“I’ll be good,” she promised.
9
Sarah couldn’t let go of Gary’s tooth. She could feel it digging into her hand as if he were trying to bite her by remote control. He held her prisoner, her own power turned against her. He let her look away for just a moment and she stared at Dekalb. Her father’s face had set in a mask of concern but he wasn’t doing anything. He should be protecting her.
Hah! My buddy here’s not much of a fighter.
“He fought you. He turned you into a bony little freak,” Sarah said, her voice stuck in her mouth. Her throat could move but not her tongue. She couldn’t move her facial muscles, she couldn’t scream for help but he was letting her talk to him, and him alone. She imagined he had the power to stop that as well, if he wanted.
She supposed if a lich were locked in his own skull for twelve years he might have time to learn a few magic tricks. Especially when he was the second most powerful lich who ever lived.
Magic? he asked, perhaps reading her thoughts. I know all kinds of magic. Who do you think taught Marisol how to tame a ghoul? That’s right, yours truly. I sold that secret for a breath of fresh air. I knew nothing about the outside world. Your Dad kept me jailed here where nothing ever happens and I couldn’t even see the sun. So I learned to send my consciousness outward, to project myself astrally, I suppose. Marisol’s was the first brain I touched—she and I go way back, of course. She was scared, too, just like you are right now, sugar beet. When I came to her in her dream and started telling her things that only the dead could know, she was frightened already. The colony here was in bad shape back in those days. People were getting sick and dying, the crops weren’t coming in. Once she realized I could teach her useful things she let me take control of her body for a few minutes a day. I never did anything drastic—most of the time I just stood in front of a mirror and touched myself, to be brutally honest. Have you seen that woman? She’s a knockout.
Sarah squirmed against her confinement.
God! Just because I lack the organs doesn’t mean I don’t feel the itch. Don’t be such a prude, Sarah. I bet you do it. I bet you do it all the time. Hmm... but we’re getting distracted. There’s a point to my little story. I talked, and Marisol listened. Get it?
Sarah kept her silence.
Good. So let’s be civil to each other. Let’s be nice, even if we can’t be friends. There’s no reason to spoil Daddy-Daughter Day. It’s him I want to talk about, of course. Your father: my jailer. Look at him. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but he’s a gibbering idiot.
Sarah bristled, but said nothing. Gary could feel her emotions. He seemed to find them amusing.
This is the most fun I’ve had since I lost my appendages. But anyway, it’s true. Your father’s a moron. A sub-intellect. I know he has a brain—you can’t be undead without one—but we’re talking walnut-size here. This whole time he’s been confronted by just one mystery, just one little puzzle to solve and he’s never worked it out. He’s had twelve years to figure out just who keeps rebuilding my aching bones every time he breaks them but he hasn’t got so much as clue one. You can tell, though. You knew it just by looking at me.
Keeping her mouth in a tight grimace she subvocalized, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Come on, sweet tart. You can see the energy, I know you can. Your friend, what’s his name... Jack? Sure. He told me all about it. You can tell who’s protecting me. You would have seen it eventually, so it doesn’t matter if I give the game away. Stop playing dumb. Unless it’s hereditary and you got your old man’s slack jaw.
Ah. Sarah let her vision relax, paid attention to the skin behind her ears, to the way the air felt. And then she saw it. Stretching away from Gary’s skull like invisible hair, long ropy tendrils of dark energy draped around the room, snaked along the platform, tying Gary right back to... to Dekalb himself.
Hot bile hit the back of her throat. Sarah wanted to scream. She wanted to smash the skull to fragments. Of all the fucked up things—this was not what Ayaan had taught her about how the world worked. Good people fought the bad things. They didn’t heal them. It was wrong, it was so wrong—
It’s not his fault.
Sarah turned to face the skull with venom in her eyes. How dare he? How dare Gary make her see that her father, the one man in the entire world she’d ever thought was worth a damn, one of only two human beings, frankly, that she had ever loved, was in league with the monsters?
