Yet the feeling Sarah got from the Islanders wasn’t so much mistrust as it was furtiveness. They weren’t concerned with what she would do, so much as they acted as if they had a secret they were afraid she would learn.
She didn’t expect to find it so soon after realizing it must exist. Yet as she squatted by a gingerbread porch coated in flaking white paint, she looked up and nearly fell over in fright. She saw energy. Dead energy.
Blotches of it all over the place. She hadn’t been paying attention, but that was when her unusual senses worked best. There was one of the dead right in front of her—in the field of mixed crops at the center of Nolan Park. Scratching at the soil with a hoe, or a rake, or... something. Sarah frowned. The dead don’t garden.
Not unless someone—specifically, a lich—told them to.
She still had her pistol. Post apocalyptic standards of hospitality allowed visitors to hold onto their weapons at communal bonfires, especially when the visitors casually forgot to mention they possessed said weapons. She drew it out of her pocket, slid the magazine into place, thumbed off the safety. The dead thing didn’t notice as she crept up on it.
Impossible, but there it was. It couldn't be, not in this place, of all places, this last citadel of humanity in New York. But the hair on the backs of her arms didn’t lie. It stood up straight as the quills of a porcupine. Horripilation. The most classic sign of the presence of the undead.
Sarah tried to make sense of it in her head. She must have brought the dead to Governors Island, the Tsarevich must have followed her. She had doomed all those nice, boring people at the bonfire. Fear sent cold daggers through the muscles of her back. Why the thing was gardening she had no idea—maybe it was tampering with the survivors’ crops, maybe it intended to poison them. That wasn't the style of most undead she'd met, though. Too subtle.
She could figure it out later. She lifted her pistol. Lined up a shot. The dead gardener scratched open another furrow in the silvery moonlit dirt. Its face, its skull didn’t move. Its features might have been a mask of bone. It was dressed in stained overalls and its feet were bare. Sarah cocked her pistol and held her breath for the bang.
“Please don’t hurt him. He’s just a slack,” someone said, their voice soft. It was as loud as a gunshot in Sarah’s terrified ear. She pivoted on one ankle and saw the boy, Jackie, standing off to her right. He moved forward quickly out of her blind spot—he must have been trained how to approach someone with a gun.
Slowly she pried her finger away from the Makarov’s trigger, uncocked its hammer. “A slack? What does that mean?”
“He’s tame.” Jackie rushed up to the gardener and waved his hand in its face. Sarah bit her lip to hold back a wave of nausea. She knew what was supposed to come next, what always came next. The ghoul would bite the child, tear his flesh. Except of course it didn’t. That was the point. The gardener stopped its hoeing just long enough to look down at the boy and issue a mindless little smile. The dead man’s eyes moved slowly around in their sockets. “He’s a slack. They do what we tell them, though sometimes it takes so long to explain things. We couldn’t survive without them. There aren’t enough of us to keep the gardens going.”
Sarah narrowed her eyes. She had never heard of such a thing. “How—how do you tame a ghoul?” she demanded. “They only exist for one thing. To eat us.”
The boy shrugged. He was twelve, she knew now, but tiny for his age. His eyes were huge, his hair thinner on his head than it ought to be. “I think it’s one of the ceremonies my Mom does on Halloween. They don’t let me watch because they get naked but I know stuff anyway. I know you tie the ghouls up in a circle you draw on the ground and then there’s some dancing and chanting and stuff.” The boy shrugged again. “You know. Science.”
Sarah was breathing heavily, unsure of what to do next. She put the pistol back in her pocket. Then she rushed forward and knocked the slack off its feet. It felt like she’d smacked into a pillowcase full of twigs. The gardener fell over, clattered to the ground. Then it got back up, retrieved its hoe, and went back to work. It didn’t bother smiling at her. If she hit it again—and again—and again—it would do the same, she decided.
You’re going to learn things, Jack had told her, and some of them are going to make you cry. Was this what he’d meant? Or were there worse shocks in store?
“Come back with me,” Jackie told her. “Mommy wants to talk to you.” He held out his miniscule hand and Sarah took it.
