“Sarah,” Ayaan croaked.
“You know her?” Nilla asked, her face wide with confusion.
Ayaan got her feet under herself and she climbed back out of the defile, back up onto the roadway. The helicopter had dipped down into the trees and the AA missile followed. Ayaan’s chest lurched and a horrible belch came out of her, stinking of dead things. The missile touched the tree line and exploded harmlessly well behind the fleeing helicopter.
Okay. Sarah was safe. Ayaan didn’t breathe a sigh of relief. She no longer breathed. But her body sagged. Relaxed a little. Okay.
Except—if Sarah was attacking the Tsarevich, then—then—Sarah was—Sarah had chosen to become—Sarah had unwittingly aligned herself against—against Ayaan, who had—in some noncommittal way—sided with the Russian lich.
She had it an instant later but it didn’t help. Sarah had to know, had somehow learned that Ayaan was now a lich herself. Sarah had attacked specifically with the intent of sanitizing Ayaan. Except she had missed.
And except for the fact that Ayaan didn’t want to be sanitized. She had always believed that when the moment came she would beg for the bullet in the head. Kneel in the dirt and grovel for it. Only now—now she had something to live for, something bigger than herself. The Tsarevich was going to rebuild the world. Ayaan wanted to help him.
Sarah was fighting against them.
“For Christ’s sake, woman, help me,” someone screeched behind her. Ayaan turned and saw the green phantom literally, physically pulling ghouls and living cultists toward the flatbed, pushing them towards the fires there. They grabbed up armfuls of snow and tossed them on the flames. A few had real fire extinguishers and were trying to save the yurt. They moved faster than the others, faster than human beings were supposed to move. The green phantom was accelerating them. Ayaan glanced forward, at the machine guns mounts. One of them was gone altogether. A crater in the side of the flatbed was all that remained. Molten metal had dripped over the side of the bed and formed long silver icicles.
The other machine gun was on fire. Its ammunition crates were right there. If they went up, if they got too hot, every round in those crates—thousands of bullets—would go off at once, firing in random directions, carving out bloody linear tracks through the living and the dead on the flatbed, all of the cultists clustered around it, everyone in range. Ayaan surged forward and was repulsed by a wave of fire that tore upwards on a gust of wind. She moved forward again and saw that the crates were already on fire. She had a split second before she was shot full of random holes. Without even thinking she gathered up energy and blasted the crates with her power.
Stupid—incredibly foolish—but it worked. Fire couldn’t exist without fuel. The wooden crates disintegrated under her blast, the wood darkening, turning gray, turning to dust. Long belts of ammunition slithered out and slinked away across the flatbed or over the edge. It didn’t matter—the fire was out.
Ayaan adjusted her footing as the flatbed went over a dip in the road surface. It was still moving. She shook her head and then she grabbed the green phantom’s arm. “We have to stop the column,” she shouted at him. He didn’t respond fast enough for her. “Let me in to see the Tsarevich. Let me talk to him.”
“Who are you?” he demanded. “A month ago I punished you for trying to kill my master. Now you want to be his ally?”
She didn’t have time for this. “I do what I think is best.”
He crossed his arms across his robe. “A dangerous policy in the best of times. You can’t see him. He’s already given me his orders and they are that the column must keep moving, at all costs.”
“There could be another attack—if it were me I would have an ambush waiting for us up ahead. Come on. I know you don’t trust me. You called me a dog, once, a dog that had to be kept on a short leash. But trust me now. Please. So much is at stake.”
He shook his skull-like head. “I have my instructions. Why don’t you go and find Nilla? Make sure she’s safe.”
Ayaan grunted in frustration and turned away from him. The green phantom was willing to give her something, though.
“My name is Enni Langstrom,” he said.
She turned around. He was squinting at her, his sunken eyes narrow, suspicious slits.
“My name was Enni Langstrom. Alright? I trust you enough to know my name.”
