Teaser

Author's Note: Some time ago a few readers expressed an interest in hearing what happened to Dekalb's daughter Sarah. What follows is my answer to that request, set four years after the events of "Monster Island" when Sarah is eleven years old. It's also a bit of foreshadowing for the third book in the trilogy.

--David Wellington

Dearest Daddy:

I haven’t written one of these letters in years… after Ayaan came back, after she told me you were dead I wrote you a lot. I still have those notes in the bottom of my kit bag. Weepy scrawlings, folded and tucked into careful little square packages, not really fit for re-reading but I take them out and touch them now and again as if they were something you had actually seen and held.

I don’t have anything else from you, not even a picture.

Why I’m writing this down now, I guess… I don’t know… I guess maybe you would understand, even if I don’t.

It was yesterday when it happened, a couple of kilometers outside of Oduur. We were riding in a half-ton truck we’d liberated from Ethiopian refugees. Fathia had the mounted gun, Ayaan was on the roof of the cab with a pair of binoculars. The rest of us kept our heads down mostly, out of the dust. We hadn’t seen any movement in days and we were pretty lax, bad form, sure I know that but if Ayaan was relaxed the rest of us tended to let our guard down. We drove right over a mine, an old Soviet model that had corroded and leaked with age but still it had some punch. The truck went right over on its side and two of the girls were dead before it stopped bouncing. Three more of them were injured. Fathia took them aside, letting them lean on her, looking for the bad news. If their skin was broken, if there was any chance of them catching something, something fatal, well.

We live in this world, not the old one. Ayaan tells us that all the time. One of the younger girls (only two years older than me) and I were given the task of sanitizing our dead. We did it with bayonets. The girl I did for had a blue tattoo on her cheek, three little skulls in a row, one for each confirmed kill. I did a good job on her, Daddy, you would have been proud.

Nobody complained about the work. We didn’t want to even think about what came next. With the truck compromised (one axle snapped, the wheel rolling off into the dust) we were alone and on foot and twenty kilometers from the nearest hardened encampment. There was nothing, truly nothing in sight from horizon to horizon: this was the dhaaqsin, great pasturage but to us it was just flat land covered in yellow grass and the occasional dead evergreen. There was nothing for it but to march to Oduur and hope to find a building we could harden for the night.

We stretched our water and kept moving, with six hours before nightfall we stood an actual chance. That’s what Ayaan said, anyway. When we first caught sight of the city, just shacks on the outskirts, we let up a warbling howl of gratitude to Mama Halima for our deliverance. We picked an old post office the Italians had built fifty years ago. Nice thick concrete walls and a flat roof, perfect for establishing kill zones. We hunkered down and shared out the last of the bread and waited for the dead to come.

It didn’t take long. I could tell you what happened that evening and night, Daddy, but I saw so little of it. They came in packs, as they sometimes do. I was kept busy carrying bags of ammunition up and down the stairs. I was so tired, my arms hurt and I wanted to go to bed but I never complained, I promise.

In the morning we went out to mop up. Ayaan kept her with me. She calls me “little good luck”. There were bodies everywhere, some of them heaped up near the doors of the Post Office, some a hundred meters away. We moved in teams of three and one of us would approach a body and then kick its foot and jump back. Kick a foot and jump back, over and over. Sometimes they can be hurt pretty bad but not be really gone and you can’t take chances, Ayaan says. I kicked some of the feet. One of the dead people twitched. It was probably nothing but Fathia fired half a clip into its head. The noise broke open the morning silence (we hunt without speaking, so they don’t hear us) and suddenly everyone was yelling and everything just felt different, like the air had changed. Like the sky had changed color. And then we heard something else.

“Sarah, if you can hear me come here!”

In English, even. Nobody here speaks English any more, Daddy.

