“He must know something I don’t,” she announced. She leaned out of the crew door and studied the column once again. One machine gun position remained on the flatbed but nobody stood anywhere near it, nobody with hands. The living cultists down there had assault weapons but she could easily stay out of their range. The Tsarevich’s yurt was on fire. That was something. As she watched, however, a group of cultists with fire extinguishers blasted it with white foam.
“Okay,” she said, uncertain of what else to do. “Let’s get ready for another attack.” Even as she said it though she heard something. The noise of the helicopter drowned out almost every sound but she heard another engine roaring, a gasoline engine. She looked down and saw an enormous truck gunning up the side of the road, looking like it might collide with the flatbed. It had flames painted on its doors and its exposed engine chugged and pistoned madly, belching pale, thin smoke out of half a dozen tailpipes.
Standing up in its cargo bed, a gorilla or maybe just a really hairy man lifted a long tube to his shoulder. Sarah recognized the rectangular plates mounted on its business end. It was a Stinger missile, an antiaircraft weapon.
The Tsarevich must have learned about repelling airborne attacks after the time Ayaan tried the same trick on him in Egypt. A pile of Stingers lay at the gorilla’s feet.
“Dive!” she shouted, and Osman spun the helicopter into a banking descent so sharp she lost her footing and fell out of the crew door, her fall cut painfully short as her safety line snapped taut. “Osman!” she screamed, dangling in mid-air three feet below the Jayhawk’s belly. “Osman!”
“I’m busy,” he shouted back.
The gorilla discharged his weapon. A silver line of smoke shot out of its muzzle. Osman dipped the helicopter over to one side but the Stinger was a guided missile and it was already locked on to the Jayhawk. As Sarah watched it rolled over in mid-flight and gimbaled around to track the helicopter’s exhaust.
Osman dropped the helicopter again and Sarah bounced madly on the end of her line. With hands like claws she grabbed again and again, trying to grab the cord. The green pointy tops of the fir trees below came rushing up at her but—but—yes—she had one hand on the cord. She managed to pull herself up a fraction of an inch before the rolling helicopter knocked her loose again.
She could hear the Stinger coming. It cut through the air with a high-pitched sreech. Sarah grabbed the line with both hands and hauled herself up, her body flailing in the wind.
A dozen linen-wrapped hands reached down and grabbed her shoulders, her arms, her neck, even her ears. The mummies hauled her up and inside the helicopter moments before the belly of the Jayhawk started hissing and rattling, smacking aside the higher treetops. Osman dropped them another two feet and wood and pine needles exploded against the undercarriage. Everything smelled like sap.
Fifty yards behind them the Stinger’s stabilizing fins tangled up in a mangled larch. The missile exploded in a brilliant cloud of fire and dark smoke. Osman tapped his yoke and the helicopter lifted up, out of the trees again.
“Alright, girl,” he said in her earphones. “What in hell comes next?”
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.
Chapter Eleven
Fire erupted all around her. It touched the trees and filled the air with the stink of burning pitch, it ran in liquid waves over the snow and left smoldering ground behind. Ayaan dropped to her knees with her arms over her head as a second explosion tore into the roadway, a third, fire everywhere and the noise, a fourth, the noise was hammering at her, the air was jumping with it she could see pine needles leaping up off the ground as if the entire planet had been picked up and given a good shake.
She rolled onto her back and slid down into a hollow, into a little space of snow where a boulder had sunk into the earth. She reached out her hands and pulled Nilla in after her. Nilla started to speak but Ayaan shook her head no. She peered up, around the side of the boulder, and saw a helicopter hanging there in the air, close enough to touch, no, that was just her poor depth perception, the inability of her dead eyes to focus properly. The helicopter stood in the air over the flatbed, white and orange, and mummies leaned out of its crew hatch, mummies in the name of the Prophet mummies—did they want revenge? Did they seek revenge for the forty-nine mummies she had killed on Cyprus, she wondered?—and then there were more explosions, brilliant flowers spreading overhead, fire, and smoke.
Her brain rattled in her skull like an animal trying to get loose. She pulled her arms in close to her body, brought her chin down. Made herself small. Nilla’s dress was stained, ruined, and they were both soaked in snow melt and splattered with cinders, some of them still on fire. Ayaan brushed at the embers on her jacket, ran her fingers through her hair to shake them loose. The helicopter just hung there in the air. Rifles started firing back from the ground, living cultists with rifles shooting at the helicopter but its pilot knew enough to stay out of range. Where were the machine guns? She had inspected the .50 caliber machine guns on the flatbed herself, had stripped and cleaned them on the long trek when she had been glad for anything to do, anything to break the boredom. Where were they, why weren’t they firing back? They had plenty of range.
The helicopter assault must have targeted them. Smart. Nilla started climbing up, clambering up the side of the boulder but Ayaan pulled her back down. They were only ten feet or so from the roadway, the column. Even if the mummies didn’t get them the column might, it had to turn around. It was the only logical move. The column had to turn around.
Where was Erasmus? Where was the truck? She hadn’t seen it in days, it had been sent to scout ahead but they needed it now. The column had to turn around. There had been a narrow defile in the side of the mountain maybe a quarter mile back, it wouldn’t be easy but the column had to turn around and head for the relative safety of the rock walls. Where was Erasmus? The column could move a lot faster, could get turned around a lot faster with the truck, the straggling cultists could clamber up onto its cargo bed, they could hang on to the outside of the truck.
The Tsarevich wasn’t turning the column. The column was still plodding forward, surging ahead at maybe three miles an hour as if there had been no attack, staying its cou
rse as if nothing had happened at all.
Another explosion tore through the thin air. Debris and metal fragments like flying daggers and body parts went flying, human body parts and it didn’t matter if they’d been alive or dead or undead, human bones and flesh went flying over Ayaan’s head like a horizontal rain of gore.
Where was the fucking truck? She heard it before she saw it, saw it only moments before it went roaring right over her head, its wheels barely gripping the road. Mud and cinders poured down into her defile, splashed against the boulder. The truck roared past—and then she heard the distinctive fizzle and bark of an anti-aircraft missile jumping out of its launcher and she saw the rocket’s exhaust, a thin banner of white wind superimposed on the blue sky. She opened her mouth wide in exultation, in excitement, and whooped with joy as the missile bent like a perfectly hit football in the air, bent right for the fleeing helicopter. Something fell out of the side of the helicopter as it banked to try to throw off the pursuit. Something fell out and dangled there on a line like a spider.
It was Sarah.
Ayaan was too far away and the helicopter was moving too fast for her to really get a good look. She didn’t use her eyes. She sensed the energy there, as familiar as the hairs on the back of her own arm, an energy she’d lived with for years, since long before she had understood that such energy existed and could be seen with the right eyes. She knew that energy.
It was Sarah.
The whoop died in her throat and she grabbed at her teeth, literally reached into her mouth and grabbed her own lower jaw in terror. At any moment the AA missile was going to collide with the helicopter’s airframe, it was going to plow right through the tender aluminum skin of the helicopter, lodge itself inside and the sexual horror of that, the violation of it wasn’t lost on her, it would come inside the helicopter and then go off, detonate, its high explosive warhead would burst apart in a million tiny jagged pieces of shrapnel, each with its own trajectory, its own ballistic intent, and there would be enough of them to cut to shreds every person in the helicopter. There would be nothing left but pieces, parcels of flesh raggedly torn apart and bleeding and unrecognizable and falling out of the sky.
Monster Planet Page 26
