The werewolf replied in English. “This is just the easy part. Later on you might have to fill up the gas tank. Hi, we haven’t been properly introduced.” He held out one hand, a furry appendage ending in inch-long, razor-sharp claws. They weren’t like fingernails at all, more like the talons of a bird, conical and slightly curved.
Ayaan figured out a second too late that he was offering the hand to shake. She reached for it even as he was pulling it back and the claws slid across the skin of her palm. The skin parted like torn silk. At least there was no blood.
He looked embarrassed, though it was hard to tell. Even if he could have blushed his face was hidden under a dense growth of hair that covered his nose and made his mouth a dark slit. His eyes were surprisingly soft and kind, though. “I don’t have any ‘powers’ in the traditional sense. My body does this weird thing, though. It doesn’t breathe, it doesn’t perspire, or do anything you would think a living thing might do, but it keeps producing keratin. The protein that makes, well, hair and nails. I have to shave myself head to foot every couple of days.” He put his hands on the steering wheel, making an obvious gesture of it—he meant her no harm, he was saying. “My name’s Erasmus, by the way.”
She smiled for him. “Ayaan.”
“Sure, sure, I know all about you. I’m German, if you can’t tell from the accent.” Whatever accent the werewolf might have came from the mass of fur inside his mouth, Ayaan thought, but she let him talk. He clearly needed to tell the story. “Believe it or not the Tsarevich didn’t create me. I want you to know that, so you’ll understand a little. I was in Leipzig when the world ended. It was bad there. The local authorities had heard already what happened to New York, to Paris. They mostly fled when the first ghouls came wandering into town. I took refuge in a hospital, hoping to outlast the Epidemic, but of course it just kept coming and coming. I starved to death, afraid to leave my little locked ward, watching shadows move outside the blinds, knowing they could get in any time if they just tried hard enough.”
He closed his eyes and his face became an oblong of hair. “When it gets down to the end, when your body is breaking down from hunger, you can feel it. It hurts. I took all the drugs I was locked in with, took anything that would get me high. In the last days I discovered that if you breathed pure oxygen long enough you could feel nothing at all.” He chuckled. “I had no idea what I was doing. I just fell asleep one day and when I woke up I was rolled up in a cocoon of hair. I could barely move.”
Ayaan’s stomach grumbled. She didn’t like all this talk of starving—it just made her hungry.
“I ended up walking to Russia. I had no idea what I was, no idea why any of this had happened. Then I was approached by the Tsarevich’s agents. I... I ate one of them, I’m sorry to say. It was an honest mistake. The others assured me it was alright. They told me what I was, a lich, and they told me that when I ate a human being I released his soul. No more horror, no more apocalypse for that man. They made it sound like I did him a favor. I don’t want you to think... I mean, I don’t buy half of what the Tsarevich says about souls and the afterlife. But he has something real to offer. If anyone can rebuild what we had before, if anyone can end all the suffering, it will be our boy. You see? We’re not all brainwashed religious freaks. I need you to know that.”
Ayaan nodded meaningfully. “Oh, of course. Certainly,” she said. She was thinking that when the Tsarevich wanted to demonstrate his remote control, the one that could set her head on fire, it was the werewolf who had turned the knobs.
She jumped when she heard a rhythmic thumping on the roof of the cab. It had to be the green phantom, she decided, sending a signal with his femur staff.
Erasmus turned the ignition key and the truck thundered to life. He looked out at the road when he spoke next, failing altogether to make eye contact. “Anyway,” he said. “Thanks for listening.”
“You got it,” she told him. She was already staring out the window.
Chapter Twelve
The boat touched a broken retaining wall with a hollow thud, a noise like a very deep drum being struck just once. The boat drifted a few feet further, its side rattling against the remaining blocks of the wall, and then it slid up onto sand or gravel that made a noise under the hull, a hissing, and then it stopped, beached on land. Sarah lifted her oar out off the water and looked at the tip of Manhattan. She just sat there, the oar still in her hands, and looked at the place where the wall had fallen away. Where mud had slipped down into the water, making a perfect ramp up into the open space of Battery Park.
