Chapter Eight

“You’ve been here before,” Ayaan said. It wasn’t a question.

Nilla turned around to look at her but the pale face under all that blonde hair gave away nothing. “I’ve been to lots of places,” she replied.

Ayaan nodded and smiled to herself. Her radio crackled and spat white noise at her but she ignored it for the time being. The two of them stood at the front of the flatbed. Ahead of them Erasmus guided the giant hot rod over a road surface that had been washed away by a dozen winters. Little but a scoured-out track in the side of the mountain remained.

They were getting close. Even Ayaan could feel it, a deep thrumming in her bones. An almost musical feeling that something big and powerful and wonderful was right over the next rise. Of course she’d been feeling that for days, since long before they’d reached the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

It had been a long and arduous journey. The Tsarevich had given them little encouragement but the zealots had never so much as threatened to rebel. Dozens of them had died: dehydration and the meager traveling rations had taken some while others were accidentally crushed by the drivers of the transport vehicles. A few had succumbed to violent fevers or terrible infections. It didn’t matter. Moments after their eyes fluttered shut their bodies rose and they simply entered their next phase of service to their master. It was something they looked forward to.

Almost all of the vehicles had broken down eventually and it became harder and harder to replace them. The dead and the living together took to walking along after the flatbed, taking turns at the ropes when they hauled it over rises, heaving with all their strength to pull it out of muddy ditches.

After the first week they came across larger and larger breaks in the tree cover and then the world seemed to open up wide and the sky got big as the forest ended and the prairie began but little changed. They had weathered brutal sun and punishing rain. The column had never stopped. The rain gave way to days so dry and dusty Ayaan had to wear a cloth around her face and sunglasses to protect her eyes. The ghouls were oblivious to the dust that scrubbed their skin right off and burned their faces an angry red. The living made do as best they could.

In all of that empty land Ayaan had seen not a single survivor. Of course the living were hardly likely to make themselves known to the column, but she had seen no signs of them at all: no villages, not even the thread of smoke from a distant campfire. If they existed at all they were like the fallen creatures she’d seen in Pennsylvania. Hidden away in places no one ever wanted to go.

Of the dead they saw many, and all of them were headed west. Whatever it was that pulled at Ayaan’s bones pulled them even more strongly. They could be spotted far to the north and south of the column sometimes, plodding along at the speed of death. Their faces didn’t turn to look at the strange caravan that passed them by. Their feet didn’t falter. They were being drawn onward inexplicably and inexorably. Ayaan wondered if something had happened recently to inspire them to come or whether this had been going on for years.

Prairie gave way to desert. The hills they climbed over turned silver or purple with sage, or a brilliant yellow where they were covered in millions of black-eyed susans, asters and fleabane. In the troughs between the rises broad swaths of grama or fescue or big bluestem grass flourished, anywhere there was a little water. They started to climb, the roads got steeper as the hills turned into mountains cloaked in loblolly pine and fir trees. They began to find pockets of snow hidden anywhere a hollow in the earth might give a little shade from the sun.

“This was all different,” Nilla said. She sat down on the edge of the flatbed, dangling her legs over the track. She gestured around at the mountains green with stunted pine trees and juniper bushes. “There was less green, more brown. All of this looked like... I don’t know. Like another planet, a dead one. I guess the ghouls ate it all, the vegetation, but then it grew back. It’s funny, isn’t it. The Source is for all of us, living and dead. It makes everything grow and it doesn’t play favorites.”

Ayaan didn’t pretend to follow Nilla’s train of thought. As for herself she wasn’t thinking much of anything, really, just watching the road go by beneath their wheels like the most tranquil movie in history. Here a sprig of bitterbrush would squeeze up between the broken rocks of the track. Next she would see the broad chevrons of the hot rod’s wheel tread where it had spun out a little in loose dirt. She had learned over the space of weeks to fall into a trance state whenever she wanted to. She remembered Erasmus standing at the portholes of the nuclear waste ship Pinega, watching the waves for days on end, just watching them rise and fall. She supposed this was the one great consolation of being dead. She was removed from time—her body did not recognize the passage of hours or days or months the way it had before she was murdered. Her period or at least the time when she should have menstruated had come and gone without so much as an episode of spotting. She didn't miss that, at least.

