Chapter Six

The knock came again. She stared at the door. “Just come in already. It’s not like I can keep you out.”

There was no response. A few minutes later the knock came once more.

Ayaan staggered to the door and pushed it open. There was no one there. Just darkness and cool, slightly salty air. A cavernous space lay out there, maybe an empty warehouse, perhaps an abandoned auditorium. She stepped outside, her bruised feet dragging over grimy concrete. A little light came from above her through a hole in the ceiling. It made a sort of natural spotlight on the floor. She could see dust motes spiraling in the shaft of sunlight. It almost, but not quite, illuminated an AK-47 assault rifle suspended from the ceiling by a length of string. Ayaan shuffled toward the weapon. She touched the cherry wood stock. It was not her own AK, she would have recognized the pattern of the stain on the wood, the scratches on the metal that had become as familiar to her over the years as the spots and blemishes on her own skin. Still. It was a Kalashnikov and she knew it would be a reliable, effective weapon. She yanked it down, snapping its cord, and examined the chamber then broke out the magazine. A full clip of ammunition. With fingers that felt unusually clumsy she slipped one of the bullets out of the magazine and examined it, almost dropping it when she held it up to her eye. She half expected the bullets to be blanks or somehow adulterated but they weren’t. Just the standard 7.62 x 39 mm cartridge. She slapped the magazine back into place, moved the selector lever to single fire and released the cocking lever with a clang.

Something stirred in the corners of the big room. No, more than one something. She brought the weapon around to firing position, ready to aim as soon as a target presented itself. None did. Slowly, deliberately, she took a step toward the still-open bedroom door.

A shadow flicked across the door, slamming it shut. A shadow that moved faster than any living human being she’d ever seen. She knew what that meant. A fast ghoul—probably an entire squad of them. Which meant the green phantom had to be nearby to spur them on. “Maybe you’ll tell me your name now that we’ve got so much in common,” she announced, trying to flush him out.

It wasn’t the green phantom who answered, however. It was the lipless wonder. “Is test,” he told her, his voice bouncing around the ceiling, amplified electronically and broadcast from several directions at once. He could be anywhere.

“Is test,” he said again. “Is very fair. Abilities special, some would call powers, they come out under great stress only. What greater stress than life-or-death, yes? Sometimes the lich has no power, nothing special, and then he must be put down. If he has powers then he can survive.”

“And making me do this in the dark, that’s part of the fairness?” Ayaan demanded, but before she could finish the sentence something slapped her arm hard enough to make it sting. She grabbed her wrist and felt torn leather there.

Clearly the test had already begun. She could live or die by her own actions. If she was going to live she needed to shoot, and to shoot she needed to see. She remembered Sarah’s gift. Ayaan would have that ability—all of the dead did. She could feel the accelerated ghouls whizzing around her, could hear them moving in the dark but she forced herself to calm down, to close her eyes, to… to feel.

It had nothing to do with the eyes, though her brain formed images of what she received. Her skin took in most of the information, sensitive areas of her body reacting with abhorrence to the presence of undead things.

And there they were. She understood, perhaps for the first time, just what ghouls were. Empty shells. Husks. Person-shaped receptacles. The energy that flowed into them and suffused them was the only thing keeping them upright. There were no minds, no souls inside them. She stared down at her own body, at her flesh wrapped up in the skin of some other dead beast and knew she was one of them. Her intelligence, her personality, were merely riding around in her… corpse.

One of the ghouls came at her, moving low and fast, bent almost parallel with the floor. Its sharpened bones flashed toward her but she could see them now, smoky and purple with stolen life energy. She ducked and spun and barely avoided impaling herself on his cut-down arms. She had time, just, to wonder if he was one of the ghouls butchered on the ship while she watched.

He came around again. She ducked and rolled away from him and watched as he skidded past her, sliding on the slick floor.

She could see them now—only three of them, their energy thrumming off the walls—but her special vision couldn’t compensate for really seeing. She had little depth perception, she couldn’t find their ranges in the dark. She knew it was day outside and the sun was shining—she could tell from the hole in the roof.

Ayaan waited for the next attack, a ghoul coming at her with arms flailing and legs pumping. She dropped to all fours and swung away from him, then dashed for the nearest wall. She felt old, dried-up wood, probably plywood installed over a broken window. There was no time to find a door.

