“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. 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 turned 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 Bronx-Battery tunnel.”
“There’s a tunnel under the water?” 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 the bay getting in?”
Marisol shook her head. She didn’t know, or didn’t care to answer. She took an enormous key ring 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.
What next? When she 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.
They climbed up a long enclosed ladder with cold metal rungs until they reached a platform maybe twelve feet above the doorway. Catwalks ran away from them in three directions. They took the middle way and walked through the center of the shaft toward an identical platform at the far side of the tower. The wind rising through the shaft vibrated the narrow catwalk and made Sarah clutch to the handrail but the mummy traversed the perilous way like a tight-rope walker—with no hesitation at all.
A bizarre and horrifying tableau waited for them at the far platform. A ghoul crouched there, feasting on a corpse, while something else, a tiny skeletal thing like a dog or... no, not like a dog at all, she couldn’t really say what it was at first but then...
It was a skull, a human skull, with no lower jawbone. Very human eyes looked out from its sockets. Six jointed crab-like legs jutted out from underneath and carried it along as it scuttled backward away from her. She screamed again—it was that kind of place, a chamber of horrors—and the skull crab backed up even farther.
Then she looked down at the feasting ghoul. It was time to go, time to get out. Had she been sent here as a sacrifice? Did Marisol and her constituents do this with all their visitors, did they feed them to the island’s resident monsters? Sure, it made sense. Send the occasional snack up to the tower and the ghouls would leave the Islanders in peace. Sarah turned to flee, only to find mummies blocking the catwalks. They didn’t advance on her, just stood there waiting for her to make a move.
She had her pistol, her little Makarov. She could... she could fight her way free, at least take down a few of her captors if—if she—
“Sarah,” the ghoul said behind her. She whirled around and was in for a mild shock. It wasn’t a ghoul, it was a lich. Its energy told her that much. And the corpse it had been eating—well, her special senses told her that it hadn’t been alive in quite a while. Her actual eyes told her as much as well. The unanimated corpse, the meal, had the dried up look of someone who died years previous. The lich had been eating a slack, not a living person.
“Sarah,” it said again. There were so many things hidden in the word, so many different kind of emotions and questions. She gave the lich a good once-over.
Blue eyes. Flannel shirt. She was pretty sure she knew what that shirt would smell like, if she got close enough to bury her face in it.
She stepped closer. He had his arms open wide and she pushed herself into his embrace. Shoved her face right into his shirt.
“Daddy,” she said, and she was eight years old again, and crying.
6
The knock came again. She stared at the door. “Just come in already. It’s not like I can keep you out.”
There was no response.
Ayaan staggered to the door and pushed it open. There was no one there. Just darkness and cool, slightly salty air. A cavernous space lay out there, maybe an empty warehouse, perhaps an abandoned auditorium. She stepped outside, her bruised feet dragging over grimy concrete. A little light came from above her through a hole in the ceiling. It made a sort of natural spotlight on the floor. She could see dust motes spiraling in the shaft of sunlight. It almost, but not quite, illuminated an AK-47 assault rifle suspended from the ceiling by a length of string. Ayaan shuffled toward the weapon. She touched the cherry wood stock. It was not her own AK, she would have recognized the pattern of the stain on the wood, the scratches on the metal that had become as familiar to her over the years as the spots and blemishes on her own skin. Still. It was a Kalashnikov and she knew it would be a reliable, effective weapon. She yanked it down, snapping its cord, and examined the chamber then broke out the magazine. A full clip of ammunition. With fingers that felt unus
ually clumsy she slipped one of the bullets out of the magazine and examined it, almost dropping it when she held it up to her eye. She half expected the bullets to be blanks or somehow adulterated but they weren’t. Just the standard 7.62 x 39 mm cartridge. She slapped the magazine back into place, moved the selector lever to single fire and released the cocking lever with a clang.
Something stirred in the corners of the big room. No, more than one something. She brought the weapon around to firing position, ready to aim as soon as a target presented itself. None did. Slowly, deliberately, she took a step toward the still-open bedroom door.
