She forced herself to calm down. “That must be... unpleasant.”
It’s fucking agonizing, is what it is. I’ve been crushed, I’ve been burned, I’ve been impaled on a spike. But it’s better than the alternative. I have a right to exist, sugar shorts. I have a right to live, whatever you may think of my current status. I don’t know. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll just tell Daddy what you’ve learned. Maybe you think that if he knows what’s going on he can fight it, and he can finally do me in. And maybe, just maybe, he can. Then again, maybe his subconscious is stronger than you think.
“You expect me to keep your secret,” Sarah spat through gritted teeth.
Yeah, I do. The skull grinned up at her. Oh, not for my sake. You probably hate me. That’s alright, it comes with the job. I expect you to keep your fucking hole shut for him. Because, snack pack, he’s spent the last twelve years pretending that he’s a hero. That he brought down the nefarious Gary, the lich king of New York City. You see, there’s not much else to do in this place except sit around talking about what used to be. After a while, memories are all a man has. That and the occasional slack that wanders by in the tunnel down there. If he knew how much time he’s wasted, playing at the vigilant guardian up here, if he knew what he’d done, well. It might just break his heart. Granted he isn’t using it right now, but I expect you’d rather keep it in one piece. Do we have a deal?
He released her, as easily as that, without any kind of agreement on her part. Obviously he thought he knew her answer already.
It burned a little that he was right.
“Did you have a nice chat?” Dekalb asked. She saw worry written on his face. On the rest of him she just saw weakness. She’d forgotten how fragile he must be. That he was one of the people from the old time, from before the end of the world. Nobody had been tough back then. The slightest emotional shock could destroy them.
“Yeah,” she said. “It was great. Listen.” She shoved the tooth into her back pocket, not knowing what else to do with it. “I’m a little tired. I think I’m going to back to, you know, the others. Get some sleep.”
“I’ll be here when you wake up.” He smiled. “I don’t get to rest, pumpkin. I don’t even get to sleep anymore.”
She put her hands on his cheeks, leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. She couldn’t quite bring herself to kiss his rotting lips.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, and she wanted to sag into those words. She wanted to curl up in them and let everything go right for a while. Then she realized he wasn’t talking to her. He was addressing himself. “Now that you’re here, everything’s going to be okay. So where’s Ayaan?” he asked.
She closed her eyes because she didn’t want to look at him while she lied to him. “Back in Somalia. She’s fine, doing great, actually. She sent me to check up on Marisol, see if Governors Island was still thriving.”
“Oh. Is it? I don’t get out much.”
She nodded. “It’s doing great.” Such a ludicrous idea—that anyone would launch such a dangerous expedition just to see how old friends were getting along—didn’t seem to strike him as odd at all.
She left him in the tower with Gary and the mummies, unsure when she would come back. Jack had said to look for help, but what could one dried-up old lich and a skull with insect legs do against the Tsarevich? She wondered about what to do next as she headed back down the causeway and onto the Island. She noticed something strange about the buildings on the north side of the island, those that faced Manhattan, but she couldn’t remember what they had looked like when she went in.
Dark stains seemed to creep across their facades. Patches of a very light green had grown in circular patterns on the bricks—lichens, she thought, like you would see on very old tombstones. The dark stains were moss or mold or mildew or something. Come to think of it she didn’t believe the buildings had looked like that when she entered the ventilation tower.
Strange. And Ayaan had taught her never to ignore the strange. She scratched a sudden itch in her left armpit and pondered what to do next.
She made her way toward Building 109, the Island’s former welcome center where she was supposed to sleep that night, keeping one eye on the water. She half expected an army of ghouls to come dribbling up out of the harbor. When Marisol’s sickly little son Jackie grabbed her from behind she automatically reached for her pistol. She stopped herself in time, because she’d had proper training in who and whom not to shoot.
