Sarah opened her mouth to reply. Then she closed it.
The Tsarevich’s mouth was moving, his jaw flexing. It looked like he was trying to say something. His right leg, the short one, flapped like a sheet on a clothesline.
The fingernails on his hand curled and bent around themselves. They split the flesh of his fingertips. His hand tried to close in a fist but the fingers spat out wet, dark sparks. His body twisted and shook and pulsed with noisy explosions. Sarah could only imagine that his internal organs were exploding one by one like potatoes left too long in the coals of a campfire.
Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
With a wet splash his good eye burst in its socket. The green phantom hobbled forward and tried to smash at the vacuum tubes with his femur staff. There was no on/off switch on the machinery. Energy slashed out of him and he staggered back. He tried again and got knocked back again. It didn’t matter, after a moment.
Up on the spikes the Tsarevich’s face split open in a horrible grimace as steam built up inside of his head. It shot out of his ears, his nose, his eyes. With a noise of air being sucked into a vacuum his entire body caught fire. He went up like a torch.
Chapter Seventeen
The Tsarevich’s body burnt like a log soaked in gasoline. His dry tissues, overloaded by the energy of the Source, hissed and spat and started to break down. A chunk of jagged bone flew from one spasming leg. Patience was standing just below him—it fell on her and cut open her cheek. She reeled back in horror and pain, a scream pushing out of her lungs even as she dropped to her knees to retrieve the bone fragment. She clutched it to her breast like a holy relic.
Above her the Tsarevich’s head slumped to one side and fell off. It hit the ground in a splatter of sparks and flame. A lot of people screamed then, and almost all of them moved backward, away from the scaffolding.
At the back of the crowd a male cultist in a blue paper shirt screamed bloody murder, much louder than any of the spectators at the Tsarevich’s grisly demise. Ayaan grabbed Sarah’s arm and yanked the girl along behind her as she rushed to see what was going on.
Through a gap in the crowd she could see the screaming cultist, his face a mask of agony. Four spikes of filed bone burst from his chest as a ghoul sank its exposed teeth deep into the back of the cultist’s neck.
Ayaan shook her head. No, that wasn’t acceptable. The ghouls couldn’t disobey their orders. Their minds were too simple—they couldn’t overcome the Tsarevich’s command. The Tsarevich was keeping them under control.
The Tsarevich was dead.
A new ghoul, one of Gary’s victims, came stumbling through the crowd, her face and hands bright red. She grabbed at Sarah but the girl twisted away. Ayaan swiveled around on one boot heel and blasted the ghoul’s face with dark energy. The undead face cracked and peeled away from smoking bone. Ayaan didn’t bother to watch her die a second time. “Are you alright?” she demanded.
Sarah nodded unhappily.
Enni Langstrom, the green phantom, appeared at Ayaan’s elbow. “Enough of the concern for her well-being,” he shouted over the screams. “Just kill her already!”
“No,” Ayaan said, “no, that’s unnecessary. she’s harmless.”
Enni shook his head. “She came here to kill him. Now he’s dead. You can call it a coincidence if you want but I want her dead. Jesus Christ, look at this! This is Armageddon. We can sort out who did what later. Just kill her. Where’s Erasmus?”
Ayaan frowned. “Didn’t you see? Gary ate half of him. He’s dead. I’m sorry, I know you two were friends.”
The skull-like face turned even paler than usual. “Then it’s just you and me. We have to save as many of the believers as possible. They served him well, they don’t deserve to die like this, not in this place.” He stared deep into Sarah’s eyes and grabbed her face in one thin hand. “Anyone we can’t trust dies, now. I’ll let you do it, but kill her! She’s an unknown factor. She could ruin everything.” He knocked Sarah into the dust with a backhand slap. Then he stomped away, his femur staff clicking on the rocky ground. As he moved through the crowd he touched each ghoul he passed and they slumped to the earth, the life force drained out of them.
Ayaan wasn’t sure what to do. She had turned on Sarah and all of her past. She had found a new cause to believe in. Yet if the Tsarevich was dead, who would rebuild the world? What was she giving her allegiance to? If Enni could remake the world and save the human race, if she truly believed he had it in him, then she had no choice but to obey and kill Sarah.