She could have thought about how that was the city up there that had killed her father, or that it was the place that nearly killed Ayaan, but she didn’t. She didn’t think about anyone else at all. She watched the ground, the slope, as if it were still moving, as if she could see it sliding down into the sea. Her breath hitched. A flash of pain, very sharp but very brief, ran through the muscles at the small of her back.
In a second she would step out of the boat, step up onto the land and then she would have to face her fear. Ghouls, cultists—even liches might be up there but she wasn’t thinking about them, either. She was thinking about what it meant to step up onto that muddy slope. She was thinking about what it meant to enter denied territory, as Jack might put it. She had done it before. Never so alone, though. In a second she would do it. In a second.
“Oh, wow,” she said, which was pretty stupid but it was all she could think of. Careful of the boat’s rocking, mindful of the weapons strapped to her back, Sarah stood up in the boat and put one foot down on the mud. It sank in a quarter of an inch but then it gave her enough purchase to get her other foot up. Instantly she started sliding down, her feet slipping, water oozing up between her toes and she threw herself forward, dug her fingers into the yielding earth, shoved her left foot up onto a protruding stone. She scrambled and cursed and grabbed and hauled her way up into Battery Park before she could really think about what she was doing and then suddenly she was there.
The park’s once verdant lawns were covered in grey growth. Mushrooms, enormous wood ear mushrooms the size of sleeping horses in serried rows lined the park, slopped over onto the concrete walkways. They lay like soporific alien pods, like the drowsing bodies of hibernating animals. She was certain they never grew that big in nature, she was certain of it. She could see their gills, the tender wet gills they kept hidden from the sun. The air was yellow with their spores, a constant vaporous discharge that spread out over the water and swept across Governors Island with the prevailing wind.
She kicked one. Big mistake. Its wet, fleshy meat came to pieces in strands that wrapped around her shoe, her ankle. Spores burst up around her like brown smoke and she had to clamp her eyes, her mouth, her nose shut or be suffocated. When the cloud finally moved on she looked down and saw the fungus knitting itself back together, so fast she could actually watch it happen, the filaments flopping against one another, sticking to one another. She yanked her foot free with a sense of real disgust.
Which was just silly. Who knew what real danger lay inside the city, and she was freaking out over a mushroom. Sarah drew her Makarov but left the safety on. She moved toward a mansion, a confection of brick and columns now slathered with yellow mold. Its antiquity and decrepitude bothered her for some reason and she moved past it quickly.
Beyond the mansion the towers of Manhattan started up almost immediately, leaping up into the air like impossible trees or... or mountains... or straight-sided pyramids, maybe. She had actually seen the Great Pyramid. It was the closest reference point she had, but it meant little. The flat sides of the buildings looked wrong to her, the metal and glass construction only softened by a heavy growth of moss and dark slime. The windows kept snagging her eyes. Ayaan had taught her to look at openings, at windows and doors, anywhere an enemy might hide. But there were hundreds of windows to keep an eye on—thousands! Clearly urban warfare required a different mindset.
She knew one thing that still mad
e sense. Stick to the shadows. Keeping her head down she ducked into the shade of an enormous tower and jogged down a sidewalk towards an intersection. Trees that reached four or five stories high clotted the crossroads. Sarah slid in between their close-growing trunks and hunkered down to have a good think, to plan her next move.
A ghoul emerged from a doorway nearby and sniffed the air.
It happened just like that—she had just ducked down, was still, in fact, in the process of sitting and getting comfortable, when the ghoul appeared. It had no hands, just wicked claws, and it wore a flat doughboy helmet. It had to be a museum piece, judging by the rust and the flaking metal at its brim. It cast the ghoul’s eyes in darkness so she could only see its surgically altered jaws and the broken lump of cartilage which had been its nose. It sniffed again—she wondered how good its sense of smell could be with that damaged lump of meat in the middle of its face. Maybe if she stayed perfectly still.
