Chapter Thirteen

Sarah and the mummies fell back to fighting positions. They grabbed cover, braced themselves for battle. Readied their weapons, laid out their spare ammunition. Prepared themselves for a guts-and-glory firefight.

They didn’t stand a chance.

The mummies were fast. Faster than any living human. The carried plenty of ammunition for their shotguns. It didn’t matter. The accelerated ghouls were faster.

Sarah watched her ambush turn into a rout without really being able to identify the turning point. She only knew she had fucked up. With the mummies crouched behind boulders, with herself on a high crest of rock trying to snipe the enemy with an assault rifle she knew it was going to end badly.

One by one the mummies were picked off. The younger ones, the Roman-era mummies with painted faces went first. One of them was stupid enough to run out into the denied zone, the region too close to the Source where the undead caught fire. He was smoldering before three of the accelerated corpses piled on top of him. All four of them burst into flame at once, a rolling, scrapping funeral pyre. The mummy’s arms pinwheeled as he tried to throw the ghouls off of him. He was slowing down as Sarah watched, however, and in moments he had stopped moving altogether.

The other painted mummy had a little more sense, but less luck. He moved steadily from rock to rock, picking off ghouls and then diving back into cover. In the end it wasn’t a ghoul that got him at all but something else, some weird magic that turned his linen yellow. His wrappings began to tatter as if they were torn at by dry desert winds and then his bones just seemed to give out and he collapsed in a heap.

Rifle fire picked off one of the older mummies. He had been smart enough to stay put and wait for the ghouls to come to him. Hunkered down between two rocks he kept the barrel of his M1014 high, ready to take opportunistic shots. He was severely outranged, however, by a cultist with a Dragunov sniper rifle. Through the scope of her OICW Sarah saw the sniper line up the perfect bead. He took his shot before she had time to even shout out a warning. The mummy’s head popped open like a bag full of freeze-dried meat.

The rest of the mummies died when the Tsarevich decided to stop playing games and sent his whole force into the valley, hundreds of ghouls, at least a hundred living men and women with assault rifles and pistols and machine guns. The enemy just tore her troops to pieces. What had been a battle of attrition turned into a plain old-fashioned defeat as bodies living and dead flung themselves at Sarah’s positions. Ptolemy threw away his weapon and threw himself into the melee, grabbing at ghouls and hurling them into the denied zone, turning around to kick in the faces of living zealots, moving so fast Sarah saw him as an off-white blur digging into the enemy’s ranks. Then he disappeared.

He was just there one moment and gone the next. “Magic,” she breathed, but no. She would have seen magic. He had simply been tackled by so many of the Tsarevich’s forces that she couldn’t see him any more.

There was no more time.

So this is it, she told herself. The moment of truth. The mummies had sacrificed themselves so she could get close enough to finish her mission. Seven mummies had died for this. Two liches. Marisol’s son. All so she could fire a single shot. Sarah lifted the OICW to her lips and kissed it. She needed luck. She had the determination.

She looked down from her perch and saw Ayaan standing in the midst of the dead and the living. She was wearing a leather jacket with painted skulls on it, which made her a perfect target. Sarah lifted the scope of her weapon to her eye and centered the crosshairs on Ayaan’s forehead. It was a duty, a sacred duty that she carried out. The shot would give away her position. She would have only moments after she killed Ayaan to get the barrel in her own mouth and destroy her own brain. But then it would be over. A cold, almost frozen calm came over her. She'd been taught how to do this by the best. She slipped off the safety. Just one shot. She just needed... she needed something. One shot, right, she just needed one shot.

Sarah blinked but it just made her vision blur. She licked her lips but her tongue was dry. Was she... was she afraid? She just needed the one... the one shot. Silence filled her head—she couldn’t hear anything.

The OICW clattered against the slickrock at her feet. Somehow it had fallen out of her hands. She shook her head and reached for the Makarov in her pocket. It felt as heavy as a rock, as a, a boulder. Why was she so tired, suddenly? Sarah sat down, hard, and closed her eyes. She couldn’t open them again no matter how determined she was. What was going on?

Oh, she thought. This time, yeah. It was. Magic.

She felt hands grab at her, rough hands. They pinched her around the thigh, around the upper arm. Someone was dragging her, she could feel the top of her head sliding along the rock. She couldn’t hear anything, she was deaf. Her hands were pulled in front of her and encircled with a length of rope. She was being tied up.

