last time he had been a hero and the island’s inhabitants had waved at him as he steamed out to sea. Now he was coming back almost anonymously and he might be attacked the second he was over the side. Anything could have happened in the interval. Anyone could have come along, slain the original survivors, and taken the island for themselves. It was that kind of world. It had been for twelve years.

At the top of the ladder five men with assault rifles waited for them. Only one man had his weapon ready and aimed at them, but that was more than enough. They were lead without a word into one of the buildings that fronted the shoreline, a low, modernist structure of concrete and glass, some of which had been boarded over. The honor guard lead them into a dim room lit only by the sunlight streaming in through high windows. A woman with a boy at her side stood at the far side of the room. She had a pistol in her hand. So did the boy, who might be twelve years old or eight—he was a scrawny little child and the lighting was terrible.

The woman stepped forward, into a patch of light. She was beautiful, astoundingly so, with just a hint of age in her face. Her caramel-colored skin was flawless and her hair, tied back in an explosive ponytail, glimmered in the half-light. She had a broad sash across a homespun black sweater. It read MAYOR, picked out in crystals and sequins.

She should have been a movie star. She had been, if Sarah remembered Marisol’s story correctly. She’d already had some success in z-grade genre films, there had already been some buzz about her, whisperings of a career to come, of a lifestyle never to be matched again. There weren’t any more movies, though, nor any Hollywood parties or private yachts or any Greek billionaires with ten carat diamond engagement rings. She’d had to settle.

“Osman,” she said, her face melting into joy as she recognized the pilot. “Oh my God, it’s you, Jesus fuck, it’s really you. Wow, that’s a whole lot of bad memories to have to relive at once.” She rushed forward to kiss him all over her face. “Here, here, I want you to meet Jackie,” she said, and ushered her boy over with wild hand gestures. Happiness split the woman’s face, made wrinkles appear in her brow and around her mouth. She was nearly jumping up and down. “Jesus shit! How have you been? What are you doing these days? Who’s your friend? Is this your daughter?” Marisol asked.

Osman laughed. “No, no. This is Sarah. Dekalb’s daughter.”

“Dekalb.” Marisol said. “Dekalb’s daughter.” Emotions erased themselves from her face.

Silence rushed into the room like a cold flood.

“Oh. Hi,” Marisol said.

Chapter Three

“They had pudding in these tiny plastic cups. You would peel back the foil on top and the pudding was in there already made,” a fortyish man with grey hair and squinting eyes said. He mimed the action of pulling back on a piece of foil, his fingertip and thumb pressed very close together, and a light bloomed in his face that didn’t come from the bonfire. “There was always a little dollop of pudding on the foil, that was the best part, it tasted the best anyway.”

A younger woman in a shapeless sweater poked at the fire with a long branch. There wasn’t much firewood on Governors Island but an enormous amount lay just four hundred yards away in Brooklyn. A boat went over every day to retrieve great bundles of sticks and logs from the trees that choked the old city streets. It had been a dangerous occupation once, the survivors told Sarah, but in recent months it was rare to even spot a ghoul, much less be attacked by one. The city had largely emptied out. “Then you could just throw the cup away, right? I kind of remember that,” the woman said. She stared into the fire. “You didn’t have to wash it out.”

“Yeah,” the squinting man agreed, nodding happily. “They had coffee you could just pour boiling water on, and it was ready. They had orange juice that came frozen in a tube and you just let it melt in some water and you could drink it.”

One of the children, a skinny girl of maybe fourteen years, laughed heartily. “Why freeze it in the first place if you were just going to let it melt?”

The old man smiled and laughed but without the girl’s abandon. “Sure.”

“Where did they go?” Sarah asked. She drew a lot of blank stares. “Where did the ghouls go?”

The old man shrugged. “West. Jersey, I guess. It’s not like they migrated or something. They just started wandering away, one by one, maybe looking for food. Over the bridges, the GWB is still standing.”

Sarah hugged herself. The night had come on colder than she expected and her hooded sweatshirt, so perfect for desert evenings, couldn’t keep out the damp of the Island. “But why to the west, why did they go into New Jersey?”

“Well,” the old man said, “if they went east they’d get stuck on the L.I.E.”

That elicited more than a few snorting laughs from the older survivors. Sarah had no idea what it meant, or why he had spelled out “lie”. She stood up and watched the fire for a second. She didn’t want to leave its warmth but the clustered survivors sitting in a circle around the blaze were confusing her more than anything else. All they wanted to talk about was what they’d lost, what the world used to have in it. For Sarah, who knew nothing except apocalypse, such talk was just wasted breath.

One of the younger men, a big guy with muscles, jumped up when she turned away from the bonfire. “Where are you headed?” he asked, not necessarily unfriendly. She definitely got the sense he’d been tasked with keeping an eye on her, though.

“I need to urinate,” she announced. The younger survivors tittered. Her guard nodded meaningfully, as if she’d passed a test.

Everything on Governors Island, she ruminated as she headed into the shadows between two Victorian houses, felt like a test. Osman and Marisol had gone off to catch up on old times, leaving her in the company of people she didn’t know. She’d been fed, welcomed effusively, cheered and toasted. She’d been welcomed to sit by the fire, brought into the conversation, given their full attention whenever she spoke. Yet as much as they seemed to want to make her feel welcome they never stopped looking at her, studying her. There were plenty of black women on the Island, so it wasn’t that. She supposed it might be that in such an insular community any newcomer was a thing of fascination, a nine day’s wonder. And surely, anyone who had survived the last twelve years had reason enough not to trust strangers.

Yet the feeling Sarah got from the Islanders wasn’t so much mistrust as it was furtiveness. They weren’t concerned with what she would do, so much as they acted as if they had a secret they were afraid she would learn.

She didn’t expect to find it so soon after realizing it must exist. Yet as she squatted by a gingerbread porch coated in flaking white paint, she looked up and nearly fell over in fright. She saw energy. Dead energy.

Blotches of it all over the place. She hadn’t been paying attention, but that was when her unusual senses worked best. There was one of the dead right in front of her—in the field of mixed crops at the center of Nolan Park. Scratching at the soil with a hoe, or a rake, or... something. Sarah frowned. The dead don’t garden.

Not unless someone—specifically, a lich—told them to.

She still had her pistol. Post apocalyptic standards of hospitality allowed visitors to hold onto their weapons at communal bonfires, especially when the visitors casually forgot to mention they possessed said weapons. She drew it out of her pocket, slid the magazine into place, thumbed off the safety. The dead thing didn’t notice as she crept up on it.

Impossible, but there it was. It couldn't be, not in this place, of all places, this last citadel of humanity in New York. But the hair on the backs of her arms didn’t lie. It stood up straight as the quills of a porcupine. Horripilation. The most classic sign of the presence of the undead.

Sarah tried to make sense of it in her head. She must have brought the dead to Governors Island, the Tsarevich must have followed her. She had doomed all those nice, boring people at the bonfire. Fear sent cold daggers through the muscles of her back. Why the thing was gardening she had no idea—maybe it was tampering with the survivors’ crops, maybe it intended to poison them. That wasn't the style of most undead she'd met, though. Too subtle.

She could figure it out later. She lifted her pistol. Lined up a shot. The dead gardener scratched open another furrow in the silvery moonlit dirt. Its face, its skull didn’t move. Its features might have been a mask of bone. It was dressed in stained overalls and its feet were bare. Sarah cocked her pistol and held her breath for the bang.

“Please don’t hurt him. He’s just a slack,” someone said, their voice soft. It was as loud as a gunshot in Sarah’s terrified ear. She pivoted on one ankle and saw the boy, Jackie, standing off to her right. He moved forward quickly out of her blind spot—he must have been trained how to approach someone with a gun.

Slowly she pried her finger away from the Makarov’s trigger, uncocked its hammer. “A slack? What does that mean?”

“He’s tame.” Jackie rushed up to the gardener and waved his hand in its face. Sarah bit her lip to hold back a wave of nausea. She knew what was supposed to come next, what always came next. The ghoul would bite the child, tear his flesh. Except of course it didn’t. That was the point. The gardener stopped its hoeing just long enough to look down at the boy and issue a mindless little smile. The dead man’s eyes moved slowly around in their sockets. “He’s a slack. They do what we tell them, though sometimes it takes so long to explain things. We couldn’t survive without them. There aren’t enough of us to keep the gardens going.”

Sarah narrowed her eyes. She had never heard of such a thing. “How—how do you tame a ghoul?” she demanded. “They only exist for one thing. To eat us.”

The boy shrugged. He was twelve, she knew now, but tiny for his age. His eyes were huge, his hair thinner on his head than it ought to be. “I think it’s one of the ceremonies my Mom does on Halloween. They don’t let me watch because they get naked but I know stuff anyway. I know you tie the ghouls up in a circle you draw on the ground and then there’s some dancing and chanting and stuff.” The boy shrugged again. “You know. Science.”

Sarah was breathing heavily, unsure of what to do next. She put the pistol back in her pocket. Then she rushed forward and knocked the slack off its feet. It felt like she’d smacked into a pillowcase full of twigs. The gardener fell over, clattered to the ground. Then it got back up, retrieved its hoe, and went back to work. It didn’t bother smiling at her. If she hit it again—and again—and again—it would do the same, she decided.

You’re going to learn things, Jack had told her, and some of them are going to make you cry. Was this what he’d meant? Or were there worse shocks in store?

“Come back with me,” Jackie told her. “Mommy wants to talk to you.” He held out his miniscule hand and Sarah took it.

Chapter Six

The knock came again. She stared at the door. “Just come in already. It’s not like I can keep you out.”

There was no response. A few minutes later the knock came once more.

Ayaan staggered to the door and pushed it open. There was no one there. Just darkness and cool, slightly salty air. A cavernous space lay out there, maybe an empty warehouse, perhaps an abandoned auditorium. She stepped outside, her bruised feet dragging over grimy concrete. A little light came from above her through a hole in the ceiling. It made a sort of natural spotlight on the floor. She could see dust motes spiraling in the shaft of sunlight. It almost, but not quite, illuminated an AK-47 assault rifle suspended from the ceiling by a length of string. Ayaan shuffled toward the weapon. She touched the cherry wood stock. It was not her own AK, she would have recognized the pattern of the stain on the wood, the scratches on the metal that had become as familiar to her over the years as the spots and blemishes on her own skin. Still. It was a Kalashnikov and she knew it would be a reliable, effective weapon. She yanked it down, snapping its cord, and examined the chamber then broke out the magazine. A full clip of ammunition. With fingers that felt unusually clumsy she slipped one of the bullets out of the magazine and examined it, almost dropping it when she held it up to her eye. She half expected the bullets to be blanks or somehow adulterated but they weren’t. Just the standard 7.62 x 39 mm cartridge. She slapped the magazine back into place, moved the selector lever to single fire and released the cocking lever with a clang.

Something stirred in the corners of the big room. No, more than one something. She brought the weapon around to firing position, ready to aim as soon as a target presented itself. None did. Slowly, deliberately, she took a step toward the still-open bedroom door.

A shadow flicked across the door, slamming it shut. A shadow that moved faster than any living human being she’d ever seen. She knew what that meant. A fast ghoul—probably an entire squad of them. Which meant the green phantom had to be nearby to spur them on. “Maybe you’ll tell me your name now that we’ve got so much in common,” she announced, trying to flush him out.

It wasn’t the green phantom who answered, however. It was the lipless wonder. “Is test,” he told her, his voice bouncing around the ceiling, amplified electronically and broadcast from several directions at once. He could be anywhere.

“Is test,” he said again. “Is very fair. Abilities special, some would call powers, they come out under great stress only. What greater stress than life-or-death, yes? Sometimes the lich has no power, nothing special, and then he must be put down. If he has powers then he can survive.”

“And making me do this in the dark, that’s part of the fairness?” Ayaan demanded, but before she could finish the sentence something slapped her arm hard enough to make it sting. She grabbed her wrist and felt torn leather there.

Clearly the test had already begun. She could live or die by her own actions. If she was going to live she needed to shoot, and to shoot she needed to see. She remembered Sarah’s gift. Ayaan would have that ability—all of the dead did. She could feel the accelerated ghouls whizzing around her, could hear them moving in the dark but she forced herself to calm down, to close her eyes, to… to feel.

It had nothing to do with the eyes, though her brain formed images of what she received. Her skin took in most of the information, sensitive areas of her body reacting with abhorrence to the presence of undead things.

And there they were. She understood, perhaps for the first time, just what ghouls were. Empty shells. Husks. Person-shaped receptacles. The energy that flowed into them and suffused them was the only thing keeping them upright. There were no minds, no souls inside them. She stared down at her own body, at her flesh wrapped up in the skin of some other dead beast and knew she was one of them. Her intelligence, her personality, were merely riding around in her… corpse.

One of the ghouls came at her, moving low and fast, bent almost parallel with the floor. Its sharpened bones flashed toward her but she could see them now, smoky and purple with stolen life energy. She ducked and spun and barely avoided impaling herself on his cut-down arms. She had time, just, to wonder if he was one of the ghouls butchered on the ship while she watched.

He came around again. She ducked and rolled away from him and watched as he skidded past her, sliding on the slick floor.

She could see them now—only three of them, their energy thrumming off the walls—but her special vision couldn’t compensate for really seeing. She had little depth perception, she couldn’t find their ranges in the dark. She knew it was day outside and the sun was shining—she could tell from the hole in the roof.

Ayaan waited for the next attack, a ghoul coming at her with arms flailing and legs pumping. She dropped to all fours and swung away from him, then dashed for the nearest wall. She felt old, dried-up wood, probably plywood installed over a broken window. There was no time to find a door.

With her arm bent, with her weight behind it Ayaan smashed at the wood expecting to dislocate her shoulder. Instead it gave way like cardboard and she spilled out into daylight so bright it seared her eyes.

Dead pupils, Ayaan learned, could not contract as quickly as live pupils. Her eyes throbbed with pain as she got her feet under her and ran, her boots finding the planks of a boardwalk, her muscles burning as she tried to run. The best she could manage was a sort of drunken stagger, little better than a stiff walk.

When her eyes finally started to adjust to the white light that flashed off the ocean she lifted the Kalashnikov into a firing position and sighted on the window she’d broken open. They would come from there, she figured. She had to assume they wouldn’t have more ghouls lying in wait for her outside.

A ghoul wearing a fireman’s helmet appeared in the window. The lower half of his face had been carved away to give him a bigger mouth, a bigger bite. His skin was the tawny color of a predator in a dusty land.

Ayaan wasted no time. She lined up her shot and placed a tight burst of three rounds right in the exposed portion of his forehead.

At least, they should have gone there. Instead none of the three even hit him. In horror Ayaan looked down at her weapon. Had it been altered somehow, had the iron sights been filed down, twisted out of alignment, something?

No. It was her. She'd never seen a ghoul with a firearm, ever. Now she knew why.

The ghoul leapt through the window and headed toward her like a rocket. She fired again and saw dusty dried blood explode from his elbow. It didn’t even slow him down.

It was her. It was her fingers, her hands that felt like formless clay at the ends of her arms. There was a reason why the green phantom took the hands of his soldiers—they were worth less as weapons than the sharpened ends of bone. And hers were the same. She lacked the motor skills, the fine muscle control it took to fire a rifle with any kind of effectiveness. She dropped the weapon on the ground. She would never use an AK-47 again, as long as she, well, lived. All that training. All that experience. How much of her had been tied to that weapon? How much else did she have?

Time to find out.

No more than ten meters separated them, a distance he could cover in seconds. If she was going to pass this test… did she even want to pass it? Let him stab her, let him destroy her, and she would be done. She had spent all her life fighting the liches. To live on, to continue to exist at any rate, meant being what she hated most.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. She knew, because Ayaan could look into her own heart, she had mastered that skill very early on, she knew she wanted to keep going. She could no longer stay alive for Sarah. But she could continue to fight.

But how? With her bare hands? She closed her eyes and tried to think. Sarah spoke often of the life force, the energy that pervaded all living things. Ayaan had always thought of it as similar to baraka, the dangerous blessedness of clan leaders and Sufi saints. Just an old Somali superstition—but perhaps there was some reality to it. Now, after her death, she had no trouble feeling the energy all around her, the life force. A field of energy that passed through her, that wrapped her up and animated her dead flesh and kept her consciousness alive. If she were going to develop powers, just spontaneously grow some kind of mystical ability it would come from that source, from that energy, that baraka. Every lich power she’d heard of, all of their magic, was simply the ability to manipulate that field.

She reached down into it, gathered it in her hands. It made her skin tingle as she clutched at it, exactly as she might clutch at a blanket that covered her. She concentrated it, and time slowed down as she focused the energy, squeezing it down into tight hot bundles of force in her hands.

The ghoul racing toward her seemed to stop in mid air as she raised her hands, threw them forward, and spat the built-up energy at him. It was that simple, it was second nature. Not something she had to learn.

The energy hit him square on, her aim perfect. It sizzled and spat with darkness as it touched him. It burst inside him like dark fire. His face wrinkled as if in concentration… and kept wrinkling. He had looked ageless before but as the energy—her energy—ripped through his flesh he took on the countenance of an old man. His skin crinkled, turned papery, tore away from his bones. As it fluttered away on the wind it turned to fine powder, like talc.

He collapsed on the boardwalk, mere paces from her, his skull crumbling like old pottery. She had aged him to destruction—what remained of his head could have been a thousand years old.

She stood there forever, waiting for time to start up again. It didn’t. She had no breath, no pulse to measure its passing. The sun failed to move across the sky. There had been more ghouls in the boarded-up warehouse, at least two more but neither of them appeared to confront her.

She supposed she had passed the test.

A door in a nearby building creaked open on rusted hinges. She heard maniacal laughter echoing all around her, but had no idea who it belonged to. Time started up once more.

Chapter Seven

He was supposed to be dead—he was always dead, in her memory, in the stories they told about him. He was dead. Jack wounded him, Jack had turned and turned on him and bit him, infection had set in, Ayaan had sanitized him. It was the story of her life, of her origins.

None of it was true. Thank God.

His dead arms went around her in a feeble kind of embrace. She might have been held by a human-shaped agglutination of popsicle sticks and pipe-cleaners. Sarah pressed harder against him, against his woolen shirt that smelled of death and his dry, dry skin that cracked and peeled against her cheek. Disgust, even horror lost out to the feeling, the one, pure feeling that sang in her. She had never felt something so primal and focused before, except maybe the fear of death, and that was old to her, and this was new.

Somewhere in the twelve year gap between their meetings she had lost him, he had turned a corner in her memory and disappeared from view. Now she had made another right, and another, and in the labyrinth their paths had crossed again. Her age—his condition—none of it was particularly important. They were just a father and a daughter, he was still the man who had taken her to meet the Bedouins and let her pet their camels, she was still the child who loved butter pecan ice cream and Arabic-language cartoons from Egypt on Saturday morning.

The scuttling bug-like skull crawled up the wall behind her father, into her field of view, but she just shut her eyes and went back to the place where they were family, a family again, and all the walls between them shifted and rearranged to make paths and routes for them to reach each other.

There was someone else in that maze, someone neither of them could see, and of course it was Helen. Her mother, his wife. Helen who had turned and who was maybe still locked in a bathroom in Nairobi, beating against the door, trying to get out to find something to eat. She was a wispy kind of ghost, a distant presence even in memory, however, and it was easy enough to ignore her rattling her chains somewhere in Sarah’s peripheral vision.

“Sarah,” he breathed, his voice a rustling of old mildew-spotted paper. “You weren’t supposed to see me like this. Ever.” His body convulsed against hers. He was trying to push her away. She let him go, let him slip out from her hug like a piece of ratty cloth falling away. “This is my spider hole. You weren’t supposed to see me this weak.” His eyes flicked away from her for a split second, just as long as it takes the sun to hide behind a cloud. She saw where he looked and shook her head. His shame had made him look at the dead slack on the platform. The one he’d been feeding from when she came in. “I held out for so long. I just went hungry—I thought I could do it.”

The skull moved behind him but they both ignored it. He stared at her. She could hear the word in his mind, as clearly as if she had a telepathic link to him, though she didn’t. The word was “cannibal,” and it made her shake her head again. “He was already dead, and—”

“And I didn’t so much eat him as drain him,” he agreed, a little too quickly. Dekalb lifted one hand creakily and put it against his cheek as if to hide a blush. The color of his face, which was the color of a white concrete sidewalk after a summer rain, did not change. “You can... you can just take their darkness. You can absorb their energy and they fall down. I think they want it, that peace.” He shook his head and she saw his neck was as thin as a length of pipe. “It makes you strong again but it doesn’t diminish the hunger. Nothing ever does. I’m so hungry, pumpkin, you can’t know.”