Chapter Four
Her feet ached, and fog wrapped the world in gauze. She was walking on wooden planks. Her arms were sore but her feet were just burning. She looked down and saw them huge, swollen, and dark.
Cicatrix wrapped a blanket around Ayaan’s shoulders. “Don’t look, will only upset you.” The Russian woman put an arm around Ayaan’s waist. “Is not much farther now.”
Ayaan nodded absently. She couldn’t muster much in the way of emotion. The fog on her skin felt good, it felt cool and soft and whisper smooth. That was about as deep as she went. She remembered everything—the engine compartment, the strap, the Tsarevich coming to her. His dark suggestions. The memories were flattened, though. Stretched out and made into mere visions, like something she had seen in a movie, with all the fear and pain carved away.
Her neck itched but she couldn’t lift her arms to scratch. She had a bandage wrapped around her throat anyway. She remembered them working there, the hornet dragging its sting across her skin. What that had been about she couldn’t have said. They were still walking, and then they weren’t.
“Almost... and we are here,” Cicatrix said. They stopped there on the boardwalk and Ayaan lifted her head to look up.
Stay alive, she thought. Or she remembered thinking. Time had done something funny, had turned on her.
In front of her stood the shell of a building, no more than half a brick wall remaining, painted a blue the color of a clear sky. A painted face floated against that backdrop laughing hysterically in perfect silence. Even the sound of Ayaan’s breathing was eaten up by the fog.
Ayaan thought of Sarah. She tried to think of Sarah. She tried to remember the girl’s face, her close-cropped hair. That filthy sweatshirt she always wore which she thought might have belonged to her father. Sarah.
“There will be none of this,” Cicactrix said, and waggled a finger in Ayaan’s face. She couldn’t remember what she had been doing to earn such disapproval. Then she looked down and saw she was naked. The blanket lay behind her, pooled on the boardwalk like liquid that had dripped down.
Ayaan’s hands were near her face. She had summoned up enough strength to lift her arms, to touch her face. No, wait. Her face hurt. It stung, in eight specific places. She could count them. She looked down at her fingers and saw bits of skin under the nails.
Had she... had she been trying to claw her own face off?
Time had turned on her. Time and... time and memory. They went inside. “Can I lie down?” Ayaan asked. Her feet hurt so badly. “Just for a while.”
“Oh yes,” Cicatrix told her. She led Ayaan into a little plastic tent set up inside the ruin of the building. There was a bed there... or not a bed but a place that looked like... well it looked a little like a bed, or maybe a long couch, a divan. But it was full of ice. “Here, let me to help,” Cicatrix said, and held Ayaan’s arm as she lay down on the cold, cold bed.
“It’s sticking to my back, to my skin,” Ayaan announced. There were a lot of people in the tent, suddenly. Her heart pounded fast and then it skipped a beat. Someone shoved a tube up her nose, its tip slick with lubricant. She tried to sneeze and cough and fight but they wouldn’t let her. They were so much stronger than she remembered. A woman in a nurse’s uniform, complete with a little peaked cap, leaned over her, throwing her into shadow, and jabbed a hypodermic in Ayaan’s neck.
“What—what was—what—was—that?” Ayaan demanded. Her arms were quivering, her body shaking. Was it the ice, was she shivering from the cold? She could
n’t really feel it any more. She was shaking too much. She was shaking a lot, she was she was convulsing convulsing. “What did you just give me?” she asked.
The nurse’s mouth was a flat line, a slot that ticker tape might come out of. “Cyanide,” she answered.
Darkness clanged shut across her vision like shutters closing with a sound of ringing, a tinnitus ring.
The sound squealed up to a howling, an echoing scream that might have come from her own throat except except except
time didn’t just turn on her it turned a wheel it turned like a wheel
(For a moment she was outside her own body, looking down, pointing at herself. Blood raced through tubes running down her throat, up her ass. A machine like a bagpipe bellowed up and down and breathed for her. There was a man next to her, a very hairy naked white man with blue tattoos curlicuing all over his body. He had a rope around his neck like a punk rock neck tie, or like a noose cut way too short. “That’s me,” she said, “they’re killing me,” and he smiled the way you might smile at a baby who suddenly, as its first words, announced it had filled its diaper. “I know you, don’t I?” she asked.)
a nurse came through the tent, and passed right through him, as if he were a ghost
(Yes, the man told her, without opening his mouth. Her vision went away and instead she saw a brain in a glass jar. I’ll be in touch, he told her, and then she was back in her body, in the dark, with that noise.)
the noise stopped
everything
stopped
.