She nodded, understanding. He wanted her to feel like part of the Tsarevich’s inner circle. He wanted to reward her allegiance. She was in.
Now she just needed to figure out where Sarah fit in. Please, she thought. Please, Sarah, just give up. Go home. She stared out at the trees that blanketed the mountain. Sarah had to be out there somewhere. Please, don’t make me fight you.
Ayaan had always been willing to sacrifice her life for a true cause. She had always believed that one life was a small price to pay for the common good.
If it came to that, to firing a blast of her darkness into Sarah’s body. If doing that meant preserving the Tsarevich and therefore the only chance the human race had left. If it came to that.
She nodded to herself. She would do it.
Chapter Twelve
he valley formed a shallow bowl with a low ridge at the far end. There were buildings up there, and the weathered statues Sarah had seen before. They looked like stylized animals from the bottom of the valley.
Dead men and women stood at the edge of the valley. Not many—only three or four. They weren’t doing anything. Just standing there. The closest of the standing ghouls—a really nasty looking guy with little skin left on his body and no arms at all—turned to glare at her with empty eye sockets but he didn’t take a step toward her. After a moment he turned his face back toward the Source and his toothless jaw fell open. He wasn’t doing a thing. None of the corpses in the valley were doing anything but then most of them were truly, finally dead. One motionless body lay not three feet from where Sarah first stepped down into the valley.
A human body, half-decomposed, and it wasn’t even twitching. It had been a long time since Sarah saw that. She nudged it with the toe of her boot. She could see yellow ribs sticking out under its coat. She could see where the flesh had been torn away by teeth.
Nothing. No movement.
Squinting, she adjusted her grip on her OICW and glanced over her shoulder. The mummies waited patiently behind her, their shotgun barrels pointed at the sky. Ptolemy stood to one side of them. He shook his painted head back and forth—he had no better idea what was going on than she did.
Directly ahead the valley was carpeted with bones and moldering bodies. None of them moved. Skulls stared up at random angles at a lifeless sky. Femurs and humeri stuck up like fence posts. Heaps of pelvises and spines and xyphoid processes and metacarpals and phalanges made narrow hummocks, obscuring the soil beneath. Thousands of people had died in this valley, or at least died somewhere else and come here to fall down. No one had buried them or done anything with their corpses. They had been allowed to just rot away.
The freshest ones formed a perimeter, a wide semi-circle of stinking carrion. Toward the middle where the ground began to rise the bones were the oldest, broken and beige with time and neglect. No plants grew there, no birds flew overhead.
Sarah figured it had to be the Source that drew the bodies to this place. It was so bright she had to shade her eyes when she turned to face it, so close she could feel its energy like warmth on her skin. The dead had come for years, pilgrims to the place where the Epidemic began.
Sarah stepped over the corpse. It took a real act of will. For all of her life, at least all of her life that she could remember, rule one had been to never turn your back on a dead body. It was how you got killed. This one wasn’t hurting anybody, though. She stepped over it and dug her boot through a pile of bones to touch the ground beyond. She took another step, careful not to put any weight on the carpet of bones. Nothing happened.
Did the dead come so far just to stand around, to just wait to fall to pieces? D
id they come because it felt good to be surrounded by that energy? Did it nourish them? Sarah had a lot of questions. What was that smell?
She turned and saw that one of the mummies had followed her into the bones. He stood there motionless, as dead as a statue, his shotgun braced on his shoulder. She sniffed the air. He smelled like warm apple pie. Sarah tried to remember when she’d ever had the chance to smell a piece of apple pie. Maybe with her father, before the Epidemic. Her father—just thinking of him sent a jagged length of metallic guilt stabbing through her heart. What she’d said to him had been unacceptable.
Burning apple pie. Apple pie? Maybe pumpkin pie. Hot spices. Burning spices. A trickle of white smoke wafted out from the mummy’s chest. With a hissing sound a piece of the wrappings on his head fluttered open and more smoke came out. The smoke smelled pungent, like incense. Like burning spice.
