Monster Planet Page 2

  “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 in its sweaty grasp 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...

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

  Chapter Three

  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. Okay, so this is stupid.” 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—”

  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.

  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 Tsarevich 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 it isn't enough to shoot him from the air. 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 suggested that Sarah was a liability. 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 possible. 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 headed back 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 an unguessable 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 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... 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 somebody with better manual dexterity—someone living—would have had to perform surgery on the ghoul to achieve such a brutal reconfiguration.

  “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 in his own image. That he made new liches to be his lieutenants.

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

  “Sarah, 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 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 b
ack,” 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, 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. It was just that kind of world. It had been for twelve years.

  Chapter Four

  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 aircraft 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 fell 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 with a hose and a pump with a foot pedal 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 taught 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’s 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. 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 jacket, 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?”

  She nodded and broke away from him. He went to get his tomatoes but as it worked out she didn’t have a chance to share in his feast. An eight year old boy dressed in a pair of shorts and flip-flops came running in, out of breath, to tell her Fathia wanted her up at the perimeter wire. She went right away.

  The boy lead her through the open-air souk of the encampment, a close space of stalls lined with broken cinderblocks where the elderly sorted through cans looking for signs of botulism or corruption. Alma, one of the women from Ayaan’s unit, was washing her face in a pan full of sandy water from the communal well as Sarah hurried by. She looked up and then looked away again as if to pretend she hadn’t seen Sarah at all.

  There was no time to figure out what that meant. Sarah hurried down a long “street” lined on both sides with semi-permanent tent homes. At the far end she found Fathia under a moth-eaten awning, leaning over a map of the surrounding territory. Other soldiers lay on the ground nearby in the shade of the palisade wall, trying to get some rest.

  The boy who had brought Sarah to the new commander crawled under the map table and dug his fingers into the loose dirt. His eyes were very moist—had he been crying?

  “I’m in command now, of course. I have some work to do before I can take the girls out again, though. I’ve got to rebuild the unit with half the soldiers I used to have,” Fathia said, as if she wanted Sarah’s input. Sarah knew she did not. “That’s alright, we’ll be faster. Smarter. I can’t see a use for you in that structure so I’m restricting you to camp duties,” Fathia said, rinsing her mouth out with non-potable water and spitting on the ground. “I hope that will be acceptable.”

  She shoved her hands in her pockets. “Actually… Ayaan always felt I should be out in the field, that that was where my talent was really useful.” Sarah’s stomach rumbled with a bad presentiment. If she couldn’t go out with the soldiers, her usefulness to Fathia would be distinctly curtailed. In the Egyptian encampment one rule had always held: the most useful people ate first. Those who couldn’t do anything valuable, those who were seen as dead weight, went hungry.

  She looked again at the boy under the table. She could count his ribs, but his belly stuck out like a swollen gourd. Had he been crying? It could help with the pangs of hunger. She remembered how it helped. He would have earned a bite of jelly, maybe, for running Fathia's message. He probably begged for the chance.

  Fathia clucked her tongue and Sarah looked back
at the soldier hurriedly, embarrassed she had broken eye contact even for a moment. “Hmm. Yes, Ayaan did say that. Of course,” Fathia said, “Ayaan is no longer here to make those kind of decisions. I hope you won’t have trouble accepting my orders. I know that obedience isn’t your strength.”

  The only thing worse than being dead weight was being insubordinate. “No, ma’am, that’ll be no problem. You’re the boss.”

  “I suppose I am,” Fathia said, looking up in mock surprise. “Well, let’s put your… talent to some real use. I need warm bodies to stand extra watch tonight. That mixed group of dead and living we saw could be here as early as midnight. Let’s put those magic eyes to use.”

  It meant staying up all night, mercilessly pinching her legs every time she started to nod off. It meant being up in the wind and the sand and spitting out dust for days afterward. She didn’t complain. It meant she wouldn’t be dead weight, at least not for that day.

  If she didn’t get to sleep that night at least she wasn’t alone. As the sun sank over the western desert the camp was lit up with oil lamps and sporadic electric lights. The fuel for both was precious and it was never burnt just because someone had trouble sleeping. Both helicopters were kept on stand-by, Osman and the other pilots being allowed to sleep in their cockpits, while armed soldiers patrolled the streets of the encampment looking for anything out of order. They shouted gossip back and forth—nothings, empty statements, assurances that all was as it should be. The need for that affirmation hung in the air like a seagull flying into a breeze.

  The camp wanted to know what happened next. Even those who could no longer lift a rifle or thrust a bayonet had to know, had to get the news. Were they all about to die? Would they be overrun that night? For twelve years each of them had somehow managed to stay alive while the darkness crowded with monsters waiting to take them apart. They had survived even when they knew that so many others had died, they had survived. They could only wait and ask themselves if this was the night that changed. Up in her observation post, a bare platform of wooden planking high in a dead palm tree, Sarah could only watch the horizon and wonder herself. Always before when she’d stood watch up in the air like that she’d felt pretty safe. The dead didn’t climb trees and the occasional ghoul who tried to attack the camp would never get through the palisade of barbed wire. Now they were facing living opponents armed with rifles, however. She was a sitting duck up there, only the dark color of her hooded sweatshirt protecting her from snipers. Maybe that was why Fathia wanted her up there. She knew that Fathia didn’t trust her because of her ability to see the energy of the dead. She knew the soldiers spoke about her behind her back, talked about how spooky she was. Now that Ayaan wasn’t around to protect her did they want to put her in harm’s way, did they want to kill her off?