He thinks he doesn’t have any powers. He think he’s the least useful lich that ever was. He’s been healing me for over a decade, and he has no idea. Every time he develops the balls to kill me, his guilt overpowers him and subconsciously he puts me back together again.
She forced herself to calm down. “That must be... unpleasant.”
It’s fucking agonizing, is what it is. I’ve been crushed, I’ve been burned, I’ve been impaled on a spike. But it’s better than the alternative. I have a right to exist, sugar shorts. I have a right to live, whatever you may think of my current status. I don’t know. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll just tell Daddy what you’ve learned. Maybe you think that if he knows what’s going on he can fight it, and he can finally do me in. And maybe, just maybe, he can. Then again, maybe his subconscious is stronger than you think.
“You expect me to keep your secret,” Sarah spat through gritted teeth.
Yeah, I do. The skull grinned up at her. Oh, not for my sake. You probably hate me. That’s alright, it comes with the job. I expect you to keep your fucking hole shut for him. Because, snack pack, he’s spent the last twelve years pretending that he’s a hero. That he brought down the nefarious Gary, the lich king of New York City. You see, there’s not much else to do in this place except sit around talking about what used to be. After a while, memories are all a man has. That and the occasional slack that wanders by in the tunnel down there. If he knew how much time he’s wasted, playing at the vigilant guardian up here, if he knew what he’d done, well. It might just break his heart. Granted he isn’t using it right now, but I expect you’d rather keep it in one piece. Do we have a deal?
He released her, as easily as that, without any kind of agreement on her part. Obviously he thought he knew her answer already.
It burned a little that he was right.
“Did you have a nice chat?” Dekalb asked. She saw worry written on his face. On the rest of him she just saw weakness. She’d forgotten how fragile he must be. That he was one of the people from the old time, from before the end of the world. Nobody had been tough back then. The slightest emotional shock could destroy them.
Gary had given her some very valuable information. Something she would eventually have figured out for herself, of course, but he hadn’t wanted to take that chance. He’d told her his biggest secret in such a way that she could never use it against him. She’d heard he was smart. She’d had no idea just how smart.
“Yeah,” she said. “It was great. Listen.” She shoved the tooth into her back pocket, not knowing what else to do with it. “I’m a little tired. I think I’m going to back to, you know, the others. Get some sleep.”
“I’ll be here when you wake up.” He smiled. “I don’t get to rest, pumpkin. I don’t even get to sleep anymore.”
She put her hands on his cheeks, leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. She couldn’t quite bring herself to kiss him.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, and she wanted to sag into those words. She wanted to curl up in them and let everything go right for a while. Then she realized he wasn’t talking to her. He was addressing himself. “Now that you’re here, everything’s going to be okay. So where’s Ayaan?” he asked.
She closed her eyes because she didn’t want to look at him while she lied to him. “Back in Somalia. She’s fine, doing great, actually.” She tried to think of a lie but the only thing that came to her was ludicrous. She went with it anyway. “She sent me to check
up on Marisol, see if Governors Island was still thriving.”
“Oh. Is it? I don’t get out much.”
She nodded. “It’s doing great.” Such a ludicrous idea—that anyone would launch such an expensive expedition just to see how old friends were getting along—didn’t seem to strike him as odd at all. Maybe in the time before the Epidemic that wouldn’t have seemed so outlandish.
She left him in the tower with Gary and the mummies, unsure when she would come back. She wondered about what to do next as she headed back down the causeway and onto the Island. She noticed something strange about the buildings on the north side of the island, those that faced Manhattan, but she couldn’t remember what they had looked like when she went in.
Dark stains seemed to creep across their facades. Patches of a very light green had grown in circular patterns on the bricks—lichens, she thought, like you would see on very old tombstones. The dark stains were moss or mold or mildew or something. Come to think of it she didn’t think the buildings had looked like that when she entered the ventilation tower.