“What’s up?” she said, and tousled Jackie’s hair. It took her a second to realize something was wrong. He coughed and a cloud of black spores erupted from his throat. His skin looked patchy and even fuzzy in places. She grabbed his chin, trying to discover if he was choking, and her hand came away covered in musty-smelling powder.
The itch in her armpit got a lot worse, all of a sudden.
Chapter Ten
“Stay away from the edge,” Marisol said, never taking the field glasses from her eyes.
Sarah danced backwards, away from the crumbling bricks at the top of the six-story dormitory building. Not the safest place on the island but it had the best view of the skeletal city across the channel. The building had been officer’s quarters once but now it was about to fall down. The thick coating of white mildew like a coating of frost on the side of a leaky refrigerator was taking its toll, eating into the bricks on one side, chemically dissolving the mortar between them.
“I can’t recognize half the buildings over there. Have you ever seen anything like this? No, nobody has. The Battery’s turned green again. The dead ate every growing thing there was over there but now... Jesus, look at those shrubs—they must be fifteen feet high.” Marisol pivoted in place and adjusted her focus.
Not just Battery Park, Sarah saw, but the entire tip of lower Manhattan had transformed overnight into a deep and dark forest. Trees crowded the broad streets, their roots overturning the rusted soft shapes of abandoned cars. The sides of buildings were verdant with moss or dark with fungal growth. Flowers in a dozen different colors sprouted from broken windows and vines dangled from straining balconies.
Behind them, curled in a folding deck chair, little Jackie hacked up another lungful of spores. It was dangerous on top of the dormitory building but Marisol wouldn’t let him out of her sight. She lowered the binoculars and looked at her son for a moment, perhaps assessing his condition. He wasn’t getting any better.
Half of Governors Island was complaining of respiratory distress. One woman, a forty-year-old grandmother, had died in the night. Those who weren’t coughing up bloody goo were complaining of skin irritations, weird rashes, discolored nails and hair and teeth.
Twenty-three people—nearly a third of the Island’s inhabitants—were bed-ridden. Half of them weren’t expected to survive another day. It was as if the natural world, the vegetative world, had rebelled against them. As if it wanted them dead.
Mold had spread across the wooden docks and piers of Governors Island, green, slimy mold, algae growing faster and thicker than it had a right to. Mushrooms had popped up all over Nolan Park. Poisonous and ugly, they exuded horrible clouds of choking spores when they were stepped on. Even the grass between the houses, even the thin weeds that popped up between the flagstones of Fort Jay, had turned thick and coarse as if they were reaching for the survivors’ ankles, wanting to trip them, to bring them down. Hidden in the shadier parts of the island deadly nightshade had emerged and poison ivy was spreading into the carefully tended gardens.
The worst part was that it wasn’t even over. It was still spreading. Since dawn the acidic mildew that threatened the dormitory building had spread to three more brick towers. Who knew what would still be standing by nightfall.
Marisol fiddled with the vinyl strap of her binoculars. “People are asking me questions I can’t answer. They don’t understand this, Sarah. They don’t know why it’s happening. They need a reason, any reason. Maybe they sinned before God. Or maybe this is just Mother
Nature getting her own back. That kind of mushy-minded stuff won’t hold them for long, though. They’re going to want a scapegoat. Someone to blame.”
Sarah nodded absently. She was as confused as anybody and she could admit to herself it would be nice to blame this horror on somebody. Hating a scapegoat would help her choke down her fear.
“Obviously,” Marisol continued, “I’m going to say it’s your fault.”
Sarah stopped nodding. “What?” she demanded.
“Well, think about it. You’re an outsider. I don’t want to string up one of my own people like some kind of pagan sacrifice. I’d much rather hang a near stranger. Secondly, it’s true, isn’t it? You brought this here. You were after that Tsarevich asshole and in the process you gave away our location. Sound familiar?”
