Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  Sarah stared at the boy standing on the flatbed. He looked like the soul of calm. The fusillade of bullets hadn’t even ruffled his thin white hair. There was something not quite right about his energy. It was dark, of course, the boy was undead, a lich among liches and his energy swallowed light like a black hole, but... what was it? Sarah couldn’t quite decide. But something was wrong.

  Bullet holes appeared in the floor of the helicopter and Leyla hurried to throw an armored blanket of rubberized Kevlar across the deck plates to give the soldiers a little protection. As the helicopter swung out and away from the flatbed and beyond the range of the remaining machine gun Sarah clipped her safety line to a tie-down on the floor and tried to grab Ayaan’s arm. “Whoa, whoa,” she said, trying to roll with the helicopter as it banked, hard, “there’s something—” she shouted, but her poorly-fitted helmet had gone askew on her head and she couldn’t hear her own voice over the engine roar. “Ayaan!” she shrieked.

  Ayaan wasted no more time. On the third pass she switched her weapon to full automatic and emptied a clip into the Russian boy, her arms tracking him with the precision of a machine. The wooden flatbed around him splintered and spat dust but he didn’t even glance at Ayaan. No, his eyes were still fastened on Sarah’s. He was still looking at her. Into her.

  In the cockpit lights blared on Osman’s control boards and a bell clanged urgently. The machine gunner on the flatbed had scored a real hit, blasting open one of the Mi-8’s fuel pods. Automatic fire control systems and self-sealing bladders in the fuel system shunted into action and kept the helicopter from exploding but blue flames lit up the fuselage and burning spatters of kerosene leapt into the open crew cabin.

  “Ayaan, he’s not—he isn’t—” Sarah had trouble concentrating on the words. The boy’s gaze compelled her, made her look at him again. She saw so much intelligence in his cheekbones, so much sorrow in his bluish lips. He was hypnotizing her, she knew it, and she knew how to fight it but it made it difficult to talk.

  She looked up and saw that Ayaan had picked up an RPG-7V from the weapons rack. She slammed a bulbous rocket-propelled grenade into the launcher and lifted the optical sight to her eye.

  Sarah glanced behind her and realized that the port-side crew door was still closed. If Ayaan discharged the RPG inside the helicopter the exhaust blast would blow back against the door and fry them all with super-heated gas. Focused so completely on her target Ayaan had transcended such concerns.

  Unclipping her safety line Sarah pitched across the width of the cabin and pulled hard on the door release just as Ayaan acquired her target and squeezed her trigger. Exhaust bloomed out of the conical jet at the back of the launcher and blew away on the wind. Sarah looked down through the open door and watched the grenade jet toward its target. Finally the boy looked away from her, instead turning to face the projectile. He raised his wand as if he could ward off the explosive. It didn’t work.

  A brown cloud boiled up off the surface of the flatbed, a welter of splinters and debris. One of the machine gun mounts went flying, spinning end over end away from the flatbed. The dead men still tirelessly turning their cranks spasmed in place as debris peppered their bodies and threw them against their wheels.

  When the smoke cleared a meter-wide hole could be seen in the top of the flatbed, a gaping crater where there had been solid wood. Standing in the middle of the hole was the Russian boy. His cheeks weren’t even smudged with soot.

  No, Sarah realized, he wasn’t standing in the crater. He was floating above it. He hadn’t moved, literally—he was floating in mid-air even though the flatbed had been blown out from under him. Sarah studied him with her occult senses and breathed an oath. She struggled to get her helmet back on straight. “That’s not him—it’s a projection, Ayaan, a mental projection! Just an illusion.”

  “Seelka meicheke,” Ayaan swore. She threw the launcher down to the deck of the helicopter with a clang. Osman backed off, out of firearms range, though the remaining machine gun on the flatbed was spinning free and unattended. Every eye in the helicopter looked to Ayaan.

  “Alright,” Ayaan said, after a moment. “Osman, set down on top of that dune.” She pointed at a rising swell of the desert maybe a kilometer away.