From up a street to the west she heard the sound of an air horn. The blast jumped from one building facade to another and shook the leaves of the trees, made the glass of the few unbroken windows rattle in place. The broken-nosed ghoul stood up straight and moved its stumpy arms in front of it briefly, as if it were a boxer ready to guard against a blow. Slowly, on stiff legs, it moved toward the noise of the horn. Slowly—this was not one of the super-speedy dead she’d seen in Egypt. At least she had that.
Once the ghoul was gone she stood up and moved to the doorway it had vacated. There was no movement beyond and she stepped into a tiny shop, its front of plate glass obscured by vines and fungus so that only a few rays of green light slipped inside. In the back a pile of cardboard boxes had transformed over time, losing their shape, bursting open at the sides, and now small round greasy knobs of fungal life were devouring them. Nothing. She turned around to leave the shop and found herself surrounded.
It must have been a trap. The first ghoul must have smelled her after all, and the air horn had been a signal for reinforcements.
Too shocked to scream she lifted her pistol and started firing. Ghouls filled the broad space between the buildings, dozens of them moving left or right, some of them toward her, some away. One of them came at her, his grey body naked but his head covered in a brightly-painted bicycle helmet. “Fuck,” she screamed, lacking the time to be more inventive. She shot at his knees but it wasn’t enough—he was on her, his stink smeared across her senses, his bony forearms weaving in the air over her, an incantation of death. One arm swung down in a wide arc and knocked the pistol out of her hand. Doom pressed hard on her sinuses, the taste of adrenaline filling her mouth.
Then something weird happened.
He crouched over her, his spikes mere inches from her skin, and then he stopped. He stopped stock still, his chest not even heaving for breath. He was so still he might have been no more than a pile of badly decomposed meat, or perhaps a picture of a dead thing. Sarah looked up and saw the others, the other ghouls, had all stopped still too. They were facing her, a crowd of them facing her and not moving. Sarah could hear water running somewhere, and she could hear the leaves of the trees rolling in a gust of wind, but that was all. Nobody moved a muscle.
“They join us may if so wish.” The voice came out of the ghoul on top of her. It sounded mostly like a human voice, with a touch of a Russian accent. There was a whistling sound underneath it, though, as if breath were leaking out of punctured lungs even as the ghoul tried to talk. “The ones on island. You, as well, join us if you wish. Only death otherwise. I spare you for this, to make choice. Is good to have choices. You be herald, take good news to island peoples. Take news of choice.”
“You belong to the Tsarevich,” Sarah said, so frightened she thought she might urinate in her pants. She could still talk. It was pretty much all she could do. “I’ve heard he recruits the living.”
“I work not for our Lord,” the ghoul said. It didn’t shake its head or use any gestures. Its arms remained around her, ready to impale her, but it just spoke to her in that flat tone. “I belong to his Lady.”
One of the trees in the square rolled over. No, not a tree. Something huge and plant-like though, something vaguely humanoid in shape but enormous, dark, covered in patches of filamentous mold and club-like fungi. A walking compost heap. It moved a yard or two closer and Sarah felt an odd prickling between her toes, in the places where her shirt bunched up against her side. Something tickled her throat and she coughed.
“Is not by intention, but only is because she is near. You die in seconds, if don’t choose right,” the ghoul told her. “Our Lady’s touch is bad thing for living. So you say... what?”
“I... I say,” Sarah said, and coughed again, coughed and coughed, a long, asthmatic series of coughs that brought up dark mucus. “I say...”
A bright flash of light swooped up the sidewalk and smashed in the ghoul’s face with one bandaged fist. The dead man’s maxilla shattered and dried brains flew from his ruined head. The ghoul’s body fell away and Sarah was free. Ptolemy’s painted face turned to look at her.
“Thanks,” she said, picking her Makarov up off the weed-cracked sidewalk. Then she realized he wanted more. He wanted direction. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, and then she ran, with the mulch demon right behind.
