“Is okay,” Vassily told her, taking her arm. “Here, we live community with ancestors. One big family.”
Ayaan watched in horror as the rotting corpses tottered past her. Their limbs and faces were streaked with decay, their eyes cloudy—she knew that look, knew what dead bodies looked like. She hadn’t seen them so focused, though, so determined, not for a long time, not since—well, not since she had fought Gary in New York. Puppets, she told herself, they were puppets. Nothing to fear.
They spread out across the fenced-in zone of the refinery, splitting into lines that lead to narrow pits dug in the ground capped with stone igloos. The pits must have gone deep—dozens of ruined bodies disappeared into each of the igloos. They must be underground storage units for the dead, who needed neither light nor air nor elbow room. Mass graves as high-density housing.
“Don’t need to look, if don’t want.” Vassily’s face had grown a little stern. Ayaan flashed him a very fake smile—all she could manage—and followed him deeper into the refinery’s grounds.
Between and among the big towers of the plant living people moved freely, smiling at one another, waving at those they knew, stopping for a bit of conversation. From the shining catwalks that connected the spires they hung hammocks and clothes lines and even suspended entire houses made of woven rope. Light and open fires were everywhere and the smell of roasting meat filled the air, making Ayaan’s stomach curdle. She thought she might throw up she was so hungry.
“Is good here,” Vassily told her, and she didn’t doubt it. As long as you didn’t mind living in community with the dead. A girl no older than five or six handed Ayaan a slice of bread smeared with honey and whirled away, giggling. Boys lined up along the path to watch her go by. She ate the bread without thinking about it, much. It could be drugged—the bright faces, the shining eyes all around her could have come out of a pill bottle, sure—but she needed sustenance too much to throw the bread away. It was delicious.
Where did it come from, though? She and her encampment had been living out of a steadily dwindling supply of tin cans, ransacked from abandoned shops and stores across Western Africa. The bread was freshly baked, though. Which meant somehow the Tsarevich had access to grain, to growing crops. He even had access to bees if he could make honey. Did the living or the dead work those fields, tend those bees? She just didn’t know. Despite all the stories she knew next to nothing about the boy lich’s resources.
Vassily lead her inwards. They passed a wooden building, a long, low shed with no windows where a pair of ghouls with no hands—just spikes at the ends of their arms—stood guard. They had been so fast in the desert but here they stood like statues, perfectly still. She caught a glimpse of a green robe inside the door but couldn’t make out any details. She tried to ask a question but her guide steered her down a side street. “Is nothing,” he said, a little gravel in his voice.
The towers of the plant divided the makeshift town into natural quarters surrounding a central souk or amphitheater. Vassily lead her deep into the heart of the place, through noisy zones where men practiced at a rifle range and past an open-air nursery where mothers played with fat little babies. In a pen formed mostly of pipes as thick as Ayaan’s arm were actual livestock—pigs, mostly, but a couple of shaggy-maned cows, too. They grazed desultorily at a trough full of scraps. Scraps that the soldiers in Ayaan’s encampment outside of Port Said would have considered a banquet.
“How is this possible?” she asked. “The dead eat everything they see. I thought cows were extinct by now.”
“He has farms, and she makes crops to grow,” Vassily whispered, “corn and wheat and rye. Are fruit trees, so many. You like apples? If you don’t, we grow oranges!” he laughed, and she couldn’t help but smile.
He lead her deeper into a shadowy, more quiet region under a vast collection of cracking towers where the lights burning on the pipes bathed the narrow streets with a blue and white lambence. Mushrooms grew underfoot, thick enough to trip on. Puffballs exploded all around her, their dusty spores staining her pant cuffs. A wooden construction, more like a tiny medieval fort than a house, stood at the end of the road, blocking further progress. Its windows were narrow slits—perfect for firing weapons out of while protecting those within. A parapet lined its roof, a place where a squad of rifles could dominate the entire street, turn it into a killzone. Ayaan wondered why she’d been brought there.
