The other liches wagered that Semyon Iurevich would be nothing more than a screaming skull long before they reached Indiana.
The bastard lich had diddled with her head, he’d gotten his rotten little fingers in her brain. Ayaan did not enjoy listening to his screams but she found she had no sympathy for him, either.
5
In the dark Sarah lay in bed and tried not to look across the room. Not more than four feet away, sitting in a chair because he did not sleep, was a corpse. A walking corpse, a hungry, dead, ex-human being with broken nails and ruptured skin and a face stretched as tight as a mask across his skull. The feeling had started to slide over her like a cold wet blanket at dinner the night before. He had sat apart. He had put people off their food. She had realized, while she gnawed on a stalk of celery, that he disgusted her, too. That this particular corpse was her father made less difference than she might have hoped. He was dreadful in appearance. Lesions filed every crease of his skin. Fluid had pooled in one half of his body and left dark patterns of bruising down one arm, one cheek. His eyes had sunk into his skull, his nose had shrunk down to little more than a scrap of leather. Even just by moonlight it was hard to look at him and not feel her skin crawl.
Dekalb stood up against the light coming in the window. He tapped at Gary’s skull with a finger no thicker than a pencil. In silhouette he looked terribly thin. More like a stick figure than a man. The terror drained out of her, little by little. It was her father, she told herself, it was the man who used to hug her and feed her pieces of carrot out of a plastic bag and who would carry her canteen for her when it got too heavy.
It was also a dead thing, a withered, sad thing. Just like Jackie had been, the little boy she had helped bury.
Too many thoughts. She rolled over and pretended to be sleeping.
Sarah wondered if everyone went through this. At a certain age did everyone look at their father, that being who had once been so tall and strong, and see just a frail old man? Of course very few people would ever see their fathers like this.
Too many thoughts. She couldn’t sleep. She took Gary’s tooth from her back pocket and looked across the room at the crab-legged thing on top of the dresser. The skull had a full set of teeth, both top and bottom. The tooth in her hand was an incisor but he wasn’t missing any. He must have regrown the tooth the mummy had pulled out of her head. Instead of shuddering at the thought she curled her hand around the tooth and made contact.
Why, look who’s dropped by for another chat. The skullbug didn’t move or react in any way. It looked preternaturally like a sleeping cat basking in a ray of moonlight. In her head Gary sounded a lot more excited.
“Let’s get one thing clear,” Sarah told him, the words staying in her throat. “If you try any of that paralysis bullshit again I will personally take you out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and drop you in. Dad might subconsciously heal you but I don’t think he can teach you how to swim.”
I can’t tell you how scared I am.
Sarah glared at the skull. “I already have the boat.”
And I have something you need, or we wouldn’t be talking. You can threaten me all you like, Sarah, but you can’t do anything about it.
He was baiting her. He wanted her to get angry. He wanted her to kick him or throw him against the wall or say something cruel. Why? She doubted it was simple masochism.
“It’s about Mael Mag Och. The guy I thought was called Jack.”
Ah. The old bastard. Yes, I knew him well. Did you want just general information or did you have a specific question?
“Why did he lie to me?” she demanded. She had tried to find out for herself, earlier, by going to the source. Time and again she had grasped the hilt of the green sword. Mael Mag Och never answered. When she’d asked her father about that he’d said the old Celt must be screening his calls. Then Dekalb had been forced to explain to her what that meant. “He won’t talk to me now. For years though he came to me. He taught me things, gave me advice. Why? Why was it so important that I think he was Jack?”
He probably chose Jack’s name as someone you would have heard of, somebody you could be expected to trust, Gary told her. His voice was surprisingly soft and kindly. He was never the kind of person who could tell you simple facts. He came on like a nice guy and frankly, I still believe he has a good heart. But he has some pretty crazy ideas about who we are and why the world had to end. If he doesn’t want to talk to you then count yourself lucky.
