Monster Planet

by David Wellington

  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 he
re. 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 Seven

  There was no roof on top of the ventilation tower, just a lattice of metal bars designed to keep birds out. Greasy lint matted the lattice, black with soot spewed from generations of cars going by in the tunnel beneath. Sarah kept slipping but Ptolemy was right there to grab her, his hands dry and very, very strong.

  His painted face betrayed no emotion whatsoever.

  In the sunlight, standing upright in the breeze and the blue sky, she studied him as she never really had before. She saw how his bandages gathered in his armpits and how they had been woven across his back. There must have been dozens of layers of cloth wrapped around him. She saw flashes of gold from the small of his back, from his kneecaps, and knew he must have amulets buried in all that swaddling. She smelled her hands where he had grasped her and smelled the spice, the cinnamon and ground nutmeg smell of the resins that preserved his body. She smelled the millennia he had outlived and the strange worlds he had inhabited. To die at the height of the Roman empire, to be reborn at the end of history. She wondered what that could do to you, what it might do to your mind, your sanity.

  “What did you want to show me?” she asked. He said nothing. Then he grabbed her hand. Hard. He grabbed her hand very hard. It started to hurt.

  A protest bubbled out of her but suddenly his energy flooded through her body, dark and thick and her arcane vision flared up, overwhelming all of her senses. She saw him, the darkness inside of him burning intensely. She saw herself, full of golden fire. She saw through his eyes, though. Her own vision had never been so sharp. He saw what she did but with far greater detail.

  Amazing. She wanted to study herself in the mirror of his eyes, she wanted to look at everything the way he did. There was no time for that, though. He turned her to look to the west. Her vision sped across the world until she saw what he wanted her to see.

  Pure energy. It radiated from a single point well to the west, high in mountains in the middle of the continent. A broken chain of enormous rocks like an exposed spinal column. The light that flooded outward in long flickering beams from that place was colorless and perfect. Colorless, neither yellow nor purple, though she knew it had to be the energy that created both. Colorless because it wasn't light at all, but life, the very energy that made her cells divide and her hair grow.

  It was awesome in its beauty. Jaw-droppingly, hypnotically beautiful. Sarah felt a powerful urge to get closer to it, to that Source. “That’s where he’s headed?” she asked, though she couldn’t imagine where else the Tsarevich might go.

  it is go where we all go want to go, he told her. it source is the source

  The Source. She understood immediately. “We’ll leave today, if we can,” she told him. The Tsarevich had a long road ahead of him still but she couldn’t afford to lose a step. “Your friends are ready?”

  He nodded again. This time just a simple nod, his painted face bowing up and down. She followed him back down a ladder to the ground and then across the narrow causeway to the Island. Osman was waiting for her, a stack of cheaply printed technical manuals in his hands. He gave Ptolemy a nasty but brief look and then turned away, gesturing for Sarah to follow him.

  “Marisol didn’t want to give up any of them, and I must say I understand her logic,” the pilot told her as he lead them deep into the Island’s interior, to where the big aircraft hangars loomed over the slack-haunted gardens. “If something should happen to this place they’ll need all the vehicles they have to get away. I had to really sweet-talk her for just the one.”

  “Do you want a medal?” Sarah asked. “I’ll make sure you get a medal when this is over.”

  He laughed and nodded appreciatively. “Alright. What we have here,” he said, and grunted as he shoved open an enormous hangar door. It was counterweighted so it could be opened easily even without power but it was still huge. “What we have here is American airpower at its finest. The HH-60 Jayhawk, which is just a United States Coast Guard version of the UH-60, I do not lie.”

  The aircraft in the hangar had the stubby nose and long tail that just said “helicopter”. There was little to distinguish its lines except its white and safety orange paint job.

  “This is the workhorse of the US Army. Medium-range, medium-lift, twin engine, single prop, it stands up to any kind of duty you’d care to mention: medical evac, air cavalry, troop transport, point-to-point and my least favorite, direct air assault. It’s the best helicopter ever built by human hands.”

  Sarah peered into the darkness of the hangar. “Medium-range? We’re going quite a ways.” She tried to remember what she had learned of American geography. “The Rocky Mountains, I think.”

  Osman shuffled through the tech manuals in his hands and pulled out a heavily annotated military aviator’s map of the country. Sarah pointed out the Source at once. With a laminated cardboard ruler Osman measured the distance, his thick fingers smoothing out the paper map as he went. “A little under two thousand miles,” he told her. He scratched his beard. “Fine, just fine. We’ll need to stop once and refuel. There’s a major air base here,” he said, pointing at a star on the map labeled Omaha. “They’ll have what we need.”

  “We can just do that? The fuel won’t have evaporated or gone stale in all this time?” Sarah asked.

  “No problem, boss. Gasoline goes bad over time, that is true. Jet fuel, on the other hand, is just very pure kerosene. It lasts forever if it’s stored properly.”

  Sarah nodded and looked up at the helicopter. “Okay, I’ll take it.”

  “Wonderful,” Osman said, and gestured broadly with his arms. “Once again I get to fly to my certain death. It had better be a very large medal, with many ribbons.”

  Sarah smiled and took some of the tech manuals from him. She was about to start looking for the fuel hoses when a shadow passed across the mouth of the hangar.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said. Dekalb didn’t look happy.

  “Sarah. I thought we discussed this.” On his shoulder Gary looked like he�
�d gone to sleep, though Sarah knew better. “I don’t want you in harm’s way. So please, just. Just step away from that helicopter.”

  “I won’t let Ayaan down,” she told him. Maybe if she could just talk him into going back to the house. Maybe if she just lied to him then he wouldn’t notice when she left. “Not when I’ve come this far already.”

  “Fine,” he said, and stepped inside the hangar. “Then I’ll do it.”

  It took her a second to realize he was serious. “Dad, this isn’t the time,” she insisted, but he was already climbing inside the helicopter.

  Osman dropped what he was doing and came over to stand next to her. Slowly the pilot folded his arms across his chest. “I know you from old times, dead man,” he said to Dekalb. “I respect you for what I’ve seen you do. So I’ll ask you nicely to get out of my vehicle.”

  “Osman.” Dekalb looked at the pilot as if trying to place him. “It’s been so long. Please, take me to where Ayaan is. I have to dispatch her.”

  Heat filled Sarah’s throat. Was she about to cry? Somebody had to teach her father a lesson about reality. Somebody needed to point out his folly.

  Why did it have to be her?

  “Dad,” she said, very, very carefully. “It’s not up to you. This isn’t your responsibility. It’s mine.”

  “I’m your only surviving parent, Sarah.” He wasn’t even looking at her. “You are my responsibility. Your safety.”

  Sarah glanced back at Osman but the pilot had nothing for her. He had taught her before to finish off her own liches.