The thought kept her alert most of the night, though she never saw any sign of the marching army. She got to the point of expecting them, of hoping they would come just to end her watch. They didn’t come. The encampment must not have been their target. Just before dawn she dozed a little, her eyelids fluttering up and down, her chin jerking spasmodically every time she nearly but not quite fell asleep. Nothing had happened. Nothing was going to happen.
In that half-awake state her esoteric senses were at their strongest. She dreamed of the dark flicker of energy beyond the wire before she saw it. When she saw it adrenaline blasted through her veins and she nearly fell out of her perch.
It wasn’t an army. It was just one ghoul. Still, she reached for the whistle around her neck. The slaughter on the dunes had started with just one ghoul attacking her. Maybe there were more nearby. Maybe hundreds of them. She couldn’t feel them, couldn’t sense their energy, but—
The single ghoul below her came to a lurching stop and looked up, right at her. It raised one hand to its mouth, placed a rotting finger against its lips. Asking her for silence. Then, with its other hand, it beckoned to her. Slowly, it turned around and headed back out into the darkness.
Shit, Sarah thought.
She had been summoned. She couldn’t imagine worse timing.
Chapter Five
Author's Note: Judging by the comments recently it appears a lot of readers are unfamiliar with just how Sarah came to have her particular power. That story appeared in a "Teaser" I posted after the end of Monster Island. It was pretty easy to miss, and I never really gave it much thought myself since it wasn't supposed to be an official part of the story. Those of you who are interested can read it here. I hope that clears up some confusion. --David Wellington
Getting over the palisade wasn’t easy.
Ayaan had designed the wall to be impassible to hungry ghouls: two thicknesses of concertina wire wrapped all the way around the camp, creating a dry moat three meters wide between them. Inside the aisle between these two impediments the soldiers had dumped a jumble of broken concrete and rebar, the rusted iron turned outward to impale careless intruders. There was no gate in the palisade anywhere—you left the encampment the same way you came back, via helicopter, or you just stayed put. A smart human could get through the mess eventually if he had a pair of very sturdy bolt cutters and plenty of time. Even then he would leave obvious signs of his passage.
The first time Jack had come to her in Egypt Sarah had left him waiting in the desert for days while she figured out how to escape without being detected. She couldn’t just ignore his call. He had taught her how to see the energy of the dead, her one true talent. Without him she would have perished long before. She couldn’t tell Ayaan about her comings and goings either so she’d had to be crafty. She had volunteered for her current job of cleaning and fueling the helicopters. When the pilots weren’t looking she had stolen one of the kevlar blankets they used to armor the interior cabins of the Mi-8s. Sarah had stripped the heavy blanket of its inset metal plates and then draped the remaining kevlar over the wire, then scrambled up and over her makeshift stile. It took impeccable timing to make sure she wasn't seen.
She had repeated the stunt many times since. Often enough to get away with it, even with the camp on heightened alert. Once she was out on the open sand, though, she began to feel a very familiar fear. Unprotected by Ayaan, unable to properly defend herself she would be easy prey for any wandering ghoul who happened to smell her on the wind. Anyone else probably would have been eaten years ago. Sarah’s special relationship with Jack was something she hesitated to count on but it kept her alive.
“Sarah,” he called to her, his voice low and sharp. She had been moving carefully up the slope of a dune that ran parallel to the wire and she dropped to hug the sand, terrified. “Sarah, hurry up. We don’t have much time.”
He came to her as he always did, in the body of a dead man. It was never the same body twice but she could tell it was him because intelligence clearly guided its actions. This one was white and was missing the flesh from one side of its face. The body wore a blue jumpsuit with a striped blue-and-white shirt underneath. It looked like a sailor. It had to have been one of the Tsarevich’s troops, she decided. Jack leaned down and offered her his hands but she shook her head and got to her feet on her own. She couldn’t afford to smell like death when she went back to the camp.
“Jack, I don’t know what you’re doing here but this is a really bad time,” she protested. “Fathia will make my life hell if she finds out I’m missing.”
“Oh, will she now? She’ll make your life hell?” Jack’s borrowed eyes glinted in the first blue rays of dawn. “You know a lot about hell, do you? You can’t know what hell is like, not when you still have skin to keep you warm and bones to keep you standing upright.”
Sarah bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry,” she tried. “I didn’t mean—“
“I’m the one who taught you how to see, girl. I’m the one who made you special. When those bitches in there thought you were too small and scrawny to waste their time on, I was the one who gave you magic. So if I call you out now you’d better come running.” He grabbed her face and stared into her eyes, his fingers digging into her cheeks.