She opened her eyes with a scream.
Ayaan sat up in bed, naked under silk sheets. She was in a small bedroom with a fireplace. A cheerful little blaze danced away at the corner of her vision. Her head felt as if it had been cracked open and stuffed full of scrap metal. She touched her face, felt a cold, rubbery mask there.
She wasn’t breathing. She sucked in a deep breath of air and felt no real need to exhale it again. She touched her wrist with two fingers and couldn’t find a pulse. She did find a black vein running underneath her grayish brown skin. It was as hard as a length of wire. The blood inside that vein wasn’t going anywhere.
She screamed and screamed, shouted and cursed and her throat never got sore. She sobbed, big wracking hard heaves but no tears came.
Nausea surged upward inside of her and she jumped out of the bed, looked around frantically for something to throw up into. Nothing presented itself so she clutched her hands over her mouth and just held on, held on until the need, the desire to vomit went away. It left her feeling drained, depleted and sore.
And then hungry. She could really use a snack, she told herself. She was going to need to keep up her energy reserves for what came next.
What came next? She couldn’t remember.
She stood up again. Looked around the room. A faded newspaper clipping was pasted to one wall, a picture of a building by a boardwalk, its windows broken, its paint faded or missing altogether. A place that died even before the world came to an end, according to the text.
She found a closet and inside the closet one single set of clothes. A black leather catsuit with lots of straps. A pair of black leather boots that came up to the middle of her calves. A black leather jacket stenciled all over in white spray paint with a motif of simplified skulls. She put the clothes on with fumbling fingers that felt twice as thick as they looked. The clothes fit her perfectly.
At the back of the closet she found a sliver of broken mirror. She picked it up and stared at her reflection. Ayaan had never been vain in life and she wasn’t about to become so now. Something leapt out at her, though, and required extensive examination. She had a tattoo on her throat and neck, running all the way around, bright silver ink inscribing cursive Russian characters. Like a choker she could never remove. She’d seen that kind of writing before, she thought. She’d seen it inscribed on a glass jar with a brain inside.
Don’t speak, she thought. Except it wasn’t her own thought. Someone had spoken into her head, his voice sounding just like her own inner monologue, but braying and too loud. It made her headache worse. Don’t react at all. Whatever they say to you, just nod and smile.
A knock came on the bedroom’s door.
Chapter Five
By the light of an oil lamp Marisol examined a handful of yellow stalks. “Winter wheat,” she explained, but that meant nothing to Sarah. The Mayor of Governors Island dropped the stalks on the table and examined her fingers. A thin, soft black powder coated them and resisted being easily brushed off. Marisol sniffed her fingers and frowned. “It’s a fungus of some kind. That’s new for us, and I don’t like it.”
In the corner of the room Osman sat with one hand on his head. The other held a bottle of milky liquid. Judging by the way he kept blinking in slow motion and slumping forward to nearly fall out of his chair, Sarah decided he must be drunk. She looked at Marisol.
The Mayor shrugged. “It’s been years, he said. Let him have a taste. In the morning he’ll feel like shit and he’ll curse God and then he’ll go back to normal. It’s not like we make enough liquor for him to become an alcoholic.” She frowned. “After the things we’ve seen, all of us, I think we deserve to get polluted now and again. I wouldn’t mind getting a snoot full myself, actually. To you,” she said, and pointed at the blighted wheat on the table, “that might look pretty banal. To me it’s a reminder. The first couple of winters here were... hard. There were two hundred of us, originally. Now, even with the refugees we’ve adopted and a couple of births we’re down to seventy-nine.”
Sarah didn’t know what to make of that. It sounded bad, it was true, but like nothing compared to what had become of Africa. There had been a whole nation of survivors there once. It wasn’t around any more.
