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.
18
“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.
“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. Or at least it would have, if I’d let it.”
“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 visionary. 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.
He wanted to end the world. Finish ending it, anyway.
“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 one to call my own. A heart, that is. How I wanted to make things easy on you. All of you survivors. Instead you chose 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. “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. He’s going to collapse it—make it stop altogether somehow.”
“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. She’d seen what happened to the dead who got too close to the Source. If enough of that energy was released at once, how much damage could it do? Plenty, she decided. “You’d kill everything. Animals, plants, trees, people. 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 tried to get Ayaan to kill him, too. So you could take his place. You put the idea into his head in the first place that he could come here and heal himself. Because this is where you needed to be. How long have you been playing this game?”
“Since your Gary slaughtered me, since I realized how silly it was to think I could finish humanity one at a time. Since I realized it would take cunning, not main force. 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 took pity on you, a soft wee bairn in the hands of such rough folk. 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, lass.”
Sarah’s cheeks burned with her blood. She had failed everyone. She had failed so many times 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. “Why couldn’t we please just 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 mountains around her and the blue sky and the white puffy clouds. She saw the valley stripped of its carpet of bones. 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 to come. And it was all her fault.
“Good night, ladies,” Mael Mag Och said. Sarah expected him to throw himself down on the spikes, much as the Tsarevich had done. He didn’t, though. The vacuum tubes lit up of their own accord. The air hummed with power. Mael Mag Och screamed so violently the noise must have s
hredded his borrowed throat. Then he threw his head back and his spine went rigid. Power, raw energy, neither dark nor light, just powerful, crackled across his skin and leaked from his eyes, his mouth, the center of his chest. Laughing as his nervous system lit up with the clear fire of it he turned—and walked right past the event horizon of the Source. Flames whooshed to life on his shoulders and his back but he was not consumed, not as he should have been. He simply walked off, toward the center of the Source. Nilla, Sarah realized, must be protecting him somehow. Sheltering him at least partially from the dreadful energy at the center of the world.
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 Mael Mag Och what would they do then? Shoot him, when he could just flit from body to body as often as he liked? 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 any human body together. It held the pattern of evolution that told her cells how to grow, and 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 her 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.
Ayaan leaned forward and kissed Sarah on the cheek. “I’ve missed you,” she said. She had a trembling smile on her lips.
“I’ve missed you too,” Sarah said. She wasn’t crying. She thought she should be crying but the tears wouldn’t come. Maybe she was just too scared.
Ayaan reached into a pocket of her jacket and took something out. Something small and silvery. It looked half melted. “Here,” she said, and put it in Sarah’s outstretched hand. “I don’t suppose it makes much difference now, but I was supposed to give this to you.” Sarah closed her fingers around its sharp edges, its smooth curves.
Why, hello, someone said inside of her head. Someone pleasant and female. I’ve been waiting for you.
19
“They’re out of range,” Ayaan said, leaning over the edge of the flatbed. She had tried, with no success, to engage the army of ghouls who waited below them. Every time they made a move to come down off of the flatbed the dead men with their sharpened arm bones and their lipless grins would take a step closer. Every time Sarah moved toward the machine gun they would take a step back. “It’s a stalemate.” Not that it mattered. The world was going to end any second.
Sarah clutched the half-melted nose ring in her fist.
You look scared, Nilla said. That’s the first thing we need to fix.
“Of course I’m scared.” Sarah sat down on the deck of the flatbed and watched Mael Mag Och’s stolen body dwindle in the distance. “You’re part of this,” Sarah said, her voice very high. “Without you he couldn’t be doing this.”
That’s true. Listen, there are better ways for us to talk. Close your eyes.
“Are you kidding?” Sarah demanded. “Now?”
Nilla wasn’t kidding. Just close your eyes. It won’t make things any worse.
That was fair enough. Sarah’s blood was racing too fast to let her truly relax but she leaned back against the machine gun’s pintle and forcibly closed her eyes.
Instead of darkness she saw bright white light. It filled her head and stroked her brain. It calmed her down and slowed her breathing.
“You’re inside the Source, sort of,” Nilla said. She came forward out of the center of things and moved toward the edge without walking or passing through any kind of space. “Or maybe this is its shadow.”
Sarah blinked and everything changed. She found herself sitting on a landscape of bones. Heaps of bones, piles of them. Unlike the bones that littered the valley of the Source, this bonescape went on forever. Or at least as far as she could see. The hills and rises of bones before her were obscured by a thin brownish-red mist. Sarah turned around and saw she was standing ankle-deep in a pool of bright red liquid. Blood. She looked down at her reflection and saw that she, herself, had been skeletonized. She could see her bones, picked clean of all her soft tissues. Her hands were bony claws, her body defleshed, her sweatshirt draped over her pelvis and rib cage . She looked up and saw Nilla come toward her. Nilla was nothing but a skeleton as well. A skeleton dressed all in white.
