She nodded and broke away from him. He went to get his tomatoes but as it worked out she didn’t have a chance to share in his feast. An eight year old boy dressed in a pair of shorts and flip-flops came running in, out of breath, to tell her Fathia wanted her up at the perimeter wire. She went right away.
The boy lead her through the open-air market of the encampment, a close space of stalls lined with broken cinderblocks where the elderly sorted through cans looking for signs of botulism or corruption. Alma, one of the women from Ayaan’s unit, was washing her face in a pan full of sandy water from the communal well as Sarah hurried by. She looked up and then looked away again as if to pretend she hadn’t seen Sarah at all.
There was no time to figure out what that meant. Sarah hurried down a long “street” lined on both sides with semi-permanent tent homes. At the far end she found Fathia under a moth-eaten awning, leaning over a map of the surrounding territory. Other soldiers lay on the ground nearby in the shade of the palisade wall, trying to get some rest.
The boy who had brought Sarah to the new commander crawled under the map table and dug his fingers into the loose dirt. His job was done.
Fathia cleared her throat.
“I’m in command now, of course. I have some work to do before I can take the girls out again, though. I’ve got to rebuild the unit with half the soldiers I used to have,” Fathia said, as if she wanted Sarah’s input. Sarah knew she did not. “That’s alright, we’ll be faster. Smarter. I can’t see a use for you in that structure so I’m restricting you to camp duties,” Fathia said, rinsing her mouth out with non-potable water and spitting on the ground. “I hope that will be acceptable.”
“Actually Ayaan always felt I should be out in the field, that that was where my talent was really useful.” Sarah’s stomach rumbled with a bad presentiment. If she couldn’t go out with the soldiers her usefulness to Fathia would be distinctly curtailed. In the Egyptian encampment one rule had always held: the most useful people ate first. Those who couldn’t do anything valuable, those who were seen as dead weight, went hungry.
She looked again at the boy under the table. She could count his ribs, but his belly stuck out like a swollen gourd. His eyes were moist. Had he been crying? It could help with the pangs of hunger. She remembered how it helped.
Fathia clucked her tongue and Sarah looked back at the soldier hurriedly, embarrassed she had broken eye contact even for a moment. “Yes, she did say that. Of course,” Fathia went on, pointing out a flaw in Sarah’s logic, “Ayaan is no longer here to make those kind of decisions. I hope you won’t have trouble accepting my orders. I know that obedience isn’t your strength.”
Of course the only thing worse than being dead weight was being insubordinate. “No, no, ma’am, that’ll be no problem. You’re the boss.”
“I suppose I am,” Fathia said, looking up in mock surprise. “Well, let’s put your talent to some real use. I need someone to stand watch. That mixed group of dead and living we saw could be here as early as midnight.”
It meant staying up all night, mercilessly pinching her legs every time she started to nod off. It meant being up in the wind and the sand and spitting out dust for days afterward. She didn’t complain. It meant she wouldn’t be dead weight, at least not for that day.
If she didn’t get to sleep that night at least she wasn’t alone. As the sun sank over the western desert the camp was lit up with oil lamps and sporadic electric lights. The fuel for both was precious and it was never burnt just because someone had trouble sleeping. Both helicopters were kept on stand-by, Osman and the other pilots sleeping sitting up in their crewseats. Armed soldiers patrolled the streets of the encampment looking for anything out of the order. They shouted gossip back and forth—nothings, empty statements, assurances that all was as it should be. The need for that affirmation hung in the air like a seagull flying into a breeze.
The camp wanted to know what happened next. Even those who could no longer lift a rifle or thrust a bayonet had to know, had to get the news. Were they all about to die? Would they be overrun that night? For twelve years each of them had somehow managed to stay alive while the darkness crowded with monsters waiting to take them apart. They had survived even when so many others had died. They could only wait and ask themselves if this was the night that changed. Up in her observation post, a bare platform of wooden planking high in a dead palm tree, Sarah could only watch the horizon and wonder herself. Always before when she’d stood watch up in the air like that she’d felt pretty safe. The dead didn’t climb trees and the occasional ghoul who tried to attack the camp would never get through the palisade of barbed wire. Now, though, they were facing living opponents armed with rifles. She was a sitting duck up there, only the dark color of her hooded sweatshirt protecting her from snipers. Maybe that was why Fathia wanted her up in the tree.