There had been a time when Jack was kind to her, when he had begged her to let him teach her his secrets. He’d believed that was the only way he could earn eternal rest. He’d killed her father, he told her, back in the other time, and he regretted it now, and he owed her a great debt. Once he began teaching her he had grown impatient and sometimes cruel. Perhaps because he’d discovered that giving her his gift wasn’t enough to buy his peace. There was something else he had to accomplish first but it eluded him. Now typically when he came to her it was because he wanted something from her. He’d taken quite a bit already. Every three or four months she could count on him to wander back into her life and want something new. Information, usually, or just gossip. Sometime he had entire shopping lists of supplies he needed for purposes he chose never to reveal. She would steal what he wanted and leave it buried in the desert for him. So far she hadn’t been caught.
“Are you still the girl I made my pupil?” he asked, loosening his grip on her face. The skin was soft but so cold where it dug into her. She nodded against his hand. “Now follow me, then, and keep quiet. I want you to meet a friend.”
He lead her down the back of a dune and into the relative shelter of an old wadi that emptied into a narrow ravine, not a word passing between them as they moved like cats in the darkness. At the back of the defile he snapped on a chemical light—something Sarah hadn’t seen in years. She’d thought the military issue blue glowsticks were part of the past she would need to learn to forget. In the dim illumination Jack took a carved piece of stone in the shape of a scarab out of his uniform and laid it on the bare rock between their feet. “He’ll come now, if we’re respectful.”
“Who?” Sarah asked. “Who, will come, Jack? The Tsarevich?”
The glance he shot her was colder than the desert at night. “This is an old place.” As usual he failed to tell her anything of substance. He expected her to just get what he meant. His lessons were difficult at best and sometimes completely unfair. “It has its protectors. They’re dead but they’re clean dead. There’s a reason why Ayaan picked this spot to settle down in, even if she didn't know it outright she could sense it.”
“Ayaan,” Sarah moaned. Of course Jack wouldn’t know what had happened.
She didn’t know that she wanted to fill him in. The hurt was still too real and too personal. She didn’t have a chance. A moving shadow appeared at the mouth of the canyon, outlined by darkness in the dawning gap between its walls. Others appeared behind it.
The shadows stepped up against the starlight, silhouettes out of a dread older than any words she knew. The first figure stepped down onto the slickrock and came into their light, moving slowly on legs that didn’t work quite right. Sarah knew that gait all
too well. Its face was obscured behind a flat plaster mask on which was painted a face with large soulful eyes and a full and sensuous mouth. The painting was in a style that made her think of mosaics in ancient Roman ruins. Below the plaster its throat and chest were wrapped tight in rotting linen bandages. Lengths of cloth dangled from its free arms and looped around its knees and calves.
A mummy. It bent and picked up the scarab carving in both of its clumsy, broken-looking hands. It held the scarab close to its chest.
“This is Ptolemaeus Canopus,” Jack said. “You can call him Ptolemy—he likes it when you do. He doesn’t talk so much for himself but he was pretty much something back in the mists of history. Now he’s sort of head man of the stinky bandage brigade. I owe him a sizeable favor and now he has a sort of problem. A couple of hours ago the Tsarevich,” and Jack spat on the ground as he spoke the name, “stole about fifty of his buddies. Just kidnapped them right off the face of the earth. He wants them back and he needs your help.”
“My help? You mean, the help of our soldiers?” Sarah asked, incredulous. She’d heard stories of mummies before but never met one. Mummies had saved Ayaan and her unit from certain death when they’d fought Gary, half a world and all of time away. They were supposed to be ridiculously strong but emotionally damaged. Sarah had always been advised to stay away from them. Ayaan had advised that. “Listen, Jack, the Tsarevich pretty much outclasses us and anyway the unit, well, there’s not much of it left, not since Ayaan died.” There. She had let it out.
“What was that, girl?” Jack asked her. He looked more surprised than sorrowful, even though in life he and Ayaan had possessed a powerful mutual respect.
“Ayaan, she’s… she’s dead.” It felt almost good to say it aloud. It made it more real but it also made it easier to cope with, somehow. “She was killed by the Tsarevich’s troops yesterday.”
“She bloody well was not,” Jack swore. “They took her alive, right before they grabbed up Ptolemy’s folk.”
Sarah could only gape at him.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
The mummy massaged his stone scarab like a pet.
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.
Monster Planet Page 3