Chapter Seventeen

The Tsarevich’s body burnt like a log soaked in gasoline. His dry tissues, overloaded by the energy of the Source, hissed and spat and started to break down. A chunk of jagged bone flew from one spasming leg. Patience was standing just below him—it fell on her and cut open her cheek. She reeled back in horror and pain, a scream pushing out of her lungs even as she dropped to her knees to retrieve the bone fragment. She clutched it to her breast like a holy relic.

Above her the Tsarevich’s head slumped to one side and fell off. It hit the ground in a splatter of sparks and flame. A lot of people screamed then, and almost all of them moved backward, away from the scaffolding.

At the back of the crowd a male cultist in a blue paper shirt screamed bloody murder, much louder than any of the spectators at the Tsarevich’s grisly demise. Ayaan grabbed Sarah’s arm and yanked the girl along behind her as she rushed to see what was going on.

Through a gap in the crowd she could see the screaming cultist, his face a mask of agony. Four spikes of filed bone burst from his chest as a ghoul sank its exposed teeth deep into the back of the cultist’s neck.

Ayaan shook her head. No, that wasn’t acceptable. The ghouls couldn’t disobey their orders. Their minds were too simple—they couldn’t overcome the Tsarevich’s command. The Tsarevich was keeping them under control.

The Tsarevich was dead.

A new ghoul, one of Gary’s victims, came stumbling through the crowd, her face and hands bright red. She grabbed at Sarah but the girl twisted away. Ayaan swiveled around on one boot heel and blasted the ghoul’s face with dark energy. The undead face cracked and peeled away from smoking bone. Ayaan didn’t bother to watch her die a second time. “Are you alright?” she demanded.

Sarah nodded unhappily.

Enni Langstrom, the green phantom, appeared at Ayaan’s elbow. “Enough of the concern for her well-being,” he shouted over the screams. “Just kill her already!”

“No,” Ayaan said, “no, that’s unnecessary. she’s harmless.”

Enni shook his head. “She came here to kill him. Now he’s dead. You can call it a coincidence if you want but I want her dead. Jesus Christ, look at this! This is Armageddon. We can sort out who did what later. Just kill her. Where’s Erasmus?”

Ayaan frowned. “Didn’t you see? Gary ate half of him. He’s dead. I’m sorry, I know you two were friends.”

The skull-like face turned even paler than usual. “Then it’s just you and me. We have to save as many of the believers as possible. They served him well, they don’t deserve to die like this, not in this place.” He stared deep into Sarah’s eyes and grabbed her face in one thin hand. “Anyone we can’t trust dies, now. I’ll let you do it, but kill her! She’s an unknown factor. She could ruin everything.” He knocked Sarah into the dust with a backhand slap. Then he stomped away, his femur staff clicking on the rocky ground. As he moved through the crowd he touched each ghoul he passed and they slumped to the earth, the life force drained out of them.

Ayaan wasn’t sure what to do. She had turned on Sarah and all of her past. She had found a new cause to believe in. Yet if the Tsarevich was dead, who would rebuild the world? What was she giving her allegiance to? If Enni could remake the world and save the human race, if she truly believed he had it in him, then she had no choice but to obey and kill Sarah.

She grabbed Sarah’s bound hands and helped her stand up. There were ghouls everywhere, their eyes dead, their lipless mouths open wide. “He’s not a good man,” she shouted into Sarah’s face. “But I saw him show compassion once, for some people who were barely even human. I don’t like betraying him, but that’s what it’s come to.” She tore at the knots that held Sarah’s hands. Her fingers were too dead and clumsy. She gasped in frustration—then realized that the rope was made of organic fibers. Careful not to damage Sarah in the process she fed a little of her energy into the rope and it withered in place until it was so thin and insubstantial Sarah could just pull her hands apart.

Sarah rubbed at her wrists for a moment—they had chafed so much she had bled a little—then threw her arms around Ayaan and held her tight.

“I didn’t expect a hug from the girl who crossed half a continent just to put a bullet in my head,” Ayaan said, laughing a little.