“Oh, shit,” Nilla said. It was shocking enough to make Ayaan look up. She saw nothing, really, except for a scar on the side of the mountain. A place where the trees weren’t as dense. She looked closer and saw a twisted piece of metal glinting dully between two trees.

“Something has come back to you,” Ayaan suggested. “A memory.”

Nilla grasped her wrist. Not in an aggressive manner. Like a little girl wanting some reassurance. “Come with me,” she begged and then she leapt down to the road. Ayaan followed, of course, though not altogether happily. She understood what was happening. Nilla had come this way on her journey to the east. Now she was going to have to recreate that passage but in reverse.

There had to be things in the past that had driven her across the country. Things no one would ever want to revisit.

Together they wove through the trees, climbing over deadfall, picking their way through whip-thin branches that showered them in dust and organic debris and crackling snow as they pushed through. The snow underfoot had formed a thin crust and it crunched like styrofoam under their footsteps.

Ayaan looked back at the column, which hadn’t stopped moving. She hadn’t been so far away from it in weeks and she felt strangely vulnerable, even with the trees arching over her. She turned again and saw Nilla getting ahead of her.

“What is it?” Ayaan called out. “What was it?” she asked, more softly. She found the piece of metal she’d seen from the track, rusted and scorched. A line of rivets, some of them burst by metal fatigue and time, bisected the shard. She moved deeper into the woods and found more pieces, some of them embedded in tree trunks. The pines had grown around the wreckage in soft, flowing contours.

“Oh, no,” Nilla said from somewhere further into the forest. Her voice was as soft as the constant sound of needles falling through the branches. The same sound, the same softness, the snow made when it fell from the trees. Ayaan hurried on.

A long vane of metal arched up from the snow ahead of her like a pole driven into the ground. Though rust and general decay had claimed it Ayaan recognized it as the rotor of a helicopter. In a clearing ahead the majority of the aircraft’s wreckage stood forgotten and ill-used by weather, a standing circle of broken titanium and steel and Plexiglas. There had been a bad fire there once, presumably when the helicopter crashed. There were human remains in the circle. Simple bones, black with soot, white where the sun had bleached them. One of them was still moving.

He wore the uniform of a soldier, faded by sunlight but still draped with insignia and medallions. He had been partially eaten, most of the flesh of his legs and arms having been torn away, and he had been burned as well. Eyeless, nearly faceless, his skull stared up at the sky. The few muscles left in his arms were straining at a jagged length of metal that erupted from his ribcage. He was trying to get himself free. He’d probably been trying for twelve years.

Nilla knelt next to his head, her hands across her face. She didn’t say anything.

Ayaan understood. She came forward and put her hands on the tattered skin of the dead man’s head. She closed her eyes and let a pulse of dark energy trickle through her fingers, into what remained of his brain. He fell back on his spike and stopped moving. Nilla nodded emphatically and rose to her feet. “He didn’t want to trust me, but he had to,” she said.

“Careful,” Ayaan told her. “You’re starting to turn into a somebody.”

Nilla gave her a smile that started to melt Ayaan’s dead heart. The smile dropped from her face almost instantly, however. “Am I losing my mind, or do you hear that, too?” She turned around to look at the pieces of the downed helicopter.

Ayaan stood perfectly still, more still than she ever could have in life, and made herself all one ear. She listened, and tuned out the natural sounds around her, and listened again. She definitely heard it. The sound a helicopter’s rotor makes when it’s moving under power. How was it possible? Was this some kind of vehicular ghost? Ayaan had seen a lot of strange things but she wasn’t ready to accept that.

Then a helicopter went by over their heads so low its shadow darkened the clearing, so fast it was gone in the time it took for Ayaan’s eyes to adjust to the dimness. She glanced at Nilla, then started running back toward the road. The explosions started before she covered half the distance.