He kept looking at the corpse. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, that she didn’t care. She remembered the lich in Cyprus, and how Osman had needed more than words. She needed to show him. With all her strength she grabbed the corpse’s thin ankles and pulled it, shoved it, heaved it over the edge of the platform. It fell into the dark shaft below with a long-lived series of clanks and bangs and thrumming impacts. Dekalb moved his hand to cover his mouth. He had grown so weak, so thin since she’d last seen him. So used up. Death wasn’t all of it, though, it wasn’t just undeath that made him so pale and attenuated. She heard a narrow scuttling sound behind her and spun on her heel.

The insectile skull with the blue eyes looked up at her from the platform. It sprang into the air, rising a few inches off the floor, and fell back. It wanted her attention.

“Is that Gary?” she said, just a hunch. She couldn’t imagine who else it might be. The two of them were linked so tightly in the story, at least the way Ayaan always told it—Dekalb and Gary, good and evil locked in epic struggle, and Dekalb had only won that battle by sacrificing his own life. Of course in the story Dekalb didn’t come back as a lich and Gary was an enormous and deadly monster who burned away to nothing but ashes. This creature, this human skull was like nothing she’d ever seen before and it worried her. She knew Ayaan would have had a million questions. You never turned your back on the new or unusual, that was one of her rules. As much as Sarah wanted to talk to her father she knew this mystery had to be cleared up first. Sarah turned the crawling skull over with one boot and saw the segmented limbs underneath, hidden like the legs of a horseshoe crab. The legs pedaled madly and she drew her foot back squeamishly, wondering if she should kick the evil thing into the darkness of the shaft. It pistoned on its tiny jointed feet and skittered away from her. She looked back at her father.

He nodded. “He’s not human anymore, I think he’s dead so many times over he’s forgotten what a living human body is like. He’s healing, and he’s growing, in ways I can’t anticipate. He doesn’t seem to be able to just die. I’ve tried everything, I even had the mummies smash him to bits with a sledgehammer. The next day he had put himself back together the way they used to put broken vases back together with superglue. I locked myself in here, I sealed myself away because I needed to watch him. To make sure he didn’t get loose.” He stared at the skull bug then as if it had changed colors. “No, I don’t think that’s appropriate,” he said, and she frowned at him until he looked back at her face. “He and I can communicate, sort of. He wants to talk to you, he—Gary, don’t make me crush you again, or maybe we could boil you in a pot... no. Never. You will never get near her, do you hear me? Never!”

“I’d like to hear what he has to say,” Sarah told Dekalb.

“Oh, alright,” the lich said, his hands at his throat. “I’ll have to translate, though. He doesn’t have any lungs or vocal cords or a tongue or anything, and—”

She stopped him in mid-sentence. “I know a trick,” she told him, thinking of the soapstone in her pocket. She’d speculated often on how it linked her to Ptolemy. “I just need something of his, something close to him. Like a piece of jewelry he always wore, a wedding ring, or a favorite shirt, or—”

One of the mummies—silent and invisible until that moment—glided forward and picked the skull up off the ground. With a casual snap it tore one of the teeth out of Gary’s upper jaw and then dumped the rest of him on the platform. The mummy handed her the long yellow tooth, complete with spiky roots, and stepped back into the shadows.

Sarah bit her lip. “I don’t know if this will work,” she said. She made a fist around the tooth and frowned.

That fucking hurt, you prick, Gary said, using her own internal voice. The words blasted through her mind and made her ears ring in sympathy. Come back here and I’ll bite your goddamned prick off! Or did they already put it in one of those fucking jars? She squinted her eyes and tried to turn down her own mental volume.

It didn’t work. So you’re Sarah, huh? You’re skinnier than I expected. I also thought you’d be white, like your old man. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no racist. I’d gladly take a bite out of you if I just had a mandible to call my own.

She could feel him grinning in her head, his tongue lapping at her grey matter, at the convolutions of her brain. She nearly let go of the tooth. Then she realized she couldn’t, that the buzzing, stinging energy in the tooth had actually paralyzed her hand. She couldn’t let go. She tried to open her mouth to speak and found she couldn’t do that, either.

Chapter Eight

 

Baraka tugged at Ayaan’s calcified veins. It had saved her life and now it wanted to be repaid. The power itched inside her, burnt her guts. It needed fuel, it needed meat. She knew exactly what it wanted. She also knew it would never be satisfied, never again, no matter how much meat she ate. No matter how much living human meat.

Nausea ballooned in her stomach, filling it like hot rocks. She dropped to one knee and spat on the boardwalk. When she wiped her mouth and looked up the naked man was there. The one with the blue tattoos and the noose around his neck.

“I know what your next move is, lass,” he told her.

“Then you’re one ahead of me,” Ayaan said. She lowered her other knee, knelt and touched her forehead to the eroded wood. She was pointed out towards the sea—as close to being oriented toward Mecca as she could hope for. Silently she began to pray. She stopped in mid-dua. “You,” she said to the man. She lifted her head. “You must know something of evil. Am I a monster now? If I speak God’s name, will He smite me?”

The ghost closed his eyes and a look of blessed relief came over his face. “Finally,” he sighed, “one of them believes!” which didn’t answer her question. When she stared at him long enough he shifted on his feet and actually addressed her problem, though he provided more of an opinion than any hard facts. “Are you a monster, now? Oh, aye. But your god made you so, didn’t he, lass? He made you what you are and he did it for good reason, you can be sure of that. Pray all you want. I’ll wait here.”

The urge had left her, however. She stood and looked at him, truly looked at him. He wasn’t there. He looked real enough, she could even feel the heat of his hands when she grasped them, but there was nothing behind the image. No energy, neither living or dead.

“I know what your next move is,” he said again, once she had stopped touching him. “You’re going to go on a bit of a tear. You’ll run inside there,” he said, pointing at the open door, “with your death ray blasting and you’ll ask questions later. Hopefully you’ll get the Tsarevich, but even if you just get the green phantom fellow, well, that’ll be a good day’s killing. They’ll slaughter you, of course. But who mourns a pawn when its loss takes a bishop?”

She had used those same chess terms when thinking to herself. She had spoken of them to no one. “You can read my mind.” Ayaan let her hands fall at her sides.

“Is a little bit of good worth it when so much potential goes to waste?” he demanded. “There’s a deeper game, here, if you’re willing to be a little patient, lass, and there’s more to win than you think. You play nice for now. Don’t go in there pretending to be one of them. They’re too smart for that. Act like you’ve been broken, though, broken like a wild horse, and they may want to believe it so bad they don’t ask so many questions. Then you just do as they say. Bide your time. Wait for the real opportunity to come along.”

What he said smacked of prudence. She nodded. “Alright,” she began, but he was gone, without so much as a fare-thee-well. Ghosts were supposed to be like that, she knew, but it was still unsettling.

She shook her head and walked through the open door. She stepped into a cavernous, dark space, and then squinted in pain as brilliant red light attacked her eyes. A sign—a neon sign in English that read “MAD-O-RAMA” buzzed into life in the dimness, showing her its corners and casting everything in a hellish glow. To enter MAD-O-RAMA she had to pass through the mouth of an enormous sculptural head, complete with giant triangular fangs.

Beyond this opening lay a serpentine length of small-gauge railroad track and piles of mannequins painted in glowing yellow-green. Some looked like witches, some like maniacs with knives. Skeletons were well-represented, as were vultures and bats. A spiderweb made of fishing line hung from the ceiling and brushed the top of her hair. MAD-O-RAMA must have been a carnival ride, she decided. A dark ride.

At the back of the room stood the liches, gathered in eerie conference. The green phantom, the lipless wonder, the werewolf. They waited for her, she could tell—their attention, their energy, was directed at her. One of the ride’s cars stood at the end of the track, its high back turned toward her and shielding its occupants from her view. With the vision of the dead she could see right through the wood and metal, however. She could see two figures there, their energy bright with excitement, their auras intertwined. One was dead, a lich. The other was alive but hurt.

Ayaan’s stomach rumbled experimentally. Hurt... living... flesh. Desire tried to bend her double but she fought it down.

Cicatrix stood up, untangled her limbs from the car’s dead occupant. The scarred woman looked almost bashful as her eyes met Ayaan’s. Or perhaps she was flushed for other reasons. An open wound on her chest oozed blood that ran down in clots to stain the plunging neckline of her white linen dress.

The living woman stepped down from the car and walked at her leisure toward the exit. As she passed Ayaan she reached out to touch the Somali’s arm. She whispered, “Is fun life, if you can make you to like it.” Without further explanation she left the way Ayaan had come in. Ayaan guessed it was some kind of warning.

Ayaan moved forward to meet the car’s occupant. It was the Tsarevich, she was sure of it. She would get around in front of the car, see what he really was. She had to know.

Before she could reach the car, however, a projection of the beautiful little boy in his filigreed armor appeared out of thin air, directly in her path. “You come too close. Stay there, yes?” he said, and she could only nod in agreement. She could see now that it was just a projection, just as Sarah had said back at the beginning. There was no energy in the boy, no darkness or light. He might as well have been hollowed out like a pumpkin. He was just as the ghost outside, an illusion. A fakery.

The boy gestured with his skull wand and the werewolf moved forward. He had a strange little machine in his hands, a metal ball studded with vacuum tubes and black bakelite dials. A long telescoping antenna emerged from its center. Its purpose was not immediately clear.

Ayaan remembered the ghost and his words. Don’t pretend to be one of them. They won’t believe it. The device the werewolf held must be a weapon. Ayaan knew one when she saw it.

“Semyon Iurevich,” the Tsarevich said. “Is trustable, this one?”

The lipless wonder came forward. The dry skin of his face had drawn away from his smallish features, making his eyes very wide. His nose turned up like a pig’s. He wore a stained white bathrobe and a pair of slippers. He came up to her and ran his hands over Ayaan’s arms and hips. She wanted to kick him away but she controlled herself. Like a broken horse, she thought. She let her shoulders slump, let her neck bow. Let them think it was too much, that she was overwhelmed, dazzled by their evil.

“He sees future, knows all,” the Tsarevich announced. “Can read you like book.”

The lich’s bony hands stole across her belly, grabbed at her buttocks. She leapt away but knew better than to attack him. The liches chuckled at her discomfort. Semyon Iurevich reached out again and she let him touch her. She closed her eyes and thought of Sarah, of just how far she would let this go if it meant keeping her promise to Dekalb, if it meant seeing Sarah again.

The lich’s touch grew more clinical, less intrusive. He focused on one small patch of her left arm as if the information he sought was written there, as if he’d found the right page of her book. Finally he looked up. She saw, with a start, that he wore a toupee.

Energy passed between them. Ayaan’s soul lurched in her body. Her heart would have gone wild with palpitations if it still could beat—this evil thing, this lich was really looking into her, his power was real. She knew that at any moment he would see through her game.

Then it was over and the hands lifted away from her skin.

“Is not one of us,” the lich told his master. “Not as yet. But is safe, with precautions.”

Only the fact that she was dead and no longer needed to breathe kept Ayaan from sighing with relief. She didn’t know how—maybe the naked ghost had come to her aid—but she had fooled them. “I don’t want anything but to rest,” she said. “And maybe get something to eat. I can see now that there’s no beating you.”

The Tsarevich's image nodded and stepped even closer to her. Another step and his nose would be in her navel. At least the projection of his nose would touch the leather covering her belly. He looked up at her like a toddler addressing his mother. “No rest for wicked,” he told her, “but maybe is not so bad. I have mission here. I have great work to complete. So many things to do, and not so many hands. I take a chance, yes? Is work for you, if you will have it, and it proves you. Otherwise, you stay here, you be like new Least. You interested?”

“I... I guess so,” Ayaan said. She bit her lip and looked away. She had never tried to look coy before and she thought she must be overdoing it ridiculously.

“Is good!” The boy nodded happily and his smile lit up the whole room. “You do good, now. You do good, come back, you see man behind the curtain.” He pointed at the car at the end of the tracks where his real body still sat out of view. “You do bad, we have provision for this as well.” He pointed again, this time at the device the werewolf held. The hairy lich touched one of the black knobs and the vacuum tubes lit up with a dull orange glow.

Ayaan felt something tickling her neck. She put a hand on her throat and felt the silver tattoo there. It felt warm, though the rest of her skin was disturbingly cool. The tickling turned to a tingle, and then a sensation of uncomfortable heat. It only took a few seconds to become painful. She clawed at the tattoo but that only made it worse.

The Tsarevich waved his wand and the searing stopped instantly. Ayaan rubbed at her neck but the warmth was gone.

“Is called ward, and is very strong magic. No way to undo it now without cutting off at neck. Be good now, or he turns it up all way.” The little boy looked as if this was the last thing he ever wanted to happen in the whole wide world. “He turns it up, and your head is to catch fire, yes?”

She nodded. Bide your time, the ghost had told her. Wait for the right opportunity.

“I’ll be good,” she promised.

Chapter Twelve

The boat touched a broken retaining wall with a hollow thud, a noise like a very deep drum being struck just once. The boat drifted a few feet further, its side rattling against the remaining blocks of the wall, and then it slid up onto sand or gravel that made a noise under the hull, a hissing, and then it stopped, beached on land. Sarah lifted her oar out off the water and looked at the tip of Manhattan. She just sat there, the oar still in her hands, and looked at the place where the wall had fallen away. Where mud had slipped down into the water, making a perfect ramp up into the open space of Battery Park.

She could have thought about how that was the city up there that had killed her father, or that it was the place that nearly killed Ayaan, but she didn’t. She didn’t think about anyone else at all. She watched the ground, the slope, as if it were still moving, as if she could see it sliding down into the sea. Her breath hitched. A flash of pain, very sharp but very brief, ran through the muscles at the small of her back.

In a second she would step out of the boat, step up onto the land and then she would have to face her fear. Ghouls, cultists—even liches might be up there but she wasn’t thinking about them, either. She was thinking about what it meant to step up onto that muddy slope. She was thinking about what it meant to enter denied territory, as Jack might put it. She had done it before. Never so alone, though. In a second she would do it. In a second.

“Oh, wow,” she said, which was pretty stupid but it was all she could think of. Careful of the boat’s rocking, mindful of the weapons strapped to her back, Sarah stood up in the boat and put one foot down on the mud. It sank in a quarter of an inch but then it gave her enough purchase to get her other foot up. Instantly she started sliding down, her feet slipping, water oozing up between her toes and she threw herself forward, dug her fingers into the yielding earth, shoved her left foot up onto a protruding stone. She scrambled and cursed and grabbed and hauled her way up into Battery Park before she could really think about what she was doing and then suddenly she was there.

The park’s once verdant lawns were covered in grey growth. Mushrooms, enormous wood ear mushrooms the size of sleeping horses in serried rows lined the park, slopped over onto the concrete walkways. They lay like soporific alien pods, like the drowsing bodies of hibernating animals. She was certain they never grew that big in nature, she was certain of it. She could see their gills, the tender wet gills they kept hidden from the sun. The air was yellow with their spores, a constant vaporous discharge that spread out over the water and swept across Governors Island with the prevailing wind.

She kicked one. Big mistake. Its wet, fleshy meat came to pieces in strands that wrapped around her shoe, her ankle. Spores burst up around her like brown smoke and she had to clamp her eyes, her mouth, her nose shut or be suffocated. When the cloud finally moved on she looked down and saw the fungus knitting itself back together, so fast she could actually watch it happen, the filaments flopping against one another, sticking to one another. She yanked her foot free with a sense of real disgust.

Which was just silly. Who knew what real danger lay inside the city, and she was freaking out over a mushroom. Sarah drew her Makarov but left the safety on. She moved toward a mansion, a confection of brick and columns now slathered with yellow mold. Its antiquity and decrepitude bothered her for some reason and she moved past it quickly.

Beyond the mansion the towers of Manhattan started up almost immediately, leaping up into the air like impossible trees or... or mountains... or straight-sided pyramids, maybe. She had actually seen the Great Pyramid. It was the closest reference point she had, but it meant little. The flat sides of the buildings looked wrong to her, the metal and glass construction only softened by a heavy growth of moss and dark slime. The windows kept snagging her eyes. Ayaan had taught her to look at openings, at windows and doors, anywhere an enemy might hide. But there were hundreds of windows to keep an eye on—thousands! Clearly urban warfare required a different mindset.

She knew one thing that still made sense. Stick to the shadows. Keeping her head down she ducked into the shade of an enormous tower and jogged down a sidewalk towards an intersection. Trees that reached four or five stories high clotted the crossroads. Sarah slid in between their close-growing trunks and hunkered down to have a good think, to plan her next move.

A ghoul emerged from a doorway nearby and sniffed the air.

It happened just like that—she had just ducked down, was still, in fact, in the process of sitting and getting comfortable, when the ghoul appeared. It had no hands, just wicked claws, and it wore a flat doughboy helmet. It had to be a museum piece, judging by the rust and the flaking metal at its brim. It cast the ghoul’s eyes in darkness so she could only see its surgically altered jaws and the broken lump of cartilage which had been its nose. It sniffed again—she wondered how good its sense of smell could be with that damaged lump of meat in the middle of its face. Maybe if she stayed perfectly still.

From up a street to the west she heard the sound of an air horn. The blast jumped from one building facade to another and shook the leaves of the trees, made the glass of the few unbroken windows rattle in place. The broken-nosed ghoul stood up straight and moved its stumpy arms in front of it briefly, as if it were a boxer ready to guard against a blow. Slowly, on stiff legs, it moved toward the noise of the horn. Slowly—this was not one of the super-speedy dead she’d seen in Egypt. At least she had that.

Once the ghoul was gone she stood up and moved to the doorway it had vacated. There was no movement beyond and she stepped into a tiny shop, its front of plate glass obscured by vines and fungus so that only a few rays of green light slipped inside. In the back a pile of cardboard boxes had transformed over time, losing their shape, bursting open at the sides, and now small round greasy knobs of fungal life were devouring them. Nothing. She turned around to leave the shop and found herself surrounded.

It must have been a trap. The first ghoul must have smelled her after all, and the air horn had been a signal for reinforcements.

Too shocked to scream she lifted her pistol and started firing. Ghouls filled the broad space between the buildings, dozens of them moving left or right, some of them toward her, some away. One of them came at her, his grey body naked but his head covered in a brightly-painted bicycle helmet. “Fuck,” she screamed, lacking the time to be more inventive. She shot at his knees but it wasn’t enough—he was on her, his stink smeared across her senses, his bony forearms weaving in the air over her, an incantation of death. One arm swung down in a wide arc and knocked the pistol out of her hand. Doom pressed hard on her sinuses, the taste of adrenaline filling her mouth.

Then something weird happened.

He crouched over her, his spikes mere inches from her skin, and then he stopped. He stopped stock still, his chest not even heaving for breath. He was so still he might have been no more than a pile of badly decomposed meat, or perhaps a picture of a dead thing. Sarah looked up and saw the others, the other ghouls, had all stopped still too. They were facing her, a crowd of them facing her and not moving. Sarah could hear water running somewhere, and she could hear the leaves of the trees rolling in a gust of wind, but that was all. Nobody moved a muscle.

“They join us may if so wish.” The voice came out of the ghoul on top of her. It sounded mostly like a human voice, with a touch of a Russian accent. There was a whistling sound underneath it, though, as if breath were leaking out of punctured lungs even as the ghoul tried to talk. “The ones on island. You, as well, join us if you wish. Only death otherwise. I spare you for this, to make choice. Is good to have choices. You be herald, take good news to island peoples. Take news of choice.”

“You belong to the Tsarevich,” Sarah said, so frightened she thought she might urinate in her pants. She could still talk. It was pretty much all she could do. “I’ve heard he recruits the living.”

“I work not for our Lord,” the ghoul said. It didn’t shake its head or use any gestures. Its arms remained around her, ready to impale her, but it just spoke to her in that flat tone. “I belong to his Lady.”

One of the trees in the square rolled over. No, not a tree. Something huge and plant-like though, something vaguely humanoid in shape but enormous, dark, covered in patches of filamentous mold and club-like fungi. A walking compost heap. It moved a yard or two closer and Sarah felt an odd prickling between her toes, in the places where her shirt bunched up against her side. Something tickled her throat and she coughed.

“Is not by intention, but only is because she is near. You die in seconds, if don’t choose right,” the ghoul told her. “Our Lady’s touch is bad thing for living. So you say... what?”

“I... I say,” Sarah said, and coughed again, coughed and coughed, a long, asthmatic series of coughs that brought up dark mucus. “I say...”