She knew that Fathia didn’t trust her because of her ability to see the energy of the dead. She knew the soldiers spoke about her behind her back, talked about how spooky she was. Now that Ayaan wasn’t around to protect her did they want to put her in harm’s way, did they want to kill her off?
The thought kept her alert most of the night. She never saw any sign of the marching army. She got to the point of expecting them, of hoping they would come just to end her watch. They didn’t come. The encampment must not have been their target. Just before dawn she dozed a little, her eyelids fluttering up and down, her chin jerking spasmodically every time she nearly but not quite fell asleep. Nothing had happened. Nothing was going to happen.
In that half-awake state her esoteric senses were at their strongest. She dreamed of the dark flicker of energy beyond the wire before she saw it. Her eyes shot open and adrenaline blasted through her veins. She nearly fell out of her perch.
It wasn’t an army. It was just one ghoul. Still, she reached for the whistle around her neck. The slaughter on the dunes had started with just one ghoul attacking her. Maybe there were more nearby. Maybe hundreds of them. She couldn’t feel them, couldn’t sense their energy, but—
The single ghoul below her came to a lurching stop and looked up, right at her. It raised one hand to its mouth, placed a rotting finger against its lips. Asking her for silence. Then, with its other hand, it beckoned to her. Slowly, it turned around and headed back out into the darkness.
Shit, Sarah thought.
She couldn’t imagine a worse time to be summoned.
5
Getting over the palisade wasn’t easy.
Ayaan had designed the wall to be impassible to hungry ghouls: a double thickness of concertina wire wrapped all the way around the camp, creating a dry moat three meters wide between them. Inside the aisle between these two impediments the soldiers had dumped a jumble of broken concrete and rebar, the rusted iron turned outward to impale careless intruders. There was no gate in the palisade anywhere—you left the encampment the same way you came back, via helicopter, or you just stayed put. A smart human could get through the mess eventually if he had a pair of very sturdy bolt cutters and plenty of time. Even then he would leave obvious signs of his passage.
The first time Jack had come to her in Egypt Sarah had left him waiting in the desert for days while she figured out how to escape without being detected. She couldn’t just ignore his call. He had taught her how to see the energy of the dead, her one true talent. Without him she would have perished long before. She couldn’t tell Ayaan about her comings and goings either so she’d had to be crafty. She had volunteered for her current job of cleaning and fueling the helicopters. When the pilots weren’t looking she had stolen one of the kevlar blankets they used to armor the interior cabins of the Mi-8s. Sarah had stripped the heavy blanket of its inset metal plates and then draped the remaining kevlar over the wire, then scrambled up and over her makeshift stile.
She had repeated the stunt many times since. Often enough to get away with it, even with the camp on heightened alert. Once she was out on the open sand,
though, she began to feel a very familiar fear. Unprotected by Ayaan, unable to properly defend herself she would be easy prey for any wandering ghoul who happened to smell her on the wind. Anyone else probably would have been eaten years ago. Sarah’s special relationship with Jack was something she hesitated to count on but it kept her alive.
“Sarah,” he called to her, his voice low and sharp. She had been moving carefully up the slope of a dune that ran parallel to the wire and she dropped to hug the sand, terrified. “Sarah, hurry up. We don’t have much time.”
He came to her as he always did, in the body of a dead man. It was never the same body twice but she could tell it was him because intelligence clearly guided its actions. This one was white and was missing the flesh from one side of its face. The body wore a blue jumpsuit with a striped blue-and-white shirt underneath. It looked like a sailor. It had to have been one of the Tsarevich’s troops, she decided. Jack leaned down and offered her his hands but she shook her head and got to her feet on her own. She couldn’t afford to smell like death when she went back to the camp.
