Chapter Fourteen

“She’s got some charm against bullets,” the green phantom said. Enni Langstrom. That was what he was called. Ayaan was still trying to get used to the name. “When we have a chance we’ll get a bathtub and see if she can breathe underwater, too.” He was dragging Sarah along behind him, literally pulling her through the dirt.

Ayaan ran a hand over her chin. “Enni,” she said. “Let’s give her an opportunity. Let’s allow her to join us, if she will.”

“She tried to kill the Tsarevich,” he told her. To him it was just that simple. Sarah’s head rolled to one side and she vomited blood all over the hem of his robe. “Stupid bitch,” he snarled. He kicked her in the ribs until she was coughing blood all over herself.

Ayaan rushed forward and knelt down by Sarah’s side. “Enni,” she said, “the first time you saw me, I was trying to kill you. Look how that worked out.”

She had been willing to kill Sarah. She had convinced herself that if it meant saving the Tsarevich—and humanity’s last hope—she would kill Sarah herself. But now it wasn’t necessary. Sarah no longer had the means to hurt anyone. Surely—surely a little mercy was in order. She wiped Sarah’s mouth with her hand and lifted her head a little to make it easier for the girl to breathe.

“Ayaan,” Sarah said, her eyes wide, so wide. “Ayaan, you’re an abomination.”

Ayaan just nodded.

“If you want her so badly, take her. At the first sign of difficulty you should kill her. If she gets away from you, you’ll both be executed.” Enni shook his skull-like head and stormed away. “I have work to oversee,” he shouted back over his shoulder.

She lifted Sarah up to a sitting posture. “Listen,” she said, but Sarah interrupted her.

“I was hoping I would find you were a prisoner here,” the girl said. Her eyes were very hard. “I assumed you wouldn’t let them turn you into a lich willingly.”

“It wasn’t my choice.” Ayaan shook her head. “Sarah, just listen. They’ll kill you. I don’t care what kind of magic you’ve found, they’ll find a way to get around it. You only have one chance to survive.”

“Ayaan never worried so much about survival,” Sarah said. “I don’t know who you are. I know who you serve, though.”

Ayaan closed her eyes and said a brief prayer. He is Sublime, she recited, the Tremendous. “I thought as you did originally. Now I’ve come to understand. The world is in bad shape, Sarah. There are fewer living people every day, and more of the walking dead. I used to think there was one answer to that problem: shoot them all. Now I know better. Somebody has to rebuild this planet.”

Sarah licked her lips. “The Tsarevich. You really want to live in the world he wants to make?”

“Yes,” Ayaan said, without hesitation. “Because I’ve seen the alternative. Come on. You have to stand up. I can’t carry you.” She helped Sarah up to her feet. The girl looked pale and weak but she didn’t collapse. Was that just the result of good training? Had Ayaan taught Sarah how to be tough? Or maybe the girl’s magic was just that strong.

Magic. Ayaan’s world had always been predicated on the idea that magic was dangerous at best and a sure route to damnation. Now she was a magical being herself. She didn't want to admit that Sarah’s anger had shaken her faith. But it had.

“Just be quiet. You can achieve nothing by talking now,” Ayaan said, letting Sarah lean against her.

“When they give the order to kill me, will you blow my brains out?” Sarah asked. “Or will you let them cut off my hands and my lips and make me one of their soldiers?”

There were worse fates. Ayaan said nothing.

She lead Sarah deeper into the encampment, into the throng of cultists who were busy preparing for the Tsarevich’s great metamorphosis. The living and the dead were busy unloading several crates of equipment from the back of the flatbed. Others labored at assembling strange contraptions Ayaan could not recognize. A narrow scaffolding made of aluminum poles was already rising from the carpet of bones, far closer to the Source than Ayaan thought safe. A work crew was putting together what looked like a giant metal coil as thick as her arm while others tested vacuum tubes and then fit them together in various metal cabinets. It looked as if they were preparing for a rock concert.

The crowd parted as a long wooden crate was brought forward. A cultist with a crowbar bent to open the crate and reveal a pair of metal spikes, each of them ten feet long and wickedly curved. Their tips looked sharper than icepicks.

Erasmus waved at Ayaan and walked over to stand next to her. “It won’t be much longer,” he said. “Wow, did you ever really think we’d make it this far?”

“Yes,” Ayaan said. “I believed. This is Sarah, by the way.”

“Uh. Yeah. Hi.” The cheerful werewolf didn’t seem to know how to talk to the girl. He looked instead at the two metal spikes. “Nice to meet you, I guess.”

“It isn’t mutual,” Sarah spat but Erasmus was unwilling to take the bait. He just shrugged off the venom as if his fur made him invulnerable to hatred.

“I think I see how this works,” Ayaan said as the work crew bolted one of the long spikes to either side of the scaffolding. “The Tsarevich will climb up there and grasp these poles. The energy will then flow through him like an electrical current.

“Yeah, kinda,” Erasmus said. He scratched at his face with his inch-long fingernails. “Look, Nilla’s ready to go.”

Ayaan looked where he pointed. The blonde lich was moving steadily toward the Source. Two female cultists followed behind her. Each of them carried a spool of wire which they unwound as they walked. The loose ends of wire connected to the scaffolding.

