Chapter Two

Ayaan had a responsibility to the survivors—the living—she had left outside of Port Said. She could have ordered Osman at any time to circle back and provide air support for the camp. She didn’t. The other women in the helicopter started to trade sidelong glances, the occasional half question. “We’ve never fought an enemy with guns before. Shouldn’t we...?” Leyla asked.

Ayaan glared back at them. Some of Mariam’s blood still flecked her cheek. “The camp is hardened against attack, if that’s even what he’s after. If we give him a chance to get away now we’ll never see him again. We’re going to find the Russian, today, and we’re going to remove him from play.”

It was enough for most of the soldiers. Ayaan had lead them into stranger encounters and she had proven her tactical brilliance a hundred times over. If she said she knew what she was doing they believed her. Sarah wasn’t so sure but she kept it to herself. As the youngest member of Ayaan’s unit and the only non-Somali (she was half American, on her father’s side, which was a strike against her with most of the women) her opinion counted for little. Still she couldn’t help having a bad feeling.

Ayaan had always been more than cautious than anyone around her. She’d bordered on paranoia in the past—and it had kept her people alive. Now she was throwing herself into the lion’s maw. It made no sense.

“I’ve got visual confirmation of a second group,” Osman called over the headset band. “Smaller... maybe fifty individuals.”

“Close with them but keep an eye on the floor.” Ayaan had a pair of field glasses in her hand. They had been designed to provide night vision but the batteries had died years before. They still worked as binoculars in broad daylight. Her voice turned to ice cubes slithering out of a pitcher. “There.”

Sarah moved forward hand over hand, grabbing at the nylon loops sewed into the headrests of the crew seats. In the cockpit of the Mi-8 she could look down through the chin bubble and see what Ayaan was talking about. About fifty people—almost all of them dead—were laboring up the side of a sand dune below her. Most of them were tugging on thick lines, dragging a flatbed rail car kitted out with enormous balloon tires. On its back crouched a kind of tent, maybe a yurt, while ghouls chained to the flatbed turned enormous cranks while living men crewed .50 caliber machine guns rigged up in universal mounts.

The flap of the yurt fell back and someone emerged from the shadowy interior. Then something happened to the light in the helicopter, to Sarah’s eyes, to her... other senses.

Though she was still five hundred meters away Sarah could make out his features perfectly. She felt as if she were looking through binoculars, though she wasn’t. He was a boy—shorter even than herself, maybe ten or twelve years old. He was astonishingly beautiful.

His skin was so white it stood out bluish in the desert sun. His complexion was perfectly clear, his hair a pale gold lighter than his skin. His large, soulful eyes smoldered with blue flame. He wore the armor of a medieval warrior, scaled down to fit his frame and enameled in glossy black then worked with a motif of bones and creeping vines. He carried a scepter in his right hand topped with a bleached human skull. Sapphires winked from its dark eye sockets.

He looked right at Sarah. Not just in her direction but right at her, making perfect eye contact. Which was when she realized something was wrong.

“Grab something, ladies,” Osman called just as he swung the Mi-8 around. The machine guns mounted on the flatbed blasted tracer fire through the air, yellow sparks that arced up and tried to touch the aircraft. Fathia leapt up out of her seat even as the bullets tore past so close Sarah was dazzled by their flickering light. The soldier started yanking assault rifles down from the rack at the front of the cargo bay and tossing them to her squad mates. Ayaan unstrapped herself and picked up the oilcloth bundle of her own weapon. The same AK-47 she’d carried since she had left school.

Osman had never impressed Sarah before by displaying courage but he didn’t shrink from Ayaan’s orders—perhaps the two of them shared some secret reason for acting so irrationally. The pilot opened up the copter’s throttle and pushed forward on the yoke, throwing the Mi-8 right at the flatbed with all the power the dual powerplants could muster. Soldiers leaned out of the crew door and the rear loading ramp, secured from a deadly fall to the sands below only by their safety lines, and the air in the helicopter vibrated with the noise of their weapons discharging again and again and again. As quickly as that they were in the midst of battle.

One of the ghouls working the flatbed’s cranks slumped against its wheel, its head a dark smear and the flatbed slewed to one side. The Russian’s troops retaliated by spraying bullets across the fuselage of the helicopter and shattering one of the porthole-like windows on the port flank. “Again, and closer this time,” Ayaan shrieked as she slapped a full magazine into her rifle and tested its iron sights.

