“Thanks,” she said, picking her Makarov up off the weed-cracked sidewalk. The mummy didn’t follow her and 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.
13
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 broken fields 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.
“How is this even possible?” Ayaan asked as they passed by another stand of saplings. “This was all developed, when I was here before. It was cities and housing developments. There were parking lots everywhere. Then the dead came through and they devoured anything organic.” She stared through the windows at what a more charitable observer might have called a jungle.
“It’s the same energy that drives us,” Erasmus told her with a shrug. “The energy that animates us also encourages green things to grow.”
“It has been only twelve years, and the world is healing itself already,” Ayaan said. Despite her mood she couldn’t help but be a little cheered by that.
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 yet 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 that legend insisted had been all toxic chemical plants and forgotten factories—was apparently one vast forest of saplings 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 rots,” 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 stubby 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 and choke. She didn’t.
Swallowing she felt the rush of the bird’s life pulse through her, burst inside of her. Her head cleared, her body softened and relaxed. It felt so good it was hard to think of what she was doing. Then she looked up. There were people—living people—watching her.
She hadn’t heard them coming. She hadn’t seen any sign of them until they were right up behind her. They were survivors, true survivors, and they knew how to stay safe. They must have only approached once the truck stopped.
Ayaan clutched the carcass of the bird to her chest and turned away. She crouched down in the shadow of the truck and tried not to look at them. It was hard. It was harder not to chew on the bird’s dying energy. So hard she couldn’t help herself, even as the survivors stared.
“Survivors” might have been putting it too strongly. There clothes had faded and torn over time and not been replaced. They had very little hair. Their skin was discolored and raw, red and irritated. Their eyes were crusty slits in their faces and they were missing teeth. Yet their energy was gold and bright.
One of them was obviously the leader—he wore a shirt, a green polo shirt with a ragged hem. He held a sharp piece of metal in his hand, a broken piece of a street sign perhaps. He stood in front of a female who held a tiny baby tight against her breasts. She couldn’t be more than four and half feet tall. How old had she been when the Epidemic struck? She must have been an infant herself. Occasionally she shook her baby a little, rocked it vigorously. It made no sound at all.
The shirted one grabbed an emaciated boy and shoved him forward. His eyes never left the pavement. The boy took a few steps towards Erasmus and then stopped, his head bowed. He said something in English but in an accent so thick Ayaan couldn’t understand. One word sounded like “sack-erf-eyes.”. Sack of eyes? Even Ayaan’s stomach turned.
No. He had meant something else. Sacrifice. He was offering up his own flesh in exchange for the safety of his family. Ayaan felt a low, hot burn of recognition, of sympathy, flushing through her chest.
“Look at dead-enders,” the green phantom said to her, in surprisingly bad Russian. “To clutch at life so much. They hide, you know. Hide in bad places, toxic wildernesses so bad not even ghouls will follow in.” He switched to English as if his tongue had grown tired. “They don’t realize it yet but this is the best day of their little lives.”
Erasmus put one clawed hand on the sacrificial boy’s shoulder and lifted the other in a sweeping gesture. He gave them a grand speech in slow, heavily enunciated English, all about what the Tsarevich would do for them. Food. Clean water. Rudimentary health care.
Despite herself Ayaan realized he was telling the truth—as had the green phantom. These starving, sick people were barely holding on to life by their fingernails. Their lives would be ruled by constant fear and constant death. They were literally living like animals. Ayaan knew about refugees, had been one herself, both before and after the Epidemic. She knew about famine and war and pestilence. It looked like America was learning from the African primer. If this tiny tribe joined up with the Tsarevich they would be slaves—but still their lives would improve dramatically. She remember the Turkish prisoners she’d seen on Cyprus, the ones who watched one of their own be drowned and then return from the dead. She thought of Dekalb, her old, long-lost friend, who had made a similarly horrible bargain. He had turned his only daughter over to a tribe of anarchic woman warriors. That must have seemed like a horror at the time, but it worked out for Sarah.
