Chapter Ten

Sarah couldn’t think. She could barely breathe.

“What’s our destination, girl?” Osman demanded in her ear. His voice sounded tinny and stretched-out. It irritated her as if an insect had flown into her earl canal. She tried pulling off her headphones but without their protection the noise of the helicopter’s rotor was deafening. It was like a buzzsaw sawing through her sinus cavities. She hurried to pull the headphones back on her head.

She didn’t know what to do next. Ayaan had taught her a lot about small unit tactics. There had been lessons in stealth and camouflage and guerilla warfare. None of it came back to her then as she sat down on the deck plates of the Jayhawk and stared at Gary.

He had grown. There was no mistaking it. The stubby little crab legs that had once supported his skull were now as long as Sarah’s forearms. With her subtle vision she could see that he was still growing, that it was an ongoing process. She watched it happen. He was drawing energy out of the earth’s biological field, using it to heal himself. He was drawing on the energy supply that Ptolemy had showed her, the Source, to rebuild his form—except it wasn’t his human form he was recreating. It was something new.

This close to the Source energy permeated the air she breathed, it filled up the sky. She could almost see the Source itself, right through the fuselage of the helicopter. It was like a projection on top of her vision, a torrent, a shower of pure light and form that constantly erupted and burst and flashed across her. Her very own light show.

“Sarah,” Osman said, at the same moment Ptolemy stepped forward and touched her arm.

Sarah, the mummy said.

She stared up at him with wild eyes. “Help me,” she said, “give me some advice. I’m, I’m drowning here. What do we do?”

our flying only machine advantage is this flying advantage machine, Ptolemy told her.

“We can’t loiter forever,” Osman said. She had spoken into her microphone and he had heard her, assumed she was talking to him. “We’ll eventually have to set down.”

we aloft must stay must aloft, the mummy said.

They were both right. Sarah remembered perfectly well when Ayaan had ordered Osman to set down back in Egypt. When she had ventured out on foot and immediately been overwhelmed by accelerated ghouls and the green lich who commanded them. Sarah had, herself, protested against a landing. She had said it was stupid. That it was suicide.

She had no choice. “Take us down, Osman,” she said, her eyes fixed on Ptolemy’s face. “Get us about a mile’s clearance from that column and then find a flat spot we can set down in.”

Ptolemy did not chastise her. She’d made a decision, which was the main thing. They would go on foot from here. They really had little choice. The gorilla in the hot rod had a whole pile of Stingers ready to go. The one advantage Sarah had possessed, air superiority, had transformed into a liability.

It took a while for Osman to find an acceptable landing site. Even then it wasn’t perfect—a rough hole in the trees where a limb of unbroken rock stuck up out of the side of the mountain. It had little cover and it provided no kind of access at all to the road. Had Sarah considered the possibility earlier they could have brought rappelling gear and hot-roped down into a better spot. But she hadn’t thought of that. She hadn’t thought of any possible problems. Her plan had looked so good she’d forgotten to make sure she had prepared for contigencies.

Ayaan would have slapped her, she thought, and rightly so.

The mummies jumped down from the crew hatch. She tossed them their firearms from the weapon rack and slung her own over her shoulder. Before she left the aircraft she turned around to look at Osman. He was frowning and drumming his fingers on the instrument panel as if he was counting down the seconds until he could lift off again.

Her father started pulling at his crash webbing and she shot him a nasty look. “You’re staying here. Guard your freaky skull thing or whatever,” she told him. Her anger had yet to subside from when he had tried to forbid her from undertaking this mission.

“Sarah. Please. Just be safe,” he pleaded with her. He kept trying to unbuckle his straps.

She leaned across him and pulled his chest straps tight. With a look of total dejection on his face he let his hands fall to his sides.

“I’ll be as safe as I’ve ever been,” she told him. “Which is not very. At least I have this,” she said, brandishing her Makarov at him. “Your generation made sure we had plenty of these.” Rage had pooled in her stomach. It started surging up her throat and she knew she was about to say something horrible. Her insecurities, though, her fear and her panic and her general misery were fueling a really colossal explosion and she knew she couldn’t fight it back. What came out of her mouth was going to be fiery and acidic and mostly just cruel.

“Don’t go,” he begged. “As your last remaining parent I’m asking you, please. Stay here.”