“No, no,” Sarah said, “we were really careful, we kept our distance—”
Marisol shrugged. “Okay. Maybe the fact that nothing like this has happened for twelve years, and then all of a sudden you show up, and the next day we’re overrun by evil plants, okay, maybe, just maybe, that’s a coincidence.” She raised her hands to the heavens. “Still.”
Sarah’s mind raced. If the survivors on Governors Island believed it, if they truly thought she was the cause of the biological attack—they wouldn’t wait for a lynching. They would tear her to pieces with their bare hands. They had just enough to lose to make them desperate.
Fear rippled her guts.
She reached for something—anything—to fight back with. “Yeah,” she said, “well, you just go ahead and try it, lady. You go ahead.”
“Alright.”
“And then—and then, when they’re going to, to burn me at the stake, whatever, when I have their attention, then I’ll explain to them exactly who it was who taught you how to make a ghoul into a slack.”
Marisol’s mouth twitched. It could have been the precursor of a grin. “Coming from the daughter of a lich that might sound a bit hard to believe.”
Blood flowed out of Sarah’s face. She was fighting for her life. “Not when—not if I tell them what Gary got, in exchange! Not when I tell them how he used you like a living sex toy!”
Marisol didn’t rise to it, however. “That would sound bad,” she admitted. “The thing of it is, though, that in the morning, I might have a lot of explaining to do, but you’ll still be dead.”
Damn.
She had a point, Sarah had to admit.
Desperate, completely unable to think clearly, Sarah tore the Makarov out of her sweatshirt pocket and swung her arm in Marisol’s direction—only to find herself looking down the barrel of a .357 revolver.
“Ayaan taught you about firearms, right? You’re pretty good,” Marisol told her. She was breathing a little heavy. Sarah was nearly gasping. “Jack taught me.”
Slowly, with a caution based on extensive paranoia, both women lowered their weapons. No safeties had been released, there had been no real danger, but Sarah knew she had been a moment away from death.
“We do what we have to do to keep going,” Marisol told her. “You know that. So don’t you dare judge me.”
“Killing me won’t solve your problem,” Sarah demanded.
“No. But it will keep my people from rioting and making things a whole lot worse. You have a better idea?”
Sarah swallowed all the spit in her mouth and turned her head to look at the towers of Manhattan. They looked like the kind of impregnable fortresses you only read about in fairy tales. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I go over there, and find out what’s doing this. And maybe I can make it stop.”
Marisol snorted. “Yeah, and maybe you can grow dragonfly wings and fly back under your own power. Come on.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Sarah said. Truthfully she didn’t believe it. She just thought it would be a way to escape. “Look—you can throw me to the wolves and maybe that will give you time to evacuate. Or I can go over there and maybe I can actually achieve something.”
Marisol stared at her, twin beams of judgment emerging from her eyes to pin Sarah to the spot, probing her, studying her. Sarah squirmed like a laboratory specimen under hot lights. Then something weird happened. Jackie coughed, a sputtering sound like a stalled engine. Marisol blinked. She seemed to lose about an inch of height and the tight muscles of her shoulders and arms drooped. “Okay,” she said.
Sarah shook her head, not comprehending. “Seriously?” She thought maybe Gary was taking over Marisol’s body, or maybe the Tsarevich could control the Mayor’s body remotely but no, there was no dark energy anywhere nearby. Sarah would have known if there were magic at work. Marisol, she realized, was just bereft of other options. She needed help that badly.
“Yeah. I’ll give you a boat and whatever weapons you want. You go over there alone. You do what you can, then you come back. I know you won’t try to run away.”
Sarah said, “Of course,” meaning, “of course I’ll run, as fast as my little legs can carry me.” She didn’t say that.
“I know it,” Marisol told her, “because if you do, you’ll never see your father again. I’ll pull him out of that tower and I’ll make him my example.”
Hope fell inside Sarah like cold liquid draining to her toes.
She had just talked herself into a nasty little corner.
