Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  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. There was a sort of line, an invisible, fuzzy boundary beyond which no dead thing could cross without being burned to a crisp. It was like the event horizon of a black hole. The point of no return.

  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 flame 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.

  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.

  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. 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.

  13

  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 had 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 caught 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 hurricane-level 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 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 skulls on it, but she didn’t have her AK-47 anymore. 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 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.

  She felt hands grab at her, rough hands. Someone went through her pockets while someone else took the green sword away from her, tearing it off her belt. They pinched her around the thigh, around the upper arm. Someone was dragging her, she could feel the top of her head sliding along the rock. She couldn’t hear anything, she was deaf. Her hands were pulled in front of her and encircled with a length of rope. She was being tied up.

  Instantly her energy returned. Her eyes shot open and she could hear again—every ragged breath, every beat of her own heart. She turned her head wildly to the side to see what was behind her, what was flanking her. She was kneeling on a pile of bones. Somebody else’s bones were digging into her shins, her knees. She rolled around, trying to get comfortable. She couldn’t see Ayaan. The green lich—the one in the monk’s robe, the one whose face looked like a skull—was standing next to her. He pointed, his arm stretched out, one bony finger stabbing at the air and she looked.

  They had Ptolemy beaten to a pulp. His legs were splayed wide open and bent at wrong angles. His arms were broken in a dozen places. Men in light blue paper shirts stood around him, sledgehammers balanced on their shoulders. A girl maybe two years younger than Sarah was bent over him with a pair of scissors. She cut right through his painted face, cut away at the plaster at his neck. She tore open his linen and exposed his head.

  His skull was the brown color of a brazil nut. Papery skin covered the round back of his head while bits of withered flesh clung to his cheeks and throat. His lips had drawn so tightly over his teeth that they looked scalloped. His eyes were closed, sewn shut, two dashes sunk deep in their sockets.

  Sarah could just reach the soapstone in her pocket, just touch it with the tip of her pinky. It was enough.

  one here of mine is here mine, he told her. her save her

  Sarah shook badly, her body vibrating like a milkweed plant in the wind.

  One of the blue-shirted men held Ptolemy’s head down against the rock. The other brought up his hammer and brought it down hard, made it clang against the ground as Ptolemy’s skull burst into fragments that spun for a moment on the slickrock and then fell down and were still.

  The green phantom grabbed Sarah’s collar and dragged her to her feet. “Walk,” he told her. No threats, no promises. Just walk. She stumbled forward, her legs weak. She passed through a gauntlet of cut-down ghouls and wild-eyed cultists but none of them moved toward her, none of them spat at her or shrieked names at her. Her own eyes were very wide and dry. They itched. The green lich marched her right up to the flatbed. There had been no attempt made to repair the damage she’d done to it. Sarah tried to gloat on that, to exult in how badly she’d hurt the Tsarevich. The message she was being sent, however, was to the contrary. She hadn’t even slowed him down.

  She swallowed convulsively. Acid was boiling in her throat but she refused to vomit. She was lead up to the side of the flatbed and then she was told to stop. She did so. She shoved her hands in her pockets. The Makarov was gone.

  The green lich jumped up on the flatbed and leaned his face inside of the yurt. He nodded a couple of times—he must be discussing her fate with the yurt’s occupant. He jumped back down and gestured at a living woman. She came over and handed him something. A Russian pistol. Her own pistol.

  No undead creature could fire a handgun—it was an axiom of Sarah’s existence. They just didn’t have the eye-hand coordination. Their nervous systems didn’t work properly. They couldn’t run, and they couldn’t shoot. Then again, she’d seen plenty of them run.

  The green lich shoved his finger through the trigger guard, then used his free hand to mold his fingers around the grip. Then he shoved the barrel against her chest. He smiled down at her and slid the handgun a little to the left.

  “Wait,” Sarah said, “Just let me see Ayaan first.”

  He fired. At point blank range he couldn’t miss. There was a lot of noise, though Sarah’s ears kind of blocked most of it out. There was some light but she blinked as the gun went off—just a reflex action. Her body tensed and curled around the impact, her muscles and skin and sinews convulsing inward as she fell backward, flat on her back and hit the ground. Blood splashed up across her face, fell wet across her chest, her legs. She could feel it pooling around her, soaking into her clothes and her hair. She couldn’t breathe, which wasn’t really a problem at first but she was dully aware that it would become important in a few seconds.

  She brought her knees up, her body wanted to double up. Death was on its way, mere seconds off. The world got darker and louder, she could hear screaming but it wasn’t her own, the screaming got louder. And louder. She felt something tugging in her chest. It jerked and ripped and tore at her like a bird eating her guts but higher, kind of near her heart. She opened her eyes and looked down.

