Chapter Three

Ayaan knelt and touched the sand, then her heart, then her forehead. It was a very old gesture, one that predated the Epidemic: she was thanking the Earth, her mother, and her God for the right to make war. The other women hurried to copy her, but Sarah refused to go along. “Okay. Okay, so this is stupid.” She knew she sounded whiny and selfish but she couldn’t help it. “Someone tell me why we’re doing this again? The ultimate lich of all time is over that hill and we’re going to stand here and fight him on foot. Even though we have a helicopter and we could just leave.”

“You have never understood what orders mean,” Fathia said, rising to her feet, her rifle swinging in her arms. The barrel wasn’t pointed at Sarah—it never would be, not unless Fathia truly intended to kill the younger woman—but the implied threat was meant to be taken seriously. “You were a foundling that she took like her own child—”

Ayaan raised her hands for silence, and she got it. “Do you know why we came to Egypt?” she asked, her voice low, soft as the sand under their feet.

“There was nothing to eat in Somalia,” Sarah replied. It was true. When the dead rose, when the Epidemic came famine had already ransacked the Horn of Africa. With few living people left to raise crops the food shortages had turned into outright starvation. Egypt, with its modernized cities full of markets and groceries, had promised at least some preserved foods. Cans and jars full of tinned meat and pickled vegetables. Ayaan had brought her unit out of Somalia in the hopes of a better life and she had delivered on her promise.

Ayaan nodded. “We’ve come so far. I won’t be driven out now.”

A protest bubbled out of Sarah’s heart. “We’re in danger. When we find ourselves in danger we fall back to a defensible position. You taught me that.”

A smile touched Ayaan’s tight face. “I’m glad to see you listened. Perhaps you will take another lesson. There are times, however rare, when running away is a mistake. This Tsarevich grows stronger every day. If I do not stop his evil now, when I have a chance, I may not be able to face him the next time. Today I will kill him. If he has the ability to project images of himself then it isn't enough to shoot him from the air. I am forced to go after him on foot, so that I can feel his skull breaking and know I have finished the job.”

“So let’s call in some backup. Get the others in here, get some free fire zones established, maybe build a redoubt to funnel his advance—”

“Sarah,” Ayaan interrupted.

“No, seriously, we can get the other helicopter down here in twenty, maybe thirty minutes, we can establish a killzone, then draw him into—”

“Sarah.” Ayaan closed her eyes and shook her head. “Please go wait with Osman.”

Stunned, Sarah finally shut up. She couldn’t believe it. Ayaan had uttered the ultimate insult—she had suggested that Sarah was a liability. That she didn’t want Sarah around during the fight. It was the kind of thing Ayaan would say to a child, a baby.

There was also no appeal possible. Once Ayaan had given an order she never took them back. Feeling the stares of Fathia and Leyla and the others on her back she headed back to the helicopter. It occurred to her when she was halfway there that she should have just been quiet, should have accepted Ayaan’s command without question the way the others did. It also occurred to her that if she was in the helicopter she was less likely to get killed.

She was thinking such thoughts, her head lowered in dejection, when something fast and horrible smacked into her like a moving car. She fell down hard on the sand as something colorless and violent and extremely fast reared up over her, its stubby arms lifted high, its shining head sparkling in the sunlight and she knew, was absolutely certain, that in the next few microseconds she was going to die an unguessable but extremely painful death. She closed her eyes but she could still see the aura of the dead thing that was about to kill her. Its energy was like nothing she’d ever seen before. It was dark, of course, cold and hungry like any ghoul’s. But instead of smoking and hissing away like ice melting in the sun, this energy fizzed and snapped like something on fire. Its shape was wrong, too, something was missing—

She heard gunfire and it fell away from her, out of her vision. One of Ayaan’s squad had saved her. She opened her eyes and saw a still-moving body sliding down the slipface of a dune. Its arms pumped wildly at the air, moving so fast they blurred. Impossible—the dead lacked the energy to move like that. They were slow, lumbering, uncoordinated wrecks.

This one could have caught a hummingbird in mid-flight and swallowed it whole in the space between two wing strokes.