Sarah had no idea what was going on.
“When we die, our bodies decay. You’ve seen plenty of that,” Nilla explained. She took Sarah by the humerus and lead her around the curve of the lake of blood. “Our personalities, though, and our thoughts, our feelings, all of the electrical patterns in our brains don’t just disappear. They’re stored here, in what he calls the eididh. It has lots of other names too: the Book of Life, the Akashic Records, the Monobloc, the Omega Point. Gary called it the Network. He imagined it as a kind of internet with human souls instead of packeted data.”
“It’s all written down and stored forever?” Sarah asked.
“Not exactly. This place is outside of time. There’s no storage. Here all of your thoughts and memories and beliefs are all still happening. All of them you ever had—and all of them you ever will have. If you know how you can read them.”
“What about his memories and ideas?” Sarah asked. “The druid’s, I mean.”
Nilla nodded. Her skull swayed back and forth on top of her spine. It was impossible, there were no integuments or sinews holding it on, but somehow the skull didn’t fall off the vertebral column. The bones made a squeaking noise as they moved, that was all. “Yes. His personality is here. It’s what you’re looking at. None of this,” she said, and waved a bony hand at the bony world, “really exists. It’s simply how he imagines the network.”
“We’re inside his soul, then. You’ve seen his soul. So you must know he’s crazy,” Sarah tried.
“I’ve seen his visions here. They’re here and they’re real. I’ve seen the father of tribes at the bottom of his bog. He’s never lied about that—he really did see what he claims he saw. If you want me to stop him because he’s insane, you’ll have to convince me that what he saw was less true than what you’re seeing right now.”
Sarah’s rib cage flexed in despair. “So you believe him? You believe that he should kill everyone just because some moldy old god told him to? You think that gives him a right?”
“I think he’s a monster,” Nilla said, and her skull turned toward the sky. There was a moon up there, directly above them. It was, of course, an enormous skull. Sarah got the idea that it was Mael Mag Och’s skull. “But I don’t see how else this should end. I mean, what’s more important than the end of the world? I’m sorry, Sarah. I hate saying that, it just sounds mean. But it’s true. The only way the dead can get any peace is if the Source is collapsed.”
“Bullshit!” Sarah leapt up and down in her rage. “I refuse to accept that!”
“Relax, Sarah. Won’t it be such a relief not to have to fight any more? I can tell you from personal experience. Death is no biggie. You come here and you spend eternity with your own memories.”
“And your own guilt?” Sarah demanded.
“Yeah, there’s some of that, too. But I know what I’m talking about. Before Mael taught me how to access this place I was a mess. I had massive brain damage and I couldn’t even remember my real name. Now I’m back in touch with my life. It was a good life, if a little short, and I’m grateful. That’s what I owe him.”
“And me?” Sarah said, grabbing for Nilla’s ulna. “What do you owe me? Why did you bring me here?”
�
�You were so upset. I thought it might help if I showed you the other side. It’s so calm here. Peaceful. But maybe you don’t see it that way—you’re still alive, so maybe this place is scary to you.”
It wasn’t. That was the weird thing. Standing on the edge of a lake of blood, watched over by a moon that was nothing but a giant grinning skull Sarah did feel the peace, the tranquility. The permanence of the boneworld gave it a certain kind of security. Nothing would ever happen there—which meant nothing bad would ever happen there.
Nilla touched her jawbone with slender phalanges. “You can go back now, if you like. I won’t hold you against your will. Or you can stay with me and just… wait it out.”
Sarah thought about it. She was going to die in just a few minutes anyway. Would it be easier if she just stayed there in paradise or whatever it was? She kicked at some of the bones at her feet and a fine powdery dust blew up, the dust of bones so old they had been worn down by eternity and yet still something remained. Her own memories were in that dust, in a very real way. Everybody’s were. Some of her memories concerned Ayaan. Ayaan was back in the real world. Would Ayaan think she was being abandoned? Sarah dug in the bone meal with her hallux. The dust brought up memories, random memories, but literally—as she stirred the dust her brain cast itself backwards on days she recalled of her life. The day she had ridden a camel with the Bedouins. Wow, that had been a good day. The day her father had told her she was going away to boarding school in Switzerland and she cried because she was afraid of all the white girls with their straight hair. The day Ayaan had first let her hold a pistol. The first time Jack had asked her what was more important than the end of the world.
“Wait,” Sarah said.
“There’s not much else I can do in here but wait,” Nilla told her. “And in another sense there’s no such thing. What’s on your mind?”
Three Zombie Novels Page 87