No way, she thought. “Back!” she shouted. The mummy didn’t move. “Get back!” she said, and shoved him backwards. She slapped at his pectorals, at his forehead and he rocked away from her as if there was no volition at all in his body. She grabbed the soapstone scarab in her pocket. “Ptolemy. Don’t let them come any closer.”
warms it the source consumes us it consumes even warms as it warms consumes us, he sputtered.
“Just stay back!” Even as she said it, though, another of the mummies—one with a poorly painted face—stepped forward. They wanted it. They wanted to be closer to the Source. It drew them just as it must have been drawing ghouls for years. And when they got close enough, when the energy in the air was thick enough, their bodies literally burned out from overexposure. The one thing they wanted more than anything in the world would kill them if they got too much of it.
A flash of motion on the far side of the valley startled Sarah. She flicked off the safety of her weapon but nothing appeared to attack her. It could have just been the sunlight bouncing off snow or a pile of bones falling over in the breeze. It could have been lots of things. She glanced back at the mummies and saw that they had all taken a step closer to the Source.
“No, listen to me,” she said, and moved to push the nearest one back. “You guys don’t even eat living things. How can you want this so badly?”
Source... Source, Ptolemy told her.
She shook her head. She heard a sound, kind of like the noise a match makes when it bursts into flame. She turned around again, her weapon up and ready.
A human form made of pure fire was running right at her faster than a cheetah. It came out of the middle of the valley. Flames licked backwards from its face, its chest. Its hands were wreathed in yellow fire. It was like nothing she'd ever seen before.
Sarah brought up her OICW and fired a three shot burst. She caught her target in center mass but it didn’t even slow down. Barreling toward her it left a smear of light on her retinas it was so bright. She fired again at its head, one burst, two, three, the rifle making a mechanical sound, a machine shop sound as it pumped bullets through its mechanism. She hit the head but nothing happened. She switched her rifle to full auto in the same second it shot past her, its fiery tail whipping at her exposed face and hands.
Ptolemy brought up his shotgun and blasted the back of its knees as it ran past him. The fiery thing stumbled and fell and rolled forward for a while, sliding over the carpet of bones. It writhed horribly, the flames off its back gusting and snapping, its bodily fluids sizzling out of it. Now that it had come to something approaching a stop Sarah saw the motorcycle helmet on its head, the bare teeth where its lips had been cut away. Its hands were nothing but sharpened ends of bone.
She heard the roaring of a truck engine and looked up. The Tsarevich had arrived. On the far side of the valley dead men and women were lining up to get into the bowl, to press closer to the Source. The giant truck weaved through the crowd, the gorilla perched on top of its cab.
Sarah grabbed the nearest mummy and tried to pull him away. It was like tugging at a marble column. She let go and reached for the soapstone.
“Ptolemy,” she said, “we’re dead if we get caught in the open like this. We have to fall back and hide.”
Source... the Source
“Fuck the Source!” she shouted. “Fall back! That’s an order!”
One of the mummies—one of the extremely old ones—started to move. He took a step away from the Source. Sarah nodded and shouted and jumped up and down. "Yeah! Move!" He took another step.
On the other end of the valley the flatbed appeared, being hauled forward by a hundred ghouls. On its back stood three figures dressed in green, black and white. Sarah stared at the one dressed in black. It was Ayaan. She was too far to see, it should have been impossible. But she knew. She lifted the OICW to her shoulder and looked through the scope. Yeah. The skin around her lower jaw looked too tight and her eyes were dark pits sunk into her face. But it was Ayaan.
In a moment, in a space of time so short she didn’t breathe, the valley was full of the running dead.
Chapter Thirteen
Sarah and the mummies fell back to fighting positions. They grabbed cover, braced themselves for battle. Readied their weapons, laid out their spare ammunition. Prepared themselves for a guts-and-glory firefight.
