Chapter Twelve

The valley formed a shallow bowl with a low ridge at the far end. There were buildings up there, and the weathered statues Sarah had seen before. They looked like stylized animals from the bottom of the valley.

Dead men and women stood at the edge of the valley. Not many—only three or four. They weren’t doing anything. Just standing there. The closest of the standing ghouls—a really nasty looking guy with little skin left on his body and no arms at all—turned to glare at her with empty eye sockets but he didn’t take a step toward her. After a moment he turned his face back toward the Source and his toothless jaw fell open. He wasn’t doing a thing. None of the corpses in the valley were doing anything but then most of them were truly, finally dead. One motionless body lay not three feet from where Sarah first stepped down into the valley.

A human body, half-decomposed, and it wasn’t even twitching. It had been a long time since Sarah saw that. She nudged it with the toe of her boot. She could see yellow ribs sticking out under its coat. She could see where the flesh had been torn away by teeth.

Nothing. No movement.

Squinting, she adjusted her grip on her OICW and glanced over her shoulder. The mummies waited patiently behind her, their shotgun barrels pointed at the sky. Ptolemy stood to one side of them. He shook his painted head back and forth—he had no better idea what was going on than she did.

Directly ahead the valley was carpeted with bones and moldering bodies. None of them moved. Skulls stared up at random angles at a lifeless sky. Femurs and humeri stuck up like fence posts. Heaps of pelvises and spines and xyphoid processes and metacarpals and phalanges made narrow hummocks, obscuring the soil beneath. Thousands of people had died in this valley, or at least died somewhere else and come here to fall down. No one had buried them or done anything with their corpses. They had been allowed to just rot away.

The freshest ones formed a perimeter, a wide semi-circle of stinking carrion. Toward the middle where the ground began to rise the bones were the oldest, broken and beige with time and neglect. No plants grew there, no birds flew overhead.

Sarah figured it had to be the Source that drew the bodies to this place. It was so bright she had to shade her eyes when she turned to face it, so close she could feel its energy like warmth on her skin. The dead had come for years, pilgrims to the place where the Epidemic began.

Sarah stepped over the corpse. It took a real act of will. For all of her life, at least all of her life that she could remember, rule one had been to never turn your back on a dead body. It was how you got killed. This one wasn’t hurting anybody, though. She stepped over it and dug her boot through a pile of bones to touch the ground beyond. She took another step, careful not to put any weight on the carpet of bones. Nothing happened.

Did the dead come so far just to stand around, to just wait to fall to pieces? Did they come because it felt good to be surrounded by that energy? Did it nourish them? Sarah had a lot of questions. What was that smell?

She turned and saw that one of the mummies had followed her into the bones. He stood there motionless, as dead as a statue, his shotgun braced on his shoulder. She sniffed the air. He smelled like warm apple pie. Sarah tried to remember when she’d ever had the chance to smell a piece of apple pie. Maybe with her father, before the Epidemic. Her father—just thinking of him sent a jagged length of metallic guilt stabbing through her heart. What she’d said to him had been unacceptable.

Burning apple pie. Apple pie? Maybe pumpkin pie. Hot spices. Burning spices. A trickle of white smoke wafted out from the mummy’s chest. With a hissing sound a piece of the wrappings on his head fluttered open and more smoke came out. The smoke smelled pungent, like incense. Like burning spice.

No way, she thought. “Back!” she shouted. The mummy didn’t move. “Get back!” she said, and shoved him backwards. She slapped at his pectorals, at his forehead and he rocked away from her as if there was no volition at all in his body. She grabbed the soapstone scarab in her pocket. “Ptolemy. Don’t let them come any closer.”

warms it the source consumes us it consumes even warms as it warms consumes us, he sputtered.

“Just stay back!” Even as she said it, though, another of the mummies—one with a poorly painted face—stepped forward. They wanted it. They wanted to be closer to the Source. It drew them just as it must have been drawing ghouls for years. And when they got close enough, when the energy in the air was thick enough, their bodies literally burned out from overexposure. The one thing they wanted more than anything in the world would kill them if they got too much of it.

A flash of motion on the far side of the valley startled Sarah. She flicked off the safety of her weapon but nothing appeared to attack her. It could have just been the sunlight bouncing off snow or a pile of bones falling over in the breeze. It could have been lots of things. She glanced back at the mummies and saw that they had all taken a step closer to the Source.

“No, listen to me,” she said, and moved to push the nearest one back. “You guys don’t even eat living things. How can you want this so badly?”

Source... Source, Ptolemy told her.

She shook her head. She heard a sound, kind of like the noise a match makes when it bursts into flame. She turned around again, her weapon up and ready.

A human form made of pure fire was running right at her faster than a cheetah. It came out of the middle of the valley. Flames licked backwards from its face, its chest. Its hands were wreathed in yellow fire. It was like nothing she'd ever seen before.

Sarah brought up her OICW and fired a three shot burst. She caught her target in center mass but it didn’t even slow down. Barreling toward her it left a smear of light on her retinas it was so bright. She fired again at its head, one burst, two, three, the rifle making a mechanical sound, a machine shop sound as it pumped bullets through its mechanism. She hit the head but nothing happened. She switched her rifle to full auto in the same second it shot past her, its fiery tail whipping at her exposed face and hands.

Ptolemy brought up his shotgun and blasted the back of its knees as it ran past him. The fiery thing stumbled and fell and rolled forward for a while, sliding over the carpet of bones. It writhed horribly, the flames off its back gusting and snapping, its bodily fluids sizzling out of it. Now that it had come to something approaching a stop Sarah saw the motorcycle helmet on its head, the bare teeth where its lips had been cut away. Its hands were nothing but sharpened ends of bone.

She heard the roaring of a truck engine and looked up. The Tsarevich had arrived. On the far side of the valley dead men and women were lining up to get into the bowl, to press closer to the Source. The giant truck weaved through the crowd, the gorilla perched on top of its cab.

Sarah grabbed the nearest mummy and tried to pull him away. It was like tugging at a marble column. She let go and reached for the soapstone.

“Ptolemy,” she said, “we’re dead if we get caught in the open like this. We have to fall back and hide.”

Source... the Source

“Fuck the Source!” she shouted. “Fall back! That’s an order!”

One of the mummies—one of the extremely old ones—started to move. He took a step away from the Source. Sarah nodded and shouted and jumped up and down. "Yeah! Move!" He took another step.

On the other end of the valley the flatbed appeared, being hauled forward by a hundred ghouls. On its back stood three figures dressed in green, black and white. Sarah stared at the one dressed in black. It was Ayaan. She was too far to see, it should have been impossible. But she knew. She lifted the OICW to her shoulder and looked through the scope. Yeah. The skin around her lower jaw looked too tight and her eyes were dark pits sunk into her face. But it was Ayaan.

In a moment, in a space of time so short she didn’t breathe, the valley was full of the running dead.