A shadow flicked across the door, slamming it shut. A shadow that moved faster than any living human being she’d ever seen. She knew what that meant. A fast ghoul—probably an entire squad of them. Which meant the green phantom had to be nearby to spur them on. “Maybe you’ll tell me your name now that we’ve got so much in common,” she announced, trying to flush him out.
It wasn’t the green phantom who answered, however. It was another of the Tsarevich’s lieutenants. The one she’d come to call (if only in her head) the lipless wonder. “Is test,” he told her, his voice bouncing around the ceiling, amplified electronically and broadcast from several directions at once. He could be anywhere.
“Is test,” he said again. “Is very fair. Abilities special, some would call powers, they come out under great stress only. What greater stress than life-or-death, yes? Sometimes the lich has no power, nothing special, and then he must be put down. If he has powers then he can survive test.”
“And making me do this in the dark, that’s part of the fairness?” Ayaan demanded, but before she could finish the sentence something slapped her arm hard enough to make it sting. She grabbed her wrist and felt torn leather there.
Clearly the test had already begun. She could live or die by her own actions. If she was going to live she needed to shoot, and to shoot she needed to see. She thought of Sarah’s gift, the ability to see the energies of life and death. Ayaan would have that ability now—she was dead. All of the dead had the special vision. It was how they hunted. She could feel the accelerated ghouls whizzing around her, could hear them moving in the dark but she forced herself to calm down, to close her eyes, to—to feel.
Yes. It was there, she had only to look. It had nothing to do with the eyes, though her brain formed images of what she received. Her skin took in most of the information, sensitive areas of her body reacting with abhorrence to the presence of undead things.
And there they were. She understood, perhaps for the first time, just what ghouls were. Empty shells. Husks. Person-shaped receptacles. The energy that flowed into them, that suffused them was the only thing keeping them upright. There were no minds, no souls inside them. She stared down at her own body, at her flesh wrapped up in the skin of some other dead beast and knew she was one of them. Her intelligence, her personality, were merely riding around in her corpse.
One of the ghouls came at her, moving low and fast, bent almost parallel with the floor. Its sharpened bones flashed toward her but she could see them now, smoky and purple with stolen life energy. She ducked and spun and barely avoided impaling herself on his cut-down arms. She had time, just, to wonder if he was one of the ghouls butchered on the ship while she watched.
She ducked and rolled away from him and watched as he skidded past her, sliding on the slick floor.
She could see them now—only three of them, their energy thrumming off the walls—but her special vision couldn’t compensate for really seeing. She had little depth perception, she couldn’t find their ranges in the dark. She knew it was day outside and the sun was shining—she could tell from the hole in the roof.
Ayaan waited for the next attack, a ghoul coming at her with arms flailing and legs pumping. She dropped to all fours and swung away from him, then dashed for the nearest wall. She felt old, dried-up wood, probably plywood installed over a broken window. There was no time to find a door.
With her arm bent, with her weight behind it Ayaan smashed at the wood expecting to dislocate her shoulder. Instead it gave way like a cobweb and she spilled out into daylight so bright it seared her eyes.
Dead pupils, Ayaan decided, could not contract as quickly as live pupils. Her eyes throbbed with pain as she got her feet under her and ran, her boots finding the planks of a boardwalk, her muscles burning as she tried to run. The best she could manage was a sort of drunken stagger, little better than a stiff walk.
When her eyes finally started to adjust to the white light that flashed off the ocean she lifted the Kalashnikov into a firing position and sighted on the window she’d broken open. They would come from there, she figured. She had to assume they wouldn’t have more ghouls lying in wait for her outside.
A ghoul wearing a fireman’s helmet appeared in the window. The lower half of his face had been carved away to give him a bigger mouth, a bigger bite. His skin was the tawny color of a predator in a dusty land.
Ayaan wasted no time. She lined up her shot and placed a tight burst of three rounds right in the exposed portion of his forehead.