Strange. And Ayaan had taught her never to ignore the strange. She scratched a sudden itch in her left armpit and pondered what to do next.
She made her way toward Building 109, the Island’s former welcome center where she was supposed to sleep that night, keeping one eye on the water. She half expected an army of ghouls to come dribbling up out of the harbor. When Marisol’s sickly little son Jackie grabbed her from behind she automatically reached for her pistol. She stopped herself in time, because she’d had proper training in who and whom not to shoot.
“What’s up?” she said, and tousled Jackie’s hair. It took her a second to realize something was wrong. He coughed and a cloud of black spores erupted from his throat. His skin looked patchy and even fuzzy in places. She grabbed his chin, trying to discover if he was choking, and her hand came away covered in musty-smelling powder.
The itch in her armpit got a lot worse, all of a sudden.
10
“Stay away from the edge,” Marisol said, never taking the field glasses from her eyes.
Sarah danced backwards, away from the crumbling bricks at the top of the six-story dormitory building. Not the safest place on the island but it had the best view of the skeletal city across the channel. The building had been officer’s quarters once but now it was about to fall down. The thick coating of white mildew, like a spill of snow up the side of the building, was taking its toll, eating into the bricks on one side, chemically dissolving the mortar between them.
“I can’t recognize half the buildings over there. Have you ever seen anything like this? No, nobody has. The Battery’s turned green again. The dead ate every growing thing there was over there but now... Jesus, look at those shrubs—they must be fifteen feet high.” Marisol pivoted in place and adjusted her focus.
Not just Battery Park, Sarah saw, but the entire tip of lower Manhattan had transformed overnight into old growth rain forest. Trees crowded the broad streets, their roots overturning the rusted soft shapes of abandoned cars. The sides of buildings were verdant with moss or dark with fungal growth. Flowers in a dozen different colors sprouted from broken windows and vines dangled from straining balconies.
Behind them, curled in a folding deck chair, little Jackie hacked up another lungful of spores. It was dangerous on top of the dormitory building but Marisol wouldn’t let him out of her sight. She lowered the binoculars and looked at her son for a moment, perhaps assessing his condition. He wasn’t getting any better.
Half of Governors Island was complaining of respiratory distress. One woman, a forty-year-old grandmother, had died in the night. Those who weren’t coughing up bloody goo were complaining of skin irritations, weird rashes, discolored nails and hair and teeth.
Sixteen people—nearly a fifth of the Island’s inhabitants—were bed-ridden. Half of them weren’t expected to survive another day. It was as if the natural world, the vegetative world, had rebelled against them. As if it wanted them dead.
Mold had spread across the wooden docks and piers of Governors Island, green, slimy mold, algae growing faster and thicker than it had a right to. Mushrooms had popped up all over Nolan Park. Poisonous and ugly, they exuded horrible clouds of choking spores when they were stepped on. Even the grass between the houses, even the thin weeds that popped up between the flagstones of Fort Jay, had turned thick and coarse as if they were reaching for the survivors’ ankles, wanting to trip them, to bring them down. Hidden in the shadier parts of the island deadly nightshade had emerged and poison ivy was spreading into the carefully tended gardens.
The worst part was that it wasn’t even over. It was still going on. Since dawn the acidic mildew that threatened the dormitory building had spread to three more brick towers. Who knew what would still be standing by nightfall.
Marisol fiddled with the vinyl strap of her binoculars. “People are asking me questions I can’t answer. They don’t understand this, Sarah. They don’t know why it’s happening. They need a reason, any reason. Maybe they sinned before God. Or maybe this is just Mother Nature getting her own back. That kind of mushy-minded stuff won’t hold them for long, though. They’re going to want a scapegoat. Someone to blame.”
Sarah nodded absently. She was as confused as anybody and she could admit to herself it would be nice to blame this horror on somebody. Hating a scapegoat would help her choke down her fear.
