Chapter Four

The giant truck rocked up on one set of giant tires as it crushed an abandoned car on the interstate, a thousand tiny glass cubes exploding from the crushed windshield, rotten struts and shocks popping and collapsing and squealing and then it was over. In the bed of the truck Ayaan held onto a roll bar until the truck stopped bouncing and then clicked on her walkie-talkie. “Bring up a wrecking crew,” she said. “The flatbed won’t make it past this one.”

A few dozen living men in blue paper scrubs came rushing up with prybars and sledgehammers. They made short work of the rusted-out car, taking it to pieces and hurling the wreckage into the undergrowth on either side of the road. They had to move quickly. Behind them the Tsarevich’s flatbed trailer was surging forward, its ranks of wheels turning in fits and starts as the giant vehicle moved forward one staggering step at a time. A hundred corpses heaved at it with their shoulders, their bent backs, their straining fingers. On top six more ghouls turned the cranks of giant flywheels, feeding storage batteries so they would have electricity for the night to come. Living gunners crewed heavy machine guns mounted in pintles at two positions on the flatbed. The green phantom sat strapped into a chair on a high superstructure from which he commanded a good view of their surroundings and everything that happened in the column of vehicles. At the back of the flatbed the Tsarevich himself reclined in his yurt, quite hidden from view. There were plenty of rumors that claimed he was actually not in there at all, that the flatbed was a complete ruse and that he was hidden elsewhere. Ayaan wouldn’t have blamed him for being a little cagy.

The attack on his person had shaken him badly and the death of Cicatrix had left him without a familiar supply of food. Once the Tsarevich had learned that Amanita was also dead, well, something had changed. He had gone from being hurt and confused to being galvanized. He had moved quickly to get his people on the road. He’d had plenty of enthusiastic help, too. The living and the dead had worked side by side to get vehicles ready, to pack up their supplies and belongings, and do whatever it took to stay near the prince of the dead. Where they were going and what they would do when they arrived was still a complete mystery to them. Ayaan, who only knew a little more, found she had too much work to get done to be asking a lot of questions anyway.

Behind the flatbed a fleet of hundreds of barely-functional cars and buses followed, their engines blowing blue smoke across a landscape that had reverted to the primeval. Ayaan remembered a time when cars were commonplace, even in her native Somalia, but she had forgotten just how noisy they were and how much of a mess they made. Most of the vehicles hadn’t seen use in over a decade and many were so badly rusted they fell to pieces after only a day or two. It didn’t matter. The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever use from his refinery on Cyprus, and there was no shortage of abandoned cars.

Ayaan had been on one of the missions to collect vehicles. Regardless of what she’d lived through and regardless of what she had become it had still spooked her. The cars had been waiting for them, parked in orderly rows outside of shopping malls and airports and stadiums. They had been left there intentionally and their owners had fully expected to come back and reclaim them at short notice. Every vehicle had been personalized in some way—a faded bumper sticker, a graduation tassel hanging from a rear-view mirror, a paint job with simulated flames. Personal effects littered the passenger seats, fast food wrappers were stuffed into the leg wells. The doors were all locked, the windows rolled up tightly. The batteries were long since drained and the gas had evaporated out of their fuel tanks, but those two problems were readily solved. The cars still worked, at a fundamental level. But no one had ever come back. The cars were forgotten. Left for dead.

It had spooked her not for the presence of any real horror but for the absence of any normality. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that ninety-nine per cent of the world’s population had died in the first months of the Epidemic. Surrounded by ghouls and cultists and liches it was easy to pretend that the world hadn’t been emptied out. Standing in a parking lot bigger than the village where she’d been born, however, watching the sun gleam from every piece of glass and mirror, Ayaan had been forced to accept it, to accept everything that had been lost.

The cars had been given a kind of afterlife now, she supposed. Each car held a single living person—the driver—and as many handless ghouls as could be stuffed into the rest of the interior, the back seat, the trunk. The green phantom and the Tsarevich kept them docile, but Ayaan kept wondering what the drivers must be thinking. Were they pleased with themselves, were they secure in the knowledge they were doing a holy duty? Or did they worry every single second that one of their passengers would break the spell, wake up and look around and realize just how hungry they were?

Ayaan looked forward and saw the road obscured ahead by the branches of a weeping willow. The tree’s roots had torn up the asphalt and sent cracks running through the blacktop in every direction. “I need a lumber crew,” she said, and living women with chainsaws came running forward. Ayaan tried not to think about the last time she’d seen a chainsaw.

Behind the ghoul-filled cars came tow trucks and fuel tankers and 18-wheelers containing mobile mechanics’ shops and crates full of spare parts for the cars as well as kitchens for both the living and the undead. Behind the support vehicles came the stragglers—those living who didn’t know how to drive, mostly, a tailback of them that receded into the distance. They kept up as best they could. The column of vehicles moved forward only a few miles an hour but it never stopped. The wrecking crews and chainsaw teams cleared debris while a pair of steam rollers and road graders were available if the way became truly impassible. Whatever the Tsarevich hoped to find out west he intended to get there in a hurry.

There would be serious obstacles to come, Ayaan knew. Rivers to ford. Mountains to climb. There would be weeks of slow going ahead of them. So far not a single person had complained.

Well. There was Semyon Iurevich. Though he didn’t complain so much as beg for forgiveness and for an end to his unlife. Even over the noise of the cars and the chainsaws Ayaan could hear his screams.

There had been quite a bit of debate over what should be done with the apostate lich. It had been suggested he should be fed to ghouls—the ultimate insult paid to the most vile of traitors. Yet ghouls did not eat their own kind. The dark energy repulsed them far more than the decomposing, suppurating flesh enticed them. It had been noticed that ghouls would quite happily eat dead human meat as long as it wasn’t currently being animated. It would have been simple enough to smash in Semyon Iurevich’s brains and then feed him to the dead, but that lacked an element of dark justice, as far as the Tsarevich was concerned. It lacked torture.

Behind her on the flatbed Ayaan could have watched, if she so chose, what the Tsarevich had finally deemed fit. Semyon Iurevich was hanging from a gibbet by his neck, his eyes turned upward to the sky. Stripped of his bathrobe it had turned out he was quite fat. Now a living man with a machete was slicing off thin strips of the lich’s body, starting with the soles of his feet and working his way up. As each slice came off he would drop it in a blender and puree it until its dark energy had completely dissipated. The resulting slurry was dribbled into the mouths of the ghouls who worked so hard hauling the flatbed across New Jersey.

The best estimate held that Semyon Iurevich would be nothing more than a screaming skull long before they reached Indiana.

The bastard lich had diddled with her head, he’d gotten his rotten little fingers in her brain. Ayaan, who had never believed in revenge, did not enjoy listening to his screams. At least not too much.