Chapter Five

Author's Note: Judging by the comments recently it appears a lot of readers are unfamiliar with just how Sarah came to have her particular power. That story appeared in a "Teaser" I posted after the end of Monster Island. It was pretty easy to miss, and I never really gave it much thought myself since it wasn't supposed to be an official part of the story. Those of you who are interested can read it here. I hope that clears up some confusion. --David Wellington

Getting over the palisade wasn’t easy.

Ayaan had designed the wall to be impassible to hungry ghouls: two thicknesses of concertina wire wrapped all the way around the camp, creating a dry moat three meters wide between them. Inside the aisle between these two impediments the soldiers had dumped a jumble of broken concrete and rebar, the rusted iron turned outward to impale careless intruders. There was no gate in the palisade anywhere—you left the encampment the same way you came back, via helicopter, or you just stayed put. A smart human could get through the mess eventually if he had a pair of very sturdy bolt cutters and plenty of time. Even then he would leave obvious signs of his passage.

The first time Jack had come to her in Egypt Sarah had left him waiting in the desert for days while she figured out how to escape without being detected. She couldn’t just ignore his call. He had taught her how to see the energy of the dead, her one true talent. Without him she would have perished long before. She couldn’t tell Ayaan about her comings and goings either so she’d had to be crafty. She had volunteered for her current job of cleaning and fueling the helicopters. When the pilots weren’t looking she had stolen one of the kevlar blankets they used to armor the interior cabins of the Mi-8s. Sarah had stripped the heavy blanket of its inset metal plates and then draped the remaining kevlar over the wire, then scrambled up and over her makeshift stile. It took impeccable timing to make sure she wasn't seen.

She had repeated the stunt many times since. Often enough to get away with it, even with the camp on heightened alert. Once she was out on the open sand, though, she began to feel a very familiar fear. Unprotected by Ayaan, unable to properly defend herself she would be easy prey for any wandering ghoul who happened to smell her on the wind. Anyone else probably would have been eaten years ago. Sarah’s special relationship with Jack was something she hesitated to count on but it kept her alive.

“Sarah,” he called to her, his voice low and sharp. She had been moving carefully up the slope of a dune that ran parallel to the wire and she dropped to hug the sand, terrified. “Sarah, hurry up. We don’t have much time.”

He came to her as he always did, in the body of a dead man. It was never the same body twice but she could tell it was him because intelligence clearly guided its actions. This one was white and was missing the flesh from one side of its face. The body wore a blue jumpsuit with a striped blue-and-white shirt underneath. It looked like a sailor. It had to have been one of the Tsarevich’s troops, she decided. Jack leaned down and offered her his hands but she shook her head and got to her feet on her own. She couldn’t afford to smell like death when she went back to the camp.

“Jack, I don’t know what you’re doing here but this is a really bad time,” she protested. “Fathia will make my life hell if she finds out I’m missing.”

“Oh, will she now? She’ll make your life hell?” Jack’s borrowed eyes glinted in the first blue rays of dawn. “You know a lot about hell, do you? You can’t know what hell is like, not when you still have skin to keep you warm and bones to keep you standing upright.”

Sarah bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry,” she tried. “I didn’t mean—“

“I’m the one who taught you how to see, girl. I’m the one who made you special. When those bitches in there thought you were too small and scrawny to waste their time on, I was the one who gave you magic. So if I call you out now you’d better come running.” He grabbed her face and stared into her eyes, his fingers digging into her cheeks.

There had been a time when Jack was kind to her, when he had begged her to let him teach her his secrets. He’d believed that was the only way he could earn eternal rest. He’d killed her father, he told her, back in the other time, and he regretted it now, and he owed her a great debt. Once he began teaching her he had grown impatient and sometimes cruel. Perhaps because he’d discovered that giving her his gift wasn’t enough to buy his peace. There was something else he had to accomplish first but it eluded him. Now typically when he came to her it was because he wanted something from her. He’d taken quite a bit already. Every three or four months she could count on him to wander back into her life and want something new. Information, usually, or just gossip. Sometime he had entire shopping lists of supplies he needed for purposes he chose never to reveal. She would steal what he wanted and leave it buried in the desert for him. So far she hadn’t been caught.