A bright flash of light swooped up the sidewalk and smashed in the ghoul’s face with one bandaged fist. The dead man’s maxilla shattered and dried brains flew from his ruined head. The ghoul’s body fell away and Sarah was free. Ptolemy’s painted face turned to look at her.

“Thanks,” she said, picking her Makarov up off the weed-cracked sidewalk. Then she realized he wanted more. He wanted direction. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, and then she ran, with the mulch demon right behind.

Chapter Fourteen

Leaving the highway for a more rural route they slowed down dramatically until they were barely crawling along, much slower than a human could walk. They stopped at a sign nearly obscured by wrist-thick tree trunks:

Now Entering REXROTH STATE FOREST

Ayaan was uncertain how one could be expected to differentiate this new forest from the jungle behind them.

A few miles farther in they came to a place where the trees grew so close to the road that the green phantom had to come down into the cab with them. He smelled like something stale and wet. They listened to the tree branches drumming on the roof of the truck for a while and drove in silence. Eventually they came to a place so narrow the truck couldn’t fit through. The green phantom and Erasmus jumped down from the cab and started to press on. The handless ghouls from the cargo bed streamed down after them, their eyes narrow slits, their tongues licking at their dry lips as if they’d only awoken from sleep, though she knew they had been dead, truly dead moments before. Ayaan called out to them to wait a moment.

“What’s this, the famous Ayaan? Scared of a few trees?” the green phantom chortled at her.

“No,” she told him. She waved at where their vehicle stood nearly wedged in by vegetation. “I just wanted to turn the truck around. If we need to get out of here in a hurry it will save us time later.”

Even the skull-faced lich had to admit she had a point.

“I’ve been doing this my whole life,” she told him. “I only stayed alive as long as I did by knowing all the little tricks.”

It took a long fifteen minutes to move the truck, backing and filling over and over again on the narrow road surface. When it was done they moved into the dark space between the trees and Ayaan realized she was, in fact, a little afraid. The shadowy forest pressed in on them instantly, the waxy leaves of the trees brushing against their clothes, their hair, the branches underneath scraping at them like limp and bony fingers. Cobwebs draped across the path every few feet and had to be swept away. Insects plagued Erasmus, live insects that he would pick from his fur and absently stuff into his mouth to suck out their golden energy.

Though it was only mid-afternoon the darkness swam in around them like a fog. They tried to follow the road but the forest had its own paths to offer. One of these lead to a wide clearing and the green phantom hurried inward, digging his femur staff into the ground for traction on the moss-slick trail.

Ayaan followed him in and emerged into a brightly-lit place where the underbrush grew wild but the trees had all been pruned back. Piles of gray deadfall ringed the open space, a few dead leaves still fluttering on the fallen branches. Ayaan had grown up in a desert land but even she could tell that trees didn’t form such a clearing naturally.

Then there was the goat. He lay in the middle of the clearing, staked to a low hillock. He was dying, his fur littered with bits of decaying leaves, his eyes milky and lost, the long sideways pupils very much dilated even in the bright sun. He had kicked over his water dish and Ayaan could count the ribs sticking out of his side. Only his horns, which rose from his head in a thick, curling V looked healthy.

“Someone has left me a snack,” the green phantom announced, cheerfully. Ayaan could feel the goat’s energy herself, flickering away slowly but still golden and almost irresistible. She put out a hand to stop the green-robed lich, though.

“Why hasn’t some wandering ghoul finished this animal off long ago?” she asked.

“Maybe there aren’t any nearby.” He looked down at her arm as if he would happily chew it off to get to the goat.

“Not any more, there aren’t.” With her free hand Ayaan pointed to piles of bleached bones—human bones—mixed in with the woody deadfall at the edges of the clearing. Then she pointed out a shallow depression in the grass on the far side of the goat’s mound. Once one knew to look for it it could be seen that broken vegetation pointed away from the defile in a radial pattern. A similar crater dipped down not more than a dozen feet from where they stood. “Have you ever seen a minefield before?” she asked.

“Ridiculous,” the green phantom rasped. Behind him Erasmus came up with a large rock in one furry hand. Before Ayaan could stop him he tossed the rock deep into the clearing. Metal sprouted from the ground like an evil weed and then a flash of light pressed up hard against Ayaan’s side and nearly knocked her over. Hot dirt and bits of shredded goat meat splattered her leathers.

“I didn’t expect that big an explosion,” Erasmus said, spitting dirt and pebbles out of his mouth. All three of them had been caught by metal shrapnel, ruining their clothes. Had they been any closer their brains would be strewn around the trees behind them.

“That,” Ayaan said, fingering a hole in her skull-print leather jacket, “was a Bouncing Betty. It was spring-loaded to jump in the air when detonated. This spreads the shrapnel over a much wider area and dramatically increases the kill radius.”

“You’ve seen these before?” the green phantom asked.

“Friends of mine have. From closer up.” Ayaan peered through the smoke that filled the clearing. “Mines. There are better ways to keep out strangers, but few that make as much noise. They will know we’re coming now if they didn’t before. We have to move faster. That’s probably the quickest way in,” she said, pointing at a continuation of the trail on the far side. “It’s probably booby-trapped, every step of the way.”

“So we go around.” The green phantom turned away from the minefield and headed back into the darkness of the forest. He had a small compass and while they lacked a map he could at least tell if they were headed in the right direction. Erasmus went first, his vicious claws effective at clearing the overhang like ten little machetes. Ayaan followed and was followed in turn by the green phantom. The handless ghouls brought up the rear, so silent Ayaan kept forgetting they were even there.

They’d been moving for the better part of half an hour, pushing westward and southward when they could, when Erasmus stopped short and Ayaan’s face collided with his furry back. “Hold on,” he said. “There’s something... there’s some energy up here.”

Ayaan called his name but he rushed forward, perhaps intent on reaching their goal, perhaps after something else. She followed as fast as she could while keeping her wits about her. Her feet—nowhere near as steady as they used to be—kept getting snagged in tree roots and undergrowth and she had a terrible presentiment that she would arrive too late, that he would fall in some pit lined with sharpened stakes or trigger a precariously-balanced log to fall on him from high branches. She shouted to him again but he made no answer.

She nearly ran into him when she finally found him. He had stopped before an enormous old-growth tree, big enough that the trail wrapped around it, a massive wooden column climbing with ants, wrapped with the tendrils of epiphytes, studded everywhere with stunted, sunlight-deprived limbs still as thick as saplings of their own. Erasmus looked as if he were leaning forward into the tree’s bulk, perhaps just resting for a moment. Resting on his face. She cautiously moved around him. He had his eyes and nose pressed up tight against a knot in the trunk the width of a dinner plate. He wasn’t moving. Coupled with a dead man’s lack of breath or pulse he looked more like some furry excrescence of the tree than a separate organism.

The green phantom came stumbling through the underbrush behind her, making enough noise to alert every enemy in the forest. “What’s wrong with him?” he demanded. “What’s been done to him? Get him out of there.”

Ayaan wasn’t sure if he should be moved but she tugged at one of his paws anyway. She might as well have pulled on a strand of ivy—Erasmus’ body, while still flexible, was stuck to the spot. She tugged again and again. Finally the green phantom stepped up to help her. He leaned his staff against the tree and pulled.

Erasmus came loose with a howl, a noise only an animal could make. His claws came up and he raked the green phantom across the belly, tearing open skin and flesh. With another scream he jumped away and headed deeper into the forest, moving as fast as his dead legs could carry him, following no trail that Ayaan could see but merely stumbling through the brush and smacking into tree limbs like a man possessed.

She had a feeling that was exactly what he had become. She saw a round space had been hollowed out of the tree, behind its wide knot. Inside someone had placed an hexagonal mirror, its frame made of human finger bones. Dark energy streamed from the thing—magic—and Ayaan was careful not to look into the glass. Instead she took the green phantom’s staff and used it to smash it into bits of silver and jagged glass.

Then she turned around, and realized what fate had offered her.

The green phantom lay disemboweled on the path. His ancient, dried-up guts slithered onto the ground next to him, his hands trying in vain to keep them in. He wasn’t even looking at her. Ayaan could kill him easily, smash in his head with his own staff or fire a bolt of her own particular kind of darkness directly into his brain. It would take a mere second of her time. The handless ghouls coming up the path would destroy her or perhaps the Tsarevich would kill her from a distance but that was immaterial.

She stepped closer to the green phantom, intending to finish him off—and then she stopped.

I see his heart. His black and dead heart!

The words moved through her head like a pebble rolling around on her tongue. Half her face lost all feeling and a thin trickle of drool fell from her numb lip.

You be caution in all things.

The words stopped her in her tracks.

“It’s your big chance, now,” the green phantom said. He looked up at her with bitter fear in his eyes. “If you want to prove yourself. If you want to live.” He had the remote control in one hand, the control that could activate the wards on her neck.

“Yes,” Ayaan said, “I want to live.” The words fell out of her mouth. She had thought nothing of the kind.

“Then you’ll go after him. You’ll go after that furry cocksucker who just gutted me and you’ll find out what happened. Yes or no?”

Ayaan sucked breath into her lungs, trying to clear her head, but the unnecessary air just wheezed out of her again. “Alright,” she said, all thought of killing the green phantom gone. It just wasn’t in her head anymore. She could feel where the thought had been but she couldn’t remember what it might have been.

Your friend has friend in me, she thought. A curious thing to think, but it didn’t bother her too much.

Chapter Sixteen

It was dark in the fire lookout atop the ridge but moonlight came in through the windows and made dappled patterns on the walls. It curled around the broken radio, glistened on the peeling finish of the enameled chairs and table. It just barely reached into the bathroom where the dry toilet had become home to thousands of spiders. From time to time, putting aside all squeamishness, Ayaan reached through another stratum of ancient webs and scooped out a handful of them from the darkness inside. The wriggling on her tongue wasn’t so bad—it was the legs that got caught in her teeth that bothered her.

With every tiny life she took her body vibrated with joy. The hunger came back almost instantly but the shivering ecstasy of each new morsel was like nothing she’d ever felt before. She wondered, in the most private part of her mind, if it was what sex felt like for a living girl.

She had little to do but sit, and think, and wait. The fire lookout station offered few other opportunities to entertain one’s self. She had a small telescope with a scratch on one lens. It let her study the valley below. Nothing had happened since she’d arrived, her legs aching and rubbery as she powered her way up to the top of the ridge. Nothing had happened since she’d found the lookout and installed herself. Nothing would happen, she imagined, until dawn.

Erasmus stood down there as if at attention, his spine locked in perfect posture. He stood in the middle of a barnyard. The barnyard lay in the middle of a fenced-off patch of land that sat in the center of the valley. Whatever magic had possessed the undead werewolf had drawn him directly to its dark and vibrant heart.

Ayaan suspected that whoever had laid the trap lived in the tidy little farmhouse down there. Like the barn and the silo it was protected by round wards hung from its eaves painted in bright geometric patterns.

They’re called hex signs, the ghost told her. The ghost who was trapped in a brain in a jar a hundred miles away. He was standing next to her, too, just barely visible in her peripheral vision. She turned her head and there was nothing there. She looked back at the valley and he was next to her. They protect those who live inside, aye, but they need a taste of the life to keep them strong. Life’s blood, that is.

Ayaan nodded. There were plenty of goats down in the pen behind the barn. It could easily be their blood that activated the hex signs, that licked out of them in purple rays.

Magic was everywhere down in that barnyard. Death magic. It pulsed around Erasmus, pinning him like a dart in a dartboard. It flickered from the windows of the farmhouse and lingered like smoke around the tarpaper roof of the barn. Deep, dark beams of it escaped through the vents of the silo. There was something bad in there, something that needed half a dozen hex signs to keep it locked away.

“That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” Ayaan asked.

Aye. It’s not what you think, though, lass. Don’t fear it.

“Believe me, it’s rather low on my list of things to be afraid of.” Ayaan leaned forward, her chin resting on her steepled fingers. “You, on the other hand...” She fought the urge to look at him.

I’m your friend. I’m your best friend, under these circumstances.

“Friends don’t hypnotize each other. They don’t leave little commands buried in each other’s minds.” Semyon Iurevich, the mind-reading lich back in Asbury Park, had bound her with a spell. It had been his voice she heard telling her not to kill the green phantom. No, worse than that, his voice had wiped the very idea out of her mind. He hadn’t merely revoked her freedom. He had made it so it never existed.

And he had done so, she was certain, at the ghost’s behest.

Is that what’s worrying you? That I wouldn’t let you throw your life away?

“My life. Mine,” she said. “Do you think I like being this... this thing, this monster?” she gestured at her leathers.

I know better than anyone, dearie. Don’t you come all indignant with me, when I haven’t even a body to speak of. His tone softened, grew soothing and low. Listen, there’s a game here, a deeper game than you know. You haven’t even met all the players yet.

Ayaan let that go for a while. The ghost had power over her. She wasn’t going to talk him into relinquishing it—that never worked, never in the history of the human race had anyone given up power freely once they had it. You had to take it back yourself.

Something else worried her, though. “You want the Tsarevich dead, yet you made sure I would survive long enough to see whatever’s in that silo. You want us to find it, even if it means the Tsarevich gets it. What’s your scheme? At least tell me that much, tell me what you hope to gain from—”

He was gone, of course. She couldn’t sense him anywhere.

She went for another handful of spiders. When she came back she got a shock—something was actually happening down in the valley. A light had come on in the farmhouse. It moved from window to window, then emerged from the door, and revealed itself to be a kerosene lantern. The man holding it glowed a brighter gold than the lamp in his hand. There was no question in her mind. This was the wizard, the magician, the wadad who had enchanted Erasmus.

He wore a baseball cap low on his brow with the name JOHN DEERE on the front. Old bloodstains decorated a white t-shirt and faded blue jeans; more recent stains discolored his tan leather work boots. His face was ringed with a fringe of beard and hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, even though the sun had yet to rise.

His left arm was missing entirely. It had been replaced with a tree branch covered in rough gray bark. It ended in three thick twigs less like fingers than the tines of a pitchfork. Dark energy surged through the wooden arm and it twisted like a snake. The tines reached up and scratched the magician’s chin. He studied Erasmus, moving around the werewolf, tapping his sternum and the back of his skull. With his human hand he plucked a hair from the paralyzed lich’s cheek.

The wooden arm slapped at Erasmus’ chest and tore a strip of skin away from the rigid muscles beneath. They were pink and grey and they didn’t glisten at all. No blood emerged, but she could clearly see the edges of his skin where it had been torn open. In the midst of all that fur the wound looked like a sickly orifice, a new and monstrous genital.

Ayaan pushed the telescope away and stood up. It was a long way down the ridge and for all she knew there were mines planted all around the little barnyard but she couldn’t wait any longer. She stumbled out of the lookout station and practically threw herself down the side of the ridge, grabbing at tree branches to slow her descent, her feet barely touching the ground. A torrent of pine needles and rustling leaves swept around her while bits and pieces of rock and soil pattered and bounced down before her like a miniature landslide. She skidded to a stop in a copse of trees near the floor of the valley and pushed the branches away from her to take a look. Nothing had changed in the barnyard. Ayaan moved forward until she was standing before a seven foot high fence of thin wooden palings, the only barrier between herself and the barnyard.

Maybe, she thought, maybe she still had the element of surprise. She would need it—this wizard had more power than any living man was supposed to. Careful to be as silent as possible she climbed up one side of the fence and jumped down on the other.

Her foot barely nudged something round and hard as she landed. She looked down and saw a human skull there, bleached white with all its delicate nasal bones still intact. Other skulls littered the ground just inside the fence. Dark energy flickered inside every cranium.

The skull she touched gave off a blood-curdling shriek. Whether it actually made a sound or it was just inside her mind—and presumably the wizard’s—she couldn’t say, but the scream made her clutch her ears and duck her head.

At the center of the barnyard the wizard looked up. His wooden hand dropped a ball of fur and skin on the ground and Ayaan felt his attention hit her like a spotlight.

“This a friend a your’n, monkey-boy?” the wizard asked, looking over at Erasmus. The furry lich didn’t move an inch. “You shoulda said somethin’. I coulda redded up the place.” The wizard’s face cracked in a wide, toothy smile.

Ayaan wasted no time. She dropped into a shooter’s crouch and flung her hands in wide arcs. Energy spilled from her core and sizzled as it cut through the air. The wizard turned, far too fast, and put his wooden arm up. The bark there cracked and snapped and the wood underneath creaked and groaned. He reached inside the back pocket of his trousers and whipped out a pocket knife. Ayaan saw that the palm of his remaining hand was one smooth callus from fingers to wrist. He slashed the callus with his knife and then squeezed his fist until blood dropped onto the dry grass of the barnyard.

The door of the barn rattled on its hinges. Ayaan shot another bolt of death energy at the wizard but he caught it easily in his wooden hand. He absorbed the darkness into his own body with a visible shudder of delight. Ayaan raised her hands to attack a third time but then the door of the barn slammed open.

Dead people came slouching out. They were skin, skeletally thin. They were missing pieces. Very few among them still had four limbs. A few were missing all the flesh from their heads and all but the sinews of their necks. All of them had chunks of their torsos and abdomens carved away. Their ribs stuck out from denuded sides or were cut away entirely leaving them horribly lopsided. None of them had body hair of any kind. None of them had eyes, nor much skin.

Ayaan had seen plenty of decomposing bodies in her time. She’d seen human flesh gnawed on, torn apart, burned, hacked, eaten away by disease. She’d never seen human bodies systematically butchered, though. Not butchered for their meat.

“Just like prime aged beef,” the wizard chuckled. “If you sauce it just right, it gets so you hardly can tell.” He squinted at Ayaan. “Now, I figger I could do with a nice skirt steak for breakfast.”

The carved dead shuffled toward her, their faces unmoving, their hands up to grab and claw and tear.

Chapter Twenty

Sarah leaned forward and puked up her guts. The hands in her armpits held her perfectly steady as her body wracked itself over and over again, her lungs and her stomach expelling their contents all over a cobblestone curb. She stared at the mortar between the paving stones, stared with an intensity she couldn’t have mustered normally, until sparkling lights appeared in her vision. With a great braying cough she opened up her whole body and spewed out another gallon of filth.

The mucus running down her face, the tears in her eyes were full of black flecks. Her nose pulsed and ran with a stale reek, an earthy, disgusting stink.

There was more of it, more foreign crap in the hollow parts of her but she lacked the strength to even heave. She sank back against waiting arms that lifted her up into the light. Someone wiped her face with a rough cloth and someone else poured water across her forehead and her eyes.

“Come on, pumpkin, just a little more,” her father said, and Sarah turned her head to the side under his bony fingers. “Just open your mouth, just a little more.”

She couldn’t have done it herself. Something else creeped inside of her, something cold, and pushed. A thick sludge of black and yellow nastiness drained out from between her lips. Then she slept.

Ptolemy stood guard, squatting on the top of a brick wall. When she woke light the color of wine colored his bandages and bounced off his painted face. When he turned to look at her she saw white patches in the death mask. Some of his linen was gone, too, probably devoured by fungus. He looked smaller, as if he’d lost weight. She wondered what he looked like under the bandages.

She remembered suddenly her arm—the compound fracture, the bloody mess that had been all that remained of her right arm. She lifted it now and examined it. Dark bruises wrapped around her elbow and a twinge of pain went up her shoulder when she tried to make a fist. But the skin was unbroken and she could bend her arm just fine.

That injury should have killed her. Any of her injuries should have killed her—up to and including the time she fell and skinned open her chin. When the Epidemic came, when the bodies of the dead filled up the cities and countries of the Earth, every strain of microbe and virus had gone through a population boom. The world was full of horrible infectious little things just waiting for you to get a bad scratch. But here she was. She didn’t feel great, not by a long shot, but she could tell she was on the mend.

Sitting up a little she coughed noisily but unproductively. She saw she was wrapped in thick blankets that were only a little tattered along the edge—had they been taken from one of the houses nearby? She looked around and saw she was in a kind of courtyard. Dead leaves filled its corners and a dry fountain stood at its center, a big cracked concrete bowl decorated with nymphs and cupids and dolphins. Lying on a cloth next to the fountain were a sword, a noose, and a length of fur. The relics, she remembered. The relics of the Celt, whoever that might be.

Ptolemy leaped down from his perch and offered her his hand. As she struggled up to her feet she checked her pockets and found her pistol there, its magazine completely empty. She touched the soapstone scarab.

i death thought sent you sent me thought to my death, he told her. He sounded embarrassed. was but strategy it was but strategy

“Yeah,” she said, “well. Just don’t doubt me again.”