She grabbed Sarah’s bound hands and helped her stand up. There were ghouls everywhere, their eyes dead, their lipless mouths open wide. “He’s not a good man,” she shouted into Sarah’s face. “But I saw him show compassion once, for some people who were barely even human. I don’t like betraying him, but that’s what it’s come to.” She tore at the knots that held Sarah’s hands. Her fingers were too dead and clumsy. She gasped in frustration—then realized that the rope was made of organic fibers. Careful not to damage Sarah in the process she fed a little of her energy into the rope and it withered in place until it was so thin and insubstantial Sarah could just pull her hands apart.
Sarah rubbed at her wrists for a moment—they had chafed so much she had bled a little—then threw her arms around Ayaan and held her tight.
“I didn’t expect a hug from the girl who crossed half a continent just to put a bullet in my head,” Ayaan said, laughing a little.
“When I do it, when I sanitize you, it will be an act of love,” Sarah muttered. “Can we not talk about it now? There’s a mini-apocalypse to worry about.”
It was true. There were hundreds of ghouls in the valley and perhaps half as many living cultists. The ratio was getting steeper with every second. Enni was cutting swaths of destruction through the undead forces but he was just one lich. The cultists were fighting back and their firearms filled the air with noise but they were disorganized and as much danger to one another as they were to the ghouls—especially since the latter were all wearing bulletproof helmets.
"I don't understand," Ayaan said.
"What's not to understand? The dead eat the living. Did you forget?"
Ayaan waved Sarah's sarcasm away. "This close to the Source they should at least be distracted. At least some of them should be moving toward it, not toward the food." She shook her head. "It's as if some power is compelling them to attack."
It had all happened so quickly—the instant the Tsarevich had perished the ghouls had become their own creatures again. They had reverted to their violent, mindless selves and once again succumbed to their terrible hunger. They acted as if the Source weren't there at all, as if this were any other place in the world.
Whatever forces were moving them didn't matter. If someone didn’t get the situation under control it was going to be a massacre. Ayaan lead Sarah over to the flatbed and crawled up on top of it. “This way,” she shouted, and at least a few of those still alive in the valley heard her and looked up. “Come on, retreat, out the way we came. Come on!” she shouted it again and again, as loud as her undead lungs would make it.
A teenage boy broke from the crowd and ran toward the flatbed. Ghouls chased after him but they were slow and clumsy without Enni’s power behind them. The boy ran right past the flatbed and into the pass beyond, back the way they’d come. The road was down there. If he could find it maybe he would survive long enough to find some shelter.
It was the best solution Ayaan had. “Come on,” she shouted again. “Fall back!”
One by one the living broke away from the dead, their legs pumping, their eyes wet with horror and shock. They had been promised so much. Now they had to start over again, from scratch, in a country few of them had ever seen before. “This way,” Ayaan screamed.
A band of ghouls came at the flatbed but Sarah was ready. She brought the heavy machine gun around and cut them to pieces before they could climb aboard.
Ayaan kept shouting even when
the flow of living cultists had all but stopped. When she realized she was just wasting her breath she looked and saw that the valley was full of nothing but ghouls. They faced her like a ragged army, their helmets shading their eyes, their wicked arms held at their sides. She had stolen their prey. And yet it wasn’t her they wanted. Enni stood in the midst of them. He had lost his staff somewhere. His hands lifted and swung at the air as he tried to dampen the ghouls’ energy but he was clearly exhausted. He had used up everything he had, and while the Source was radiating life energy from no more than a thousand yards away he was about to collapse.
One of the ghouls came up behind him and swiped at his back. The sharpened bone of its arm tore off a strip of green cloth. Two more ghouls flanked him, coming at him from the sides. He couldn’t seem to resist them in even the most basic way. They tore his robe from him in rags.
Exposed to the air his emaciated body was as white as bleached bone. He looked like something carved out of soap. He had big ears that had always been hidden before by his cowl, at least in Ayaan’s experience. He had a few long strands of hair plastered to his otherwise bald head.
He turned, his body swooning backwards, to look at Ayaan. She couldn’t read his eyes. Then the ghouls fell on him and tore him to pieces. Sarah fired wildly into the seething mass of bodies but there were just too many of them.
