Chapter Eleven

She didn’t sleep anymore. She would never sleep again. As the night came on Ayaan’s eyes began to feel sore and dry. She rubbed and rubbed at them until her skin started coming away. After that she forced herself not to rub.

One by one the cultists headed off to their beds, hammocks, old mattresses with the dust and insects beaten out of them. They drained away into the dark storefronts and broken-down hotels, stretching their arms, yawning.

The moon came up and found Ayaan still waiting, waiting for sleep to come, and knowing it never would. Something else found her, too. The lipless lich. Semyon Iurevich, who saw all, who knew all. He wrapped his bathrobe tight around striped pajamas a size too big for his gaunt frame. “Come,” he said, and he lead her away from the bonfire in the middle of Ocean Avenue. Away from the light and the few zealots who stood an almost silent guard duty.

She watched the lich’s back as he moved away from her, the pale stretch of robe across his shoulders like a beacon drawing her into the grid of darkened streets. She watched his feet shamble forward, ungainly but unflagging, she saw the complicated engineering of his shriveled ankles, all the knobs and spars and bits of bone, and the stretched sinews over them. When he turned to look back at her his face was a death mask, leather pulled far too tight over unyielding bone. His eyes were so large in their sockets.

She was vaguely aware that she was paying far too much attention to the lich. She thought perhaps that she was subconsciously horrified by him not because of his dire appearance but because she knew she would be like him soon enough, that her own body would dry up, slim down, exude horrible chemicals. Rot.

Then again it was possible he was merely hypnotizing her. She didn’t know the extent of his psychic powers. She only knew that he could see inside of her heart. And that he had lied to his master on her behalf.

“Yes, is right,” he told her. They had stopped moving. They were inside a tiny room with stripes of light slanting in through wooden jalousies. She didn’t remember entering the building, which was probably a bad sign. She stretched out her hands to try to get a literal grasp on where she might be but she clutched only cobwebs. “I lied, for you. You understand? Is lie I told, that you are trustable. Harmless. Bah!”

She looked for him but could only see his teeth in the filtered moonlight. Teeth bared in eternal rictus—the lips had pulled back, away from his mouth. His gums stood out from his face, pink like wounds. “We both know, you are assassin. We are both knowing who should you kill! He is dangerous, more than anyone know. I see his heart! His black and dead heart!”

Ayaan nodded, and licked her own lips, checking they were still there. She had very little saliva in her mouth and her tongue felt like a cat’s as it rasped over her flesh. Her hand went up to touch her neck, where her tattooed ward wrapped around her like a fence.

“Yes, he has control. Control of you. You must be caution, in all things. Together, though. Together we kill. Your friend, the ghost.” A smile, a frown, they were the same on his face. “He has friend in me. We work together.”

She blinked and it was daylight and her mind was clear. It happened that quickly. Behind her a horn thundered out a prolonged bass chord and she jumped.

She turned slowly and found herself looking at a vehicle that was a cross between a hot rod and a giant pickup truck. It had four enormous balloon tires and a cab that could easily seat five. Its engine was exposed to the air, all chrome pipes and dancing pistons. Its grille looked like a gothic arch stolen off a cathedral. Multi-toned flames decorated the cab. The hood ornament was a skull done in chrome and the cargo bed was full of corpses held down with bungee cords.

Ayaan looked closer. The naked bodies in the back had been surgically adjusted. They had neither hands nor lips. Their torpor, she imagined, would only be temporary—their metabolisms had been dialed back by the green phantom. She looked up and saw him on the roof of the truck, tied into a lawn chair bolted in amongst a wide array of fog lights and horns. He grinned down at her when he saw her jump in surprise.

The passenger side door of the truck swung open. The werewolf sat in the driver’s seat and he slid across to reach down and give her a hand up. He showed her how to use her seat belt and how to adjust the air conditioning and the CD player. This was necessary since the dashboard was so long he was unable to reach those instruments while belted into the driver’s seat.

“This is the... the job the Tsarevich offered me?” Ayaan asked.

The werewolf replied in English. “This is just the easy part. Later on you might have to fill up the gas tank. Hi, we haven’t been properly introduced.” He held out one hand, a furry appendage ending in inch-long, razor-sharp claws. They weren’t like fingernails at all, more like the talons of a bird, conical and slightly curved.

Ayaan figured out a second too late that he was offering the hand to shake. She reached for it even as he was pulling it back and the claws slid across the skin of her palm. The skin parted like torn silk. At least there was no blood.

He looked embarrassed, though it was hard to tell. Even if he could have blushed his face was hidden under a dense growth of hair that covered his nose and made his mouth a dark slit. His eyes were surprisingly soft and kind, though. “I don’t have any ‘powers’ in the traditional sense. My body does this weird thing, though. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t perspire, or do anything you would think a living thing might do, but it keeps producing keratin. The protein that makes, well, hair and nails. I have to shave myself head to foot every couple of days.” He put his hands on the steering wheel, making an obvious gesture of it—he meant her no harm, he was saying. “My name’s Erasmus, by the way.”

She smiled for him. “Ayaan.”

“Sure, sure, I know all about you. I’m German, if you can’t tell from the accent.” Whatever accent the werewolf might have came from the mass of fur inside his mouth, Ayaan thought, but she let him talk. He clearly needed to tell the story. “Believe it or not the Tsarevich didn’t create me. I want you to know that, so you’ll understand a little. I was in Leipzig when the world ended. It was bad there. The local authorities had heard already what happened to New York, to Paris. They mostly fled when the first ghouls came wandering into town. I took refuge in a hospital, hoping to outlast the Epidemic, but of course it just kept coming and coming. I starved to death, afraid to leave my little locked ward, watching shadows move outside the blinds, knowing they could get in any time if they just tried hard enough.”

He closed his eyes and his face became an oblong of hair. “When it gets down to the end, when your body is breaking down from hunger, you can feel it. It hurts. I took all the drugs I was locked in with, took anything that would get me high. In the last days I discovered that if you breathed pure oxygen long enough you could feel nothing at all.” He chuckled. “I had no idea what I was doing. I just fell asleep one day and when I woke up I was rolled up in a cocoon of hair. I could barely move.”

Ayaan’s stomach grumbled. She didn’t like all this talk of starving—it just made her hungry.

“I ended up walking to Russia. I had no idea what I was, no idea why any of this had happened. Then I was approached by the Tsarevich’s agents. I... I ate one of them, I’m sorry to say. It was an honest mistake. The others assured me it was alright. They told me what I was, a lich, and they told me that when I ate a human being I released his soul. No more horror, no more apocalypse for that man. They made it sound like I did him a favor. I don’t want you to think... I mean, I don’t buy half of what the Tsarevich says about souls and the afterlife. But he has something real to offer. If anyone can rebuild what we had before, if anyone can end all the suffering, it will be our boy. You see? We’re not all brainwashed religious freaks. I need you to know that.”

Ayaan nodded meaningfully. “Oh, of course. Certainly,” she said. She was thinking that when the Tsarevich wanted to demonstrate his remote control, the one that could set her head on fire, it was the werewolf who had turned the knobs.

She jumped when she heard a rhythmic thumping on the roof of the cab. It had to be the green phantom, she decided, sending a signal with his femur staff.

Erasmus turned the ignition key and the truck thundered to life. He looked out at the road when he spoke next, failing altogether to make eye contact. “Anyway,” he said. “Thanks for listening.”

“You got it,” she told him. She was already staring out the window.