He bowed gallantly. Behind him Gary scuttered over the wall on his six bony legs. She could have talked to him if she wanted—she still had his tooth in her pocket—but she remembered what had happened before and didn’t dare. Her father arrived a few moments later, forced to take the long way round. He emerged through a door in the house behind the courtyard. “Oh, sweetheart, you look so much better,” he said, putting a withered hand on her cheek. She closed her eyes and smiled. It was so good to be back with him, to have him be alive. She refused to question that feeling.

“You saved me, you healed me,” she said, feeling like a toddler, feeling like her dad was the strongest man on earth. “I got too close to the fungus queen. That was supposed to be fatal.”

Dekalb put an arm around her shoulder and lead her through the house. The furniture inside, the fixtures of the rooms meant nothing to her. They passed through the front door and into the street overrun with trees.

“I didn’t know I had it in me,” he said. “Your Egyptian, um, friend came and found me. He said you were dying and I was the only one who could stop it. I didn’t know what he was talking about but then I saw you looking so blue and still and I couldn’t help it, I just picked you up and held onto you and suddenly you started coughing. I guess I did something. It left me so tired, though. I kind of want to just go back to my tower.”

“What about her?” Sarah asked, fear suddenly blooming inside her, cold and sweaty. “What about the one I shot, the, the lich I shot?”

Ptolemy raised one arm and pointed down the street. Sarah saw the building where she had taken refuge. One whole side of its facade had crumbled down into the street. In the exposed innards of the place she saw a tangle of rebar sticking out of half of a retaining wall. A human figure had been impaled on half a dozen spars—clearly the work of someone with superhuman strength. She glanced at Ptolemy and the mummy bowed.

The impaled woman looked nothing at all like the blight demon. She was short, almost as short as Sarah and her skin was barely mottled with fungus. Her head was missing altogether. Sarah looked down and saw it near the woman’s feet, scorched and silvered. It sat on top of the remains of a campfire.

“He burned it for six hours straight,” her father told her. “That should do it. She wasn’t like Gary. I’m pretty sure.”

Sarah felt weak and sick and feverish but she had to see for herself. She climbed up into the ruined building, whimpering a little every time she put her foot down on a pile of broken bricks and it started to slide away from her. Eventually she reached the skull. She picked it up and slammed it against a block of concrete. It cracked open and inside she found only ashes.

It was about as dead as you could get. It would have to be enough.

Looking at the corpse, of what had been done to sanitize the lich, a cold feeling seeped through her hands, her wrists. Up her forearms. She had something to do. A duty. She had pretended like she was done, that her responsibilities were discharged. She had hidden in fear. Not anymore. She knew what had to be done.

“The Tsarevich isn’t going to like this,” she said, scrambling back down into the street. “I think we just declared war. What happened to her soldiers?”

The soapstone buzzed under her fingers. i scattered chased them chased they scattered

Sarah nodded. “So they probably went back to their master. What about those relics she was after, did you figure out why he wanted them?”

no

Sarah frowned. He could be clear-spoken when he wanted.

He had gathered them up while she was examining the dead lich’s skull. He handed them to her and she studied them. The length of fur was matted and disgusting. The noose looked like it might fall apart at any second. She studied the sword, though, and something about it called to her. It was ancient, truly ancient, and bright green with verdigris. The blade had fused with its scabbard and showed a spot of bronze at its tip, as if someone had used it like a walking stick and repeatedly struck it against hard ground. The hilt was made of twisted cable and fashioned in the shape of a howling warrior. She grasped it with one hand, intending to wave it through the air a few times and get a feel for its balance. Before she could lift it, though—

—dare you, I’ve given you a command! You will do as I say, and you’ll do it now, lass, because there is one fucking lot more riding on this than you think. I—

The voice in her head made her want to drop the sword, made her want to cover her ears it was so loud. It made her teeth shake. When it stopped she felt like someone was looking right into her head, like whoever it was who belonged to the sword had noticed her intrusion, had become aware that she could hear him. At the same time she realized exactly who it was. Or who he had always said he was.

Sarah, he said. Dearie, you’re not supposed to be here. Not yet.

“Hi, Jack,” she replied. She let go of the sword. It clattered on the street. Her hand buzzed and shook—she had to grab her wrist to make it stop. It felt like she’d been polluted by bad energy, but the feeling faded once she was rid of the relic. She turned to her father. “Whose sword is this?” she demanded. “Did it belong to Jack before he became a ghost?”

Dekalb’s eyes clouded over. It was a lot of memories to process at once, evidently. “Jack? No... no, he never had a sword. And Jack’s no ghost, sweetheart.”

“What?” she asked. She was still connecting the dots in her head.

“Listen, I knew Jack pretty well. We worked together, fought together. He even killed me, after all. But now he’s just another ghoul. He was chained to a wall uptown from here the last I saw of him, with a broken neck, unable to move or walk or hunt. He was as brainless as any of them. Jack was never the type to become a ghost, anyway. He would have erased himself from the network before he let that happen.”

“Listen,” Sarah said. “I have the ability to talk to—to ghosts, and ghouls, and dead people who can’t speak for themselves, but only if I have something really important to them. Like Gary’s tooth or Ptolemy’s heart scarab. Who does this sword belong to? It was somebody the Tsarevich wanted to talk to, they called him, what was it—the Celt?” She glanced at Ptolemy, who nodded in agreement.

“There was this one guy,” her father told her. “He was a ghost, sure. Gary knew him better than I did but he was from Orkney, up in Scotland. He was a Druid.” Dekalb picked up the sword and looked at it, then showed it to Gary. The scuttling little skull-bug jumped up and down on his six pointy little feet in excitement. “Gary says yes, this was his sword. His name was Mael something, I remember now. He helped me at the end, he talked to the mummies on my behalf. Mael Mag Och. Why, sweety? What does he have to do with anything?”

“Well, he’s lied to me, for a start. He’s lied to me for years. He told me he was somebody else. He brought me here—he’s been playing me for a fool. Who knows what else he set up?” She frowned at the green sword in her father’s hand. “Right now, I am willing to believe,” she told him, “that Mael Mag Och has been playing with us all, like checkers on a board.”

The skull-bug did a little dance it was so excited.

“Yeah,” Dekalb said, “Gary says that sounds exactly like Mael.”

END OF PART TWO OF MONSTER PLANET

Chapter Three

Back on Governors Island the living came before Dekalb, one after the other. As he healed each of them he sank lower and lower in the lawn chair they’d set up for him but the survivors didn’t seem to care. One by one they came up and he put his hands on their shoulders and when they walked away they breathed easier and their skin looked clear.

It seemed to surprise no one on the Island that Dekalb could heal them. It was lich magic that had infected their crops, their buildings, their bodies. Of course it was lich magic that would undo the blight. Sarah wondered if they expected her father to clean the mildew off the buildings, too. Did they want him to go around the gardens in the middle of the island and heal each individual stalk of winter wheat?

“I’m getting hungry,” he said, when she stopped the line momentarily. He had slipped down so far in his chair his hands lay across the ground like discarded bones. His head rolled around on his chest. “But don’t worry, pumpkin, this will all be fine. When I'm done we can find a house for you.”

Sarah stood up and looked at the ones who had already been healed. They were gathered in a joking, laughing knot, their hands on their knees, their mouths open and wet as if they were practicing being healthy again. “You guys,” she said. “Help me out, will you? He needs food. Meat, if you have any.”

“I’m not wasting my time hunting up grub for some fucking ghoul,” one bearded man shot back. “Not after years of them hunting me.”

Sarah sighed, exasperated, but her father clasped at her wrist. “Honey, go easy on them. They’ve lost so much. They don’t have what we have now.”

She left him there with the living still crowding in, demanding their turn with the healer. She headed toward the warehouse buildings at the south end of the Island—there had to be something there for him. On the way she touched the soapstone. “Is he behaving himself?” she asked. She had left Ptolemy in charge of Gary. The skullcrab hadn’t made a threatening move since the time it paralyzed her but she hadn’t lived to the ripe age of nineteen by being stupid around the dead.

he quietly in speaks in riddles and riddles sits speaks in quietly, the mummy told her.

Sarah let it go. She crossed through the cool, shadowy interior of Liggett Hall, which bisected the island, and came out into the verdant fields beyond. The southern part of the Island remembered what it had been before the Epidemic, a sprawling Coast Guard base. Three piers stood out into Buttermilk Channel, their names drawn from a naval alphabet: Lima, Tango, Yankee. The old ball fields might have been turned into farmland but basketball hoops still stood in the middle of green pastures, listing a little in the sun and the wind like emaciated scarecrows.

To get to the warehouses Sarah had to pass by the strangest of the Island’s structures, the commercial facilities off Tango Pier. There was a hotel, a laundromat, even a supermarket with shelves bare so long they sagged under their own emptiness. Vending machines once full of ice cold Pepsi stood forgotten or vandalized on every corner. Weirdest of all was the burnt-out shell of a Burger King restaurant, something Sarah had only heard of before in her father’s bedtime tales of a decade earlier. Metal signs creaked in the evening breeze down there and old neon tubes stood lifeless and cold. The soft and rusted shapes of cars lurked in the weed-choked parking lots.

When the kerosene lamps were turned on up in Nolan Park, in the old half of the Island, they looked natural, they looked normal. In the gingerbread houses a little flickering light was a welcome thing. Down on Tango Pier an open flame looked altogether different. It looked wrong in front of all those broken unpowered light bulbs. It was no surprise people rarely came down so far—the survivors tended to stay on the north side except to work in the fields or if they needed something from the general supplies down on Lima Pier. Even then they usually sent a slack to do the job.

Sarah was a little surprised then when she saw Marisol standing in front of the main warehouse. The Mayor had a shovel in her hand and a small bundle wrapped in white cloth over her shoulder. Sarah stopped in her tracks and didn’t move, embarrassed for some reason to be caught in such a quiet place.

They just looked at each for a while, and it wasn’t a particularly friendly look. Marisol, after all, had threatened Sarah with summary execution the last time they’d spoken. For her part Marisol’s bundle was readily discernible, from closer up, to be a dead human body.

“Did you come to help me bury my son?” Marisol asked. Her voice was rough with crying but it lacked much in the way of emotion.

Sarah sought out her own voice. “He didn’t make it?” she asked.

“He wasn’t magic, like you. Dekalb’s daughter lives and my Jackie dies. We’re just normal people, you see. He didn’t have any magic.”

Sarah started to object, to say that she had no magic, but it wasn’t true. Her father could have saved the boy. If he hadn’t rushed to Manhattan to fix her broken arm, he could have stayed on Governors Island and saved the boy. If he’d even known that he had that power—if Sarah had told him, if she had broken her promise to Gary and told the secret—

There were too many ways to feel guilty, and too many possible excuses, for Sarah to make any moral sense out of the boy’s death. She said nothing and hoped her silence would sound like solemnity.

The two of them entered the field of winter wheat and hacked out a narrow space for a grave. The Islanders always buried their dead in their fields, just as a practical measure—the bodies returned certain nutrients to the soil. If the corpses were sunk deep enough the health risks were minimal.

They didn't waste time getting started. Marisol dug and Sarah pulled and pushed and carried dirt out of the hole. It was horrible, draining, sweaty work and neither of them had brought any water or food. Sarah’s sweatshirt turned into a stained rag almost instantly. The dirt got into her eyes, into her nose. It coated her lips and stuck to her hair. She didn’t complain once.

At first she just thought she was being polite. That she was helping Marisol because she’d been asked to do so. She figured it was the right thing to do and she was a good person. She even considered that this would get her in good with Marisol, whose help she would probably need in the future—she was earning credit at the price of her own sweat. After the first hour though when her arms started to burn and her hands cramped up and her back became one fused bar of glowing heat and pain from bending down and then rising up over and over and over, after all that, she stopped thinking about herself.

Burying Jackie wasn’t a political maneuver or a gesture of apology. It was an ugly necessity and she was there when the time came. It was just one more task on a list of things that had to be done.

When the hole was deep enough Marisol just knew it and she put her shovel aside. She held out her arms and Sarah picked up the boy’s tiny body. Jackie weighed next to nothing but he didn’t feel like a corpse in Sarah’s hands. She knew what it was like to hug a skeleton like her father or a mummy but Jackie felt different. His flesh was cold but still soft and pliant. The winding sheet didn’t cover his head very well and she got an unwelcome look inside. She saw the hole in the middle of his forehead.

Sarah knew what that hole was for. In Somalia, in her first years under Ayaan’s tutelage when she was still too young to carry a gun Sarah had been given the task of sanitizing the dead. She had a little hammer and a chisel for the task and she’d learned to be quick about it—the dead didn’t take long to come back, not long at all. When a soldier fell you paid them the final respect. You sent them off to rest by destroying their nervous system. So they could be dead, truly dead, not the restless kind.

She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to do it to your own flesh and blood. Your only child. Wouldn’t you want, despite all wisdom to the contrary, to just see them move again, to see their eyelids flutter open? Wouldn’t that stay your hand even just for a moment?

But of course Marisol was tough. Ayaan had recognized it when she’d stood on the Island and looked at the bleak future facing the survivors. Marisol was tough and she could make hard decisions. Sarah handed the woman her son and watched as she laid him down gently in the worm-riddled earth. Then Sarah reached down and helped Marisol climb up out of the grave. Together they pushed the dirt over the boy, concealing him forever from view.

Marisol didn’t say any prayers or offer the boy a eulogy. Her obvious grief, written in the streaks of dirt on her face, was eloquence enough. Sarah sat and watched her and wondered why she didn’t feel just as strongly about Ayaan. Maybe because it wasn’t real to her yet. Maybe it was because Ayaan hadn't stopped moving yet. After about half an hour of just sitting and mourning Marisol turned and looked at her. “What do you want?” she asked.

Sarah understood what she was being asked. Why had she come to Governors Island, and what would it take to get her to leave? “I won’t lie to you. I’m on a dangerous journey and no good is coming of it. Originally I was on a rescue mission. Now I’m after revenge.”

Marisol smiled, a quiet, overworked smile. “Jack taught me about revenge. He said it was the only form of suicide accepted by the Catholic Church.”

Sarah shrugged. “Okay, maybe revenge isn’t the word I want. We used to call it sanitation. The woman who raised me is dead now. Undead. It’s my last duty to her to put a bullet in her head.” She looked down at the fresh grave. That had been Marisol’s last duty to her son. It was the same. She wanted to say as much but she knew the words would profane Jackie’s death. “I need guns, and I need soldiers. Right now though I need some meat to feed my father.”

Her father—wasn’t it also her duty to sanitize him?

No. She would never think about that again. Anyway. Ayaan had told Sarah a hundred times what she wanted done if she ever turned into one of the walking dead. She had left explicit instructions. Her father seemed to want to go on.

She refused to explore that thought any further.

Marisol helped her find what she needed in the main stores. An economy-sized bag of pork rinds, guaranteed not to spoil for decades to come. They brought it north, into the half of the island where a bonfire was already being built, where lights were coming on in the houses and the sound of playful violins and acoustic guitars hung in the air like the music had gotten caught in the tree branches. They found Dekalb slumped forward across his own knees, still sitting in his lawn chair, while all around him living people set about making a communal dinner. The lich took the pork rinds from his daughter and tried to tear open the bag but he just didn’t have the strength. Sarah did it for him. As she handed the bag to her father she looked at Marisol, and Marisol looked back. It was a lot more comfortable, the silence that passed between them, than it had been before.

“We need to find you a house,” Dekalb said around a mouth of what looked to Sarah like dirty pink styrofoam. “If you’re going to stay here with me you’ll need a proper house. You can’t live in the ventilation shaft with us, it’s not healthy.”

Sarah’s brow furrowed. “Daddy, I didn’t plan on staying,” she said. “I’ve got work to do. Important stuff.” She felt like an infant as the words came out of her mouth.

Dekalb shook his head. “It’ll wait,” he told her. “We have way too much catching up to do. And there’s the question of your education. Marisol, what about the officer’s quarters over by the schoolhouse, what’s available over there?”

“Dad!” Sarah interjected, “I—”

He pushed his hand into the bag and rustled it in his annoyance. “I will not let you be put in danger again,” he told her. He drew out a handful of rinds and shoved them into his permanently stretched-out rictus. “Who’s the grown-up here, after all?”

Chapter Four

The giant truck rocked up on one set of giant tires as it crushed an abandoned car on the interstate, a thousand tiny glass cubes exploding from the crushed windshield, rotten struts and shocks popping and collapsing and squealing and then it was over. In the bed of the truck Ayaan held onto a roll bar until the truck stopped bouncing and then clicked on her walkie-talkie. “Bring up a wrecking crew,” she said. “The flatbed won’t make it past this one.”

A few dozen living men in blue paper scrubs came rushing up with prybars and sledgehammers. They made short work of the rusted-out car, taking it to pieces and hurling the wreckage into the undergrowth on either side of the road. They had to move quickly. Behind them the Tsarevich’s flatbed trailer was surging forward, its ranks of wheels turning in fits and starts as the giant vehicle moved forward one staggering step at a time. A hundred corpses heaved at it with their shoulders, their bent backs, their straining fingers. On top six more ghouls turned the cranks of giant flywheels, feeding storage batteries so they would have electricity for the night to come. Living gunners crewed heavy machine guns mounted in pintles at two positions on the flatbed. The green phantom sat strapped into a chair on a high superstructure from which he commanded a good view of their surroundings and everything that happened in the column of vehicles. At the back of the flatbed the Tsarevich himself reclined in his yurt, quite hidden from view. There were plenty of rumors that claimed he was actually not in there at all, that the flatbed was a complete ruse and that he was hidden elsewhere. Ayaan wouldn’t have blamed him for being a little cagy.

The attack on his person had shaken him badly and the death of Cicatrix had left him without a familiar supply of food. Once the Tsarevich had learned that Amanita was also dead, well, something had changed. He had gone from being hurt and confused to being galvanized. He had moved quickly to get his people on the road. He’d had plenty of enthusiastic help, too. The living and the dead had worked side by side to get vehicles ready, to pack up their supplies and belongings, and do whatever it took to stay near the prince of the dead. Where they were going and what they would do when they arrived was still a complete mystery to them. Ayaan, who only knew a little more, found she had too much work to get done to be asking a lot of questions anyway.

Behind the flatbed a fleet of hundreds of barely-functional cars and buses followed, their engines blowing blue smoke across a landscape that had reverted to the primeval. Ayaan remembered a time when cars were commonplace, even in her native Somalia, but she had forgotten just how noisy they were and how much of a mess they made. Most of the vehicles hadn’t seen use in over a decade and many were so badly rusted they fell to pieces after only a day or two. It didn’t matter. The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever use from his refinery on Cyprus, and there was no shortage of abandoned cars.

Ayaan had been on one of the missions to collect vehicles. Regardless of what she’d lived through and regardless of what she had become it had still spooked her. The cars had been waiting for them, parked in orderly rows outside of shopping malls and airports and stadiums. They had been left there intentionally and their owners had fully expected to come back and reclaim them at short notice. Every vehicle had been personalized in some way—a faded bumper sticker, a graduation tassel hanging from a rear-view mirror, a paint job with simulated flames. Personal effects littered the passenger seats, fast food wrappers were stuffed into the leg wells. The doors were all locked, the windows rolled up tightly. The batteries were long since drained and the gas had evaporated out of their fuel tanks, but those two problems were readily solved. The cars still worked, at a fundamental level. But no one had ever come back. The cars were forgotten. Left for dead.

It had spooked her not for the presence of any real horror but for the absence of any normality. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that ninety-nine per cent of the world’s population had died in the first months of the Epidemic. Surrounded by ghouls and cultists and liches it was easy to pretend that the world hadn’t been emptied out. Standing in a parking lot bigger than the village where she’d been born, however, watching the sun gleam from every piece of glass and mirror, Ayaan had been forced to accept it, to accept everything that had been lost.

The cars had been given a kind of afterlife now, she supposed. Each car held a single living person—the driver—and as many handless ghouls as could be stuffed into the rest of the interior, the back seat, the trunk. The green phantom and the Tsarevich kept them docile, but Ayaan kept wondering what the drivers must be thinking. Were they pleased with themselves, were they secure in the knowledge they were doing a holy duty? Or did they worry every single second that one of their passengers would break the spell, wake up and look around and realize just how hungry they were?

Ayaan looked forward and saw the road obscured ahead by the branches of a weeping willow. The tree’s roots had torn up the asphalt and sent cracks running through the blacktop in every direction. “I need a lumber crew,” she said, and living women with chainsaws came running forward. Ayaan tried not to think about the last time she’d seen a chainsaw.