Instantly her energy returned. Her eyes shot open and she could hear again—every ragged breath, every beat of her own heart. She turned her head wildly to the side to see what was behind her, what was flanking her. She was kneeling on a pile of bones. Somebody else’s bones were digging into her shins, her knees. She rolled around, trying to get comfortable. She couldn’t see Ayaan. The green lich—the one in the monk’s robe, the one whose face looked like a skull—was standing next to her. He pointed, his arm stretched out, one bony finger stabbing at the air and she looked.

They had Ptolemy beaten to a pulp. His legs were splayed wide open and bent at wrong angles. His arms were broken in multiple places. Men in light blue paper shirts stood around him, sledgehammers balanced on their shoulders. A girl maybe two years younger than Sarah was bent over him with a pair of garden shears. She cut right through his painted face, cut away at the plaster at his neck. She tore open his linen and exposed his head.

His skull was the brown color of a Brazil nut. Papery skin covered the round back of his head while bits of withered flesh clung to his cheeks and throat. His lips had drawn so tightly over his teeth that they looked scalloped. His eyes were closed, sewn shut, two dashes sunk deep in their sockets.

Sarah could just reach the soapstone in her pocket, just touch it with the tip of her pinky. It was enough.

one here of mine is here mine, he told her. her save her

Sarah shook badly, her body vibrating like a milkweed pod in the wind.

One of the blue-shirted men held Ptolemy’s head down against the rock. The other brought up his hammer and brought it down hard, made it clang against the ground as Ptolemy’s skull burst into fragments that spun for a moment on the slickrock and then fell down and were still.

The green phantom grabbed Sarah’s collar and dragged her to her feet. “Walk,” he told her. No threats, no promises. Just walk. She stumbled forward, her legs weak. She passed through a gauntlet of cut-down ghouls and wild-eyed cultists but none of them moved toward her, none of them spat at her or shrieked names at her. Her eyes were very wide. The green lich marched her right up to the flatbed. There had been no attempt made to repair the damage she’d done to it. Sarah tried to gloat on that, to exult in how badly she’d hurt the Tsarevich. The message she was being sent, however, was to the contrary. She hadn’t even slowed him down.

She swallowed convulsively. Acid was boiling in her throat but she refused to vomit. She was lead up to the side of the flatbed and then she was told to stop. She did so. She shoved her hands in her pockets. The Makarov was gone.

The green lich jumped up on the flatbed and leaned his face inside of the yurt. He nodded a couple of times—he must be discussing her fate with the yurt’s occupant. He jumped back down and gestured at a living woman. She came over and handed him something. A Russian pistol. Her own pistol.

No undead creature could shoot a gun—it was an axiom of Sarah’s existence. They just didn’t have the eye-hand coordination. Their nervous systems didn’t work properly. They couldn't run, and they couldn’t shoot. Then again, she’d seen plenty of them run.

The green lich dug his finger through the trigger guard, then used his free hand to mold his fingers around the grip. Then he shoved the barrel against her chest. He smiled down at her and slid the handgun a little to the left.

“Wait,” Sarah said, “Just let me see Ayaan first.”

He fired. At point blank range he couldn’t miss. There was a lot of noise, though the sound of her pulse blocked most of it out. There was some light but she blinked as the gun went off—just a reflex action. Her body tensed and curled around the explosion, her muscles and skin and sinews convulsing inward as she fell backward, flat on her back and hit the ground. Blood splashed up across her face, fell wet across her chest, her legs. She could feel it pooling around her, soaking into her clothes and her hair. She couldn’t breathe, which wasn’t really a problem at first but she was dully aware that it would become important all too soon.

She brought her knees up, her body wanted to double up. Death was on its way, mere seconds off. The world got darker and louder, she could hear screaming but it wasn’t her own, the screaming got louder. And louder. She felt something tugging in her chest. It jerked and ripped and tore at her like a bird eating her guts but higher, nearer her heart. She opened her eyes and looked down.

The bullet edged backwards out of the wound as if it were being pushed out from inside. She could see the striations on its surface, the rifling marks. It hurt a lot more going out than it had coming in. Pain wracked her body and suddenly it was her screaming, she could hear her own screams again. The bullet fell out of her and rolled down onto the bloody slickrock. The cloth around the gunshot wound, the cloth of her sweatshirt smoldered and winked orange at her here and there but the skin underneath sealed up without so much as a scar. She sat up and screamed and screamed. The green lich stared at her with genuine curiosity.

Was she... dead? Undead? No. She was breathing. The dead didn’t breathe. She was still alive. She was still, somehow, alive. Her chest was full of blood, her lungs congested with it but she could talk, kind of. “Dad,” she wheezed. “Daddy.”