  The women in the cargo bay looked at each other and some of them gasped. Fear gripped Sarah too tightly to let her utter a word. If she could she would have asked Ayaan if she had suddenly lost her mind. The helicopter provided the only real advantage the living possessed against the dead—the ability to fly away. If they put down now, with an army of the dead within striking range they would have no real protection at all.

  Osman knew a direct order when he heard it, though, and did what he was told.

  3

  Ayaan knelt and touched the sand, then her heart, then her forehead. It was a very old gesture, one that predated the Epidemic: she was thanking the Earth, her mother, and her God for the right to make war. The other women hurried to copy her, but Sarah refused to go along. “Okay, so this is stupid,” she muttered. She knew she sounded whiny and selfish but she couldn’t help it. “Someone tell me why we’re doing this again? The ultimate lich of all time is over that hill and we’re going to stand here and fight him on foot. Even though we have a helicopter and we could just leave.”

  “You have never understood what orders mean,” Fathia said, rising to her feet, her rifle swinging in her arms. The barrel wasn’t pointed at Sarah—it never would be, not unless Fathia truly intended to kill the younger woman—but the implied threat was meant to be taken seriously. “You were a foundling that she took like her own child, and you cry like you are still a baby.”

  Sarah started to respond but Ayaan raised her hands for silence, and she got it. “Do you know why we came to Egypt?” she asked, her voice low, soft as the sand under their feet.

  “There was nothing to eat in Somalia,” Sarah replied. It was true. When the dead rose, when the Epidemic came famine had already ransacked the Horn of Africa. With few living people left to raise crops the food shortages had turned into outright starvation. Egypt, with its modernized cities full of markets and groceries, had promised at least some preserved foods. Cans and jars full of tinned meat and pickled vegetables. Ayaan had brought her unit out of Somalia in the hopes of a better life and she had delivered on her promise.

  “To survive,” Fathia answered. “To rebuild.”

  Ayaan nodded. “We’ve come so far. I won’t be driven out now.”

  A protest bubbled out of Sarah’s heart. “We’re in danger. When we find ourselves in danger we fall back to a defensible position. You taught me that.”

  A smile touched Ayaan’s tight face. “I’m glad to see you listened. Perhaps you will take another lesson. There are times, however rare, when running away is a mistake. This Russian, this Tsarevich, the Prince of Death, he grows stronger every day. If I do not stop his evil now, when I have a chance, I may not be able to face him the next time. Today I will kill him. If he has the ability to project images of himself then I am forced to go after him on foot, so that I can feel his skull breaking and know I have finished the job.”

  “So let’s call in some backup. Get the others in here, get some free fire zones established, maybe build a redoubt to funnel his advance—”

  “Sarah,” Ayaan interrupted.

  “No, seriously, we can get the other helicopter down here in twenty, maybe thirty minutes, we can establish a killzone, then draw him into—”

  “Sarah.” Ayaan closed her eyes and shook her head. “Please go wait with Osman.”

  Stunned, Sarah finally shut up. She couldn’t believe it. Ayaan had uttered the ultimate insult—she had announced that Sarah was useless. That she didn’t want Sarah around during the fight. It was the kind of thing Ayaan would say to a child, a baby.

  There was also no appeal to be made. Once Ayaan had given an order she never took them back. Feeling the stares of Fathia and Leyla and the others on her back she
retreated to the helicopter. It occurred to her when she was halfway there that she should have just been quiet, should have accepted Ayaan’s command without question the way the others did. It also occurred to her that if she was in the helicopter she was less likely to get killed.