The Tsarevich was a monster, a demon out of hell. Yet if he was the only one who could save people like this, the only one who could help them...
They left the tribe standing by the side of the road. The liches piled back into the truck and headed on their way, with a promise that another truck would be along soon.
Through the back window Ayaan watched the little family dwindle behind them. She saw no hope in their slitted eyes. Their heads were lowered. They did not speak to each other about the wonders to come.
“Just a little further,” Erasmus told her, looking strangely subdued. Wasn’t he excited about the prospect of saving souls? “One of them had a tip for us,” the werewolf told her. “We’re definitely on the right track.”
Ayaan scowled. “Those people—we didn’t lie to them, did we? Someone will come for them, yes?”
“Yes,” Erasmus said, biting into the word. “We will come back. Only... there are some people so far gone that you can’t recruit them. They’re too weak or too diseased to be any use. I don’t know if it’ll happen to this bunch, that decision’s not up to me.”
His eyes said he did know, that he was certain of it. “What then?” she demanded.
“They get used for something else.”
He wouldn’t say anymore. He only ignored her when she demanded an answer. She knew there were only two possibilities, though. They could become new, handless soldiers for the Tsarevich. Or they could be made into food.
In the rear-view mirror the sacrificial boy still stood just where he had, waiting to see, waiting for whatever came next.
14
Leaving the highway for a more rural route they slowed down dramatically until they were barely crawling along, much slower than a human could walk. They stopped at a sign nearly obscured by wrist-thick tree trunks:
Now Entering
ROCKROTH STATE FOREST
Ayaan was uncertain how one could be expected to differentiate this new forest from the jungle behind them.
A few miles farther in they came to a place where the trees grew so close to the road that the green phantom had to come down into the cab with them. He smelled like something stale and wet. They listened to the tree branches drumming on the roof of the truck for a while and drove in silence. Eventually they came to a place so narrow the truck couldn’t fit through. The green phantom and Erasmus jumped down from the cab and started to press on. The handless ghouls from the cargo bed streamed down after them, their eyes narrow slits, their tongues licking at their dry lips as if they’d only awoken from sleep, though she knew they had been dead, truly dead moments before. Ayaan called out to them to wait a moment.
“What’s this, the famous Ayaan? Scared of a few trees?” the green phantom chortled at her.
“No,” she told him. She waved at where their vehicle stood nearly wedged in by trees. “I just wanted to turn the truck around. If we need to get out of here in a hurry it will save us time later.”
Even the skull-faced lich had to admit she had a point.
“I’ve been doing this my whole life,” she told him. “I only stayed alive as long as I did by knowing all the little tricks.”
It took a long fifteen minutes to move the truck, backing and filling over and over again on the narrow road surface. When it was done they moved into the dark space between the trees and Ayaan realized she was, in fact, a little afraid. The shadowy forest pressed in on them instantly, the waxy leaves of the trees brushing against their clothes, their hair, the branches underneath scraping at them like limp and bony fingers Cobwebs draped across the path every few feet and had to be swept away. Insects plagued Erasmus, live insects that he would pick from his fur and absently stuff into his mouth to suck out their golden energy.
Though it was only mid-afternoon the darkness pressed in around them like a fog. They tried to follow the road but the forest had its own paths to offer. One of these lead to a wide clearing and the green phantom hurried inward, digging his femur staff into the ground for traction on the moss-slick trail.
Ayaan followed him in and emerged into a brightly-lit place where the underbrush grew wild but the trees had all been pruned back. Piles of gray deadfall ringed the open space, a few dead leaves still fluttering on the fallen branches. Ayaan had grown up in a desert land but even she could tell that trees didn’t form such a clearing naturally.
Then there was the goat. He lay in the middle of the clearing, staked to a low hillock. He was dying, his fur littered with bits of decaying leaves, his eyes milky and lost, the long pupils very much dilated even in the bright sun. He had kicked over his water dish and Ayaan could count the ribs sticking out of his side. Only his horns, which rose from his head in a thick, curling V looked healthy.