“Obviously,” Marisol continued, “I’m going to say it’s your fault.”
Sarah stopped nodding. “What?” she demanded.
“Well, think about it. You’re an outsider. I don’t want to string up one of my own people like some kind of pagan sacrifice. I’d much rather hang a near stranger. Secondly, it’s true, isn’t it? You brought this here. You were after that Tsarevich asshole and in the process you gave away our location. Sound familiar?”
“No, no,” Sarah said, “we were really careful, we kept our distance—”
Marisol shrugged. “Okay. Maybe the fact that nothing like this has happened for twelve years, and then all of a sudden you show up, and the day later we’re overrun by evil plants, okay, maybe, just maybe, that’s a coincidence.” She raised her hands to the heavens. “Still.”
Sarah’s mind raced. If the survivors on Governors Island believed it, if they truly thought she was the cause of the biological attack—they wouldn’t wait for a lynching. They would tear her to pieces with their bare hands.
She reached for something—anything—to fight back with. “Yeah,” she said, “well, you just go ahead and try it, lady. You go ahead.”
“Alright.”
“And then—and then, when they’re going to, to burn me at the stake, whatever, when I have their attention, then I’ll explain to them exactly who it was who taught you how to make a ghoul into a slack.”
Marisol’s mouth twitched. It might have been the precursor of a grin. “Coming from the daughter of a lich that might sound a bit hard to believe.”
Blood flowed out of Sarah’s face. She was fighting for her life. “Not when—not if I tell them what Gary got, in exchange! Not when I tell them how he used you like a living sex toy!”
Marisol didn’t rise to it, however. “That would sound bad. The thing of it is, though, that in the morning, I might have a lot of explaining to do, but you’ll still be dead.”
Damn.
She had a point, Sarah had to admit.
Desperate, completely unable to think clearly, Sarah tore the Makarov out of her sweatshirt pocket and swung her arm in Marisol’s direction—only to find herself looking down the barrel of a .357 revolver.
“Ayaan taught you about firearms, right? You’re pretty good,” Marisol told her. She was breathing a little heavy. Sarah was nearly gasping. “Jack taught me.”
Slowly, with a caution based on extensive paranoia, both women lowered their weapons. No safeties had been released, there had been no real danger, but Sarah knew she ha
d been a moment away from death.
“We do what we have to do to keep going,” Marisol told her. “You know that. So don’t you dare judge me.”
“Killing me won’t solve your problem,” Sarah demanded.
“No. But it will keep my people from rioting and making things a whole lot worse. You have a better idea?”
Sarah swallowed all the spit in her mouth and turned her head to look at the towers of Manhattan. They looked like the kind of impregnable fortresses you only read about in fairy tales. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I go over there, and find out what’s doing this. And maybe I can make it stop.”
Marisol snorted. “Yeah, and maybe you can fly back. Come on.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Sarah said. Truthfully she didn’t believe it. She just thought it would be a way to escape. “Look—you can throw me to the wolves and maybe that will give you time to evacuate. Or I can go over there and maybe I can actually achieve something.”
Marisol stared at her, twin beams of judgment emerging from her eyes to pin Sarah to the spot, probing her, studying her. Sarah squirmed like a laboratory specimen under hot lights. Then something weird happened. Marisol blinked. She seemed to lose about an inch of height and the tight muscles of her shoulders and arms drooped. “Okay,” she said.
Sarah shook her head, not comprehending. “Seriously?” She thought maybe Gary was taking over Marisol’s body, or maybe the Tsarevich could control the Mayor’s body remotely but no, there was no dark energy anywhere nearby. Sarah would have known if there were magic at work. Marisol, she realized, was just desperate. She needed help that badly.
“Yeah. I’ll give you a boat and whatever weapons you want. You go over there alone. You do what you can, then you come back. I know you won’t try to run away.”
Sarah said, “of course,” meaning, “of course I’ll run, as fast as my little legs can carry me.” She didn’t say that.
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