As Nilla approached the zone of exclusion where any undead thing would catch on fire Ayaan wanted to rush forward and drag her back. Erasmus knew better, however. “It’s okay. This is why we needed her so much. You’ll see. Nilla is the only one who can actually go to the Source. As far as we know she’s the only dead person ever to get close enough to touch it.”

“And she will take those wires and connect them to it?” Ayaan asked. She’d never been very good with electronics.

“There's really nothing to attach them to without her. She's going to enter the Source, physically. It's the only way. She needs to act as a conduit for the life force. A transformer, I guess—she can take the power of the Source and feed it to the Tsarevich out here as healing energy.”

Nilla vanished without fanfare as she crossed the line. She turned invisible. The female cultists in her train looked frightened for a moment but she must have spoken aloud to them because they kept walking.

“He’s coming,” someone said in Russian. “He is ready,” someone else shouted. Some of the cultists dropped to their knees as the flap of the yurt was drawn back. The ghouls kept working—they didn’t even look up.

A young girl, maybe twelve years old, stepped out of the yurt. Her head had been shaved and she had a fresh cut on her cheek. She wore a silk dress stained with blood in a couple of places. Ayaan barely recognized her at first but slowly her brain worked it out. It was Patience, the girl she had taken away from the farm in Pennsylvania. By the look of things she was the new Cicatrix.

A hand appeared out of the darkness of the yurt. A length of twisted forearm. The Tsarevich hauled himself forward, pushing his misshapen skull out into the light. He couldn’t walk. His legs were two different lengths—his left was nearly a foot longer than his right—but clearly he intended to emerge under his own power. Inch by inch his deformed flesh hauled itself out of the yurt.

The green phantom waited at the side of the flatbed with a shiny metal shopping cart. The Tsarevich lurched forward and slid down into it, his off-center hips jamming down into the metal basket. His shorter arm reached forward and his fingers wove through the bars while his longer arm draped over the side of the cart and nearly dragged his knuckles in the dirt. The green phantom pushed him forward with visible effort, toward the scaffolding.

“What’s that?” someone said, and Ayaan assumed they’d never seen the Tsarevich before. She almost laughed. She had been holding her breath—except that she had no breath to hold. Her chest had locked into rigor with anticipation. “No, seriously,” the voice called again, and she turned to see who had broken the tension. “What is that?”

She looked—everyone looked—and saw someone walking towards them from the far side of the valley. A clearly dead person whose face was a bare skull. There were scraps of skin adhering to the bone, and a pair of prominent eyes in the sockets, and a wispy lock of hair or two. The figure was perhaps six feet tall and extremely thin—except for the skull its entire body was wrapped up in a heavy olive drab blanket.

It glided forward, rolling a bit, because it didn't have any feet to walk with. Sharp-looking ends of bone stuck out of the bottom of the blanket. Instead of walking forward it sidled forward in the manner of a crab.

“Dad,” Sarah breathed. But Ayaan knew the figure wasn’t Dekalb—it couldn’t be. For some reason she felt like she recognized it, though it was unlike anything she'd ever seen before.

“Get a sniper over here,” Ayaan shouted but it was too late. A female cultist in a paper smock approached the strange figure. She had a pistol in either hand and she raised them to shoulder height. She demanded that the creature stop at once. “Come on, we need a fire team!” Ayaan yelled. She half-turned to relay her instructions to Erasmus but that would mean taking her eyes off this new enemy.

The woman with the pistols opened fire, her handguns barking like angry dogs. Bullets tore into the green blanket and spun the stranger around in a circle. It fell over not like a human being falling to the ground but like a camera tripod being knocked over. And then it got back up, bending in all the wrong places.

The blanket slid off its slender frame. The creature had no body, only six enormous jointed legs of yellow bone that flashed out like the fingers of a giant hand. Two of them snapped outward and neatly impaled the living woman. They flicked in different directions and she came apart in halves.

Screaming and shouting and general alarm rolled around the encampment. Cultists and ghouls rushed to the attack. Snipers climbed up into the rocks surrounding the valley while a team of rifles rushed forward to kneel in the dirt before the Tsarevich, protecting him.

Someone brought out a machine gun, a crew-served RPK-74, which looked like a big AK-47 with a reinforced stock. A teenage boy fed long curving magazines into the weapon as its operator lay prone on the ground, angling the barrel up on its tripod. The operator tore through an entire magazine of forty-five rounds in a few seconds.

The monster took another step forward and fell on its face, three of its legs crumpled beneath it. Chips of bone fell from its body. One of its eyes burst and jelly dripped out of the socket like ugly tears. Ayaan closed her mouth. It had been gaping open. The thing was dead. Its skull had been punctured in a dozen places.

Somebody cheered.

Then the monster stood back up. A new eye opened in the empty socket. Its broken legs fused themselves back together. If anything the beast looked bigger—it looked like it was ten feet tall. It surged forward fast enough to impale half a dozen ghouls. Around Ayaan the living began to panic. They ran in every possible direction, some of them throwing away their weapons. Disorganized and panicked they posed no threat to the monster. It came right towards Ayaan. It came right for her.

“Who...” she wondered out loud. “Who is it?”

“Gary,” Sarah gloated, her face parted by a broad and exultant smile. “It’s mother-fucking Gary, that’s who!”