At least, they should have gone there. Instead none of the three even hit him. In horror Ayaan looked down at her weapon. Had it been altered somehow, had the iron sights been filed down, twisted out of alignment, something?
No. It was her.
The ghoul leapt through the window and headed toward her like a rocket. She fired again and saw dusty dried blood explode from his elbow. It didn’t even slow him down.
It was her. It was her fingers, her hands that felt like formless clay at the ends of her arms. There was a reason why the green phantom took the hands of his soldiers—they were worth less as weapons than the sharpened ends of bone. And hers were the same. She lacked the motor skills, the fine muscle control it took to fire a rifle with any kind of effectiveness. She dropped the weapon on the ground. She would never use an AK-47 again, she knew.
No more than ten meters separated them, a distance he could cover in seconds. If she was going to pass this test—did she even want to pass it? Let him stab her, let him destroy her, and she would be done. She had spent all her life fighting the liches. To live on, to continue to exist at any rate, meant becoming what she hated most.
It didn’t matter. She knew, because Ayaan could look into her own heart, she had mastered that skill very early on, she knew she wanted to keep going. She could no longer stay alive for Sarah. But she could continue to fight.
But how? With her bare hands? She closed her eyes and tried to think. Sarah spoke often of the life force, the energy that pervaded all living things. Ayaan had always thought of it as similar to baraka, the dangerous blessedness of clan leaders and Sufi saints. Just an old Somali superstition—but perhaps there was some reality to it. Now, after her death, she had no trouble feeling the energy all around her, the life force. A field of energy that passed through her, that wrapped her up and animated her dead flesh and kept her consciousness alive. If she were going to develop powers, just spontaneously grow some kind of mystical ability it would come from that source, from that energy, that baraka. Every lich power she’d heard of, all of their magic, was simply the ability to manipulate that field.
She reached down into it, gathered it in her hands. It made her skin tingle as she clutched at it, exactly as she might clutch at a blanket that covered her. She concentrated it, and time slowed down as she focused the energy, squeezing it down into tight hot balls of force in her hands.
The ghoul racing toward her seemed to stop in mid air as she raised her hands, threw them forward, and spat the built-up energy at him. It was that simple, it was second nature. Not something she had to learn.
The energy hit him square on, her aim perfect. It sizzled and spat with darkness as it touched him. It burst inside him like dark fire. His face wrinkled as if in concentration… and kept wrinkling. He had looked ageless before but as the energy—her energy—ripped through his flesh he took on the count
enance of an old man. His skin crinkled, turned papery, tore away from his bones. As it fluttered away on the wind it turned to fine powder, like talc.
His bones collapsed on the boardwalk, mere paces from her, his skull crumbling like old pottery. She had aged him to destruction—what remained of his head could have been a thousand years old.
She stood there forever, waiting for time to start up again. It didn’t. She had no breath, no heart beat to measure its passing. The sun failed to move across the sky. There had been more ghouls in the boarded up warehouse, at least two more but neither of them appeared to confront her.
She supposed she had passed the test.
A door in a nearby building creaked open on rusted hinges. She heard maniacal laughter echoing in her head, but had no idea who it belonged to. Then time started up once more, and she walked on swollen feet toward the door.
7
He was supposed to be dead—he was always dead, in her memory, in the stories they told about him. He was dead. Jack wounded him, Jack had turned and turned on him and bit him, infection had set in, Ayaan had sanitized him. It was the story of her life, of her origins.
None of it was true. Thank God.
His dead arms went around her in a feeble kind of embrace. She might have been held by a human-shaped agglutination of popsicle sticks and pipe-cleaners. Sarah pressed harder against him, against his woolen shirt that smelled of death and his dry, dry skin that cracked and peeled against her cheek. Disgust, even horror lost out to the feeling, the one, pure feeling that sang in her. She had never felt something so primal and focused before, except maybe the fear of death, and that was old to her, and this was new.
Three Zombie Novels Page 69