A curtain flicked open in one of the doors of the place and a woman stepped out into the street. She would have been beautiful a long time ago, a collection of long angular limbs, high breasts, perfectly chiseled features. Someone had hurt her badly, though. Her skin was covered everywhere with identical thin red scars that disappeared down her cleavage and into the back of her halter top. They showed on her finely-turned legs and her muscular arms. Even her face, even the curve of her shaved head was covered in the tiny cuts. Her body was a map of torture—prolonged, methodical, unkind. Her eyes showed a deep, cold intelligence that refused to let Ayaan see her as a victim, though. With a bad shudder Ayaan realized what that stare meant. The injured woman wanted Ayaan to know that it had been her decision, that she had chosen to be cut to ribbons. What reward had she received?
“Vasya,” she said, “this is the one from Egypt, da? The one Semyon Iurevich said was coming.”
“Konyechno,” Vassily said, nodding eagerly. He was staring at the scarred woman as if he’d never seen a living female before. With disgust Ayaan saw real lust in his eyes. “Amanita said to bring.”
The scarred woman nodded. “This far, no farther. Our Lady sees her even now, is close enough.”
“Do you want me to do a little pirouette, so you can see my backside too?” Ayaan asked, surprising them all.
The scarred woman stepped closer. She smelled of expensive moisturizers and lotions. She had diamonds in her ear lobes. “They say you killed the American koschei.” Ayaan knew that was the Russian word for “lich”. “They say you’re assassin, the best with a rifle.”
Damn. The one thing Ayaan had been counting on was anonymity. She hadn’t personally killed Gary but she’d been part of his death. If the Tsarevich knew about that he would certainly keep her under close observation. He wasn’t stupid.
“Take her to showplace, with others,” the scarred woman said, dismissing Vassily. The young man took Ayaan’s arm and she let him guide her away. At least she’d learned something. They didn’t want people getting past the mushroom-lined street—the fortification there spoke volumes. There had to be something behind it, behind the scarred woman. Ayaan figured that must be where the Tsarevich lived. Knowing that much, she ruminated, perhaps she was one step closer to killing him.
9
Lined up in rows the prisoners filed into the small amphitheater at the center of the refinery and plunked themselves down on the hard ground. The prisoners were seated in the round, leaving only a narrow aisle down to an impromptu stage. There were no seats or benches, just a conical depression with a wide metal drain in its center. An enamel bath tub stood near the drain, full of what looked like clean water, clearly part of the pageant about to unfurl. Would the Tsarevich come out and baptise each of them, maybe wash their feet?
Ayaan scanned the faces of her fellow captives, looking for something—not anger, no, it was the wrong time for that. She was looking for intelligence, resolve, will. She was looking for people who could help her escape. As she studied the middle-aged women and young boys and old men and veteran soldiers with poorly-treated wounds she found little to inspire her. Most of the gathered people looked a little scared, a lot confused, with maybe a trace of hope dashed in for measure.
It was that last, the hope, that made her despair. It looked like the others had been treated to the same act she got—the kindly guide leading them on a tour of what must look like a paradise on earth. To many of these people the idea of a safe place where the dead were kept at bay and where there was a little something to eat had long ago
faded from possibility. They had been hiding, hiding for years in fallout shelters or hardened public buildings, eating when and what they could, resorting to whatever it took to stay alive—Ayaan knew that many of them could tell her what human flesh tasted like. They had been cold and hungry and alone for over a decade. When the Tsarevich’s troops dug them up out of their holes it must have felt like inevitable doom descending. What little fight or spark of anger left to them had been shaken out on the long, horrible journey in the cages. Now they were brought to this safe, clean place and told lies about apple trees. Their brains no longer knew how to process bullshit.
In other words the Tsarevich had them right where he wanted them. The show he provided was a master stroke and even Ayaan had to admit its brilliance.
