“Is good life, I want more,” the scarred woman begged, but there was nothing Ayaan could do. Clearly she had been promised eternal life as a lich. Instead in a few minutes she would die and rise as a ghoul.
Ayaan looked up at the Tsarevich, who was literally foaming at the mouth with excitement. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
The single eye rolled in her direction but the prince of the dead said nothing.
“Damn you,” Ayaan said. Cicatrix had lost consciousness and was barely breathing. “There’s no time to make her a lich, even if I thought it should be done. I can keep her from coming back, though.”
The Tsarevich sucked on his lower lip and convulsed in his throne. Was it a nod, a shrug, or merely an involuntary spasm?
It would have to be good enough. Ayaan frowned and pulled power into her hands. She leaned forward and closed Cicatrix’s eyes. In a very perverse way the living woman had been her closest friend in the camp of the liches. She kissed the shaved head and said a brief prayer for Cicatrix’s salvation, begging Allah to see past the woman’s decadence and her fraternization with monsters.
Then Ayaan brought up her hands and blasted Cicatrix’s head until the skin and muscle and fat melted away and the skull beneath turned yellow. She kept it up until the bone scorched and steam fizzed out of Cicatrix’s eye sockets.
For a long moment while she hovered over the dead woman Ayaan could think only of Dekalb. At the end of his life she had offered this same service. He had refused, and she had simply walked away. She’d always regretted that, leaving such a hero to become just another shambling, mindless wanderer. Perhaps this duty made up a little for her previous failure.
Eventually she rose to her feet and straightened her hair. She felt drained. She felt hungry and wondered if any of the goats from the farm in Pennsylvania were still available. A tang of disgust bit into the back of her throat—she had just boiled the brains of a friend, she had turned Cicatrix’s eyes to running custard. She should hardly be thinking of food. Yet she was a dead thing and she knew the hunger would never stop.
“Be taking this one away,” the Tsarevich said. Ayaan looked up, startled, expecting to be accosted by handless ghouls. The Russian lich had been talking to the green phantom, however, who grabbed up Cicatrix’s pink ankles in his skeletal hands. He dragged her from the room without further ceremony.
Ayaan turned to face the mummy who held the brain, then at Nilla, who just looked sad. She glanced back at the Tsarevich. “I will take them to a safe place,” she announced. “There could be a follow-up attack. I recommend finding a hiding place for yourself.”
It turned out the Tsarevich was capable of nodding after all.
Nilla led her small procession out of MAD-O-RAMA and up the boardwalk, the silver planks of wood echoing like drums under her boots. Before they had taken a hundred steps the brain spoke to her again.
Bollocks, he swore. I can assure you we won’t get a chance like that again. We could have killed him! Slaughtered him where he sat! From now on he’ll be expecting an attack. He’ll take precautions, perhaps hide himself away again where no one can find him. And it’s all your fault.
Ayaan looked at Nilla. The blonde lich pushed her hair out of her eyes with one pale hand but the breeze off the sea kept fluttering her locks down across her eyes.
The brain sputtered inside Ayaan’s mind. Don’t worry about her, she and I are friends from far back. You can speak as you please. Now tell me, lass, did you lack courage? When it came to the fatal moment, did you lose your bottle? Tell me just what in the blooming bastard hell were you thinking?
Ayaan addressed the brain directly, leaning down toward the mummy’s hands to get closer. “I was thinking I don’t trust you.”
Hah! You don’t trust me?
“I don’t trust the Tsarevich either, if that’s what you’re driving at. He turned me into a monster and I will never forgive him. But how much do my feelings matter in this? He is the only one who can rebuild this sad empty world. He is the only one who has the power. I saw as much in Pennsylvania.”
Strength should never be concentrated in the hands of one man. It must always be tempered with the wisdom of those who went before. It sounded like a recitation of holy scripture. Ayaan ignored it.
“You told me he had to be destroyed, that he had a plan of ultimate evil in mind. Now that grand secret plan is revealed—he simply wants to heal his broken body! I should kill a crippled man because he wishes to be whole?”
I'm not sure you understand. He has forced me to teach him the necessary magics. He has prepared the way to absorb all the energy of the Source into himself. That kind of power can do anything. It can reshape his body, fair enough, and mayhaps that's all he wants. Yet coupled with his level of control there’s not a lot he couldn’t do. He could end your life with an eyeblink, lass, if he chose. Cause wanton destruction, vanquish all who stood before him without lifting a deformed finger. He could rule by fire where before he’s always ruled by iron.
“He needs to take power into his own hands if he’s to do anything valuable.” Ayaan scowled. Why couldn’t she make the brain understand? Humanity needed a leader. It needed a leader who could work miracles. It was the only hope, for any kind of a future.
She felt the brain trying to turn over in its jar. It’s an ugly stretch of road from here to there. Do you truly expect him to do his best by all the wee folk in his wake? He mutilates their corpses!
“That’s true. Who ever built a mosque, though, who didn’t tear down hovels to make room? If you gave me a good enough reason, if you had given me any kind of reason at all I would gladly have sacrificed myself and yes, all of his followers, to destroy him. But you didn’t. You decided instead to pollute my mind with post-hypnotic suggestions. Why should I give you my loyalty, when you try to take it by force?”
The brain was silent for quite a while.
You’ve gone soft.
Ayaan roared with disgust.
Fathers before us. You’ve actually fallen for the cod’s wallop that tosser spews out, haven’t you? You’ve turned. I had our Semyon lie on your behalf but he needn’t have, eh? They brainwashed you just fine.
“Be careful what you suggest,” Ayaan told him. “I happen to be a specialist in laying the dead to rest. I’ve never killed a ghost before but I’m willing to learn how.”
If only it were that simple.
Ayaan stormed away from him, but only for a few paces. She was alone, all alone in the midst of monstrosity. She was enmeshed in secrets and lies and plans she didn’t have a hand in forming. She could not afford to give anything up. “What about you?” she demanded, staring at Nilla. “What’s your part in this?”
The blonde lich turned to face the sun. “I’ve already told you, I’m nobody. And that’s what makes me special.”
Ayaan shook her head and dropped to sit on the sand. She hated nothing more in the world than riddles. Studiously she tried to ignore them. She stared out at the water as it broke on the sand. The sun had moved visibly across the sky by the time she noticed something flailing in the surf, something yellow and red and black with a bit of silver on one end and white spars sticking out of the sides.
Its limbs extended and then dropped, digging deep into the sand. It reared up, water pouring from its orifices and crevices and nooks and crannies. It had been human, once. It looked like a portioned chicken. The silver bit had been a helmet, strapped to its head. It had slipped down to cover one of its eyes; the other eye socket was empty and raw as if it had been gnawed on. Long strips of its skin had come off in the water while the salt had washed its exposed bones quite clean. It was the ugliest thing Ayaan had ever seen.
“What now?” she demanded.
The brain answered. That’s one of Amanita’s foot soldiers. If it came here on its own that can only mean one thing. She must be dead.
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 sh
e 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.
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