When it was over the ghouls fell back out of Sarah’s range and stood in an orderly formation like soldiers in a parade. It didn’t make any sense. There was no one around to control them, no lich who could command them. Yet there was no reason for them to line up like that, either, just as there had been no possible explanation why they should attack Enni.
A voice sounded from atop the scaffolding. “The stench up here,” it intoned, its timbre watery and barely recognizable as human speech, “is bloody awful.”
A single ghoul stood there above the twin spikes. It was one of the most horrifying creatures Sarah had ever seen. Its skin hung off of its chest in long, tattered strips that fell across its groin like a gruesome kilt. Its face was a smudge of once-human features that had been battered and burnt out of all recognition. Its legs, thick and muscular, were covered in sores and lesions. It had no arms whatsoever, just ragged ends of flayed bone that hung down like tiny, broken wings.
Chapter Eighteen
“Hello, lasses,” the armless ghoul choked out. It laughed at them, a sputtering, horrible noise. “Honestly, I am glad to see you both still with us.”
All that remained of the Tsarevich were a few lumps of indistinct meat skewered on the steel spikes, fuming and smoking as they smoldered away to black carbon.
“I want you to know that I never wanted anyone to suffer.” He staggered closer to the edge of the scaffolding. Another step and he would fall onto the spikes. Sarah was pretty sure that was exactly what he intended to do.
“Mael Mag Och, I presume,” she said.
The ghoul flexed the ragged nubbins of bone he possessed in place of arms. “In the flesh.”
“What’s going on here?” Ayaan shook Sarah’s shoulder but Sarah didn’t know how to answer. “What happened to the Tsarevich? The machinery was supposed to heal him! It was supposed to make him whole again. What went wrong?”
Mael Mag Och shrugged. It made the skin of his chest split and peel. “The machinery worked just fine, lass. I just never meant it to do any such thing.”
“You? You killed him?” Ayaan was nearly shrieking. Sarah wished she would calm down. “How is that possible?”
“It helps to have friends on the inside.”
“Nilla,” Sarah said, getting it.
He tried to smile but the remains of his mouth merely twitched. “His plan required her to condition the energy of the Source. To step it down to a level his bodily tissues could accept. At my command she merely fed him an extra little jolt.”
“But why?” Ayaan demanded. “Why did you do this? Why did you kill him?”
“Sarah knows,” he told her. Sarah bit her lip. She had a feeling she did know, and it terrified her. When Gary had told her about Mael Mag Och she’d thought of him as a laughable sort of vision. Someone stuck in the mindset of the Dark Ages. That was, of course, before he got his hands on the ultimate power of the life force itself.
“So I was saying that I never wanted this to be such a difficult transition. You should ask Gary some time, Sarah. He would tell you, I’m sure, just how much compassion I still had in my heart, back in those all-too-brief days when I still had my own body. How I wanted to make things easy on you. Instead you chose all this blood-curdling violence and pain.”
“We chose nothing,” Ayaan spat. “What are you talking about?” She leapt down from the flatbed and took a few steps toward the scaffolding. The ghouls moved toward her just as quickly. She had watched them tear Enni Langstrom to pieces. She took a step back.
Mael Mag Och acted as if nothing had happened. “I was a nice chap, once. I know that’s changed. It’s a hard lot to be a raw consciousness stripped of form and left spinning in the void. If it made me a bit cranky, well. I do apologize.”
Ayaan grabbed Sarah’s arm tight enough to hurt. “What is it, Sarah? What does he want? What is he going to do?”
She struggled to find the best words. “His god told him to destroy the human race. Like, all of it. I think he’s going to do something to the Source.”
“Very good,” he told her. “The Source is a hole in the side of the world. Imagine a balloon with a tiny little pinprick in it. Imagine the air coming out, just a little at a time. Enough to keep the likes of you upright, that’s all. Now imagine what happens if you let all the air out of the balloon at once.”
Ayaan shook her head in disbelief. “You’d kill everything. Animals, plants, trees, people. Overload them, burn them to ashes. Everything.”
“Hmm. It is a pity about the trees. But I’ve been given a mission. If I’d had a bit of help from the start maybe things wouldn’t have come to so drastic a pass. I asked Gary for his help and the buggering bastard ate my head. I asked the Tsarevich and instead he turned himself into the king of the blighted world. I asked you,” he said, the clouded orbs of his eyes burning as he stared at Ayaan, “and you spat in my face.”