Chapter Thirteen
Ayaan had at first believed that the giant truck was just one more example of the Tsarevich’s personal style but she quickly saw there was a method to his madness. The roads leading away from Asbury Park had been engineering marvels, once, a web of immaculately paved highways that connected every part of America to everywhere else.
Twelve years later they were a broken field of rubble. Arches and overpasses had collapsed, potholes had opened up as cracks in the earth and then widened to become great fissures in the concrete, deep holes within which lurked rusted twists of rebar that could slash a tire to ribbons. Every fleck of water on the road could be a puddle or it could be a deep hole in the earth big enough to swallow them up. Mud and dirt had spilled across the roadway, blocking it in places, washing it away entirely in others. Plant life sprung up from every pit and pock mark. Here and there a simple crack had been opened up by a line of trees, running at crazy angles across the road, their roots hurling up fist- and head-sized chunks of paving material.
Erasmus kept the truck moving at a steady five miles an hour and stopped every time an obstruction presented itself. Still Ayaan was thrown around in her seat like a doll in an empty suitcase. She held on to a thick metal handle mounted on the dashboard and tried to keep her head from cracking against the window every time the car bounced over another piece of rubble.
The truck could just as easily have gone off-road but conditions out there were far worse. Looking out the window Ayaan was startled to see that New Jersey—a place she had always associated with toxic chemical plants and forgotten factories—was apparently one vast forest that went on forever. The trees did part from time to time but she saw no cities, just burnt-out electrical sub-stations and mazes of housing developments as convoluted as the passages of the human digestive system. It was hard to find a single house still intact. The roofs of the houses fell inward on themselves, or their walls had devolved into unorganized piles of bricks. They passed through great zones where fire had taken its toll and ashes whipped through the air as thick as snow. In other regions it looked to Ayaan like a massive earthquake had tried to suck the suburbs down into the very belly of the earth. A fault line ran through one neighborhood of Trenton, a vast and inclined plane of ground at the bottom of which glass and brick and steel had collected in a kind of homogeneous mass, a stagnant pool of sharp edges.
After about six hours of rumbling and rolling over the fragmented highway they stopped to stretch their legs. This was mostly for her benefit, Erasmus told her—she was still newly dead and prone to fits of rigor mortis. He must have seen the look on her face when she heard that, even if she had quickly hidden her mouth with her hand.
�
�Everybody pays,” he told her, his voice weary. Then he popped open his door and leapt down to the hot black surface of the road.
They had stopped in a region halfway between housing developments and farmland. The concrete lip of the road stood at a slight angle, with a twisted mass of green and rusted signage hanging over them on steel pylons. One half-obscured sign read:
WELCO.... TO ..........YLVANIA
Popu.ation 12,281,054
Beyond lay a grassy depression in the earth, a mile-wide bowl of land half-filled with weather-beaten, falling down houses, giant concrete blocks with crumbling faces, subsidiary roads only recognizable now because they were less overgrown than the surrounding land. A thin mist hovered in the bowl, a last shred of vapor as yet not burned off by the rising sun, protected by pine trees.
With a flurry of motion from one of the concrete blocks a bird launched itself into the air and threw itself in a long curving course over the hollow. Erasmus looked up at the green phantom on the roof of the truck and one of the corpses in the flatbed twitched to life. It spilled out into the depression like a top jerking away from its string.
Ayaan frowned and did some deep knee bends, some toe-touches. She could feel where her muscles had started to seize up and cramp. She wasn’t expecting it when a few minutes later the accelerated ghoul returned and knelt down before her. It had the bird, the same bird she’d watch wing through the late-morning mist, impaled on one ulna.
The bird was still alive. It kept trying to tuck its wing under its breast but the spar of bone got in the way. Its blood splashed on the asphalt. Ayaan saw very little of that. What she saw was its energy, its tremulous golden energy, already flickering away. It was precious, that energy, that life. She reached out and freed the bird. She brought it closer, brought it toward her body.
She bit right through its feathers and its tiny hollow bones. It wasn’t something she thought about doing. The blood ran down her throat and she expected to gag, to choke. She didn’t.
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