Chapter Eleven

the lost i cannot bone eater has their names them their faces are lost to me i cannot faces hear their bone eater names

Sarah drew her fingertips away from the soapstone scarab in her pocket. She would worry about Ptolemy’s grief later, once she had found Ayaan. She knelt before the chain link fence and worked at it for a while with a pair of bolt cutters, always keeping one hand on the fence so it wouldn’t rattle. So close, she thought. There had been tragedy already but maybe, just maybe she could actually pull this off—maybe she could actually rescue Ayaan. If the damn mummy would calm down for a minute.

It took six days to track the Tsarevich back to Larnaca on the island of Cyprus. He had been easy enough to track—Ptolemy could sense his lost kin, even from hundreds of kilometers away. The bunker and its scene of carnage had drawn them inexorably. That had been the easy part. Osman had dropped them at a safe distance away and then flown off in the Mi-8. When Sarah had asked him to come with her he had just laughed. “There’s a reason I learned how to fly this thing,” he explained to her. “When you’re the wheelman, you always get to be in on the getaway.” He agreed to pick them up when they were done and that was the extent of his involvement.

Alone—except for Ptolemy, who didn’t have anything to say—Sarah located the bunker and found her way inside. The lights still worked but the smell of death nearly drove her away.

She still didn’t know what to make of the slaughter up in the hills. Forty-nine mummies dead, assassinated methodically with a bullet in each cranium. The wounds were all in the same place, perfectly centered on the foreheads. There should have been a fiftieth mummy: there was a place for it in the concrete bunker, there were even scraps of linen stapled to the floor where it must have been imprisoned. What might have happened to it was anybody’s guess.

Ptolemy had taken the massacre badly, of course. there wombs will never dead be more of dead us, no births never to dead more wombs, he had wailed, and she had felt his loss. He had a point, too. There were only so many mummies in the world and only a small percentage of them had returned from the dead—the vast majority of mummies had their brains spooned out of their heads as part of the mummification ritual. There would never be any more of them, either. The exact recipe for creating one of their kind was lost to the ages. They might well be immortal but when one of them died their total population shrank for good.

Inside the fence she kept low. It was well past midnight and anybody human inside the refinery complex should be asleep. The undead stayed up late, though, and she couldn’t afford to be seen. Ptolemy slipped under the wire behind her with a feral grace, his painted face a mask of composure. He could at least still function to the extent of following her around—presumably he could fight, too. If not she was probably screwed.

“Stay low—we’re going to slip in between those two big pipes there,” she told him. He could hear her just fine, even when she wasn’t touching the soapstone heart scarab. Together they crab-walked through the darkness and ducked under a pipe as thick as a tree trunk. Electric light burned in the narrow alley beyond the pipe, something Sarah hadn’t seen in years. It flooded the way with brilliant illumination. There was nowhere to hide in that light, no shadow to exploit.

Sarah breathed out through her mouth and closed her eyes. She looked for the dark energy of the undead. If no one was looking maybe they could just slip by. She found nothing, extended her perception and tried again. There—a few dozen meters away—she caught the golden radiance of a living human, the closest animate creature. Fast asleep, too, judging by the vibrations. Okay.

She signaled Ptolemy and then dashed across the lighted alley into the shadows beyond. More living people—all of them asleep—lay above her, tucked into sleeping bags on a catwalk. There seemed to be no real resistance to her invasion inside the refinery. Did they think one chain-link fence was enough? She supposed if you had an army of the undead to back you up then perimeter security didn’t have to be your main focus.

“Come on,” she said, and touched the soapstone to make sure Ptolemy was still with her.

they rot will did perish and they rot for what perish they did, he said. Well, it was the right spirit, anyway.

A large wooden structure, clearly built by the Tsarevich and not part of the original refinery, stood at the end of a road before her. Mold spotted the wood but there didn’t appear to be any guards stationed inside. She could vaguely sense some dark energy ahead of her but she decided to risk it. Ducking inside the shack she pushed a curtain away from a door and stepped into a large enclosed space.

Clear plastic sheeting hung down in the middle of the room, dividing it in half. Electronic equipment filled most of the far half—radar screens, several television sets, medical equipment. High-wattage light bulbs hung from the ceiling and blasted any shadows out of the corners. On the near side of the curtain stood some old, mildew-damaged furniture and a antique silver microphone on a tall stand.

Sarah stepped up to the microphone. She had only skimpy memories of how such things worked. She had only been eight years old when the Epidemic hit, after all, and electricity had been a commodity rarer than jewels in her life. She must have seen a movie at some point, however, or even a television show in which someone tested a microphone by tapping it. Almost reflexively she reached up with one finger and touched the microphone’s windscreen.