She exploded. “My parent! My guardian! You can’t get enough of this power trip, can you? Can you?” She stabbed one finger in the direction of Gary, who failed to move at all. “You’ve been his guardian for twelve years. You must have loved that.”

“It was my sacred duty,” he told her. His voice was very soft.

Almost soft enough to stop her. “Yeah, well, that’s one fucked up duty you have there. Spending twelve years alternately smashing and healing a dead human brain. Wow. Way to keep the eternal flame alive, there, Dad.”

His face—what was left of it—fell. He understood instantly what she was saying. He’d always been a smart guy. Smart enough to think he knew what was best for everyone else.

Something changed inside of her. A chemical reaction that froze her rage and turned her volcano of anguish into a glacier of pure hate. When she actually heard her voice she sounded cool and passionless. “Ayaan was my parent,” she told him. “You’re just my father.”

Osman’s fingers on the panel drummed faster and faster. His agitation filled the cockpit like a bad smell. Sarah stepped backward once, and again, and her foot hit solid rock. She ducked down and gestured for the mummies to stand back as the helicopter lifted from the ground, its rotor beating thunderously at the air.

When it was gone Sarah was alone with the mummies. Ptolemy stood near her but facing slightly away. Ready to accept orders without expressly demanding anything. The others studied their weapons. She’d given them shotguns, M1014 military-grade shotguns with gas-operated actions and short blocky buttstocks. That's right, focus on the details. It kept her heart from jumping out of her mouth. The mummies possessed a little more manual dexterity than garden variety ghouls but their bandaged hands and desiccated eyes just weren’t enough for precision firearms. The shotguns were a perfect balance between stopping power and ease of use.

She inspected them, her squad, before moving out. Six of them, the entire contingent who had once been on display in an art museum in New York. Two of them had painted faces like Ptolemy, though the renditions were pretty crude by comparison. The rest were truly ancient mummies, their tattered wrappings stained with bodily fluids and rotten with time. Here and there a length of withered forearm or a gruesomely dried-out glimpse of cheek poked through their unkempt linen.

Sarah picked one of these relics for point and handed him a machete. He wasted no time but moved steadily into the trees surrounding the landing zone, his arm flashing back and forth like a pendulum, his blade clearing out undergrowth, chopping through tree roots, splattering his bandages with thrown tree sap. The others clustered up tight behind him with Sarah and Ptolemy taking the rear. It was hard work keeping up with him. They were on the side of a mountain, a rugged side that had never been developed, which might never have been touched before by human hands. Sarah’s gloves tore and snagged every time she reached for a tree root to haul herself up and her boots skidded on the precariously-balanced talus of the slope. She started to sweat, even though the snow all around her reflected a cold sunlight that made her face sting. Her nose began to run and she was instantly miserable with having to snort up the snot or wipe it away with her sleeve every ten seconds. She tried to just let it run but that was excruciating—every nerve ending in her face was red and raw with the mountain air.

She needed to think. She needed to plan her next move. Yet all she wanted, all her body strained to do was go back, back to the helicopter. She had so much more to say to her father. Most of it vicious. She couldn't do that, though, not now. She had committed to violent action and she had to stay in the moment, stay on the path. It was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do.

In time—she could not have said how long it had been and in fact she wasn’t wearing a watch, but it was still daylight—she reached up and found a piece of stable rock and pulled and dragged and cursed her way up until she was doubled over the top of a ridgeline, her legs on one side and her face on the other. She looked up and saw the mummies standing on the rocks like mountain goats or Sherpas or something else that can climb mountains really well. Between oxygen deprivation and sheer exhaustion she lacked the strength to curse them.

When she had stopped wheezing and was merely panting, when she had wiped the sweat out of her hair and shaken most of the pine needles out of her clothes she saw that Ptolemy was pointing at something. She followed his linen-wrapped finger and nodded. The Source was beneath them, now, down in the hollow of a valley below. She blinked her eyes. Her arcane vision was almost dominant so close to the energy supply—it was hard to see things in normal, visible light.

When her eyes did clear she found herself looking down into a modest bowl in the side of the mountain, a semi-circular valley about a hundred and fifty feet straight down the slope. There were a couple of buildings and some sculptures, their forms half-erased by wind and snow. The valley itself was full of human bones.