Behind the ghoul-filled cars came tow trucks and fuel tankers and 18-wheelers containing mobile mechanics’ shops and crates full of spare parts for the cars as well as kitchens for both the living and the undead. Behind the support vehicles came the stragglers—those living who didn’t know how to drive, mostly, a tailback of them that receded into the distance. They kept up as best they could. The column of vehicles moved forward only a few miles an hour but it never stopped. The wrecking crews and chainsaw teams cleared debris while a pair of steam rollers and road graders were available if the way became truly impassible. Whatever the Tsarevich hoped to find out west he intended to get there in a hurry.

There would be serious obstacles to come, Ayaan knew. Rivers to ford. Mountains to climb. There would be weeks of slow going ahead of them. So far not a single person had complained.

Well. There was Semyon Iurevich. Though he didn’t complain so much as beg for forgiveness and for an end to his unlife. Even over the noise of the cars and the chainsaws Ayaan could hear his screams.

There had been quite a bit of debate over what should be done with the apostate lich. It had been suggested he should be fed to ghouls—the ultimate insult paid to the most vile of traitors. Yet ghouls did not eat their own kind. The dark energy repulsed them far more than the decomposing, suppurating flesh enticed them. It had been noticed that ghouls would quite happily eat dead human meat as long as it wasn’t currently being animated. It would have been simple enough to smash in Semyon Iurevich’s brains and then feed him to the dead, but that lacked an element of dark justice, as far as the Tsarevich was concerned. It lacked torture.

Behind her on the flatbed Ayaan could have watched, if she so chose, what the Tsarevich had finally deemed fit. Semyon Iurevich was hanging from a gibbet by his neck, his eyes turned upward to the sky. Stripped of his bathrobe it had turned out he was quite fat. Now a living man with a machete was slicing off thin strips of the lich’s body, starting with the soles of his feet and working his way up. As each slice came off he would drop it in a blender and puree it until its dark energy had completely dissipated. The resulting slurry was dribbled into the mouths of the ghouls who worked so hard hauling the flatbed across New Jersey.

The best estimate held that Semyon Iurevich would be nothing more than a screaming skull long before they reached Indiana.

The bastard lich had diddled with her head, he’d gotten his rotten little fingers in her brain. Ayaan, who had never believed in revenge, did not enjoy listening to his screams. At least not too much.

Chapter Five

In the dark Sarah lay in bed and tried not to look across the room. Not more than four feet away, sitting in a chair because he did not sleep, was a corpse. A walking corpse, a hungry, dead, ex-human being with broken nails and ruptured skin and a face stretched as tight as a mask across his skull. The feeling had started to slide over her like a cold wet blanket at dinner the night before. He had sat apart. He had put people off their food. She had realized, while she gnawed on a stalk of celery, that he disgusted her, too. That this particular corpse was her father made less difference than she might have hoped. He was dreadful in appearance. Lesions filed every crease of his skin. Fluid had pooled in one half of his body and left dark patterns of bruising down one arm, one cheek. His eyes had sunk into his skull, his nose had shrunk down to little more than a scrap of leather. Even just by moonlight it was hard to look at him and not feel her skin crawl.

Dekalb stood up against the light coming in the window. He tapped at Gary’s skull with a finger no thicker than a pencil. In silhouette he looked terribly thin. More like a stick figure than a man. The terror drained out of her, little by little. It was her father, she told herself, it was the man who used to hug her and feed her pieces of carrot out of a plastic bag and who would carry her canteen for her when it got too heavy.

It was also a dead thing, a withered, sad thing. Just like Jackie had been, the little boy she had helped bury.

Too many thoughts. She rolled over and pretended to be sleeping.

Sarah wondered if everyone went through this. At a certain age did everyone look at their father, that being who had once been so tall and strong, and see just a frail old man? Of course very few people would ever see their fathers like this.

Too many thoughts. She couldn’t sleep. She took Gary’s tooth from her back pocket and looked across the room at the crab-legged thing on top of the dresser. The skull had a full set of teeth, both top and bottom. The tooth in her hand was an incisor but he wasn’t missing any. He must have regrown the tooth the mummy had pulled out of his head. Instead of shuddering at the thought she curled her hand around the tooth and made contact.

Why, look who’s dropped by for another chat. The skullbug didn’t move or react in any way. It looked preternaturally like a sleeping cat basking in a ray of moonlight. In her head Gary sounded a lot more excited.

“Let’s get one thing clear,” Sarah told him, the words staying in her throat so her father wouldn't hear. “If you try any of that paralysis bullshit again I will personally take you out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and drop you in. Dad might subconsciously heal you but I don’t think he can teach you how to swim.”

I can’t tell you how scared I am.

Sarah glared at the skull. “I already have the boat.”

And I have something you need, or we wouldn’t be talking. You can threaten me all you like, Sarah, but you can’t do anything about it.

He was baiting her. He wanted her to get angry. He wanted her to kick him or throw him against the wall or say something cruel. Why? Maybe even that level of human contact would be something he wanted. Or maybe he just enjoyed winding her up.

She didn't have the energy to try to figure it out.

“It’s about Mael Mag Och. The guy I thought was called Jack.”

Ah. The old bastard. Yes, I knew him well. Did you want just general information or did you have a specific question?

“Why did he lie to me?” she demanded. She had tried to find out for herself, earlier, by going to the horse's mouth. Time and again she had grasped the hilt of the green sword. Mael Mag Och never answered. When she’d asked her father about that he’d said the old Celt must be screening his calls. Then Dekalb had been forced to explain to her what that meant. “He won’t talk to me now. For years though he came to me. He taught me things, gave me advice. Why? Why was it so important that I think he was Jack?”

He probably chose Jack’s name as someone you would have heard of, somebody you could be expected to trust, Gary told her. His voice was surprisingly soft and kindly. He was never the kind of person who could tell you simple facts. He came on like a nice guy and frankly, I still believe he has a good heart. But he has some pretty crazy ideas about who we are and why the world had to end. If he doesn’t want to talk to you then count yourself lucky.

“I guess he fooled you, too, huh?” Sarah asked.

For a while. Then I ate his brain. Of course, that says more about me than him.

Sarah shook with horror.

He’s insane. I can tell you that much for free, short cake. He told me once his god sent him back from death so that he could oversee the extinction of the human race. He didn't strike me as the kind who would give up on a commandment from a god.

Chills ran down Sarah's back. Extinction...? Was that what he wanted? Why had he helped her, then? What kind of game was he playing behind her back? It had to be something else.

Whatever he asks you, whatever he asks from you. Don’t give it to him.

“Thanks for the advice.” Sarah put the tooth back in her pocket and rolled over again. She could hear her father moving around on the hardwood floor. He didn’t sound like a human being. His footsteps weren’t loud or strong enough.

Too many thoughts.

In the morning white sunlight marched up the sheets and eventually hit her in the face. Sarah wrinkled her nose but eventually she had to give in. She sat up in bed and saw her father sitting in the chair across the room. He had a book in his hands.

“There was a time when I was too weak even to read,” he told her, his mouth curved into something wistful, something approaching a smile but never quite reaching it. He was so much less horrible, less, well, disgusting when he talked. He had her father’s voice and that made all the difference. Grateful, she sat up and listened attentively. “That was before I figured out I could take energy from the ghouls like a sort of vampire. I’ve had a hard time of it, kiddo.”

“I’m... sorry, Dad,” she said, and put her feet down on the floor. Her shoes were lined up next to the bed, in case she had to get up for an emergency in the middle of the night. Ayaan had taught her that, not her father. She slipped into them effortlessly.

“I can’t tell you how proud I am of what you’ve accomplished. It’s not easy moving around the world these days, I should know. I came to New York back when all the ghouls were still here. I’m a little peeved with Ayaan. She said she would take care of you.”

Sarah looked down at the floor. Her head was too fuzzy to process much. “Actually, that’s kind of something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.” She stood up and shivered. Her sweatshirt was in the laundry, leaving her with just a tank top. It was cold in the bed room—no central heating anymore. Wrapping her arms around her she tried to look him in the eye, like an adult. “She’s... dead. She got captured by the Tsarevich and... I’ve been following her, trying to save her but I waited too long, I could have, I could have stopped it, somehow, if I had taken the fight to them, if I hadn’t been so cautious but now she’s undead and. And. And. I have to sanitize her now. I have to save her from being one of those... things.” She stopped herself. She had been about to say that she needed to save Ayaan from being a lich. He might take that the wrong way.

He stared at her unblinking. She couldn’t remember if he still had eyelids or not.

“Okay, that came out all wrong. Can I start again?” she asked.

“No need,” he told her. His head tilted backward and his eyes clouded over and she wondered if he was having the ghoulish equivalent of a stroke. Then he went to the dresser and touched the green sword. “So you were trying to rescue Ayaan. I see. It didn’t work out. You can’t blame yourself for that. It wasn’t your fault.”

“It’s... not?” Sarah asked. She wondered what that he could know that she didn’t.

“Ayaan was a devout Moslem. She hated the idea of ever becoming ritually unclean,” Dekalb said, fiddling with the sword. He was too weak to actually pick it up and brandish it. “But she was also fiercely practical. I don’t think she would like the idea of anyone going out of their way to mop up after her. Especially not if it meant putting you in danger.”

That didn’t matter, Sarah thought. It wasn’t a question of what anybody wanted. It was a question of duty. She went to say it out loud... and couldn’t.

She left him, claiming she was going to eat breakfast with the survivors. The little house that Marisol had sorted out for the three of them (herself, Dekalb and Gary) was on the north side of Nolan Park, well away from the Victorian houses where the survivors lived. It was easy to slip away with no one seeing her. She remembered the time she’d slipped away from the camp in Egypt, scurrying over the wire. Funny that after so much time she was running away for exactly the same reason.

She went to the gardens and found a slack right away. Any of them would do. This one had been a woman and she still had breasts like empty winesacks that dangled down every time she bent over to pull up a weed. Her hair was cut with precision, perhaps done right before her death—though it badly needed to be washed Sarah could still see where it was supposed to flare out in a bob.

There was nothing in her eyes. Nothing at all. Sarah knew that look. She knew that when most people died it was their personality and their memories that went first. Everything that made them human beings. When oxygen stopped flowing in the brain the fine tracery of personhood just melted away, like frost on a window pane when the sun comes up. Now there was nobody home in this shell. It smiled at her with cracked lips, but only because it had been programmed to do so.

It was what she needed. She lifted up the noose in one hand and the fur armband in the other. There had to be a reason why the Tsarevich had sent half an army to retrieve them. “Mael Mag Och,” she said, staring into the slack’s eyes. “Mael Mag Och, please. Please, come forward and... and make yourself known.” She sighed. She had no idea how to do this. In the past he’d always come to her.

“Mael Mag Och... Jack... please. I need to talk to you. I need advice so badly and there’s nobody else. Please. I need you. I need you. I miss you so much.”

She kept at it for far too long before she finally had to admit defeat. Maybe it was her inability to concentrate. She had heard that about magic, that you had to clear your mind before it could work, that you had to approach it from a position of serenity.

She had too many thoughts in her head for that.

Chapter Six

Crate after crate of MP4s lined the metal shelves of the smallest of the Island’s warehouses. The small arms magazine was the best-maintained of the buildings outside of Nolan Park. Fresh paint inside and out, not a speck of dust. Someone had been busy, and it wasn’t the slacks. “We still don’t trust them in here,” Marisol explained. She showed Sarah the basement, filled with collapsible cots and a gravity-fed water purifier.

“About three years after we arrived a ship came through. People, living people were onboard and I can’t tell you how excited we were.” Marisol’s eyes went misty with time as she remembered. “We’d just gotten through yet another terrible winter and we were all half-dead. None of us had the energy to start digging up the baseball diamonds and start planting seeds. So when we saw the newcomers we shouted and waved and set off flares. This turned out to be a bad idea.”

“This must have been when I was still recovering,” Dekalb said. “I don’t remember any of it.” Gary perched on his shoulder like a morbid species of parrot. Sarah wished she could have left him resting in the house—this errand was one she definitely needed to be in charge of—but so far she hadn’t been able to tell her father anything.

“They were pirates,” Marisol went on. “They traveled from one enclave of survivors to the next, killing all the men, raping all the women and then killing them too, and stealing all the food. We figured that much out when they started shooting at us. I got everybody in here and sealed the door before they could even make landfall.”

There were weapons in the small, well-lit building that were advanced beyond anything in Sarah’s experience. Crazy Special Forces stuff. Experimental arms. Sniper rifles that got plugged into laptop computers and fired by remote control. Unmanned aerial vehicles little bigger than cooking pots that could fly into buildings and kill everyone inside on their own volition. Sarah picked up an enormous pistol from an open crate and checked its action. It was a .45 caliber ACP, a Heckler and Koch Mark 23 Mod 0 according to its spec sheet and it had a tubular laser aiming module on top. Sarah pointed the weapon at the wall with the safety still on and flicked on the LAM. Nothing happened. Well, sure. It had been twelve years at least since the weapon had been stowed away. The batteries would have run down or something.

Marisol came over to her, smiling, staying well uprange of the pointed weapon. She slapped a pair of night vision goggles on Sarah’s head and switched them on. In the green world of the NVGs she saw a brilliant pinpoint on the far well—exactly where the laser was pointing. Nice, she thought.

“We keep all the batteries charged with a little windmill on the roof. Not enough power to let us have light or heat in the houses but it keeps the guns ready to shoot.” Marisol took back the NVGs and continued her story. “Well, with us locked in here and with enough guns to last until the Second Coming the pirates didn’t have a lot of options. A couple of them got killed. We specifically didn’t go for head shots. When their own people got back up and started eating them they fell back to their boat. A couple of days later they just left. We shot the ghouls and came back out hungry but unscathed. The pirates had messed the place up a little, spray-painted graffiti on the houses, burned up half our furniture for firewood. They took those few crops we’d already put in the ground, even though nothing was ripe. It didn’t matter. We were alive.”

“I wish I had known this was happening. I would have helped,” Dekalb said.

Marisol and Sarah looked at his slight, bony frame, and then at one another. Nothing more needed to be said.

Sarah opened a crate in the middle of the room and dug through the shredded newspapers inside. Gingerly she lifted out a rifle with a bizarre blocky forearm and a curved rail running from the muzzle back to the receiver. It weighed less than the Mark 23 Mod 0 had, she thought. It wasn’t made of metal at all but some kind of lightweight resin. The only metal she could find on it was the stubby little barrel and the bullets themselves.

“Is this...?” she asked, unwilling to say it out loud in case it sounded foolish.

“Objective Individual Combat Weapon,” Marisol said, nodding. “The rifle that was supposed to replace the M16. It’s just a prototype. We have ten of them—I think they only ever made about five hundred before Congress killed the project.”

Ayaan had spoken about such weapons the way some people might talk about the houses they wanted to live in some day or what kind of food they would serve at their weddings. It fired regular NATO rounds or, with minimal reconfiguration, airburst munitions, the so-called smart grenades. The sighting system—which included not just an optical scope but laser, infrared, and night vision elements—had its own computer that could tell the difference between an ally and an enemy. If it detected an ally it wouldn’t shoot. The rifle was supposed to be smarter than its user. Sarah laid it back down. “So I’m sorry I interrupted. You fought off the pirates.”

“No,” Marisol told her. “We sat them out. From day one we’ve had a place like this. Some place safe we can run to and fortify as necessary. Whenever bad things happen we’re trained to come here and sit tight and wait it out. Jack taught me that.”

“Jack.” Sarah turned away so Marisol wouldn’t see her face. She felt deeply, deeply embarrassed, too lame even to feel guilty. As if she had had an affair with a man she’d always been told was Marisol’s husband only to find out he was somebody else altogether. Jack was dead, Jack was a ghoul hanging from a chain miles to the north but he lived in Governors Island and always would as long as the survivors remembered his teachings. Sarah had never met Jack in her life.

“You remember Jack, sweetie,” her father said, coming up to put a hand on her shoulder. “He was the Army Ranger who killed me.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said, blushing. She reached for another weapon and found a heavy plastic pipe with a slick translucent coating inside. Various bits and pieces could be clamped onto the tube. It was a SMAW according to its crate but she couldn’t remember what that stood for. “So. So, Marisol, that’s a great story about the pirates. I guess you weren’t just making conversation, though.”

“No,” the Mayor admitted. “I need you to understand. I owe you for killing the lich in Manhattan.” Sarah understood what Marisol didn’t say: she would have owed Sarah a lot more if Jackie hadn’t died. “You can have all the guns you can carry out of here. My people, on the other hand, are all staying here where I can keep an eye on them. Okay? I’m not going to let you have so much as one soldier.”

Sarah started to speaked but she was forestalled by her father. “That won’t be a problem,” Dekalb chirped. “Since we’re not going anywhere, either. Sarah’s going to stay here with me.” He stepped between the two women. “I have my own people to look after.”

She shook her head. She was going to have to confront him, and soon. It was just so hard. When he sat motionless in a chair he terrified her, he was one of the walking dead. When he got up and moved around and talked he was her long lost daddy. A big emotional part of her was terrified that if she said anything he would stop loving her and leave her life again.

Finding him on Governors Island, finding him still, in a certain sense, alive, meant so much. It changed her whole life. It gave her a life, where before she’d only had a past.

On some level she wondered if she was expecting too much from him. If she was setting herself up for disappointment. But no, she wouldn’t explore that just yet. She retreated into those corners of her mind where Ayaan’s training still reigned. Connecting with her father was going to make her vulnerable. It was going to hurt. She didn’t have time to resolve any of it, just yet. “Excuse me,” she said, and slipped out of the warehouse.

Outside she put her hand in her pocket and touched the heart scarab. “Ptolemy,” she whispered. “Have they mobilized?” Time for business.

perhaps vehicles one hundred perhaps vehicles, he told her. west heading west

She bit her lip. There was still time to catch the Tsarevich—and sanitize Ayaan—but she needed to get moving herself. “I only wish we knew where they were headed. We could just get there first and ambush him. If we follow in his footsteps there’s no telling what will be lying in wait for us. But the only person who might know where he’s headed isn’t talking to me.”

perhaps, the mummy told her, i there help can be i of help there
 

Chapter Eight

“You’ve been here before,” Ayaan said. It wasn’t a question.

Nilla turned around to look at her but the pale face under all that blonde hair gave away nothing. “I’ve been to lots of places,” she replied.

Ayaan nodded and smiled to herself. Her radio crackled and spat white noise at her but she ignored it for the time being. The two of them stood at the front of the flatbed. Ahead of them Erasmus guided the giant hot rod over a road surface that had been washed away by a dozen winters. Little but a scoured-out track in the side of the mountain remained.

They were getting close. Even Ayaan could feel it, a deep thrumming in her bones. An almost musical feeling that something big and powerful and wonderful was right over the next rise. Of course she’d been feeling that for days, since long before they’d reached the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

It had been a long and arduous journey. The Tsarevich had given them little encouragement but the zealots had never so much as threatened to rebel. Dozens of them had died: dehydration and the meager traveling rations had taken some while others were accidentally crushed by the drivers of the transport vehicles. A few had succumbed to violent fevers or terrible infections. It didn’t matter. Moments after their eyes fluttered shut their bodies rose and they simply entered their next phase of service to their master. It was something they looked forward to.

Almost all of the vehicles had broken down eventually and it became harder and harder to replace them. The dead and the living together took to walking along after the flatbed, taking turns at the ropes when they hauled it over rises, heaving with all their strength to pull it out of muddy ditches.

After the first week they came across larger and larger breaks in the tree cover and then the world seemed to open up wide and the sky got big as the forest ended and the prairie began but little changed. They had weathered brutal sun and punishing rain. The column had never stopped. The rain gave way to days so dry and dusty Ayaan had to wear a cloth around her face and sunglasses to protect her eyes. The ghouls were oblivious to the dust that scrubbed their skin right off and burned their faces an angry red. The living made do as best they could.

In all of that empty land Ayaan had seen not a single survivor. Of course the living were hardly likely to make themselves known to the column, but she had seen no signs of them at all: no villages, not even the thread of smoke from a distant campfire. If they existed at all they were like the fallen creatures she’d seen in Pennsylvania. Hidden away in places no one ever wanted to go.

Of the dead they saw many, and all of them were headed west. Whatever it was that pulled at Ayaan’s bones pulled them even more strongly. They could be spotted far to the north and south of the column sometimes, plodding along at the speed of death. Their faces didn’t turn to look at the strange caravan that passed them by. Their feet didn’t falter. They were being drawn onward inexplicably and inexorably. Ayaan wondered if something had happened recently to inspire them to come or whether this had been going on for years.

