“Oh, no,” Nilla said from somewhere further into the forest. Her voice was as soft as the constant sound of needles falling through the branches. The same sound, the same softness, that the snow made when it fell from the trees. Ayaan hurried on.
A long vane of metal arched up from the snow ahead of her like a pole driven into the ground. Though rust and general decay had claimed it Ayaan recognized it as the rotor of a helicopter. In a clearing ahead the majority of the aircraft’s wreckage stood forgotten and ill-used by weather, a standing circle of broken titanium and steel and Plexiglas. There had been a bad fire there once, presumably when the helicopter crashed. There were human remains in the circle. Simple bones, black with soot, white where the sun had bleached them. One set of remains was still moving.
He wore the uniform of a soldier, faded by sunlight but still draped with insignia and medallions. He had been partially eaten, most of the flesh of his legs and arms having been torn away, and he had been burned as well. Eyeless, nearly faceless, his skull stared up at the sky. The few muscles left in his arms were straining at a jagged length of metal that erupted from his ribcage. He was trying to get himself free. He’d probably been trying for twelve years.
Nilla knelt next to his head, her hands across her face. She didn’t say anything.
Ayaan understood. She came forward and put her hands on the tattered skin of the dead man’s head. She closed her eyes and let a pulse of dark energy trickle through her fingers, into what remained of his brain. He fell back on his spike and stopped moving. Nilla nodded emphatically and rose to her feet. “He didn’t want to trust me, but he had to,” she said.
“Careful,” Ayaan told her. “You’re starting to turn into a somebody.”
Nilla gave her a smile that started to melt Ayaan’s dead heart. The smile dropped from her face almost instantly, however. “Am I losing my mind, or do you hear that, too?” She turned around to look at the pieces of the downed helicopter.
Ayaan stood perfectly still, more still than she ever could have in life, and made herself all one ear. She listened, and tuned out the natural sounds around her, and listened again. She definitely heard it. The sound a helicopter’s rotor makes when it’s moving under power. How was it possible? Was this some kind of vehicular ghost? Ayaan had seen a lot of strange things but she wasn’t ready to accept that.
Then a real helicopter went by over their heads so low its shadow darkened the clearing, so fast it was gone in the time it took for Ayaan’s eyes to adjust to the dimness. She glanced at Nilla, then started running back toward the road. The explosions started before she covered half the distance.
9
There were hundreds of them down there. Most of them dead, but not all. She saw golden energy sprinkled throughout the column. The vast majority of them were on foot. They trailed along for a quarter of a mile as they threaded through the narrow pass in the side of the mountain. Some of them were alive.
“Am I clear?” Sarah shouted into her microphone. Someone tapped her shoulder—that was the signal for “affirmative”. They had practiced this, drilled it in Omaha but that hadn’t really counted. The fuel depot at the air base there had been swarming with ghouls. They had flown around for nearly three hours picking off the hungry dead from the air until it was safe to land. That time nobody had been able to shoot back.
The flatbed beneath them, the same one she’d seen in Egypt, had two machine gun positions on its back. Both of them were crewed by living people in light blue paper shirts. Sarah had never killed a living person before.
In any war, she told herself, somebody had to shoot first.
The SMAW, which she had learned stood for Shoulder-mounted Multi-purpose Assault Weapon, came with a little rifle built into the side of the tube. You weren’t supposed to hurt anybody with the rifle. It was just for lining up the real shot. Sarah squeezed the trigger and a cloud of splinters jumped off the flatbed. One of the machine gunners looked down, his head turning comically fast.
“Rocket,” she announced, and depressed the firing bar at the same time she touched the trigger mechanism. The magneto at the back of the SMAW clicked and super-hot exhaust jumped out the back of the tube and through the far crew door, which she had remembered to open first. There was no recoil whatsoever, though the rocket launcher vibrated enough that her hands went numb.
When she had chosen the SMAW from the arsenal on Governors Island she had rationalized that she was fighting liches, not just ghouls, and so she needed something bigger than just a sidearm. She hadn’t considered at the time that she might be aiming her rockets at living people.