“When I do it, when I sanitize you, it will be an act of love,” Sarah muttered. “Can we not talk about it now? There’s a mini-apocalypse to worry about.”

It was true. There were hundreds of ghouls in the valley and perhaps half as many living cultists. The ratio was getting steeper with every second. Enni was cutting swaths of destruction through the undead forces but he was just one lich. The cultists were fighting back and their firearms filled the air with noise but they were disorganized and as much danger to one another as they were to the ghouls—especially since the latter were all wearing bulletproof helmets.

"I don't understand," Ayaan said.

"What's not to understand? The dead eat the living. Did you forget?"

Ayaan waved Sarah's sarcasm away. "This close to the Source they should at least be distracted. At least some of them should be moving toward it, not toward the food." She shook her head. "It's as if some power is compelling them to attack."

It had all happened so quickly—the instant the Tsarevich had perished the ghouls had become their own creatures again. They had reverted to their violent, mindless selves and once again succumbed to their terrible hunger. They acted as if the Source weren't there at all, as if this were any other place in the world.

Whatever forces were moving them didn't matter. If someone didn’t get the situation under control it was going to be a massacre. Ayaan lead Sarah over to the flatbed and crawled up on top of it. “This way,” she shouted, and at least a few of those still alive in the valley heard her and looked up. “Come on, retreat, out the way we came. Come on!” she shouted it again and again, as loud as her undead lungs would make it.

A teenage boy broke from the crowd and ran toward the flatbed. Ghouls chased after him but they were slow and clumsy without Enni’s power behind them. The boy ran right past the flatbed and into the pass beyond, back the way they’d come. The road was down there. If he could find it maybe he would survive long enough to find some shelter.

It was the best solution Ayaan had. “Come on,” she shouted again. “Fall back!”

One by one the living broke away from the dead, their legs pumping, their eyes wet with horror and shock. They had been promised so much. Now they had to start over again, from scratch, in a country few of them had ever seen before. “This way,” Ayaan screamed.

A band of ghouls came at the flatbed but Sarah was ready. She brought the heavy machine gun around and cut them to pieces before they could climb aboard.

Ayaan kept shouting even when the flow of living cultists had all but stopped. When she realized she was just wasting her breath she looked and saw that the valley was full of nothing but ghouls. They faced her like a ragged army, their helmets shading their eyes, their wicked arms held at their sides. She had stolen their prey. And yet it wasn’t her they wanted. Enni stood in the midst of them. He had lost his staff somewhere. His hands lifted and swung at the air as he tried to dampen the ghouls’ energy but he was clearly exhausted. He had used up everything he had, and while the Source was radiating life energy from no more than a thousand yards away he was about to collapse.

One of the ghouls came up behind him and swiped at his back. The sharpened bone of its arm tore off a strip of green cloth. Two more ghouls flanked him, coming at him from the sides. He couldn’t seem to resist them in even the most basic way. They tore his robe from him in rags.

Exposed to the air his emaciated body was as white as bleached bone. He looked like something carved out of soap. He had big ears that had always been hidden before by his cowl, at least in Ayaan’s experience. He had a few long strands of hair plastered to his otherwise bald head.

He turned, his body swooning backwards, to look at Ayaan. She couldn’t read his eyes. Then the ghouls fell on him and tore him to pieces. Sarah fired wildly into the seething mass of bodies but there were just too many of them.

When it was over the ghouls fell back out of Sarah’s range and stood in an orderly formation like soldiers in a parade. It didn’t make any sense. There was no one around to control them, no lich who could command them. Yet there was no reason for them to line up like that, either, just as there had been no possible explanation why they should attack Enni.

A voice sounded from atop the scaffolding. “The stench up here,” it intoned, its timbre watery and barely recognizable as human speech, “is bloody awful.”

A single ghoul stood there above the twin spikes. It was one of the most horrifying creatures Sarah had ever seen. Its skin hung off of its chest in long, tattered strips that fell across its groin like a gruesome kilt. Its face was a smudge of once-human features that had been battered and burnt out of all recognition. Its legs, thick and muscular, were covered in sores and lesions. It had no arms whatsoever, just ragged ends of flayed bone that hung down like tiny, broken wings.