Prairie gave way to desert. The hills they climbed over turned silver or purple with sage, or a brilliant yellow where they were covered in millions of black-eyed susans, asters and fleabane. In the troughs between the rises broad swaths of grama or fescue or big bluestem grass flourished, anywhere there was a little water. They started to climb, the roads got steeper as the hills turned into mountains cloaked in loblolly pine and fir trees. They began to find pockets of snow hidden anywhere a hollow in the earth might give a little shade from the sun.

“This was all different,” Nilla said. She sat down on the edge of the flatbed, dangling her legs over the track. She gestured around at the mountains green with stunted pine trees and juniper bushes. “There was less green, more brown. All of this looked like... I don’t know. Like another planet, a dead one. I guess the ghouls ate it all, the vegetation, but then it grew back. It’s funny, isn’t it. The Source is for all of us, living and dead. It makes everything grow and it doesn’t play favorites.”

Ayaan didn’t pretend to follow Nilla’s train of thought. As for herself she wasn’t thinking much of anything, really, just watching the road go by beneath their wheels like the most tranquil movie in history. Here a sprig of bitterbrush would squeeze up between the broken rocks of the track. Next she would see the broad chevrons of the hot rod’s wheel tread where it had spun out a little in loose dirt. She had learned over the space of weeks to fall into a trance state whenever she wanted to. She remembered Erasmus standing at the portholes of the nuclear waste ship Pinega, watching the waves for days on end, just watching them rise and fall. She supposed this was the one great consolation of being dead. She was removed from time—her body did not recognize the passage of hours or days or months the way it had before she was murdered. Her period or at least the time when she should have menstruated had come and gone without so much as an episode of spotting. She didn't miss that, at least.

“Oh, shit,” Nilla said. It was shocking enough to make Ayaan look up. She saw nothing, really, except for a scar on the side of the mountain. A place where the trees weren’t as dense. She looked closer and saw a twisted piece of metal glinting dully between two trees.

“Something has come back to you,” Ayaan suggested. “A memory.”

Nilla grasped her wrist. Not in an aggressive manner. Like a little girl wanting some reassurance. “Come with me,” she begged and then she leapt down to the road. Ayaan followed, of course, though not altogether happily. She understood what was happening. Nilla had come this way on her journey to the east. Now she was going to have to recreate that passage but in reverse.

There had to be things in the past that had driven her across the country. Things no one would ever want to revisit.

Together they wove through the trees, climbing over deadfall, picking their way through whip-thin branches that showered them in dust and organic debris and crackling snow as they pushed through. The snow underfoot had formed a thin crust and it crunched like styrofoam under their footsteps.

Ayaan looked back at the column, which hadn’t stopped moving. She hadn’t been so far away from it in weeks and she felt strangely vulnerable, even with the trees arching over her. She turned again and saw Nilla getting ahead of her.

“What is it?” Ayaan called out. “What was it?” she asked, more softly. She found the piece of metal she’d seen from the track, rusted and scorched. A line of rivets, some of them burst by metal fatigue and time, bisected the shard. She moved deeper into the woods and found more pieces, some of them embedded in tree trunks. The pines had grown around the wreckage in soft, flowing contours.

“Oh, no,” Nilla said from somewhere further into the forest. Her voice was as soft as the constant sound of needles falling through the branches. The same sound, the same softness, the snow made when it fell from the trees. Ayaan hurried on.

A long vane of metal arched up from the snow ahead of her like a pole driven into the ground. Though rust and general decay had claimed it Ayaan recognized it as the rotor of a helicopter. In a clearing ahead the majority of the aircraft’s wreckage stood forgotten and ill-used by weather, a standing circle of broken titanium and steel and Plexiglas. There had been a bad fire there once, presumably when the helicopter crashed. There were human remains in the circle. Simple bones, black with soot, white where the sun had bleached them. One of them was still moving.

He wore the uniform of a soldier, faded by sunlight but still draped with insignia and medallions. He had been partially eaten, most of the flesh of his legs and arms having been torn away, and he had been burned as well. Eyeless, nearly faceless, his skull stared up at the sky. The few muscles left in his arms were straining at a jagged length of metal that erupted from his ribcage. He was trying to get himself free. He’d probably been trying for twelve years.

Nilla knelt next to his head, her hands across her face. She didn’t say anything.

Ayaan understood. She came forward and put her hands on the tattered skin of the dead man’s head. She closed her eyes and let a pulse of dark energy trickle through her fingers, into what remained of his brain. He fell back on his spike and stopped moving. Nilla nodded emphatically and rose to her feet. “He didn’t want to trust me, but he had to,” she said.

“Careful,” Ayaan told her. “You’re starting to turn into a somebody.”

Nilla gave her a smile that started to melt Ayaan’s dead heart. The smile dropped from her face almost instantly, however. “Am I losing my mind, or do you hear that, too?” She turned around to look at the pieces of the downed helicopter.

Ayaan stood perfectly still, more still than she ever could have in life, and made herself all one ear. She listened, and tuned out the natural sounds around her, and listened again. She definitely heard it. The sound a helicopter’s rotor makes when it’s moving under power. How was it possible? Was this some kind of vehicular ghost? Ayaan had seen a lot of strange things but she wasn’t ready to accept that.

Then a helicopter went by over their heads so low its shadow darkened the clearing, so fast it was gone in the time it took for Ayaan’s eyes to adjust to the dimness. She glanced at Nilla, then started running back toward the road. The explosions started before she covered half the distance.

Fire erupted all around her. It touched the trees and filled the air with the stink of burning pitch, it ran in liquid waves over the snow and left smoldering ground behind. Ayaan dropped to her knees with her arms over her head as a second explosion tore into the roadway, a third, fire everywhere and the noise, a fourth, the noise was hammering at her, the air was jumping with it she could see pine needles leaping up off the ground as if the entire planet had been picked up and given a good shake.

She rolled onto her back and slid down into a hollow, into a little space of snow where a boulder had sunk into the earth. She reached out her hands and pulled Nilla in after her. Nilla started to speak but Ayaan shook her head no. She peered up, around the side of the boulder, and saw a helicopter hanging there in the air, close enough to touch, no, that was just her poor depth perception, the inability of her dead eyes to focus properly. The helicopter stood in the air over the flatbed, white and orange, and mummies leaned out of its crew hatch, mummies in the name of the Prophet mummies—did they want revenge? Did they seek revenge for the forty-nine mummies she had killed on Cyprus, she wondered?—and then there were more explosions, brilliant flowers spreading overhead, fire, and smoke.

Her brain rattled in her skull like an animal trying to get loose. She pulled her arms in close to her body, brought her chin down. Made herself small. Nilla’s dress was stained, ruined, and they were both soaked in snow melt and splattered with cinders, some of them still on fire. Ayaan brushed at the embers on her jacket, ran her fingers through her hair to shake them loose. The helicopter just hung there in the air. Rifles started firing back from the ground, living cultists with rifles shooting at the helicopter but its pilot knew enough to stay out of range. Where were the machine guns? She had inspected the .50 caliber machine guns on the flatbed herself, had stripped and cleaned them on the long trek when she had been glad for anything to do, anything to break the boredom. Where were they, why weren’t they firing back? They had plenty of range.

The helicopter assault must have targeted them. Smart. Nilla started climbing up, clambering up the side of the boulder but Ayaan pulled her back down. They were only ten feet or so from the roadway, the column. Even if the mummies didn’t get them the column might, it had to turn around. It was the only logical move. The column had to turn around.

Where was Erasmus? Where was the truck? She hadn’t seen it in days, it had been sent to scout ahead but they needed it now. The column had to turn around. There had been a narrow defile in the side of the mountain maybe a quarter mile back, it wouldn’t be easy but the column had to turn around and head for the relative safety of the rock walls. Where was Erasmus? The column could move a lot faster, could get turned around a lot faster with the truck, the straggling cultists could clamber up onto its cargo bed, they could hang on to the outside of the truck.

The Tsarevich wasn’t turning the column. The column was still plodding forward, surging ahead at maybe three miles an hour as if there had been no attack, staying its course as if nothing had happened at all.

Another explosion tore through the thin air. Debris and metal fragments like flying daggers and body parts went flying, human body parts and it didn’t matter if they’d been alive or dead or undead, human bones and flesh went flying over Ayaan’s head like a horizontal rain of gore.

Where was the fucking truck? She heard it before she saw it, saw it only moments before it went roaring right over her head, its wheels barely gripping the road. Mud and cinders poured down into her defile, splashed against the boulder. The truck roared past—and then she heard the distinctive fizzle and bark of an anti-aircraft missile jumping out of its launcher and she saw the rocket’s exhaust, a thin banner of white wind superimposed on the blue sky. She opened her mouth wide in exultation, in excitement, and whooped with joy as the missile bent like a perfectly hit football in the air, bent right for the fleeing helicopter. Something fell out of the side of the helicopter as it banked to try to throw off the pursuit. Something fell out and dangled there on a line like a spider.

It was Sarah.

Ayaan was too far away and the helicopter was moving too fast for her to really get a good look. She didn’t use her eyes. She sensed the energy there, as familiar as the hairs on the back of her own arm, an energy she’d lived with for years, since long before she had understood that such energy existed and could be seen with the right eyes. She knew that energy.

It was Sarah.

The whoop died in her throat and she grabbed at her teeth, literally reached into her mouth and grabbed her own lower jaw in terror. At any moment the AA missile was going to collide with the helicopter’s airframe, it was going to plow right through the tender aluminum skin of the helicopter, lodge itself inside and the sexual horror of that, the violation of it wasn’t lost on her, it would come inside the helicopter and then go off, detonate, its high explosive warhead would burst apart in a million tiny jagged pieces of shrapnel, each with its own trajectory, its own ballistic intent, and there would be enough of them to cut to shreds every person in the helicopter. There would be nothing left but pieces, parcels of flesh raggedly torn apart and bleeding and unrecognizable and falling out of the sky.

“Sarah,” Ayaan croaked.

“You know her?” Nilla asked, her face wide with confusion.

Ayaan got her feet under herself and she climbed back out of the defile, back up onto the roadway. The helicopter had dipped down into the trees and the AA missile followed. Ayaan’s chest lurched and a horrible belch came out of her, stinking of dead things. The missile touched the tree line and exploded harmlessly well behind the fleeing helicopter.

Okay. Sarah was safe. Ayaan didn’t breathe a sigh of relief. She no longer breathed. But her body sagged. Relaxed a little. Okay.

Except—if Sarah was attacking the Tsarevich, then—then—Sarah was—Sarah had chosen to become—Sarah had unwittingly aligned herself against—against Ayaan, who had—in some noncommittal way—sided with the Russian lich.

She had it an instant later but it didn’t help. Sarah had to know, had somehow learned that Ayaan was now a lich herself. Sarah had attacked specifically with the intent of sanitizing Ayaan. Except she had missed.

And except for the fact that Ayaan didn’t want to be sanitized. She had always believed that when the moment came she would beg for the bullet in the head. Kneel in the dirt and grovel for it. Only now—now she had something to live for, something bigger than herself. The Tsarevich was going to rebuild the world. Ayaan wanted to help him.

Sarah was fighting against them.

“For Christ’s sake, woman, help me,” someone screeched behind her. Ayaan turned and saw the green phantom literally, physically pulling ghouls and living cultists toward the flatbed, pushing them towards the fires there. They grabbed up armfuls of snow and tossed them on the flames. A few had real fire extinguishers and were trying to save the yurt. They moved faster than the others, faster than human beings were supposed to move. The green phantom was accelerating them. Ayaan glanced forward, at the machine guns mounts. One of them was gone altogether. A crater in the side of the flatbed was all that remained. Molten metal had dripped over the side of the bed and formed long silver icicles.

The other machine gun was on fire. Its ammunition crates were right there. If they went up, if they got too hot, every round in those crates—thousands of bullets—would go off at once, firing in random directions, carving out bloody linear tracks through the living and the dead on the flatbed, all of the cultists clustered around it, everyone in range. Ayaan surged forward and was repulsed by a wave of fire that tore upwards on a gust of wind. She moved forward again and saw that the crates were already on fire. She had a split second before she was shot full of random holes. Without even thinking she gathered up energy and blasted the crates with her power.

Stupid—incredibly foolish—but it worked. Fire couldn’t exist without fuel. The wooden crates disintegrated under her blast, the wood darkening, turning gray, turning to dust. Long belts of ammunition slithered out and slinked away across the flatbed or over the edge. It didn’t matter—the fire was out.

Ayaan adjusted her footing as the flatbed went over a dip in the road surface. It was still moving. She shook her head and then she grabbed the green phantom’s arm. “We have to stop the column,” she shouted at him. He didn’t respond fast enough for her. “Let me in to see the Tsarevich. Let me talk to him.”

“Who are you?” he demanded. “A month ago I punished you for trying to kill my master. Now you want to be his ally?”

She didn’t have time for this. “I do what I think is best.”

He crossed his arms across his robe. “A dangerous policy in the best of times. You can’t see him. He’s already given me his orders and they are that the column must keep moving, at all costs.”

“There could be another attack—if it were me I would have an ambush waiting for us up ahead. Come on. I know you don’t trust me. You called me a dog, once, a dog that had to be kept on a short leash. But trust me now. Please. So much is at stake.”

He shook his skull-like head. “I have my instructions. Why don’t you go and find Nilla? Make sure she’s safe.”

Ayaan grunted in frustration and turned away from him. The green phantom was willing to give her something, though.

“My name is Enni Langstrom,” he said.

She turned around. He was squinting at her, his sunken eyes narrow, suspicious slits.

“My name was Enni Langstrom. Alright? I trust you enough to know my name.”

She nodded, understanding. He wanted her to feel like part of the Tsarevich’s inner circle. He wanted to reward her allegiance. She was in.

Now she just needed to figure out where Sarah fit in. Please, she thought. Please, Sarah, just give up. Go home. She stared out at the trees that blanketed the mountain. Sarah had to be out there somewhere. Please, don’t make me fight you.

Ayaan had always been willing to sacrifice her life for a true cause. She had always believed that one life was a small price to pay for the common good.

If it came to that, to firing a blast of her darkness into Sarah’s body. If doing that meant preserving the Tsarevich and therefore the only chance the human race had left. If it came to that.

She nodded to herself. She would do it.

he valley formed a shallow bowl with a low ridge at the far end. There were buildings up there, and the weathered statues Sarah had seen before. They looked like stylized animals from the bottom of the valley.

Dead men and women stood at the edge of the valley. Not many—only three or four. They weren’t doing anything. Just standing there. The closest of the standing ghouls—a really nasty looking guy with little skin left on his body and no arms at all—turned to glare at her with empty eye sockets but he didn’t take a step toward her. After a moment he turned his face back toward the Source and his toothless jaw fell open. He wasn’t doing a thing. None of the corpses in the valley were doing anything but then most of them were truly, finally dead. One motionless body lay not three feet from where Sarah first stepped down into the valley.

A human body, half-decomposed, and it wasn’t even twitching. It had been a long time since Sarah saw that. She nudged it with the toe of her boot. She could see yellow ribs sticking out under its coat. She could see where the flesh had been torn away by teeth.

Nothing. No movement.

Squinting, she adjusted her grip on her OICW and glanced over her shoulder. The mummies waited patiently behind her, their shotgun barrels pointed at the sky. Ptolemy stood to one side of them. He shook his painted head back and forth—he had no better idea what was going on than she did.

Directly ahead the valley was carpeted with bones and moldering bodies. None of them moved. Skulls stared up at random angles at a lifeless sky. Femurs and humeri stuck up like fence posts. Heaps of pelvises and spines and xyphoid processes and metacarpals and phalanges made narrow hummocks, obscuring the soil beneath. Thousands of people had died in this valley, or at least died somewhere else and come here to fall down. No one had buried them or done anything with their corpses. They had been allowed to just rot away.

The freshest ones formed a perimeter, a wide semi-circle of stinking carrion. Toward the middle where the ground began to rise the bones were the oldest, broken and beige with time and neglect. No plants grew there, no birds flew overhead.

Sarah figured it had to be the Source that drew the bodies to this place. It was so bright she had to shade her eyes when she turned to face it, so close she could feel its energy like warmth on her skin. The dead had come for years, pilgrims to the place where the Epidemic began.

Sarah stepped over the corpse. It took a real act of will. For all of her life, at least all of her life that she could remember, rule one had been to never turn your back on a dead body. It was how you got killed. This one wasn’t hurting anybody, though. She stepped over it and dug her boot through a pile of bones to touch the ground beyond. She took another step, careful not to put any weight on the carpet of bones. Nothing happened.

Did the dead come so far just to stand around, to just wait to fall to pieces? Did they come because it felt good to be surrounded by that energy? Did it nourish them? Sarah had a lot of questions. What was that smell?

She turned and saw that one of the mummies had followed her into the bones. He stood there motionless, as dead as a statue, his shotgun braced on his shoulder. She sniffed the air. He smelled like warm apple pie. Sarah tried to remember when she’d ever had the chance to smell a piece of apple pie. Maybe with her father, before the Epidemic. Her father—just thinking of him sent a jagged length of metallic guilt stabbing through her heart. What she’d said to him had been unacceptable.

Burning apple pie. Apple pie? Maybe pumpkin pie. Hot spices. Burning spices. A trickle of white smoke wafted out from the mummy’s chest. With a hissing sound a piece of the wrappings on his head fluttered open and more smoke came out. The smoke smelled pungent, like incense. Like burning spice.

No way, she thought. “Back!” she shouted. The mummy didn’t move. “Get back!” she said, and shoved him backwards. She slapped at his pectorals, at his forehead and he rocked away from her as if there was no volition at all in his body. She grabbed the soapstone scarab in her pocket. “Ptolemy. Don’t let them come any closer.”

warms it the source consumes us it consumes even warms as it warms consumes us, he sputtered.

“Just stay back!” Even as she said it, though, another of the mummies—one with a poorly painted face—stepped forward. They wanted it. They wanted to be closer to the Source. It drew them just as it must have been drawing ghouls for years. And when they got close enough, when the energy in the air was thick enough, their bodies literally burned out from overexposure. The one thing they wanted more than anything in the world would kill them if they got too much of it.

A flash of motion on the far side of the valley startled Sarah. She flicked off the safety of her weapon but nothing appeared to attack her. It could have just been the sunlight bouncing off snow or a pile of bones falling over in the breeze. It could have been lots of things. She glanced back at the mummies and saw that they had all taken a step closer to the Source.

“No, listen to me,” she said, and moved to push the nearest one back. “You guys don’t even eat living things. How can you want this so badly?”

Source... Source, Ptolemy told her.

She shook her head. She heard a sound, kind of like the noise a match makes when it bursts into flame. She turned around again, her weapon up and ready.

A human form made of pure fire was running right at her faster than a cheetah. It came out of the middle of the valley. Flames licked backwards from its face, its chest. Its hands were wreathed in yellow fire. It was like nothing she'd ever seen before.

Sarah brought up her OICW and fired a three shot burst. She caught her target in center mass but it didn’t even slow down. Barreling toward her it left a smear of light on her retinas it was so bright. She fired again at its head, one burst, two, three, the rifle making a mechanical sound, a machine shop sound as it pumped bullets through its mechanism. She hit the head but nothing happened. She switched her rifle to full auto in the same second it shot past her, its fiery tail whipping at her exposed face and hands.

Ptolemy brought up his shotgun and blasted the back of its knees as it ran past him. The fiery thing stumbled and fell and rolled forward for a while, sliding over the carpet of bones. It writhed horribly, the flames off its back gusting and snapping, its bodily fluids sizzling out of it. Now that it had come to something approaching a stop Sarah saw the motorcycle helmet on its head, the bare teeth where its lips had been cut away. Its hands were nothing but sharpened ends of bone.

She heard the roaring of a truck engine and looked up. The Tsarevich had arrived. On the far side of the valley dead men and women were lining up to get into the bowl, to press closer to the Source. The giant truck weaved through the crowd, the gorilla perched on top of its cab.

Sarah grabbed the nearest mummy and tried to pull him away. It was like tugging at a marble column. She let go and reached for the soapstone.

“Ptolemy,” she said, “we’re dead if we get caught in the open like this. We have to fall back and hide.”

Source... the Source

“Fuck the Source!” she shouted. “Fall back! That’s an order!”

One of the mummies—one of the extremely old ones—started to move. He took a step away from the Source. Sarah nodded and shouted and jumped up and down. "Yeah! Move!" He took another step.