“I know you saw the slacks in the garden. I know what you must think of us. But we couldn’t have made it without help.” Marisol smiled and reached forward with one tentative hand. When Sarah didn’t flinch Marisol cupped the younger woman’s chin and smiled at her. “You know some of the stories, of course. You know about Gary.”
Sarah nodded. No more needed to be said. What Gary had done to Marisol, and how eventually he was destroyed, was part of the myth of Governors Island. It was part of the myth of the Epidemic.
“There are things I have to tell you, hard things. It’s too bad I’m such a spineless coward. So instead I’m just going to show you and you’ll have to cope whatever way you know how. You can hate me later, I’m okay with that.”
Sarah’s heart sank. She had something to learn—something which would make her cry. Jack had told her as much, in his usual, cryptic way. This was going to be it, she was sure of it. She didn’t speak or protest in any way, though, as Marisol took her hand and lead her back out into the darkness. The Mayor paused only to speak to her son, to little Jackie, and tell him to stay put with Osman and wait for her to return.
“When I saw you I hated you a little,” Marisol said. “It’s not fair that Dekalb gets to have such a healthy and beautiful daughter. My little boy is what we used to call sickly.” She grunted a little in pain, but not the physical kind. “He’s got genetic problems, a heart murmur, the early signs of scoliosis and maybe even Lupus. Do you know about those? We can barely diagnose them—there’s no treatment at all, not anymore.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Sarah asked, scared for the kid. Most sickly children in Africa died in their first couple of years.
“I won’t let him slip away from me, not when he’s all I have left of... of some old friends.” Marisol grew quiet then, very quiet. She lead Sarah along the edge of the water, along a concrete parapet lined with a steel railing that had fallen away in places. When she saw where they were headed Sarah felt her heart speeding up.
Marisol had lead her along a narrow causeway to the octagonal ventilation tower at the northern tip of the island. It rose over them in the dark like a giant robot out of science fiction, a clattering, enormous construction of fans that turn
ed endlessly and vents that flicked open and shut in a pattern of willful randomness. A skeletal crown of exposed girders topped it, the stars showing through rusted gaps in the metal.
They threaded a simple maze of empty cargo containers and came to a set of three metal stairs leading to the tower’s doorway. “This place was nothing special, back in the day,” Marisol told Sarah. “It’s just a vent, a pipe stuck in the ground to provide air for the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel.”
“There’s a tunnel under the bay?” Sarah asked. As usual the marvels of twentieth-century engineering fascinated her, even if her elders found them trivial and commonplace. “How did they build it without all the water getting in?”
Marisol shook her head. She didn’t know, or didn’t care to answer. She took an enormous keyring from her belt and unlocked the tower’s door. Then she stepped aside. Clearly Sarah was supposed to go in alone.
A little light illuminated the tower’s guts, a wan little electric light that came from hundreds of weak bulbs, some mounted in cages on the walls, some dangling on wires draped across the vast open space. Sarah found herself on a gallery, a narrow enclosed walkway that ran around the edge of an open pit. She looked down and saw that the vast majority of the tower was just an empty shaft, an air shaft with one enormous fan at its bottom. Its vanes rotated with geological slowness but still it generated a vast wind that rushed up into her face and pushed the hood of her sweatshirt back. She imagined a generator must be hooked up to that fan to power all the lights.
The place was a miracle, in that it was still running. Yet discovering that hardly seemed worth all the suspense Marisol had created. What next? When Sarah finished staring into the blackness below the great fan she had no idea what to do. Was she supposed to climb down into the shaft, or ascend one of the tower’s ladders towards the catwalks high above? She turned to look back at the doorway and found a mummy standing directly in front of her.
She screamed, of course, but cut it short. This one was far older than Ptolemy, yellow with antiquity and largely unadorned. His tattered wrappings hung on him like the flag of a forgotten nation. Obviously he was there to guide her. He started moving as soon as she quieted down, heading away from her at a brisk pace. She kept an eye on his dark energy—much easier to follow him that way in the dimness. It was like a perfect sphere of darkness, buzzing and complete. He didn't hunger the way ghouls did but he lacked the busy mind of a lich. Funny. She had never bothered to study Ptolemy's energy like that. She wondered what she would find if she did.
Monster Planet Page 12