She had no choice. Those machine guns had to be taken out, and quickly. They could chew up the Jayhawk in seconds. She had no choice. She kept telling herself that.
Her rocket looked to her like a perfectly straight silver line drawn between the helicopter and the converted railroad car. When it reached the wooden surface of the flatbed it expanded in a cloud of brown and grey smoke. What looked like two hundred pounds of red jelly splattered across the flatbed and painted the side of the yurt, coated the dead men turning the flywheels near the front of the car. The dead men didn’t stop at their work.
The other machine gunner, the one she hadn’t aimed for, was down on the deck, clutching his ears. He was coated in red jelly too. Sarah couldn’t find any sign that her target, either the machine gun itself or the man who had been standing next to it, had ever even existed. Except for all that jelly.
She wanted to vomit, she very much intended to lean out the crew door of the Jayhawk and heave her guts out. Instead she rolled back inside and got out of the way of her replacements.
Mael Mag Och had told her to find an army, but Marisol had refused her any living soldiers. Sarah had taken the next best option, and recruited the mummies who had once watched over her father. The mummies from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When Ptolemy called them forward, they had not hesitated.
Three mummies stepped into the rectangular crew door opening and pulled open the telescoping tubes of their M72 Light Antitank Weapons. In perfect unison the mummies lifted the tubes to their cheeks, selected targets, and let fly. Their rockets popped out of their tubes with a hollow sound, fah-wuhp, fah-wuhp, fah-wuhp and twisted in mid-air as stabilizing fins popped out of their casings. Lying on a ballistic blanket on the floor of the helicopter Sarah couldn’t see where the rockets went. Each M72 held only one 66 mm rocket: in chorus the mummies dropped their tubes out of the crew door and then stepped back to let the third wave move into place.
The solid fuel in the rockets combusted entirely before the rockets left their tubes. The exhaust gases thus produced could reach fourteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Sarah thought Ayaan had been right. She’d told Sarah many times that if you focused on the numbers and statistics and technical details it helped you not think about what you were doing to human bodies.
Red jelly... Sarah shivered and pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head.
She moved forward to stand in the hatch to the crew compartment where her father sat next to Osman. Gary crouched on the floor behind her father’s seat. He looked different somehow but she couldn’t place it. Maybe he had grown some—yes, his legs looked longer. Maybe her father was subconsciously working on him even in that moment. “Make a wide circle but let me see what we achieved,” she told Osman, who simply nodded.
Through the crew door she studied the column of people living and dead. She saw that half the flatbed looked damaged and parts of it were definitely on fire. It was still moving. It should stop at any moment as the Tsarevich gave the signal to halt the column and take cover. That was basic military tactics—the longer he stayed out in the open the longer she could dominate the engagement from the sky.
This was exactly what Sarah wanted. She wanted him to run for cover, because the best available cover was a narrow cut in the mountain about half a mile back down the road behind him. It would be impossible to atta
ck that defile effectively from the air—the Tsarevich would make for it at once. Sarah had spent most of a day burying remotely-detonated mines in the road surface there.
She was pretty proud of her strategy. It made a lot of logical sense. There was only one flaw in it.
“He hasn’t changed course at all,” she said out loud when five minutes had passed. That was more than enough time for a retreat order to go down the chain of command. The flatbed still crawled forward. The dead—and the living—still clustered in its wake. They were sitting ducks. She could pick them off at her leisure.
“Did he bring them all this way just so I could kill them?” she demanded.
“He doesn’t seem the type to cry over casualties,” Osman replied. She was glad somebody was talking to her. She looked back to the tail end of the crew compartment where Ptolemy stood waiting with a fresh SMAW for her. She chewed on her lip.
“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 madly.
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?”
10
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 the process was still going on. 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 clearing 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 a backup.
Ayaan would have slapped her, she thought, and rightly so.
The mummies jumped down from the crew hatch. She tossed them their guns 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.
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