They didn’t stand a chance.
The mummies were fast. Faster than any living human. The carried plenty of ammunition for their shotguns. It didn’t matter. The accelerated ghouls were faster.
Sarah watched her ambush turn into a rout without really being able to identify the turning point. She only knew she had fucked up. With the mummies crouched behind boulders, with herself on a high crest of rock trying to snipe the enemy with an assault rifle she knew it was going to end badly.
One by one the mummies were picked off. The younger ones, the Roman-era mummies with painted faces went first. One of them was stupid enough to run out into the denied zone, the region too close to the Source where the undead caught fire. He was smoldering before three of the accelerated corpses piled on top of him. All four of them burst into flame at once, a rolling, scrapping funeral pyre. The mummy’s arms pinwheeled as he tried to throw the ghouls off of him. He was slowing down as Sarah watched, however, and in moments he had stopped moving altogether.
The other painted mummy had a little more sense, but less luck. He moved steadily from rock to rock, picking off ghouls and then diving back into cover. In the end it wasn’t a ghoul that got him at all but something else, some weird magic that turned his linen yellow. His wrappings began to tatter as if they were torn at by dry desert winds and then his bones just seemed to give out and he collapsed in a heap.
Rifle fire picked off one of the older mummies. He had been smart enough to stay put and wait for the ghouls to come to him. Hunkered down between two rocks he kept the barrel of his M1014 high, ready to take opportunistic shots. He was severely outranged, however, by a cultist with a Dragunov sniper rifle. Through the scope of her OICW Sarah saw the sniper line up the perfect bead. He took his shot before she had time to even shout out a warning. The mummy’s head popped open like a bag full of freeze-dried meat.
The rest of the mummies died when the Tsarevich decided to stop playing games and sent his whole force into the valley, hundreds of ghouls, at least a hundred living men and women with assault rifles and pistols and machine guns. The enemy just tore her troops to pieces. What had been a battle of attrition turned into a plain old-fashioned defeat as bodies living and dead flung themselves at Sarah’s positions. Ptolemy threw away his weapon and threw himself into the melee, grabbing at ghouls and hurling them into the denied zone, turning around to kick in the faces of living zealots, moving so fast Sarah saw him as an off-white blur digging into the enemy’s ranks. Then he disappeared.
He was just there one moment and gone the next. “Magic,” she breathed, but no. She would have seen magic. He had simply been tackled by so many of the Tsarevich’s forces that she couldn’t see him any more.
There was no more time.
So this is
it, she told herself. The moment of truth. The mummies had sacrificed themselves so she could get close enough to finish her mission. Seven mummies had died for this. Two liches. Marisol’s son. All so she could fire a single shot. Sarah lifted the OICW to her lips and kissed it. She needed luck. She had the determination.
She looked down from her perch and saw Ayaan standing in the midst of the dead and the living. She was wearing a leather jacket with painted skulls on it, which made her a perfect target. Sarah lifted the scope of her weapon to her eye and centered the crosshairs on Ayaan’s forehead. It was a duty, a sacred duty that she carried out. The shot would give away her position. She would have only moments after she killed Ayaan to get the barrel in her own mouth and destroy her own brain. But then it would be over. A cold, almost frozen calm came over her. She'd been taught how to do this by the best. She slipped off the safety. Just one shot. She just needed... she needed something. One shot, right, she just needed one shot.
Sarah blinked but it just made her vision blur. She licked her lips but her tongue was dry. Was she... was she afraid? She just needed the one... the one shot. Silence filled her head—she couldn’t hear anything.
The OICW clattered against the slickrock at her feet. Somehow it had fallen out of her hands. She shook her head and reached for the Makarov in her pocket. It felt as heavy as a rock, as a, a boulder. Why was she so tired, suddenly? Sarah sat down, hard, and closed her eyes. She couldn’t open them again no matter how determined she was. What was going on?
Oh, she thought. This time, yeah. It was. Magic.
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