Sarah put her hands over her mouth. She couldn’t believe this.
“Ah, yes, I asked young Sarah as well, though I was a trifle dishonest about things. She was the only one who actually tried to help me. Too bad she was such an ineffectual little child. In the name of the father of tribes himself, lass, did you honestly expect to fight an army with a couple of mummies? I’m fond of the Egyptian folk, I truly am, but they’re crap against modern weaponry. You really missed the point.”
“You’ve been planning this all along,” Sarah said, dumbfounded. “You wanted me to kill the Tsarevich. You wanted Ayaan to kill the Tsarevich. So you could take his place. You let him capture you and put you in that jar. You told him exactly what he wanted to hear: that he could come here and heal himself. Because this is where you needed to be. How long have you been planning this?”
“I’ve been planning for this since your Gary knocked me down. You have no notion, lass, of how many snares I’ve laid and schemes I’ve hatched to get us here.”
“And my gift, my special vision?” Sarah demanded. “That was all part of your plan?”
“No, no, lass, that was Nilla’s idea, you’ve her to thank. She said the human race deserved one last chance to prove itself. I disagreed, of course, but I have trouble saying no to that one. So I chose you and said if you could stop me, you and you alone, then it would be clear that Teuagh had forgiven the whole sorry mess of us. So just as I had helped your father I helped you. And just like the geezer, you were a complete and utter failure. He couldn’t kill Gary though he was given years to pull it off. You couldn’t do anything right. If I ever wanted for proof that humanity is too far gone for saving, well, you’ve provided it in full, bairn.”
Sarah’s cheeks burned with her bl
ood. She had failed everyone. She had failed so many time over. And now... and now... the enormity of what was about to happen was impossible. She started to faint. She could feel herself spontaneously losing consciousness in the face of such a horrible ending to her life, to her rescue attempt.
“And you, Ayaan. I actually held out some hope for you,” he said. His voice was tinny and small in Sarah’s ears. She was losing it. “We’re the monsters,” he said to Ayaan. She could barely make out the words. “Can we please start acting like it?”
Sarah’s eyes fluttered closed and when they opened she was looking at a rocky landscape that belonged to another planet entirely. Maybe Mars. Or Pluto. She saw the valley stripped of its carpet of bones, she saw the mountains around her and the blue sky and the white puffy clouds. Yet the mountains were naked, totally devoid of trees, of underbrush, even of the patchy lichens that mottled the highest peaks. There were no birds in the air. No fish in the sea. No bacteria. Not even a virus. The air itself had become poison to her—with no plants there could be no oxygen. She started to choke, to asphyxiate, and then she opened her eyes again.
Nothing had changed. She had just become so painfully aware of what was about to transpire that she had seen it. Call it pre-traumatic stress disorder. She had literally seen the lifeless world. And it was going to be all her fault.
“Good night, ladies,” Mael Mag Och said. Then he threw himself down on the steel spikes. One passed right through his thigh and came out the other side with a noise like cloth ripping. The other passed through his throat. His body convulsed in what had to be terrible pain but he made no sound. Beneath him the vacuum tubes lit up with their happy orange glow. The machinery began to hum.
Sarah turned to Ayaan. What could they do? There was nothing they could do. The scaffolding was out of machine gun range. If they tried to rush the scaffolding on foot the remaining handless ghouls would slaughter them before they could cover half the distance. Even if they could get to the body on the spikes what would they do then? Tear him down with their bare hands? It was over. In a moment the life force would be released, dispersed, whatever. It would be gone. That life force was the only thing that kept the human body together, kept all the pieces working with each other. When it was gone Sarah’s cells would turn against themselves, cannibalizing each other for what little golden energy remained stored inside them. In a matter of minutes they would fade out of existence altogether, depleted of the raw mainstay of life. Ayaan would merely collapse. She would fall forward on her face and be truly, finally dead. Sarah would have just enough time to watch that before the cells that made up her eyes devoured each other and she went blind. Before the cells of her brain ate their own memories and thoughts and feelings.
Monster Planet Page 30