On the other end of the valley the flatbed appeared, being hauled forward by a hundred ghouls. On its back stood three figures dressed in green, black and white. Sarah stared at the one dressed in black. It was Ayaan. She was too far to see, it should have been impossible. But she knew. She lifted the OICW to her shoulder and looked through the scope. Yeah. The skin around her lower jaw looked too tight and her eyes were dark pits sunk into her face. But it was Ayaan.

In a moment, in a space of time so short she didn’t breathe, the valley was full of the running dead.

Sarah and the mummies fell back to fighting positions. They grabbed cover, braced themselves for battle. Readied their weapons, laid out their spare ammunition. Prepared themselves for a guts-and-glory firefight.

They didn’t stand a chance.

The mummies were fast. Faster than any living human. The carried plenty of ammunition for their shotguns. It didn’t matter. The accelerated ghouls were faster.

Sarah watched her ambush turn into a rout without really being able to identify the turning point. She only knew she had fucked up. With the mummies crouched behind boulders, with herself on a high crest of rock trying to snipe the enemy with an assault rifle she knew it was going to end badly.

One by one the mummies were picked off. The younger ones, the Roman-era mummies with painted faces went first. One of them was stupid enough to run out into the denied zone, the region too close to the Source where the undead caught fire. He was smoldering before three of the accelerated corpses piled on top of him. All four of them burst into flame at once, a rolling, scrapping funeral pyre. The mummy’s arms pinwheeled as he tried to throw the ghouls off of him. He was slowing down as Sarah watched, however, and in moments he had stopped moving altogether.

The other painted mummy had a little more sense, but less luck. He moved steadily from rock to rock, picking off ghouls and then diving back into cover. In the end it wasn’t a ghoul that got him at all but something else, some weird magic that turned his linen yellow. His wrappings began to tatter as if they were torn at by dry desert winds and then his bones just seemed to give out and he collapsed in a heap.

Rifle fire picked off one of the older mummies. He had been smart enough to stay put and wait for the ghouls to come to him. Hunkered down between two rocks he kept the barrel of his M1014 high, ready to take opportunistic shots. He was severely outranged, however, by a cultist with a Dragunov sniper rifle. Through the scope of her OICW Sarah saw the sniper line up the perfect bead. He took his shot before she had time to even shout out a warning. The mummy’s head popped open like a bag full of freeze-dried meat.

The rest of the mummies died when the Tsarevich decided to stop playing games and sent his whole force into the valley, hundreds of ghouls, at least a hundred living men and women with assault rifles and pistols and machine guns. The enemy just tore her troops to pieces. What had been a battle of attrition turned into a plain old-fashioned defeat as bodies living and dead flung themselves at Sarah’s positions. Ptolemy threw away his weapon and threw himself into the melee, grabbing at ghouls and hurling them into the denied zone, turning around to kick in the faces of living zealots, moving so fast Sarah saw him as an off-white blur digging into the enemy’s ranks. Then he disappeared.

He was just there one moment and gone the next. “Magic,” she breathed, but no. She would have seen magic. He had simply been tackled by so many of the Tsarevich’s forces that she couldn’t see him any more.

There was no more time.

So this is it, she told herself. The moment of truth. The mummies had sacrificed themselves so she could get close enough to finish her mission. Seven mummies had died for this. Two liches. Marisol’s son. All so she could fire a single shot. Sarah lifted the OICW to her lips and kissed it. She needed luck. She had the determination.

She looked down from her perch and saw Ayaan standing in the midst of the dead and the living. She was wearing a leather jacket with painted skulls on it, which made her a perfect target. Sarah lifted the scope of her weapon to her eye and centered the crosshairs on Ayaan’s forehead. It was a duty, a sacred duty that she carried out. The shot would give away her position. She would have only moments after she killed Ayaan to get the barrel in her own mouth and destroy her own brain. But then it would be over. A cold, almost frozen calm came over her. She'd been taught how to do this by the best. She slipped off the safety. Just one shot. She just needed... she needed something. One shot, right, she just needed one shot.

Sarah blinked but it just made her vision blur. She licked her lips but her tongue was dry. Was she... was she afraid? She just needed the one... the one shot. Silence filled her head—she couldn’t hear anything.

The OICW clattered against the slickrock at her feet. Somehow it had fallen out of her hands. She shook her head and reached for the Makarov in her pocket. It felt as heavy as a rock, as a, a boulder. Why was she so tired, suddenly? Sarah sat down, hard, and closed her eyes. She couldn’t open them again no matter how determined she was. What was going on?

Oh, she thought. This time, yeah. It was. Magic.

She felt hands grab at her, rough hands. They pinched her around the thigh, around the upper arm. Someone was dragging her, she could feel the top of her head sliding along the rock. She couldn’t hear anything, she was deaf. Her hands were pulled in front of her and encircled with a length of rope. She was being tied up.

Instantly her energy returned. Her eyes shot open and she could hear again—every ragged breath, every beat of her own heart. She turned her head wildly to the side to see what was behind her, what was flanking her. She was kneeling on a pile of bones. Somebody else’s bones were digging into her shins, her knees. She rolled around, trying to get comfortable. She couldn’t see Ayaan. The green lich—the one in the monk’s robe, the one whose face looked like a skull—was standing next to her. He pointed, his arm stretched out, one bony finger stabbing at the air and she looked.

They had Ptolemy beaten to a pulp. His legs were splayed wide open and bent at wrong angles. His arms were broken in multiple places. Men in light blue paper shirts stood around him, sledgehammers balanced on their shoulders. A girl maybe two years younger than Sarah was bent over him with a pair of garden shears. She cut right through his painted face, cut away at the plaster at his neck. She tore open his linen and exposed his head.

His skull was the brown color of a Brazil nut. Papery skin covered the round back of his head while bits of withered flesh clung to his cheeks and throat. His lips had drawn so tightly over his teeth that they looked scalloped. His eyes were closed, sewn shut, two dashes sunk deep in their sockets.

Sarah could just reach the soapstone in her pocket, just touch it with the tip of her pinky. It was enough.

one here of mine is here mine, he told her. her save her

Sarah shook badly, her body vibrating like a milkweed pod in the wind.

One of the blue-shirted men held Ptolemy’s head down against the rock. The other brought up his hammer and brought it down hard, made it clang against the ground as Ptolemy’s skull burst into fragments that spun for a moment on the slickrock and then fell down and were still.

The green phantom grabbed Sarah’s collar and dragged her to her feet. “Walk,” he told her. No threats, no promises. Just walk. She stumbled forward, her legs weak. She passed through a gauntlet of cut-down ghouls and wild-eyed cultists but none of them moved toward her, none of them spat at her or shrieked names at her. Her eyes were very wide. The green lich marched her right up to the flatbed. There had been no attempt made to repair the damage she’d done to it. Sarah tried to gloat on that, to exult in how badly she’d hurt the Tsarevich. The message she was being sent, however, was to the contrary. She hadn’t even slowed him down.

She swallowed convulsively. Acid was boiling in her throat but she refused to vomit. She was lead up to the side of the flatbed and then she was told to stop. She did so. She shoved her hands in her pockets. The Makarov was gone.

The green lich jumped up on the flatbed and leaned his face inside of the yurt. He nodded a couple of times—he must be discussing her fate with the yurt’s occupant. He jumped back down and gestured at a living woman. She came over and handed him something. A Russian pistol. Her own pistol.

No undead creature could shoot a gun—it was an axiom of Sarah’s existence. They just didn’t have the eye-hand coordination. Their nervous systems didn’t work properly. They couldn't run, and they couldn’t shoot. Then again, she’d seen plenty of them run.

The green lich dug his finger through the trigger guard, then used his free hand to mold his fingers around the grip. Then he shoved the barrel against her chest. He smiled down at her and slid the handgun a little to the left.

“Wait,” Sarah said, “Just let me see Ayaan first.”

He fired. At point blank range he couldn’t miss. There was a lot of noise, though the sound of her pulse blocked most of it out. There was some light but she blinked as the gun went off—just a reflex action. Her body tensed and curled around the explosion, her muscles and skin and sinews convulsing inward as she fell backward, flat on her back and hit the ground. Blood splashed up across her face, fell wet across her chest, her legs. She could feel it pooling around her, soaking into her clothes and her hair. She couldn’t breathe, which wasn’t really a problem at first but she was dully aware that it would become important all too soon.

She brought her knees up, her body wanted to double up. Death was on its way, mere seconds off. The world got darker and louder, she could hear screaming but it wasn’t her own, the screaming got louder. And louder. She felt something tugging in her chest. It jerked and ripped and tore at her like a bird eating her guts but higher, nearer her heart. She opened her eyes and looked down.

The bullet edged backwards out of the wound as if it were being pushed out from inside. She could see the striations on its surface, the rifling marks. It hurt a lot more going out than it had coming in. Pain wracked her body and suddenly it was her screaming, she could hear her own screams again. The bullet fell out of her and rolled down onto the bloody slickrock. The cloth around the gunshot wound, the cloth of her sweatshirt smoldered and winked orange at her here and there but the skin underneath sealed up without so much as a scar. She sat up and screamed and screamed. The green lich stared at her with genuine curiosity.

Was she... dead? Undead? No. She was breathing. The dead didn’t breathe. She was still alive. She was still, somehow, alive. Her chest was full of blood, her lungs congested with it but she could talk, kind of. “Dad,” she wheezed. “Daddy.”

Chapter Sixteen

“If,” the Tsarevich said, his voice loud enough to roll around the rocks and bones and echo in the still, cold air, “if there are to be no more of interruptions. Then perhaps it is possible to do this thing.”

Some of the cultists had still been screaming. All of them had been shouting for help or for succor. They fell silent at their lord’s command. Those who had been busy before with assembling the machinery around the scaffold and those who had been erecting the two sharp metal spikes at its top got back to work. There were a lot of bodies to be removed from the battlefield, many of them already struggling to get back up, to begin the new and glorious phase of their existence.

No one touched Dekalb’s headless body. It was just so much dead meat to them. Sarah wanted to go to it, to hold her father’s hands once last time, but she knew if she tried to do so the Tsarevich’s troops would simply shoot her. There would be no warnings, no second chances. They would kill her. Without her father to protect and heal her she would just die. And then come back.

A sort of convulsion went through her, wracking her body. Her muscles spasmed and her eyes ached. A sob came up out of her throat and threatened to turn into a wail. She was surprised by the emotional reaction. She didn’t understand it. It was grief, and she had known she would feel grief, but this just wasn’t the time. It wasn’t yet time for her to process everything that had happened.

It shook her and shook her until she dropped to her knees and bowed her head and hot tears fell into the dust. It made no sense. She was tougher than this. She shoved her hands in her pockets to try to keep them from trembling. She found the noose and ran it between and around her fingers as if she were making a cat’s cradle.

Lass, I feel for you, I do. But I’m the last fellow you should be coming to for comfort. You failed me. You failed all of us.

Sarah shook her head, uncomprehending. “What is so important,” she asked, staring into the brain’s jar, wanting to reach into the liquid there and shred the grey matter inside. “What is so important that it had to bring me to my father, and then tear him away from me like this? What is so important that Ayaan had to be turned into a monster? Please, Mael Mag Och, help me. Help me understand.”

The end of the world, he told her. What could be more important than the end of the world?

She stood up, straining her legs to get up off her knees. The mummy holding the jar stood as still as the dead thing she’d once been. A perfect statue, a thing to prop up the jar and nothing more. The mummy didn’t react at all when Sarah stumbled forward and grabbed at the jar with her bound hands. She had trouble grasping it so she put her chin down on its top and supported it from beneath with spread fingers. The mummy didn’t try to stop her. It didn’t even relax its arms—it just stood there, elbows bent, hands extended, waiting for her to put the jar back.

Instead she turned around and started walking. Toward the Source.

What should have been won by strength of arms can still be won by guile, he told her. She ignored him, though she didn’t let go of the noose either. She stepped on a jagged piece of pelvis and nearly fell over but managed to recover her balance.

She took another step and felt the jar grow warm in her hands. The brain inside had no muscles and couldn’t spasm but she could feel its consciousness bashing against the walls of the jar, trying to break free.

Lass! Don’t quit on me now. I took a chance with your Ayaan and she quit on me too soon. That’s why so many had to die. I’m telling you full truth, now. Don’t make the same mistake she did, not if you value the things I’ve given you.

Sarah took another step. Another one. A bubble appeared inside the jar and splattered apart against its lid. She felt Mael Mag Och kick at her hands. It was all in her mind, she knew that, but he was fighting her. He didn’t want to go any farther in.

“My mother. My father. Ayaan. Jack. All of my parents, all of them dead. Undead. And then murdered fucking again,” she chanted.

I feel I really must protest. Ayaan isn’t twice dead, Jack was just a false persona and your mother—

“You know nothing about my mother! Neither do I! That’s the goddamned point!”

She kept walking. The liquid in the jar grew uncomfortably hot. Her chin burned against the metal lid. Her hands ached from his attacks. She took another step and the heat was just too much. She let go and the jar fell away from her. The glass cracked as it struck the carpet of bones. The jar broke apart and half the liquid inside sloshed out. The brain sat in what remained of the jar—a kind of broken-edged cup, half-full of liquid. Steam lifted from between its two hemispheres like a ghostly crest.

Do you think this will kill me? he asked. He sounded quite calm. There’s no point to this, whatever it is you may want, lass. I have as many bodies as I like. I have as many—

She shoved the noose back into her pocket. She didn’t want to hear anymore. She watched the brain turn white and shrink down as the liquid bubbled and hissed and frothed. She watched the brain boil in its own juices. That was the point. It made her feel a little better. That was the point.

A mountain of flesh that stank like an unwashed cultist grabbed her around the waist and hauled her up into the air. Someone had noticed she was missing and had come to bring her back. She didn’t scream. Bodily she was carried back to the Tsarevich’s camp, most likely to be killed.

Life had a little surprise for her. Ayaan was waiting near the scaffolding. Sarah was dumped at the lich’s feet. Ayaan helped her stand up.

“I didn’t like him either, but the Tsarevich had a use for him.” Ayaan shook her head fiercely. “I hate to play at being the adult and telling you not to meddle in things you don’t understand.”

“Then don’t. And I’ll return the favor.” Sarah refused to meet Ayaan’s eyes.

The two women who had attended Nilla as she approached the Source returned. Their wires lead across the valley and up the ridge on the far side. Their faces and hands were covered in a fine powdering of white and yellow dust. A boy with a bucket of water and a ladle ran up to them and let them drink and wash up.

The Tsarevich, still sitting in a wire shopping cart, was wheeled closer to the scaffolding. His head dangled over the side and his knuckles twitched against the bones as he was brought bumping and rattling to the base of the construction.

“This is the master you serve,” Sarah said. She lacked the energy to really belabor the point but she couldn’t let it go without comment, either. “The monster’s monster.”

“He’ll be transformed in a moment. If physical beauty is all you look for in a leader then I’ve taught you poorly.” Ayaan sounded pissed. Sarah wondered how far she would have to go to make the lich attack her. If she was doomed, if she had no more chances, maybe it would be worth it. Maybe she could anger Ayaan so much that her body, or rather her corpse, would be of no use to the Tsarevich.

Sarah’s blood went cold at the thought. Not the thought of being a ghoul. At the thought of dying at all. She knew it was just her biology speaking, her ingrained survival instinct, but it didn’t seem to matter. Her body didn’t want to die, no matter what her mind might decide. It would rebel against her if she tried to commit suicide.

The electronic boxes bolted to the scaffolding started to buzz and the exposed vacuum tubes came to life, glowing a cheerful orange. One of them flared white and then burst into darkness, then another. Cultists were ready for this and switched out the bulbs with remarkable speed. They must have been training for this for months, Sarah decided. Drilling for their one big moment, their contribution to the Tsarevich’s ascendance.

Under the power of his own unequal arms the arch-lich dragged himself up a ladder on the side of the scaffolding. Rung by torturous rung he hauled himself upward. The air smelled of ozone and real heat was coming off the machinery by the time he reached the top. He waved at the crowd, who cheered in return. Then he threw himself forward, right onto the twin giant metal spikes.

He sank downward with a scream that was a little bit violent agony and a tad sexual. The spikes transfixed him. Impaled him. Pure energy rushed through them like water down high-pressure hoses. It flooded into him. Sarah could see it crackling around him like electricity crawling over his skin. His one visible eye went wide with it, his mouth opened in a perfectly round O. A stench of burning hair rushed down off of him and flowed across the spectators. Sarah raised her bound hands to her face.

“You can be part of the future, Sarah. You can come with me and build something. Wouldn’t that be nice? To stop destroying, to stop killing, and build?” Ayaan was shouting in her ear. Sarah hadn’t realized how noisy the little valley had become with all the popping vacuum tubes and crackling skin.

Every bone in the Tsarevich’s left arm cracked with a series of pops like muffled gunshots. The skin of his deformed hand flowed and flexed like a piece of rubber under stress. His face was changing shape, its contours shifting, rebuilding themselves.

“You don’t have to die today. It will be difficult,” Ayaan told her, “but I can convince them. I know I can. I only need you to say yes. I need you to agree to be a part of what we are working for.”

Sarah opened her mouth to reply. Then she closed it.

The Tsarevich’s mouth was moving, his jaw flexing. It looked like he was trying to say something. His right leg, the short one, flapped like a sheet on a clothesline.

The fingernails on his hand curled and bent around themselves. They split the flesh of his fingertips. His hand tried to close in a fist but the fingers spat out wet, dark sparks. His body twisted and shook and pulsed with noisy explosions. Sarah could only imagine that his internal organs were exploding one by one like potatoes left too long in the coals of a campfire.

Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

With a wet splash his good eye burst in its socket. The green phantom hobbled forward and tried to smash at the vacuum tubes with his femur staff. There was no on/off switch on the machinery. Energy slashed out of him and he staggered back. He tried again and got knocked back again. It didn’t matter, after a moment.

Up on the spikes the Tsarevich’s face split open in a horrible grimace as steam built up inside of his head. It shot out of his ears, his nose, his eyes. With a noise of air being sucked into a vacuum his entire body caught fire. He went up like a torch.

Chapter Seventeen

The Tsarevich’s body burnt like a log soaked in gasoline. His dry tissues, overloaded by the energy of the Source, hissed and spat and started to break down. A chunk of jagged bone flew from one spasming leg. Patience was standing just below him—it fell on her and cut open her cheek. She reeled back in horror and pain, a scream pushing out of her lungs even as she dropped to her knees to retrieve the bone fragment. She clutched it to her breast like a holy relic.

Above her the Tsarevich’s head slumped to one side and fell off. It hit the ground in a splatter of sparks and flame. A lot of people screamed then, and almost all of them moved backward, away from the scaffolding.

At the back of the crowd a male cultist in a blue paper shirt screamed bloody murder, much louder than any of the spectators at the Tsarevich’s grisly demise. Ayaan grabbed Sarah’s arm and yanked the girl along behind her as she rushed to see what was going on.

Through a gap in the crowd she could see the screaming cultist, his face a mask of agony. Four spikes of filed bone burst from his chest as a ghoul sank its exposed teeth deep into the back of the cultist’s neck.

Ayaan shook her head. No, that wasn’t acceptable. The ghouls couldn’t disobey their orders. Their minds were too simple—they couldn’t overcome the Tsarevich’s command. The Tsarevich was keeping them under control.

The Tsarevich was dead.

A new ghoul, one of Gary’s victims, came stumbling through the crowd, her face and hands bright red. She grabbed at Sarah but the girl twisted away. Ayaan swiveled around on one boot heel and blasted the ghoul’s face with dark energy. The undead face cracked and peeled away from smoking bone. Ayaan didn’t bother to watch her die a second time. “Are you alright?” she demanded.

Sarah nodded unhappily.

Enni Langstrom, the green phantom, appeared at Ayaan’s elbow. “Enough of the concern for her well-being,” he shouted over the screams. “Just kill her already!”

“No,” Ayaan said, “no, that’s unnecessary. she’s harmless.”

Enni shook his head. “She came here to kill him. Now he’s dead. You can call it a coincidence if you want but I want her dead. Jesus Christ, look at this! This is Armageddon. We can sort out who did what later. Just kill her. Where’s Erasmus?”

Ayaan frowned. “Didn’t you see? Gary ate half of him. He’s dead. I’m sorry, I know you two were friends.”

The skull-like face turned even paler than usual. “Then it’s just you and me. We have to save as many of the believers as possible. They served him well, they don’t deserve to die like this, not in this place.” He stared deep into Sarah’s eyes and grabbed her face in one thin hand. “Anyone we can’t trust dies, now. I’ll let you do it, but kill her! She’s an unknown factor. She could ruin everything.” He knocked Sarah into the dust with a backhand slap. Then he stomped away, his femur staff clicking on the rocky ground. As he moved through the crowd he touched each ghoul he passed and they slumped to the earth, the life force drained out of them.