A dull roaring sound echoed around the wooden shack, a high-pitched ringing following close on its heels. Sarah ducked as if undead birds were cawing for her flesh. She looked up and saw speakers mounted in the room’s four ceiling corners.

“You shouldn’t be here yet. You haven’t been cleaned properly.”

Sarah’s heart lurched. A dead thing—a lich, one of the Tsarevich’s creations—had emerged from behind the piles of electronics in the far half of the room. Its greenish face loomed up against the plastic, the curtain draping across its dead features. Sarah had never seen a human body so badly decayed. Boils and sores had replaced most of its skin, while its hair hung in sparse clumps leaving plenty of rotten scalp exposed. Its eyes looked like they’d been boiled too long, its teeth were brown and broken. She couldn’t even tell what sex it had been in life. It wore a crisp green hospital gown and latex gloves and it looked at her as if it were studying a germ under a microscope.

“Filthy little child. Not one of ours, no, you’re not one of ours at all. You’re looking for something, looking, no, looking for some one. You won’t find her, not here.” Its voice was barely human, rough around the edges, husky, wheezing.

Sarah shook her head. “You don’t know what I—”

“Filthy, you’ve been hiding in dusty unclean places, you’ve been hiding for years in the desert and you shower what, once a week? If you’re lucky. There’s filth on you. I can see it under your nails, I can see it in your hair.” The lich leered at her. “Sarah, you need a bath. Thirty-two million microbes on every square inch of you, chewing away happily, twenty-four seven on your dead skin cells. Imagine what they’d make of an aged slice of beef like me.”

“How did you—”

The lich tilted its head to one side. “Know your name? How did I know your name? There’s always a consolation prize. I’m not one of his special ones, no, I can’t bring flowers to the desert, I can’t kill you from here with my mind, no, but I have my uses.” It scratched at its upper lip with one latex-covered finger, popping some blisters there. “You’ll need a good disinfecting, Sarah. All those razor bumps on your head, that pimple on your chin—infections, all of them, did you know that? Nasty little colonies of germs. Take your clothes off. They’ll need to be incinerated. You just need to be parboiled a bit, get the nastiness off you.”

Sarah knew a threat when she heard one. She pulled her Makarov MP out of her pocket and slipped the safety off. “I don’t think so, asshole. I think—”

“You think you can kill me from there and you’re right, you can. One shot to the head.” The lich pushed against the plastic curtain, moved a step closer to her. Despite herself Sarah took a step back. “Why don’t you? Why don’t you kill me right now? I won’t stop you, I won’t even try. It’s this skin.” The lich ran the knuckles of one hand across its leprous cheek. “I’m not one of the special ones. I wasn’t brought back quite right. They tell you all about life eternal, you know, they tell you your body is good forever but they can’t stop it. They can’t stop the rot, you can’t stop the rot no matter what you do. There’s not enough bleach in the world. Now. Clothes off. Or shoot me in the head. I don’t care either way.”

Ptolemy swooped out from behind Sarah—he moved faster, nearly as fast as one of the accelerated ghouls that got Ayaan—and grabbed up the plastic sheet in both hands. He tore it off the rings holding it to the ceiling and thrust it away. The mummy grabbed the lich and wrestled it around into a headlock, its face peering up at Sarah, its rotten eyes wobbling in their sockets. It smiled broadly.

“That’s the way, big boy. Come on. Squeeze me harder. You think I want to live forever in a rotten old shell like this?”

“Wait,” Sarah told Ptolemy. “You’d just be doing it a favor.” She stepped closer and put the safety back on her pistol. “We need information. We need to know where Ayaan is being kept. You can read my mind, you know who I’m talking about.”

“Oh, I know indeed, but you don’t think I’d give up that kind of dirt for nothing, do you? Let me have a little taste, first. Let me chew on one of your fingers.”

Sarah grimaced and looked at the mummy. His painted face didn’t offer any inspiration. She had an idea of her own, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of cautious, well-thought-out plan that Ayaan would have come up with.

What the hell. “Hold him down, hold his head down,” she told the mummy, and Ptolemy obliged. Scowling she stuck a finger in her mouth, licked it a couple of times. She held it up to the light, caught a glint off the glob of saliva there, and jabbed it into the lich’s rotting ear. Its waxy skin split under the pressure and she felt thick, viscous fluid swell up around her fingernail, but she knew the lich was more afraid of her than she was of it. “How many germs in a gram of human spit?” she asked, but the lich was already screaming.