“Someone has left me a snack,” the green phantom announced, cheerfully. Ayaan could feel the goat’s energy herself, flickering away slowly but still golden and almost irresistible. She put out a hand to stop the green-robed lich, though.
“Why hasn’t some wandering ghoul finished this animal off long ago?” she asked.
“Maybe there aren’t any nearby.” He looked down at her arm as if he would happily chew it off to get to the goat.
“Not anymore, there aren’t.” With her free hand Ayaan pointed to piles of bleached bones—human bones—mixed in with the woody deadfall at the edges of the clearing. Then she pointed out a shallow depression in the grass on the far side of the goat’s mound. Broken vegetation pointed away from the defile in a radial pattern. A similar crater dipped down not more than a dozen feet from where they stood. “Have you never seen a minefield before?” she asked.
“Ridiculous,” the green phantom rasped. Behind him Erasmus came up with a large rock in one furry hand. Before Ayaan could stop him he tossed the rock deep into the clearing. Metal sprouted from the ground like an evil weed and then a flash of light pressed up hard against Ayaan’s side and nearly knocked her over. Hot dirt and bits of shredded goat meat splattered her leathers.
“I didn’t expect that big an explosion,” Erasmus said, spitting dirt and pebbles out of his mouth. All three of them had been caught by metal shrapnel, ruining their clothes. Had they been any closer their brains would be strewn around the trees behind them.
“That,” Ayaan said, fingering a hole in her skull-print leather jacket, “was a Bouncing Betty. It was spring-loaded to jump in the air when detonated. This spreads the shrapnel over a much wider area and dramatically increases the kill radius.”
“You’ve seen these before?” the green phantom asked.
“Friends of mine have. From closer up.” Ayaan peered through the smoke that filled the clearing. “Mines. There are better ways to keep out strangers, but few that make as much noise. Whoever planted these mines was listening. They’ll know we’re coming now if they didn’t before. We should turn back.”
&n
bsp; “We can’t abort now. The Tsarevich puts a great deal of importance on our mission,” the green phantom told her.
“We have to move faster, then. Find our enemies before they find us. That’s probably the fastest way in,” she said, pointing at a continuation of the trail on the far side. “It’s probably booby-trapped, every step of the way.”
“So we go around.” The green phantom turned away from the minefield and headed back into the darkness of the forest. He had a small compass and while they lacked a map he could at least tell if they were headed in the right direction. Erasmus went first, his vicious claws effective at clearing the overhang like ten little machetes. Ayaan followed and was followed in turn by the green phantom. The handless ghouls brought up the rear, so silent Ayaan kept forgetting they were even there.
They’d been moving for the better part of half an hour, pushing westward and southward when they could, when Erasmus stopped short and Ayaan’s face collided with his furry back. “Hold on,” he said. “There’s something... there’s some energy up here.”
Ayaan called his name but he rushed forward, perhaps intent on reaching their goal, perhaps after something else. She followed as fast as she could while keeping her wits about her. Her feet—nowhere near as steady as they used to be—kept getting snagged in tree roots and undergrowth and she had a terrible presentiment that she would arrive too late, that he would fall in some pit lined with sharpened stakes or trigger a precariously-balanced log to fall on him from high branches. She shouted to him again but he made no answer.
She nearly ran into him again when she finally found him. He had stopped before an enormous old-growth tree, big enough that the trail wrapped around it, a massive wooden column climbing with ants, wrapped with the tendrils of epiphytes, studded everywhere with stunted, sunlight-deprived limbs still as thick as saplings of their own. Erasmus looked as if he were leaning forward into the tree’s bulk, perhaps just resting for a moment. Resting on his face. She cautiously moved around him. He had his eyes and nose pressed up tight against a knot in the trunk the width of a dinner plate. He wasn’t moving. Coupled with a dead man’s lack of breath or pulse he looked more like some furry excrescence of the tree than a separate organism.
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