Ayaan wasn’t sure what to do. She had turned on Sarah and all of her past. She had found a new cause to believe in. Yet if the Tsarevich was dead, who would rebuild the world? What was she giving her allegiance to? If Enni could remake the world and save the human race, if she truly believed he had it in him, then she had no choice but to obey and kill Sarah.

She grabbed Sarah’s bound hands and helped her stand up. There were ghouls everywhere, their eyes dead, their lipless mouths open wide. “He’s not a good man,” she shouted into Sarah’s face. “But I saw him show compassion once, for some people who were barely even human. I don’t like betraying him, but that’s what it’s come to.” She tore at the knots that held Sarah’s hands. Her fingers were too dead and clumsy. She gasped in frustration—then realized that the rope was made of organic fibers. Careful not to damage Sarah in the process she fed a little of her energy into the rope and it withered in place until it was so thin and insubstantial Sarah could just pull her hands apart.

Sarah rubbed at her wrists for a moment—they had chafed so much she had bled a little—then threw her arms around Ayaan and held her tight.

“I didn’t expect a hug from the girl who crossed half a continent just to put a bullet in my head,” Ayaan said, laughing a little.

“When I do it, when I sanitize you, it will be an act of love,” Sarah muttered. “Can we not talk about it now? There’s a mini-apocalypse to worry about.”

It was true. There were hundreds of ghouls in the valley and perhaps half as many living cultists. The ratio was getting steeper with every second. Enni was cutting swaths of destruction through the undead forces but he was just one lich. The cultists were fighting back and their firearms filled the air with noise but they were disorganized and as much danger to one another as they were to the ghouls—especially since the latter were all wearing bulletproof helmets.

"I don't understand," Ayaan said.

"What's not to understand? The dead eat the living. Did you forget?"

Ayaan waved Sarah's sarcasm away. "This close to the Source they should at least be distracted. At least some of them should be moving toward it, not toward the food." She shook her head. "It's as if some power is compelling them to attack."

It had all happened so quickly—the instant the Tsarevich had perished the ghouls had become their own creatures again. They had reverted to their violent, mindless selves and once again succumbed to their terrible hunger. They acted as if the Source weren't there at all, as if this were any other place in the world.

Whatever forces were moving them didn't matter. If someone didn’t get the situation under control it was going to be a massacre. Ayaan lead Sarah over to the flatbed and crawled up on top of it. “This way,” she shouted, and at least a few of those still alive in the valley heard her and looked up. “Come on, retreat, out the way we came. Come on!” she shouted it again and again, as loud as her undead lungs would make it.

A teenage boy broke from the crowd and ran toward the flatbed. Ghouls chased after him but they were slow and clumsy without Enni’s power behind them. The boy ran right past the flatbed and into the pass beyond, back the way they’d come. The road was down there. If he could find it maybe he would survive long enough to find some shelter.

It was the best solution Ayaan had. “Come on,” she shouted again. “Fall back!”

One by one the living broke away from the dead, their legs pumping, their eyes wet with horror and shock. They had been promised so much. Now they had to start over again, from scratch, in a country few of them had ever seen before. “This way,” Ayaan screamed.

A band of ghouls came at the flatbed but Sarah was ready. She brought the heavy machine gun around and cut them to pieces before they could climb aboard.

Ayaan kept shouting even when the flow of living cultists had all but stopped. When she realized she was just wasting her breath she looked and saw that the valley was full of nothing but ghouls. They faced her like a ragged army, their helmets shading their eyes, their wicked arms held at their sides. She had stolen their prey. And yet it wasn’t her they wanted. Enni stood in the midst of them. He had lost his staff somewhere. His hands lifted and swung at the air as he tried to dampen the ghouls’ energy but he was clearly exhausted. He had used up everything he had, and while the Source was radiating life energy from no more than a thousand yards away he was about to collapse.

One of the ghouls came up behind him and swiped at his back. The sharpened bone of its arm tore off a strip of green cloth. Two more ghouls flanked him, coming at him from the sides. He couldn’t seem to resist them in even the most basic way. They tore his robe from him in rags.

Exposed to the air his emaciated body was as white as bleached bone. He looked like something carved out of soap. He had big ears that had always been hidden before by his cowl, at least in Ayaan’s experience. He had a few long strands of hair plastered to his otherwise bald head.

He turned, his body swooning backwards, to look at Ayaan. She couldn’t read his eyes. Then the ghouls fell on him and tore him to pieces. Sarah fired wildly into the seething mass of bodies but there were just too many of them.

When it was over the ghouls fell back out of Sarah’s range and stood in an orderly formation like soldiers in a parade. It didn’t make any sense. There was no one around to control them, no lich who could command them. Yet there was no reason for them to line up like that, either, just as there had been no possible explanation why they should attack Enni.

A voice sounded from atop the scaffolding. “The stench up here,” it intoned, its timbre watery and barely recognizable as human speech, “is bloody awful.”

A single ghoul stood there above the twin spikes. It was one of the most horrifying creatures Sarah had ever seen. Its skin hung off of its chest in long, tattered strips that fell across its groin like a gruesome kilt. Its face was a smudge of once-human features that had been battered and burnt out of all recognition. Its legs, thick and muscular, were covered in sores and lesions. It had no arms whatsoever, just ragged ends of flayed bone that hung down like tiny, broken wings.

Chapter Eighteen

“Hello, lasses,” the armless ghoul choked out. It laughed at them, a sputtering, horrible noise. “Honestly, I am glad to see you both still with us.”

All that remained of the Tsarevich were a few lumps of indistinct meat skewered on the steel spikes, fuming and smoking as they smoldered away to black carbon.

“I want you to know that I never wanted anyone to suffer.” He staggered closer to the edge of the scaffolding. Another step and he would fall onto the spikes. Sarah was pretty sure that was exactly what he intended to do.

“Mael Mag Och, I presume,” she said.

The ghoul flexed the ragged nubbins of bone he possessed in place of arms. “In the flesh.”

“What’s going on here?” Ayaan shook Sarah’s shoulder but Sarah didn’t know how to answer. “What happened to the Tsarevich? The machinery was supposed to heal him! It was supposed to make him whole again. What went wrong?”

Mael Mag Och shrugged. It made the skin of his chest split and peel. “The machinery worked just fine, lass. I just never meant it to do any such thing.”

“You? You killed him?” Ayaan was nearly shrieking. Sarah wished she would calm down. “How is that possible?”

“It helps to have friends on the inside.”

“Nilla,” Sarah said, getting it.

He tried to smile but the remains of his mouth merely twitched. “His plan required her to condition the energy of the Source. To step it down to a level his bodily tissues could accept. At my command she merely fed him an extra little jolt.”

“But why?” Ayaan demanded. “Why did you do this? Why did you kill him?”

“Sarah knows,” he told her. Sarah bit her lip. She had a feeling she did know, and it terrified her. When Gary had told her about Mael Mag Och she’d thought of him as a laughable sort of vision. Someone stuck in the mindset of the Dark Ages. That was, of course, before he got his hands on the ultimate power of the life force itself.

“So I was saying that I never wanted this to be such a difficult transition. You should ask Gary some time, Sarah. He would tell you, I’m sure, just how much compassion I still had in my heart, back in those all-too-brief days when I still had my own body. How I wanted to make things easy on you. Instead you chose all this blood-curdling violence and pain.”

“We chose nothing,” Ayaan spat. “What are you talking about?” She leapt down from the flatbed and took a few steps toward the scaffolding. The ghouls moved toward her just as quickly. She had watched them tear Enni Langstrom to pieces. She took a step back.

Mael Mag Och acted as if nothing had happened. “I was a nice chap, once. I know that’s changed. It’s a hard lot to be a raw consciousness stripped of form and left spinning in the void. If it made me a bit cranky, well. I do apologize.”

Ayaan grabbed Sarah’s arm tight enough to hurt. “What is it, Sarah? What does he want? What is he going to do?”

She struggled to find the best words. “His god told him to destroy the human race. Like, all of it. I think he’s going to do something to the Source.”

“Very good,” he told her. “The Source is a hole in the side of the world. Imagine a balloon with a tiny little pinprick in it. Imagine the air coming out, just a little at a time. Enough to keep the likes of you upright, that’s all. Now imagine what happens if you let all the air out of the balloon at once.”

Ayaan shook her head in disbelief. “You’d kill everything. Animals, plants, trees, people. Overload them, burn them to ashes. Everything.”

“Hmm. It is a pity about the trees. But I’ve been given a mission. If I’d had a bit of help from the start maybe things wouldn’t have come to so drastic a pass. I asked Gary for his help and the buggering bastard ate my head. I asked the Tsarevich and instead he turned himself into the king of the blighted world. I asked you,” he said, the clouded orbs of his eyes burning as he stared at Ayaan, “and you spat in my face.”

Sarah put her hands over her mouth. She couldn’t believe this.

“Ah, yes, I asked young Sarah as well, though I was a trifle dishonest about things. She was the only one who actually tried to help me. Too bad she was such an ineffectual little child. In the name of the father of tribes himself, lass, did you honestly expect to fight an army with a couple of mummies? I’m fond of the Egyptian folk, I truly am, but they’re crap against modern weaponry. You really missed the point.”

“You’ve been planning this all along,” Sarah said, dumbfounded. “You wanted me to kill the Tsarevich. You wanted Ayaan to kill the Tsarevich. So you could take his place. You let him capture you and put you in that jar. You told him exactly what he wanted to hear: that he could come here and heal himself. Because this is where you needed to be. How long have you been planning this?”

“I’ve been planning for this since your Gary knocked me down. You have no notion, lass, of how many snares I’ve laid and schemes I’ve hatched to get us here.”

“And my gift, my special vision?” Sarah demanded. “That was all part of your plan?”

“No, no, lass, that was Nilla’s idea, you’ve her to thank. She said the human race deserved one last chance to prove itself. I disagreed, of course, but I have trouble saying no to that one. So I chose you and said if you could stop me, you and you alone, then it would be clear that Teuagh had forgiven the whole sorry mess of us. So just as I had helped your father I helped you. And just like the geezer, you were a complete and utter failure. He couldn’t kill Gary though he was given years to pull it off. You couldn’t do anything right. If I ever wanted for proof that humanity is too far gone for saving, well, you’ve provided it in full, bairn.”

Sarah’s cheeks burned with her blood. She had failed everyone. She had failed so many time over. And now... and now... the enormity of what was about to happen was impossible. She started to faint. She could feel herself spontaneously losing consciousness in the face of such a horrible ending to her life, to her rescue attempt.

“And you, Ayaan. I actually held out some hope for you,” he said. His voice was tinny and small in Sarah’s ears. She was losing it. “We’re the monsters,” he said to Ayaan. She could barely make out the words. “Can we please start acting like it?”

Sarah’s eyes fluttered closed and when they opened she was looking at a rocky landscape that belonged to another planet entirely. Maybe Mars. Or Pluto. She saw the valley stripped of its carpet of bones, she saw the mountains around her and the blue sky and the white puffy clouds. Yet the mountains were naked, totally devoid of trees, of underbrush, even of the patchy lichens that mottled the highest peaks. There were no birds in the air. No fish in the sea. No bacteria. Not even a virus. The air itself had become poison to her—with no plants there could be no oxygen. She started to choke, to asphyxiate, and then she opened her eyes again.

Nothing had changed. She had just become so painfully aware of what was about to transpire that she had seen it. Call it pre-traumatic stress disorder. She had literally seen the lifeless world. And it was going to be all her fault.

“Good night, ladies,” Mael Mag Och said. Then he threw himself down on the steel spikes. One passed right through his thigh and came out the other side with a noise like cloth ripping. The other passed through his throat. His body convulsed in what had to be terrible pain but he made no sound. Beneath him the vacuum tubes lit up with their happy orange glow. The machinery began to hum.

Sarah turned to Ayaan. What could they do? There was nothing they could do. The scaffolding was out of machine gun range. If they tried to rush the scaffolding on foot the remaining handless ghouls would slaughter them before they could cover half the distance. Even if they could get to the body on the spikes what would they do then? Tear him down with their bare hands? It was over. In a moment the life force would be released, dispersed, whatever. It would be gone. That life force was the only thing that kept the human body together, kept all the pieces working with each other. When it was gone Sarah’s cells would turn against themselves, cannibalizing each other for what little golden energy remained stored inside them. In a matter of minutes they would fade out of existence altogether, depleted of the raw mainstay of life. Ayaan would merely collapse. She would fall forward on her face and be truly, finally dead. Sarah would have just enough time to watch that before the cells that made up her eyes devoured each other and she went blind. Before the cells of her brain ate their own memories and thoughts and feelings.

Ayaan leaned forward and kissed Sarah on the cheek. “I’ve missed you,” she said. She had a trembling smile on her lips.

“I’ve missed you too,” Sarah said. She wasn’t crying. She thought she should be crying but the tears wouldn’t come. Maybe she was just too scared.

Ayaan reached into a pocket of her jacket and took something out. Something small and silvery. It looked half melted. “Here,” she said, and put it in Sarah’s outstretched hand. Sarah closed her fingers around its sharp edges, its smooth curves. "I was supposed to give you this."

Why, hello, someone said inside of Sarah's head. Someone pleasant and female. I’ve been waiting for you.

Chapter Twenty

Banners of flame licked out of Mael Mag Och’s mouth and eyesockets. The scaffolding beneath him hummed and whined as it began to shake itself to pieces. Sarah knew she was only seeing the outer edge of what was really happening. The main event was not for human eyes to observe.

“What did you do?” Ayaan demanded.

Sarah couldn’t seem to get the words out. She could only point. Her finger stabbed out toward the mass of ghouls had been waiting patiently in perfect formation for the world to stop. Now they were moving, surging forward as a mass. They were headed for the armless body on the spikes. Were they going to try to pull it free? Sarah had no idea.

“What did you do?” Ayaan asked again. She grabbed Sarah by the arms and shook her.

Sarah looked up into her mentor’s face. “I answered a riddle,” she said.

Ayaan released her.

The ghouls attacked the scaffolding with their sharpened bones, with their feet, even with their teeth. It was fruitless. Mael Mag Och’s abdominal cavity popped open under pressure from within and showered the dead men in flaming entrails.

“You stopped him, I take it,” Ayaan said, very quietly. “That... that’s good,” she said.

Mael Mag Och’s spine arched wildly, twisting his body around on the spikes. His flesh tore as his bones tried to wrap themselves in knots. His head burst with a hiss of steam, a flap of skin popping back and waving tremulously as his brains ejected in a spray of grey liquid.

The dead men still beat and kicked at the scaffolding, though half of them were on fire themselves. Their smoke stained the air around them and the stink was oppressive. One by one they broke off from the scene at the scaffolding and rushed toward the Source itself. Perhaps Mael Mag Och was trying to get into their bodies. It didn’t work—they flared up and burned to ashes almost instantly.

Eventually there were none of them left.

“It’s over,” Ayaan announced. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” She jumped down from the flatbed and headed for the pass that lead down toward the road.

“I just have a couple of things to do,” Sarah said. “You stagger along. I’ll catch up.”

Ayaan frowned at that but she could hardly deny that Sarah could walk a lot faster. She shrugged and headed down the path.

Sarah pulled Gary’s tooth out of her back pocket. “Are you watching this?” she asked. “He’s out of bodies. He’s trapped inside the Source. I don’t know if I killed him or not but he’s powerless now.”

I don’t think you can kill him any more. Believe me, I’ve tried. Gary sounded very faint and very far away. Sarah imagined it had to be a trick. He would be somewhere close, holing up and licking his wounds. He didn’t want her to find him.

Well. He had good reason.

“Gary,” she told him, “there’s no one left to heal you. You’re not bulletproof any more.”

I have a right to exist, he told her.

“I don’t recognize that right,” she replied.

He was silent for a very long time. Let’s not forget that I helped you out when you needed it, he suggested.

“And let’s not forget you kept my father a prisoner of conscience for twelve years. I’m coming for you, Gary, and I will put you down. That’s what I do. I kill liches.” She didn’t want to hear his reply. She threw the tooth as far away from her as she could manage. It was lost instantly in the scattered bones of the valley.

Ayaan wouldn’t have approved. She would have said that the tooth represented a source of intelligence, that the more Sarah knew about Gary the easier it would be to kill him. Sarah reminded herself, though, that everyone who ever listened to Gary had reason to regret it. He could seduce with words, and he could lie with the best of them. Let him fear her. Let him wonder where she was. It would do him good.

That was taken care of, then. Just one more loose end to tie up. She searched the yurt at the back of the flatbed. She found the female mummy waiting for her, her arms still outstretched to take back the jar. Sarah shook her head. “You’re free now. Ptolemaeus Canopus died to make you free.”

The mummy didn’t move. She might as well be dead. Well, she had plenty of time to figure it out on her own. Most likely she wouldn’t spend eternity there waiting for the jar to return to her arms but if she did—it was her own choice. At least somebody had been successfully rescued. Sarah sighed and dug through the various boxes and chests in the yurt until she found what she wanted. Her Makarov PM. She shoved it in the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt and stepped back outside and down from the flatbed.

Ayaan was about two hundred yards away, her back turned to Sarah. It couldn’t be that easy, though. Sarah owed Ayaan something more. She jogged to catch up and then tapped the lich on the shoulder.

Ayaan turned around painfully as if she had a stiff neck. She didn’t look at all surprised to see the pistol in Sarah’s hand.

She didn’t waste any time begging for her life. She had a better argument to make. “When your father was dying I was with him. I was in your position, looking down my sights at a monster. He asked me not to shoot, and I didn’t. I think you’re probably glad for my decision.”

“You just killed my father,” Sarah said, blood rushing into her cheeks. “How dare you invoke him now?”

“You had a little more time together. Wasn’t that better than nothing? Life is precious, Sarah, and death is eternal. Any reprieve from the void is a good thing.” Ayaan said.

“Come on. You’re a lich, Ayaan. You’re an abomination. What would your God say if he saw you now?” Sarah’s hand was shaking. She switched to a two-handed grip and it helped.

“Oh, He sees me just fine,” Ayaan said. She closed her eyes and her mouth moved silently for a while. Sarah knew exactly what she was doing. She was praying. When she finished she opened her eyes and looked very calmly down at Sarah. “This is what you’ve made up your mind to do, then. I will not beg like a dog. If you truly believe you can pull that trigger then please do so now.”

Sarah gasped. She could barely think straight. “It’s what you taught me to do.”

“I did not,” Ayaan said, very slowly, “teach you to talk. I taught you to shoot. I hope you will remember what it takes to kill a lich. I hope you remember how you will have to mutilate my corpse. You will need to smash my head to powder, are you prepared for that? My body should be burnt, or crushed with heavy stones.”

“You think I can’t do it,” Sarah said.

“I’m betting on it, actually.” Ayaan considered her with a long, cool look. “I think you haven’t prepared yourself psychologically for this. I think that you will be haunted by it for a very—”

Sarah squeezed the trigger. The noise of the gunshot bounced off the walls of the valley. When Osman found her, several hours later, she had burned Ayaan’s body with gasoline and spread the ashes on the wind. Only the heart remained. It refused to burn. There was no magic in that—a human heart was a hard lump of dense muscle tissue and not very flammable. Sarah held it in her hand when Osman came for her. She was hoping to hear Ayaan’s voice in her head. She was hoping that Ayaan had become a ghost like Mael Mag Och.

She was also hoping that nothing of the sort would happen. In that she got her wish.

Osman took one look at the charred organ in her hand and rubbed his head with his long fingers. “You can’t bring that on my helicopter,” he said. “No way.”

Sarah dug a little hole in the ground near the valley of the Source and buried the heart. It was the closest thing to a grave Ayaan could have. Sarah remembered what Ayaan had taught her about baraka, the dangerous blessedness of the Sufi saints. It was said you could invoke baraka when you stood by the tomb of a powerful person. Sarah wondered if in some future generation warriors would come to where the heart was buried and from it gather some strength. She left no marker, no gravestone. Those future warriors would have to find the burial place on their own.

She strapped herself into the co-pilot’s seat of the Jayhawk and they lifted up and away. Osman carried her off over a green world, a world of trees and rock and water and no people. An emptied-out world where even the dead were in scarcity. A truly silent, truly haunted place.

It was that kind of planet. It was going to be that kind of planet for a long time to come.

END OF MONSTER PLANET