“Jack, I don’t know what you’re doing here but this is a really bad idea,” she protested. “Fathia will make my life hell if she finds out I’m missing.”
“Oh, will she now? She’ll make your life hell?” Jack’s borrowed eyes glinted in the first blue rays of dawn. “You know a lot about hell, do you? You can’t know what hell is like, not when you still have skin to keep you warm and bones to keep you standing upright.”
Sarah bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry,” she tried. “I didn’t mean—“
“I’m the one who taught you how to see, girl. I’m the one who made you special. When those bitches in there thought you were too small and scrawny to waste their time on, I was the one who gave you magic. So if I call you out now you’d better come running.” He grabbed her face and stared into her eyes, his fingers digging into her cheeks.
There had been a time when Jack was kind to her, when he had begged her to let him teach her his secrets. He’d believed that was the only way he could earn eternal rest. He’d killed her father, he told her, back in the other time, and he regretted it now, and he owed her a great debt. Once he began teaching her he had grown impatient and sometimes cruel. Perhaps because he’d discovered that giving her his gift wasn’t enough to buy his peace. There was something else he had to accomplish first but it eluded him. Now typically when he came to her it was because he wanted something from her. He’d taken quite a bit already. Every three or four months she could count on him to wander back into her life and want something new. Information, usually, or just gossip. Sometime he had entire shopping lists of supplies he needed for purposes he chose never to reveal. She would steal what he wanted and leave it buried in the desert for him. So far she hadn’t been caught.
“Are you still the girl I made my pupil?” he asked, loosening his grip on her face. His body’s flesh was so cold. The skin was soft but so cold where it dug into her. She nodded against his hand. “Now follow me, then, and keep quiet. I want you to meet a friend.”
He lead her down the back of a dune and into the relative shelter of an old wadi that emptied into a narrow ravine, not a word passing between them as they moved like cats in the darkness. At the back of the defile he snapped on a chemical light—something Sarah hadn’t seen in years. She’d thought the military issue blue glowsticks were part of the past she would need to learn to forget. In the dim illumination Jack took a carved piece of stone in the shape of a scarab out of his uniform and laid it on the bare rock between their feet. “He’ll come now, if we’re respectful.”
“Who?” Sarah asked. “Who, will come, Jack? The Tsarevich?”
The glance he shot her was colder than the stone beneath her feet. “This is an old place,” he told her, by way of explanation. As usual he failed to tell her anything of substance. He expected her to just get what he meant. It didn’t surprise her—his lessons were difficult at best and sometimes completely unfair. “It has its protectors. They’re dead but they’re clean dead. There’s a reason why Ayaan picked this spot to settle down in.”
“Ayaan,” Sarah moaned. Of course Jack wouldn’t know what had happened.
She didn’t know that she wanted to fill him in. The hurt was still too real and too personal. She didn’t have a chance. A moving shadow appeared at the mouth of the canyon, outlined by darkness in the dawning gap between its walls. Others appeared behind it.
The shadows stepped up against the starlight, silhouettes out of a dread older than any words she knew. The first figure stepped down onto the slickrock and came into their light, moving slowly on legs that didn’t work quite right. Sarah knew that gait all too well. When she saw the creature’s face she was in for a shock, though. Its face was obscured behind a flat plaster mask on which was painted a portrait with large serene eyes and a full and sensuous mouth. The painting was in the style of Classical antiquity—ancient Greek or Roman, perhaps. Below the plaster its throat and chest were wrapped tight in rotting linen bandages. Lengths of cloth dangled from its free arms and looped around its knees and calves.
A mummy. It bent and picked up the scarab carving in both of its clumsy, broken-looking hands. It held the scarab close to its chest.
“This is Ptolemaeus Canopus,” Jack said. “You can call him Ptolemy—he likes it when you do. He doesn’t talk so much for himself but he was pretty much something back in the mists of history. Now he’s sort of head man of the stinky bandage brigade. I owe him a sizeable favor and just now he has a sort of problem. He wants you to know that a couple of hours ago the Tsarevich,” and Jack spat on the ground as he spoke the name, “stole about fifty of his buddies. Just kidnapped them right off the face of the earth. He wants them back and he needs your help.”