“I’ll take you right up his nose if you like, and leave you there,” Osman replied but he wheeled around for another pass. He brought the aircraft in low and fast, almost losing his landing gear as they brushed the top of the yurt. Ayaan’s rifle snapped and spat with tight, perfectly-controlled bursts of three bullets each. The ghouls dragging the flatbed scattered away from her fire but not fast enough. Heads burst, bodies spun and fell. One of the machine gunners slipped and fell onto the sand, his blood jetting from his ruptured chest.

Sarah stared at the boy standing on the flatbed. He looked like the soul of calm. The fusillade of bullets hadn’t even ruffled his thin white hair. There was something, something not quite right about his energy. It was dark, of course, the boy was undead, a lich among liches and his energy swallowed light like a black hole, but... what was it? Sarah couldn’t quite decide. But something was wrong.

Bullet holes appeared in the floor of the helicopter and Leyla hurried to throw a armored blanket of rubberized Kevlar across the deck plates to give the soldiers a little protection. As the helicopter swung out and away from the flatbed and beyond the range of the remaining machine gun Sarah clipped her safety line to a tie-down on the floor and tried to grab Ayaan’s arm. “Whoa, whoa,” she said, trying to roll with the helicopter as it banked, hard, “there’s something—” she shouted, but her poorly-fitted helmet had gone askew on her head and she couldn’t hear her own voice over the engine roar. “Ayaan!” she shrieked.

Ayaan wasted no more time. On the third pass she switched her weapon to full automatic and emptied a clip into the Russian boy, her arms tracking him with the precision of the machine. The wooden flatbed around him splintered and spat dust but he didn’t even glance at Ayaan. No, his eyes were still fastened on Sarah’s. He was still looking at her. Into her.

In the cockpit lights blared on Osman’s control boards and a bell clanged urgently. The machine gunner on the flatbed had scored a real hit, blasting open one of the Mi-8’s fuel pods. Automatic fire control systems and self-sealing bladders in the fuel system shunted into action and kept the helicopter from exploding but blue flames lit up the starboard flank of the fuselage and burning spatters of kerosene leapt into the open crew cabin.

“Ayaan, he’s not—he isn’t—” Sarah had trouble concentrating on the words. The boy’s gaze compelled her, made her look at him again. She saw so much intelligence in his cheekbones, so much sorrow in his bluish lips. He was hypnotizing her, she knew it, and she knew how to fight it but it made it difficult to talk.

She looked up and saw that Ayaan had picked up an RPG-7V from the weapons rack. She slammed a bulbous rocket-propelled grenade into the launcher and lifted the optical sight to her eye.

Sarah glanced behind her and realized that the port-side crew door was still closed. If Ayaan discharged the RPG inside the helicopter the exhaust blast would blow back against the door and fry them all with super-heated gas. Focused so completely on her target Ayaan had transcended such concerns.

Unclipping her safety line Sarah pitched across the width of the cabin and pulled hard on the door release just as Ayaan acquired her target and squeezed her trigger. Exhaust bloomed out of the conical jet at the back of the launcher and blew away on the wind. Sarah looked down through the open door and watched the grenade jet toward its target. Finally the boy looked away from her, instead turning to face the projectile. He raised his wand as if he could ward off the explosive. It didn’t work.

A brown cloud boiled up off the surface of the flatbed, a welter of splinters and debris. One of the machine gun mounts went flying, spinning end over end away from the flatbed. The dead men still tirelessly turning their cranks spasmed in place as debris peppered their bodies and threw them against their chains.

When the smoke cleared a meter-wide hole could be seen in the top of the flatbed, a gaping crater where there had been solid wood. Standing in the middle of the hole was the Russian boy. His cheeks weren’t even smudged with soot.

No, Sarah realized, he wasn’t standing in the crater. He was floating above it. He hadn’t moved, literally—he was floating in mid-air even though the flatbed had been blown out from under him. Sarah studied him with her occult senses and breathed an oath. She struggled to get her helmet back on straight. “That’s not him—it’s a projection, Ayaan, a mental projection! Just an illusion.”

“Seelka meicheke,” Ayaan swore. She threw the launcher down to the deck of the helicopter with a clang. Osman backed off, out of firearms range, though the remaining machine gun on the flatbed was spinning free and unattended. Every eye in the helicopter looked to Ayaan.

“Alright,” Ayaan said, after a moment. “Osman, set down on top of that dune.” She pointed at a rising swell of the desert maybe a kilometer away.

The women in the cargo bay looked at each other and some of them gasped. Fear gripped Sarah too tightly in its sweaty grasp to let her utter a word. If she could she would have asked Ayaan if she had suddenly lost her mind. The helicopter provided the only real advantage the living possessed against the dead—the ability to fly away. If they put down now, with an army of the dead within striking range...

Osman knew a direct order when he heard it, though, and did what he was told.