“Are you still the girl I made my pupil?” he asked, loosening his grip on her face. The skin was soft but so cold where it dug into her. She nodded against his hand. “Now follow me, then, and keep quiet. I want you to meet a friend.”

He lead her down the back of a dune and into the relative shelter of an old wadi that emptied into a narrow ravine, not a word passing between them as they moved like cats in the darkness. At the back of the defile he snapped on a chemical light—something Sarah hadn’t seen in years. She’d thought the military issue blue glowsticks were part of the past she would need to learn to forget. In the dim illumination Jack took a carved piece of stone in the shape of a scarab out of his uniform and laid it on the bare rock between their feet. “He’ll come now, if we’re respectful.”

“Who?” Sarah asked. “Who, will come, Jack? The Tsarevich?”

The glance he shot her was colder than the desert at night. “This is an old place.” As usual he failed to tell her anything of substance. He expected her to just get what he meant. His lessons were difficult at best and sometimes completely unfair. “It has its protectors. They’re dead but they’re clean dead. There’s a reason why Ayaan picked this spot to settle down in, even if she didn't know it outright she could sense it.”

“Ayaan,” Sarah moaned. Of course Jack wouldn’t know what had happened.

She didn’t know that she wanted to fill him in. The hurt was still too real and too personal. She didn’t have a chance. A moving shadow appeared at the mouth of the canyon, outlined by darkness in the dawning gap between its walls. Others appeared behind it.

The shadows stepped up against the starlight, silhouettes out of a dread older than any words she knew. The first figure stepped down onto the slickrock and came into their light, moving slowly on legs that didn’t work quite right. Sarah knew that gait all too well. Its face was obscured behind a flat plaster mask on which was painted a face with large soulful eyes and a full and sensuous mouth. The painting was in a style that made her think of mosaics in ancient Roman ruins. Below the plaster its throat and chest were wrapped tight in rotting linen bandages. Lengths of cloth dangled from its free arms and looped around its knees and calves.

A mummy. It bent and picked up the scarab carving in both of its clumsy, broken-looking hands. It held the scarab close to its chest.

“This is Ptolemaeus Canopus,” Jack said. “You can call him Ptolemy—he likes it when you do. He doesn’t talk so much for himself but he was pretty much something back in the mists of history. Now he’s sort of head man of the stinky bandage brigade. I owe him a sizeable favor and now he has a sort of problem. A couple of hours ago the Tsarevich,” and Jack spat on the ground as he spoke the name, “stole about fifty of his buddies. Just kidnapped them right off the face of the earth. He wants them back and he needs your help.”

“My help? You mean, the help of our soldiers?” Sarah asked, incredulous. She’d heard stories of mummies before but never met one. Mummies had saved Ayaan and her unit from certain death when they’d fought Gary, half a world and all of time away. They were supposed to be ridiculously strong but emotionally damaged. Sarah had always been advised to stay away from them. Ayaan had advised that. “Listen, Jack, the Tsarevich pretty much outclasses us and anyway the unit, well, there’s not much of it left, not since Ayaan died.” There. She had let it out.

“What was that, girl?” Jack asked her. He looked more surprised than sorrowful, even though in life he and Ayaan had possessed a powerful mutual respect.

“Ayaan, she’s… she’s dead.” It felt almost good to say it aloud. It made it more real but it also made it easier to cope with, somehow. “She was killed by the Tsarevich’s troops yesterday.”

“She bloody well was not,” Jack swore. “They took her alive, right before they grabbed up Ptolemy’s folk.”

Sarah could only gape at him.

“I thought you knew,” he said.

The mummy massaged his stone scarab like a pet.