Getting a good look at it wasn’t easy but Sarah could make out some details. The dead thing had been knee-capped by automatic rifle fire and would never walk again. It was naked, its skin grey and shrunken on its bones. Its lips had either rotten away or been cut back, revealing a pale stretch of jawbone. The better to bite with, Sarah supposed. It wore a miner’s helmet, complete with a broken lamp, to protect its vulnerable cranium. Its hands... its hands had been cut off, leaving bloodless, ragged stumps. The bones of its forearms had been sharpened into vicious spikes.

Nausea washed up from her stomach into her throat but Sarah held herself together. The dead felt little pain, she knew, but somebody with better manual dexterity—someone living—would have had to perform surgery on the ghoul to achieve such a brutal reconfiguration.

“Two o’clock,” Leyla called. Sarah managed to turn away from the horror below her to see a new one in front of her. The body of an undead man stood atop a dune a hundred meters from her position. His skin had collapsed on his skeleton so that all she could see of his face was bone. At least he had hands, though they were equally skeletonized. He wore a flapping and fluttering green robe, a little like a burnoose, more like a medieval monk’s habit. He leaned on a heavy walking staff that was made of three human femurs, fused end-to-end.

A lich. Not one of the mindless puppets Sarah had seen reaching for the helicopter but a lich, a real lich, a dead man with an intact brain, as smart as any human and more than likely possessing powers indistinguishable from magic. It was the greatest of the Tsarevich’s crimes that he not only destroyed the living but he changed them, making them over in his own image. That he made new liches to be his lieutenants.

Sarah had survived dozens of raids against the undead and hundreds of attacks by mindless ghouls. She didn’t spook easily. She’d never seen a lich before though and the apparition chilled her right to her guts.

“Sarah, I gave you an order,” Ayaan said. She wasn’t looking at Sarah. She had her AK-47 up to her eye and she was lining up a headshot. The green phantom was at range though and Sarah knew Ayaan’s chances of a clean kill were slim.

The robed monster raised its free hand to point at the women before it. One bony finger stabbed out at them across the sand. Sarah could feel dark energy streaming from it like light through broken clouds. Rolling up over the dunes, bouncing, bounding for them on all fours a dark shape zipped across the sand. Another came up behind its green master, launched itself at the women.

“Fall back,” Ayaan said. The women started, slowly, to come out of their battle postures. “Everyone fall back.”

Sarah tried to move but was compelled to watch a third speeding shape jump over the dunes. A fourth, a fifth, and a sixth came along in close order. One of them wore a motorcycle helmet with the visor closed—she got half a look at it before it accelerated right for her.

A warm and yielding arm—with a hand on the end of it—scythed across her stomach and knocked her off her feet. It was Fathia, Ayaan’s second in command. She picked up Sarah like a rucksack and bodily flung her into the helicopter’s cargo space. Lying on her stomach Sarah looked out across the sand. She saw the female soldiers running towards her, running towards the aircraft. The accelerated ghouls, moving like time lapse movies of what they should be, were running faster.

“Get us out of here,” Fathia screamed at Osman. The pilot was already flipping switches on his control panel. One of the speeding ghouls skidded to a stop not fifty meters away and looked right at the helicopter. It saw them—Sarah could feel its attention, its desire.

One soldier, another jumped into the helicopter. Sarah watched three of the sped-up ghouls collide on top of Leyla, their sharpened talons stabbing into her again and again like mechanical pistons. Her blood spilled out on the sand and the smell of death brushed up against Sarah’s nose. There were others losing their individual battles with the blurred monsters. Where was Ayaan? Sarah could hear her screaming but she couldn’t see her.

“Go now, go now, go now,” Fathia chanted, leaning out of the loading door, scanning the dune for the women who hadn’t made it to the helicopter. Sarah found herself chanting the words too. The fast ghoul was heading for them, galloping across the sand. If he got inside the helicopter it would take him only moments to kill them all.

But where was Ayaan? Sarah couldn’t see her. She pushed her attention outward, as she’d been taught, searching for any sign of the commander. There—she heard something. “Cantuug tan!” Ayaan’s voice. She sounded distant, her words torn at by the desert wind. Had she surged forward to try to take down the green phantom? Any further instructions she might have were lost in the noise of the rotors spinning up. Before the fast ghoul could reach the Mi-8 Osman had it airborne and banking away.

Only half the crew seats were filled. It was just that kind of world. It had been for twelve years.