There were no light displays, no music. Just a man shuffling down the aisle, his body wrapped in a shapeless burlap robe. He moved slowly, deliberately, and Ayaan wondered what was wrong with him. He took his time and showed no response to the inquisitive calls of the audience. When he reached the center and stepped onto the drain every eye was focused on him though no word had yet been spoken.
After a pregnant pause the man lifted shaking hands to his head and twitched back the cowl that had obscured his features. The audience screamed or gasped or recoiled in horror—it was a ghoul standing before them. The flesh of his face had been eaten away, either literally or just eroded by time. His eyeballs were huge and staring, his nose nothing more than a dark cavity in the middle of his head. His cracked yellow teeth curved into something approaching a smile. And then he began to cough. Long, painful paroxysms as air flooded into his motionless lungs. When it came back out of him it sounded like words.
This dead man could talk.
“My... name is... Kolya...” he creaked. His eyes rolled around the audience, trying to make eye contact. They were very blue. “Kolenka,” he stuttered out, “Kolenka Timofeovich Lavachenko. I was... mechanic for... agriculture implementation... in Ukraine farms... I repair and oil combines and, and tractors... now I serve him... in life eternal. Is real.”
A puppet. Ayaan knew that the dead man wasn’t speaking of his own volition, that the Tsarevich had to be somewhere nearby, controlling this corpse, pushing air down its throat, plucking its vocal cords like the strings of a guitar. Gary had done something similar years prior. He’d made a crowd of dead people speak with one voice, one outpouring of hatred. She frowned, thinking this was in very poor taste, and looked around the audience again.
They were rapt. Leaning forward, propping their faces in their hands, their eyes were wide. Some of their mouths had fallen open.
“Soul is... still in body, after our death. Is remains. As you can... see.”
A woman wearing a headcloth and a peasant dress broke down in tears, the scant moisture running down the canyons of her wrinkled face. A boy near her covered his mouth with one hand and looked around. When his eyes met Ayaan’s she read there what was going on.
Hope. The bastard Tsarevich had given them all just a little bit of hope. Enough that they could let themselves believe. He was offering them a solution to the central problem of the age, and they, by the looks of them, were seriously considering buying in.
“I live... forever... I feel no pain. You see this, is real. You serve... him too and reward... is yours. For everlasting. You will see.” The dead man raised his bony arms to beckon to them, to beg them to come into the fold. To live forever with no pain.
“Blasphemy!”
Ayaan spun around and saw one of the prisoners had risen to his feet. A big Turkish man with a mole on his chin and a mustache so thick and bristly it looked like he’d glued horse hair to his face. He had a tiny book in his hand, a leather-bound book with gilt edges that had to be a Koran. “Blasphemy!” he shrieked again. He was speaking broken Russian, just like the animated corpse. “God made man in his image, this is to mock the Creator!”
A pair of living men carrying rifles came running down the aisle and grabbed at the Turk, hitting him savagely in the face. They couldn’t stop him from shouting even as they dragged him down toward the stage, toward the bath tub standing near the drain.
“‘Allah is the Guardian, and He gives life to the dead, and He has power over all things!’ Allah! Not this imposter wizard!”
He ducked under the arm of one of the guards, still shouting chapter and verse, and shoved the dead man across the stage. The ghoul didn’t even look confused, he just stood there with his arms out and open wide.
“Here, listen, all of you, to the word of the Prophet: ‘...Most certainly I will bid them so that they shall alter Allah's creation; and whoever takes the Shaitan for a guardian rather than Allah he indeed shall suffer a manifest loss!’”
The guards seized the Turk again, each of them getting an arm and dragging them behind his back. The Koran fell to the drain, its pages askew. Without any preamble the guards frog-marched the Turk over to the bath tub and shoved his face down into the clear water.
Ayaan hugged herself. If she protested or rebelled now she knew she would simply join him down there where foaming water was already slopping into the drain. The Turk kicked wildly and fought his captors but he couldn’t breathe water like a fish. His spasmodic movements grew disorganized, then weak, then stopped altogether. Ayaan saw the efficiency in this method of execution. The Turk’s body was preserved largely intact with no bullet holes or broken bones. The guards released him once he stopped writhing and slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. His eyes were bloodshot and water streamed from his mustache, slicked it down across his mouth.