“I guess he fooled you, too, huh?” Sarah asked.
For a while. Then I ate his brain. Of course, that says more about me than him.
Sarah shook with horror.
He’s insane. I can tell you that much for free, short cake. He told me once his god sent him back from death so that he could oversee the extinction of the human race. Whatever he asks you, whatever he asks from you. Don’t give it to him.
“Thanks for the advice.” Sarah put the tooth back in her pocket and rolled over again. She could hear her father moving around on the hardwood floor. He didn’t sound like a human being. His footsteps weren’t loud or strong enough.
Too many thoughts.
In the morning white sunlight marched up the sheets and eventually hit her in the face. Sarah wrinkled her nose but eventually she had to give in. She sat up in bed and saw her father sitting in the chair across the room. He had a book in his hands.
“There was a time when I was too weak even to read,” he told her, his mouth curved into something wistful, something approaching a smile but never quite reaching it. He was so much less horrible, less, well, disgusting when he talked. He had her father’s voice and that made all the difference. Grateful, she sat up and listened attentively. “That was before I figured out I could take energy from the ghouls like some kind of vampire. I’ve had a hard time of it, kiddo.”
“I’m... sorry, Dad,” she said, and put her feet down on the floor. Her shoes were lined up next to the bed. Ayaan had taught her that, not her father. She slipped into them effortlessly.
“I can’t tell you how proud I am of what you’ve accomplished. It’s not easy moving around the world these days, I should know. I came to New York back when all the ghouls were still here. I’m a little peeved with Ayaan. She said she would take care of you.”
Sarah looked down at the floor. Her head was too fuzzy to process much. “Actually, that’s kind of something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.” She stood up and shivered. Her sweatshirt was in the laundry, leaving her with just a tank top. It was cold in the bed room—no central heating anymore. Wrapping her arms around her she tried to look him in the eye, like an adult. “She’s... dead. She got captured by the Tsarevich and... I’ve been following her, trying to save her but I waited too long, I could have, I could have stopped it, somehow, if I had taken the fight to them, if I hadn’t been so cautious but now she’s a lich and. And. And. I have to sanitize her now. I have to save her from being one of those... things.” She stopped herself. She had been about to say that she needed to save Ayaan from being a lich. He might take that the wrong way.
He stared at her unblinking. She couldn’t remember if he still had eyelids or not.
She felt like an idiot when he looked at her like that. Like a child. “Okay, that came out all wrong. Can I start again?” she asked.
“No need,” he told her. His eyes clouded over and she wondered if he was having the ghoulish equivalent of a stroke. Then he went to the dresser and touched the green sword. “So you were trying to rescue Ayaan. I see. It didn’t work out. You can’t blame yourself for that. It wasn’t your fault.”
“It’s... not?” Sarah asked. She wondered what that he could know that she didn’t.
“Ayaan was a devout Moslem. She hated the idea of ever becoming ritually unclean,” Dekalb said, fiddling with the sword. He was too weak to actually pick it up. “But she was also fiercely practical. I don’t think she would like the idea of anyone going o
ut of their way to clean up after her. Especially not if it meant putting you in danger.”
That didn’t matter, Sarah thought. It wasn’t a question of what anybody wanted. It was a question of duty. She went to say it out loud... and couldn’t.
She left him, claiming she was going to eat breakfast with the survivors. The little house that Marisol had sorted out for the three of them (herself, Dekalb and Gary) was on the north side of Nolan Park, well away from the Victorian houses where the survivors lived. It was easy to slip away with no one seeing her. She remembered the time she’d slipped away from the camp in Egypt, scurrying over the wire. Funny that after so much time she was running away for exactly the same reason.
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 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 from the underside of a leaf 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.”
She kept at it for far too long before she finally had to admit defeat.
6
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. That 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 deny 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 clear 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 Sarah 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. “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 here. 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 speak 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.”
Sarah 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 convinced 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.
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