With her arm bent, with her weight behind it Ayaan smashed at the wood expecting to dislocate her shoulder. Instead it gave way like cardboard and she spilled out into daylight so bright it seared her eyes.

Dead pupils, Ayaan learned, could not contract as quickly as live pupils. Her eyes throbbed with pain as she got her feet under her and ran, her boots finding the planks of a boardwalk, her muscles burning as she tried to run. The best she could manage was a sort of drunken stagger, little better than a stiff walk.

When her eyes finally started to adjust to the white light that flashed off the ocean she lifted the Kalashnikov into a firing position and sighted on the window she’d broken open. They would come from there, she figured. She had to assume they wouldn’t have more ghouls lying in wait for her outside.

A ghoul wearing a fireman’s helmet appeared in the window. The lower half of his face had been carved away to give him a bigger mouth, a bigger bite. His skin was the tawny color of a predator in a dusty land.

Ayaan wasted no time. She lined up her shot and placed a tight burst of three rounds right in the exposed portion of his forehead.

At least, they should have gone there. Instead none of the three even hit him. In horror Ayaan looked down at her weapon. Had it been altered somehow, had the iron sights been filed down, twisted out of alignment, something?

No. It was her. She'd never seen a ghoul with a firearm, ever. Now she knew why.

The ghoul leapt through the window and headed toward her like a rocket. She fired again and saw dusty dried blood explode from his elbow. It didn’t even slow him down.

It was her. It was her fingers, her hands that felt like formless clay at the ends of her arms. There was a reason why the green phantom took the hands of his soldiers—they were worth less as weapons than the sharpened ends of bone. And hers were the same. She lacked the motor skills, the fine muscle control it took to fire a rifle with any kind of effectiveness. She dropped the weapon on the ground. She would never use an AK-47 again, as long as she, well, lived. All that training. All that experience. How much of her had been tied to that weapon? How much else did she have?

Time to find out.

No more than ten meters separated them, a distance he could cover in seconds. If she was going to pass this test… did she even want to pass it? Let him stab her, let him destroy her, and she would be done. She had spent all her life fighting the liches. To live on, to continue to exist at any rate, meant being what she hated most.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. She knew, because Ayaan could look into her own heart, she had mastered that skill very early on, she knew she wanted to keep going. She could no longer stay alive for Sarah. But she could continue to fight.

But how? With her bare hands? She closed her eyes and tried to think. Sarah spoke often of the life force, the energy that pervaded all living things. Ayaan had always thought of it as similar to baraka, the dangerous blessedness of clan leaders and Sufi saints. Just an old Somali superstition—but perhaps there was some reality to it. Now, after her death, she had no trouble feeling the energy all around her, the life force. A field of energy that passed through her, that wrapped her up and animated her dead flesh and kept her consciousness alive. If she were going to develop powers, just spontaneously grow some kind of mystical ability it would come from that source, from that energy, that baraka. Every lich power she’d heard of, all of their magic, was simply the ability to manipulate that field.

She reached down into it, gathered it in her hands. It made her skin tingle as she clutched at it, exactly as she might clutch at a blanket that covered her. She concentrated it, and time slowed down as she focused the energy, squeezing it down into tight hot bundles of force in her hands.

The ghoul racing toward her seemed to stop in mid air as she raised her hands, threw them forward, and spat the built-up energy at him. It was that simple, it was second nature. Not something she had to learn.

The energy hit him square on, her aim perfect. It sizzled and spat with darkness as it touched him. It burst inside him like dark fire. His face wrinkled as if in concentration… and kept wrinkling. He had looked ageless before but as the energy—her energy—ripped through his flesh he took on the countenance of an old man. His skin crinkled, turned papery, tore away from his bones. As it fluttered away on the wind it turned to fine powder, like talc.

He collapsed on the boardwalk, mere paces from her, his skull crumbling like old pottery. She had aged him to destruction—what remained of his head could have been a thousand years old.

She stood there forever, waiting for time to start up again. It didn’t. She had no breath, no pulse to measure its passing. The sun failed to move across the sky. There had been more ghouls in the boarded-up warehouse, at least two more but neither of them appeared to confront her.

She supposed she had passed the test.

A door in a nearby building creaked open on rusted hinges. She heard maniacal laughter echoing all around her, but had no idea who it belonged to. Time started up once more.