  She was thinking such thoughts, her head lowered in dejection, when something fast and horrible smacked into her like a moving car. She fell down hard on the sand as something colorless and violent and extremely fast reared up over her, its stubby arms lifted high, its shining head sparkling in the sunlight and she knew, was absolutely certain, that in the next few microseconds she was going to die a quick but extremely painful death. She closed her eyes but she could still see the aura of the dead thing that was about to kill her. Its energy was like nothing she’d ever seen before. It was dark, of course, cold and hungry like any ghoul’s. But instead of smoking and hissing and sizzling away like ice melting in the sun, this energy fizzed and snapped like something on fire. Its shape was wrong, too, something was missing—

  She heard gunfire and it fell away from her, out of her vision. One of Ayaan’s squad had saved her. She opened her eyes and saw a still-moving body sliding down the slipface of a dune. Its arms pumped wildly at the air, moving so fast they blurred. Impossible—the dead lacked the energy to move like that. They were slow, lumbering, uncoordinated wrecks.

  This one could have caught a hummingbird in mid-flight and swallowed it whole in the space between two wing strokes.

  Getting a good look at it wasn’t easy but Sarah could make out some details. The dead thing had been knee-capped by automatic rifle fire and would never walk again. It was naked, its skin grey and shrunken on its bones. Its lips had either rotten away or been cut back, revealing a pale stretch of jawbone. The better to bite with, Sarah supposed. It wore a miner’s helmet, complete with a broken lamp, to protect its vulnerable cranium. Its hands—oh God—its hands had been cut off, leaving bloodless, ragged stumps. The bones of its forearms had been sharpened into vicious spikes.

  Nausea washed up from her stomach into her throat but Sarah held herself together. The dead felt little pain, she knew, but they also lacked the manual dexterity for that kind of surgery. It had to have been a living person who had cut those hands off.

  “Two o’clock,” Leyla called. Sarah managed to turn away from the horror below her to see a new one in front of her. The body of an undead man stood atop a dune a hundred meters from her position. His skin had collapsed on his skeleton so that all she could see of his face was bone. At least he had hands, though they were equally skeletonized. He wore a flapping and fluttering green robe, a little like a burnoose, more like a medieval monk’s habit. He leaned on a heavy walking staff that was made of three human femurs, fused end-to-end.

  A lich. Not one of the mindless puppets Sarah had seen reaching for the helicopter but a lich, a real lich, a dead man with an intact brain, as smart as any human and more than likely possessing powers indistinguishable from magic. It was the greatest of the Tsarevich’s crimes that he not only destroyed the living but he changed them, making them over to suit his designs. He had made the handless ghoul, just as he had made liches to be his lieutenants.

  Sarah had survived dozens of raids against the undead and hundreds of attacks by hungry corpses. She didn’t spook easily. She’d never seen a lich before though and the apparition chilled her right to her guts.

  “I gave you an order,” Ayaan said. She wasn’t looking at Sarah. She had her AK-47 up to her eye and she was lining up a headshot. The green phantom was at long range though and Sarah knew Ayaan’s chances of a clean kill were slim.

  The robed monster raised its free hand to point at the women before it. One bony finger stabbed out at them across the sand. Sarah could feel dark energy streaming from it like light through broken clouds. Rolling up over the dunes, bouncing, bounding for them on all fours a dark shape zipped across the sand. Another came up behind its green master, launched itself at the women.

  “Fall back,” Ayaan said. The women started, slowly, to come out of their battle postures. “Everyone fall back.”

  Sarah tried to move but was compelled to watch a third speeding shape jump over the dunes. A fourth, a fifth, and a sixth came along in close order. One of them wore a motorcycle helmet with the visor closed—she got half a look at it before it accelerated right for her.

  A warm and yielding arm—with a hand on the end of it—scythed across her stomach and knocked her off her feet. It was Fathia, Ayaan’s second in command. She picked up Sarah like a rucksack and bodily flung her into the helicopter’s cargo space. Lying on her stomach Sarah looked out across the sand. She saw the female soldiers running towards her, running towards the aircraft. The accelerated ghouls, moving like time lapse movies of what they should be, were running faster.

  “Get us out of here,” Fathia screamed at Osman. The pilot was already flipping switches on his control panel. One of the speeding ghouls skidded to a stop not fifty meters away and looked right at the helicopter. It saw them—Sarah could feel its attention, its desire.