Chapter Eleven
She didn’t sleep anymore. She would never sleep again. As the night came on Ayaan’s eyes began to feel sore and dry. She rubbed and rubbed at them until her skin started coming away. After that she forced herself not to rub.
One by one the cultists headed off to their beds, hammocks, old mattresses with the dust and insects beaten out of them. They drained away into the dark storefronts and broken-down hotels, stretching their arms, yawning.
The moon came up and found Ayaan still waiting, waiting for sleep to come, and knowing it never would. Something else found her, too. The lipless lich. Semyon Iurevich, who saw all, who knew all. He wrapped his bathrobe tight around striped pajamas a size too big for his gaunt frame. “Come,” he said, and he lead her away from the bonfire in the middle of Ocean Avenue. Away from the light and the few zealots who stood an almost silent guard duty.
She watched the lich’s back as he moved away from her, the pale stretch of robe across his shoulders like a beacon drawing her into the grid of darkened streets. She watched his feet shamble forward, ungainly but unflagging, she saw the complicated engineering of his shriveled ankles, all the knobs and spars and bits of bone, and the stretched sinews over them. When he turned to look back at her his face was a death mask, leather pulled far too tight over unyielding bone. His eyes were so large in their sockets.
She was vaguely aware that she was paying far too much attention to the lich. She thought perhaps that she was subconsciously horrified by him not because of his dire appearance but because she knew she would be like him soon enough, that her own body would dry up, slim down, exude horrible chemicals. Rot.
Then again it was possible he was merely hypnotizing her. She didn’t know the extent of his psychic powers. She only knew that he could see inside of her heart. And that he had lied to his master on her behalf.
“Yes, is right,” he told her. They had stopped moving. They were inside a tiny room with stripes of light slanting in through wooden jalousies. She didn’t remember entering the building, which was probably a bad sign. She stretched out her hands to try to get a literal grasp on where she might be but she clutched only cobwebs. “I lied, for you. You understand? Is lie I told, that you are trustable. Harmless. Bah!”
She looked for him but could only see his teeth in the filtered moonlight. Teeth bared in eternal rictus—the lips had pulled back, away from his mouth. His gums stood out from his face, pink like wounds. “We both know, you are assassin. We are both knowing who should you kill! He is dangerous, more than anyone know. I see his heart! His black and dead heart!”
Ayaan nodded, and licked her own lips, checking they were still there. She had very little sa
liva in her mouth and her tongue felt like a cat’s as it rasped over her flesh. Her hand went up to touch her neck, where her tattooed ward wrapped around her like a fence.
“Yes, he has control. Control of you. You must be caution, in all things. Together, though. Together we kill. Your friend, the ghost.” A smile, a frown, they were the same on his face. “He has friend in me. We work together.”
She blinked and it was daylight and her mind was clear. It happened that quickly. Behind her a horn thundered out a prolonged bass chord and she jumped.
She turned slowly and found herself looking at a vehicle that was a cross between a hot rod and a giant pickup truck. It had four enormous balloon tires and a cab that could easily seat five. Its engine was exposed to the air, all chrome pipes and dancing pistons. Its grille looked like a gothic arch stolen off a cathedral. Multi-toned flames decorated the cab. The hood ornament was a skull done in chrome and the cargo bed was full of corpses held down with bungee cords.
Ayaan looked closer. The naked bodies in the back had been surgically adjusted. They had neither hands nor lips. Their torpor, she imagined, would only be temporary—their metabolisms had been dialed back by the green phantom. She looked up and saw him on the roof of the truck, tied into a lawn chair bolted in amongst a wide array of fog lights and horns. He grinned down at her when he saw her jump in surprise.
The passenger side door of the truck swung open. The werewolf sat in the driver’s seat and he slid across to reach down and give her a hand up. He showed her how to use her seat belt and how to adjust the air conditioning and the CD player. This was necessary since the dashboard was so long he was unable to reach those instruments while belted into the driver’s seat.
“This is the... the job the Tsarevich offered me?” Ayaan asked.
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