“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 ow
n 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 s
ome 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
PART TWO
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.
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