“My help? You mean, the help of our soldiers?” Sarah asked, incredulous. She’d heard stories of mummies before, but never met one. Mummies had saved Ayaan and her unit from certain death when they’d fought Gary, half a world and all of time away. They were undead, but they didn’t eat the living, which was a nice change. They were supposed to be ridiculously strong but mentally unbalanced. Sarah had always been advised to stay away from them. Ayaan had advised her of that. “Listen, Jack, the Tsarevich pretty much outclasses us and anyway the unit, well, there’s not much of it left, not since Ayaan died.” There. She had let it out.
“What was that, girl?” Jack asked her. He looked more surprised than sorrowful, even though in life he and Ayaan had possessed a powerful mutual respect.
“Ayaan, she’s… she’s dead.” It felt almost good to say it aloud. It made it more real but it also made it easier to cope with, somehow. “She was killed by the Tsarevich’s troops yesterday.”
“She bloody well was not,” Jack swore. “They took her alive, right before they grabbed up Ptolemy’s folk.”
Sarah could only gape at him.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
The mummy massaged his stone scarab like a pet.
6
They put Ayaan in a cage, a box almost perfectly sized to fit a human being. It was all quite efficient. The cage was a meter and a half wide, a meter tall, and two meters long. It gave her enough room to shift around in but not enough to sit up. They put a thin blanket under her and loaded her into a truck full of identical cages. The cages fit together almost perfectly, modular containers for human beings. They closed the door of the truck and left the prisoners in darkness. A very little light came in under the bottom of the truck’s door. In that little illumination Ayaan could tilt her head around carefully and see her neighbors on three sides. They kept their faces pressed into their blankets, their arms wrapped around their heads. The one on her left, a boy of maybe seventeen, was bleeding pretty badly from a gash in his chest. His ragged breathing echoed inside the steel cell of the truck.
When the truck moved the cages rattled against each other, clanged against the walls of the cab, vibrated crazily. Aya
an grasped the bars of her cage to keep herself from sliding around. The injured boy lacked the strength to do the same and he moaned pitiably every time the truck cab swayed or jounced or turned and he slid up hard against the limits of his cage, bruising his already injured flesh.
The enclosed air quickly took on the stench of unwashed bodies and shit—there were no sanitary facilities available in the cages. Ayaan needed to urinate a little herself but she swore she would wait and deny the Tsarevich that small indignity against her person.
She lacked the ability to tell time in the enclosed hell. Alone with her thoughts she could only measure the duration of her captivity by how much her anger had cooled and how badly she was failing her obligations. Of those there were many to think on. She had her unit to think of—the entire encampment, frankly, depended on her leadership. They would not have survived so long without her. She owed them her strength. She had a larger obligation to fight the khasiis, the liches—that was a duty she had accepted the day she shot Gary but forgot to makes sure he was actually dead. The consequences of that careless moment had been paid for by others beside herself. She owed their ghosts a lifetime of service.
Now she had new ghosts, too. Mariam and Leyla were dead, half a dozen more of her soldiers were slaughtered by the fast ghouls in the desert. She owed them vengeance, assuming she ever got the opportunity.
Perhaps more painfully she was letting Sarah down. Dekalb, Sarah’s father, had saved Ayaan’s life many times. He had gone so far to refuse to let her martyr herself when it would have achieved nothing. In his final moments he had begged her to look after his daughter. Ayaan had done as he asked—until she let herself be captured by a strange new kind of ghoul.
As much as she tried to torture herself with thoughts of Sarah alone and defenseless out in the desert boredom eventually trumped guilt. Thirst and hunger helped as well. The pressure on her bladder built and refused to go away and the darkness settled on her like a heavy weight on her stomach. She was used to being able to see things. She needed to see things so that she could shoot them. With no gun and no light she was out of her element.
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