There was silence in the amphitheater as he looked down, studied his hands. As his body shuddered and water fell from him. He didn’t move for a very long time.
Then he stepped forward, clearly dead, and looked out across the crowd, making eye contact. He opened his mouth and vomited out a great quantity of water into the drain. Then, choking on the words just a little, he began to speak.
“I am called Emre Destan. I... was a baker... in Turkiye, in Tarsus. Now I... I serve the Tsarevich. I serve him in eternal life.”
Ayaan looked at the spectators again but to her surprise she saw there was no change. They still wanted to believe—they still did believe. The bath tub, the sudden execution, hadn’t changed their minds at all. Why would it? That was the way their world worked. But here there was more, a suggestion, a promise that they could live, that they could survive in their own bodies. That they could meet this new world in their old flesh and still be spared.
The first ghoul, the Ukrainian, smiled warmly for the audience. “Is real... you see,” he said again, and again.
10
“Was no accident, of course. We target you. You’re quite celebrity famous in some circles.” The scarred woman palmed the wheel and threw the Hummer 2 into second gear to get up a rugged hill. “We were in neighborhood anyway.” The car was a message, like everything else she’d been shown. The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever want. No one else was using it.
In the passenger seat Ayaan grabbed a handhold mounted above the glove compartment and tried not to bounce around too violently as the big vehicle rumbled up a goat track. She still wasn’t sure what was going on. She had been sleeping in a hammock in a part of the refinery reserved for new recruits when the scarred woman had woken her by calling her name. Dawn hadn’t broken when they left the compound to head up into the dusty hills. “Do you have a name, or is that part of the big mystery?” Ayaan asked.
“They call me Cicatrix. I am very close with Tsarevich. I could be good friend to you, do you understand? Us two ladies, we could be friends. Or maybe you want to kill me, hmm? Maybe I will always be enemy to you, well, that is okay also. That can also be made to use. Now is time to make up your mind.”
Ayaan grasped a little of what was happening, then. She was being given the option of serving the Tsarevich alive or serving him undead. This unscheduled joyride up into the mountains
was some kind of test. Either she would prove herself to the lich of liches or she would go face down in a bath tub. If she chose the latter option she would stand up a minute later and proclaim that she served the Tsarevich in eternal life. She remembered her decision when she’d been locked in a cage in darkness and fear. She remembered that she wanted to stay alive as long as possible so that maybe she could eventually meet all of her commitments, avenge all of her ghosts. “I want to be your friend, obviously. Who do I have to fuck?”
Cicatrix—if that was her real name—laughed happily. “Around here,” she said, looking over at her new friend with a crooked smile, “our kicks are never so simple.”
She wheeled the car around to a stop with a plume of dust that rose up around the windows and obscured the view. From the back seat Cicatrix grabbed a sheer, see-through violet coat lined with fox fur and struggled into it. The fur danced around her bald head like a replacement mane when she jumped down from the Hummer’s footboard. Clearly the coat wasn’t meant to keep her warm. Even up in the hills with a meager breeze feathering over her skin Ayaan was warm enough to start sweating the moment she stepped down from the car.
Cicatrix lead her between two lines of semi-permanent tents toward a concrete bunker half sunk into the grassy hill-side. Whoever had lived in the tents was long gone—the wind had torn holes in their fabric and some of their stakes were coming up. Ayaan looked in through the flap of one tent and was mystified by what she saw: a card table surrounded by folding chairs, the table’s top covered by dozens of Ouija boards. A deck of cards lay scattered on the floor, some water-stained and others bleached to blankness by the sun. They weren’t playing cards, though, but endless repetitions of the same five symbols, a cross, a circle, a star, a square and three wavy lines.
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