  One soldier, then another jumped into the helicopter. Sarah watched three of the sped-up ghouls collide on top of Leyla, their sharpened talons stabbing into her again and again like mechanical pistons. Her blood spilled out on the sand and the smell of death brushed up against Sarah’s nose. There were others losing their individual battles with the blurred monsters. Where was Ayaan? Sarah could hear her screaming but she couldn’t see her.

  “Go now, go now, go now,” Fathia chanted, leaning out of the loading door, scanning the dune for the women who hadn’t made it to the helicopter. Sarah found herself chanting the words too. The fast ghoul was heading for them, galloping across the sand. If he got inside the helicopter it would take him only moments to kill them all.

  But where was Ayaan? Sarah couldn’t see her. She pushed her attention outward, as she’d been taught, searching for any sign of the commander. There—she heard something. “Cantuug tan!” Ayaan’s voice. She sounded distant, her words torn at by the desert wind. Had she surged forward to try to take down the green phantom? Any further instructions she might have were lost in the noise of the rotors spinning up. Before the fast ghoul could reach the Mi-8 Osman had it airborne and banking away.

  Only half the crew seats were filled. No one protested or asked the pilot to go back for the missing soldiers—they knew better. It was just that kind of world. It had been for twelve years.

  4

  The helicopter set down in the middle of the camp near Port Said, five kilometers away from where Ayaan had died. Osman put it down gently between its twin and the third, smaller copter that had broken down a year before and was kept now only for spare parts. Sarah took the rifles from the women who’d made it out and checked their safeties, then loaded them back into the weapons rack. As the official mascot of Ayaan’s squad it felt on her to do all the heavy lifting even though she lacked the muscle mass of the soldiers. It was also her job to clean the blood out of the cargo bay but she couldn’t even fathom how she would do that. She couldn’t begin to think of what she was going to do next. She jumped down from the helicopter’s deck and felt the hard heavy lump of her weapon in her pocket. She took out the flat Makarov PM and released the magazine from the grip and let the slide move forward until it locked in the open position. Checking to make sure there was no round in the chamber she put the magazine in one pocket and the pistol in the other. She did all this without the slightest thought, just as she’d done it hundreds of times before. Ayaan had forced her to practice, to do it fast, to do it the same way every time. Ayaan.

  Sarah had no idea what to do next.

  Ayaan was gone. Dead—Ayaan was dead. She might be wandering out in the desert that very moment, mindless, hungry, unfeeling. Or maybe the fast ghouls had devoured her entirely. Dead. Either way... either way there was no one left to tell her what to do. She couldn’t remember another time like that. If she thought back far enough
she could remember her father, she could remember pushing her face into the softness of his shirt, the smell of his sweat as he held her against his chest. She could remember him running, moving, she could remember her mother not being with them anymore. After that every memory she had revolved around Ayaan. She ran her hands over her cropped hair, scratched at her scalp with her nails. She didn’t know what to do.

  “Hey, help me with this,” Osman said.

  She wheeled around and saw him crouched down by the ruined fuel pod on the side of the aircraft. He looked up at her with an expression of such concern and compassion that she wondered if it was actually pity that he felt. Her cheeks burned and she moved quickly to help him disassemble the pod, unbolting it from the airframe with a socket wrench. She caught the webbing between her thumb and index finger in the rough metal and pain lanced up her arm. It cleared her mind out in a hurry.

  “I’m hungry, do you want something? I have a can of stewed tomatoes I’ve been saving for a rainy day.” Osman didn’t look at her this time, which was almost worse. “Listen, little girl, we’re alive, and that counts for something, that’s an achievement in a world like this.” His arm slipped around her shoulders and she started to shove him away, then relented. After a moment she turned into him, pressed her body against his in an actual embrace. Osman had been in her life as long as she could remember, too. If Ayaan had been like a big sister to her, Osman had been her uncle. It was good to smell the kif smoke that cured his frayed shirt, good to feel his body heat. “We’ll get by,” he told her, “just as we always have. God and his Prophet must not want us so badly if he let us live this long, right?”