  The bullet edged backwards out of the wound as if it were being pushed out from inside. She could see the striations on its surface, the rifling marks. It hurt a lot more going out than it had coming in. Pain wracked her body and suddenly it was her screaming, she could hear her own screams again. The bullet fell out of her and rolled down onto the bloody slickrock. She sat up and screamed and screamed. The green lich stared at her with genuine curiosity.

  Was she... dead? Undead? No. She was breathing. The dead didn’t breathe. She was still alive. She was still, somehow, alive. Her chest was full of blood, her lungs congested with it but she could talk, kind of. “Dad,” she wheezed. “Daddy.”

  14

  “She’s got some charm against bullets,” the green phantom said. Enni Langstrom. That was what he was called. Ayaan was still trying to get used to the name. “When we have a chance we’ll get a bathtub and see if she can breathe underwater, too.” He was dragging Sarah along behind him, literally pulling her through the dirt.

  Ayaan ran a hand over her chin. “Enni,” she said. “Let’s give her an opportunity. Let’s allow her to join us, if she will.”

  “She tried to kill the Tsarevich,” he told her. Sarah’s head rolled to one side and she vomited blood all over the hem of his robe. “Stupid bitch,” he snarled. He kicked her in the ribs until she was coughing blood all over herself.

  Ayaan rushed forward and knelt down by Sarah’s sided. “Enni,” she said, “the first time you saw me, I was trying to kill you. Look how that worked out.”

  She had been willing to kill Sarah. She had convinced herself that if it meant saving the Tsarevich—and humanity’s last hope—she would kill Sarah herself. But now it wasn’t necessary. Sarah no longer had the means to hurt anyone. Surely—surely a little mercy was in order. She wiped Sarah’s mouth with her hand and lifted her head a little to make it easier for the girl to breathe.

  “Ayaan,” Sarah said, her eyes wide, so wide. “Ayaan, you’re an abomination.”

  Ayaan just nodded.

  “If you want her so badly, take her. If she causes trouble you’ll both be executed.” Enni shook his skull-like head and stormed away. “I have work to oversee,” he shouted back over his shoulder.

  She lifted Sarah up to a sitting posture. “Listen,” she said, but Sarah interrupted her.

  “I was hoping I would find you were a prisoner here,” the girl said. Her eyes were very hard. “I assumed you wouldn’t let them turn you into a lich willingly.”

  “It wasn’t my choice.” Ayaan shook her head. “Sarah, just listen. They’ll kill you. I don’t care what kind of magic you’ve found, they’ll find a way to get around it. You only have one chance to survive.”

  “Ayaan never worrie
d so much about survival,” Sarah said. “I don’t know who you are. I know who you serve, though.”

  Ayaan closed her eyes and said a brief prayer. He is Sublime, she recited, the Tremendous. “I thought as you did originally. Now I’ve come to understand. The world is in bad shape, Sarah. There are fewer living people every day, and more of the walking dead. I used to think there was one answer to that problem: shoot them all. Now I know better. Somebody has to rebuild this planet.”

  Sarah licked her lips. “The Tsarevich. You really want to live in the world he wants to make?”

  “Yes,” Ayaan said, without hesitation. “Because I’ve seen the alternative. Come on. You have to stand up. I can’t carry you.” She helped Sarah up to her feet. The girl looked pale and weak but she didn’t collapse. Was that just the result of good training? Had Ayaan taught Sarah how to be tough? Or maybe the girl’s magic was just that strong.

  Magic. Ayaan’s world had always been predicated on the idea that magic was dangerous at best and a sure route to damnation. Now she was a magical being herself. She wouldn’t admit that Sarah’s anger had shaken her faith in the righteousness of her path, but she knew it, consciously.

  “Just be quiet. You can achieve nothing by talking now,” Ayaan said, letting Sarah lean against her.

  “When they decide to kill me, will it be you who blows my brains out?” Sarah asked. “Or will you let them cut off my hands and my lips and make me one of their soldiers?”

  There were worse fates. Ayaan said nothing.

  She lead Sarah deeper into the encampment, into the throng of cultists who were busy preparing for the Tsarevich’s great moment. The living and the dead were busy unloading several crates of equipment from the back of the flatbed. Others labored at assembling strange contraptions Ayaan could not recognize. A narrow scaffolding made of aluminum poles was already rising from the carpet of bones, far closer to the Source than Ayaan thought safe. A work crew was putting together what looked like a giant metal coil as thick as her arm while others tested vacuum tubes and then fit them together in various metal cabinets. It looked as if they were preparing for a rock concert.