Everybody moved so fast, all the soldiers converging on our location like they’d been trained and they shoved me to the back even if the voice was speaking to me. Ayaan knows English, too, so she can’t pretend she didn’t understand. The soldiers crowded in so I couldn’t see but Ayaan told me it was just a dead man. Dead men don’t talk, of course, but she had told me stories about Gary and the mummy that talked to you, Daddy. One of the soldiers said she held down the dead man’s body with her boot, that he was pretty well cut up with bullets already and couldn’t move much (I didn’t see this but they told me later). All I could hear was his voice.

“I’ve been searching for you for years, Sarah. Tell them to step back. I have a message for you. My name is Jack and—”

There was a gunshot and then Fathia grabbed my wrist and pulled me away so I couldn’t see. It was silly, she said, some kind of trick. She knew Jack, she said. She had met him and worked beside him and he had been a white man, even though the talking corpse was an Ethiopian. A refugee. It was all some kind of trap.

I was confused and a little angry. I wanted to hear more and I also wanted not to think about it. I knew what Ayaan would recommend.

We decamped after breakfast, refilling our canteens with water from the local well, boiled and purified. It tasted like pills, like the dust at the bottom of a pill bottle. We moved fast and kept together, headed for the main encampment on the border. All day I kept by Ayaan’s side, holding her rifle and her binoculars. She’s teaching me to shoot, Daddy. She says I’m going to be good at it.

We passed a tiny little house, the kind of place a goatherd would live. It could be taken apart and carried. We passed a dried-up river bed where we had to walk carefully because sometimes the mud isn’t as solid as it looks. We came out on a ridge, a line of hills between us and the encampment and some of the girls just couldn’t go any further. I guess I was one of them. Ayaan called for a halt and we set up tents and cut down trees to make logs for a palisade, like a fringe of sharpened stakes all around the camp. There wasn’t enough wood for a complete wall so we strung wire between the stakes and hung empty cans from it. That way at least we would hear the dead coming.

In the night I woke up next to Ayaan in our tent. She was snoring pretty loud. She never has trouble sleeping, unlike the rest of the soldiers. I had to pee so I pulled on my poncho and crept out to the edge of the camp, waving at the girls who stood watch. They turned around and gave me some privacy. It had been a quiet night, not so much as an animal out in the dark. So when the darkness started talking to me I jumped.

“Sarah!” I dropped to the ground in case something was about to grab me and tried to scan the shadows outside the perimeter with my eyes. I could just make out a silhouette out there—a human-shaped silhouette. One of the dead. “Don’t make any loud noises. We need to talk.”

I stayed silent. The first thing the soldiers did was train me not to scream.

“They won’t let me near you. I’ve been close a couple of times now but they destroy my body before I get a chance.”

I checked the position of the nearest guard. She was maybe five meters away—too far to hear a whisper, close enough to see any movement.

“You're dead,” I hissed. “What can you possibly want with me?”

“I want to rest, Sarah. That’s all. I can’t seem to die. I don’t have a body anymore, I guess you’d call me a ghost. I can animate any corpse I want but something just won’t let me go. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. I’ve lost pretty much everything as a result. I think I have one last thing to be rid of and maybe then I can be free. You have to help me. You have to accept my gift. If you’ll do it—when you’re ready—come out into the desert and meet me. Come alone or they’ll just gun me down.”

He was gone before I could say anything else. Come alone—out into the dhaaqsin, alone, without even knowing how to shoot a gun. I would be dead in a matter of hours. Dead with nobody to sanitize me, which is worse.

I’m writing this now in Ayaan’s tent. She’s still snoring away. She won’t notice if I go out again. She’ll never know what happened if I just curl up and go to sleep.

What do I do, Daddy? I know you would have an answer. Ayaan and Fathia told me all about Jack and the horrible things he did. They also told me he was the bravest warrior they ever met. That means a lot to Ayaan, to be a brave warrior.

If I go out there, what will happen to me? What does he want to give me? What can a ghost give to anybody?

Daddy? Please, help me. What do I do?

I don't know what else to say, so I'll just end this like I always did before:

Archive Link