Monster Planet(103)

Sarah brought up her OICW and fired a three shot burst. She caught her target in center mass but it didn't even slow down. Barreling toward her it left a smear of light on her retinas it was so bright. She fired again at its head, one burst, two, three, the rifle making a mechanical sound, a machine shop sound as it pumped bullets through its mechanism. She hit the head but nothing happened. She switched her rifle to full auto in the same second it shot past her, its fiery tail whipping at her exposed face and hands.

Ptolemy brought up his shotgun and blasted the back of its knees as it ran past him. The fiery thing stumbled and fell and rolled forward for a while, sliding over the carpet of bones. It writhed horribly, the flames off its back gusting and snapping, its bodily fluids sizzling out of it. Now that it had come to something approaching a stop Sarah saw the motorcycle helmet on its head, the bare teeth where its lips had been cut away. Its hands were nothing but sharpened ends of bone.

She heard the roaring of a truck engine and looked up. The Tsarevich had arrived. On the far side of the valley dead men and women were lining up to get into the bowl, to press closer to the Source. The giant truck weaved through the crowd, the gorilla perched on top of its cab.

Sarah grabbed the nearest mummy and tried to pull him away. It was like tugging at a marble column. She let go and reached for the soapstone.

'Ptolemy,' she said, 'we're dead if we get caught in the open like this. We have to fall back and hide.'

Source... the Source

'Fuck the Source!' she shouted. 'Fall back! That's an order!'

One of the mummies'one of the extremely old ones'started to move. He took a step away from the Source. Sarah nodded and shouted and jumped up and down. “Yeah! Move!” He took another step.

On the other end of the valley the flatbed appeared, being hauled forward by a hundred ghouls. On its back stood three figures dressed in green, black and white. Sarah stared at the one dressed in black. It was Ayaan. She was too far to see, it should have been impossible. But she knew. She lifted the OICW to her shoulder and looked through the scope. Yeah. The skin around her lower jaw looked too tight and her eyes were dark pits sunk into her face. But it was Ayaan.

In a moment, in a space of time so short she didn't breathe, the valley was full of the running dead.





Monster Planet





Chapter Thirteen


Sarah and the mummies fell back to fighting positions. They grabbed cover, braced themselves for battle. Readied their weapons, laid out their spare ammunition. Prepared themselves for a guts-and-glory firefight.

They didn't stand a chance.

The mummies were fast. Faster than any living human. The carried plenty of ammunition for their shotguns. It didn't matter. The accelerated ghouls were faster.

Sarah watched her ambush turn into a rout without really being able to identify the turning point. She only knew she had f*cked up. With the mummies crouched behind boulders, with herself on a high crest of rock trying to snipe the enemy with an assault rifle she knew it was going to end badly.

One by one the mummies were picked off. The younger ones, the Roman-era mummies with painted faces went first. One of them was stupid enough to run out into the denied zone, the region too close to the Source where the undead caught fire. He was smoldering before three of the accelerated corpses piled on top of him. All four of them burst into flame at once, a rolling, scrapping funeral pyre. The mummy's arms pinwheeled as he tried to throw the ghouls off of him. He was slowing down as Sarah watched, however, and in moments he had stopped moving altogether.

The other painted mummy had a little more sense, but less luck. He moved steadily from rock to rock, picking off ghouls and then diving back into cover. In the end it wasn't a ghoul that got him at all but something else, some weird magic that turned his linen yellow. His wrappings began to tatter as if they were torn at by dry desert winds and then his bones just seemed to give out and he collapsed in a heap.

Rifle fire picked off one of the older mummies. He had been smart enough to stay put and wait for the ghouls to come to him. Hunkered down between two rocks he kept the barrel of his M1014 high, ready to take opportunistic shots. He was severely outranged, however, by a cultist with a Dragunov sniper rifle. Through the scope of her OICW Sarah saw the sniper line up the perfect bead. He took his shot before she had time to even shout out a warning. The mummy's head popped open like a bag full of freeze-dried meat.

The rest of the mummies died when the Tsarevich decided to stop playing games and sent his whole force into the valley, hundreds of ghouls, at least a hundred living men and women with assault rifles and pistols and machine guns. The enemy just tore her troops to pieces. What had been a battle of attrition turned into a plain old-fashioned defeat as bodies living and dead flung themselves at Sarah's positions. Ptolemy threw away his weapon and threw himself into the melee, grabbing at ghouls and hurling them into the denied zone, turning around to kick in the faces of living zealots, moving so fast Sarah saw him as an off-white blur digging into the enemy's ranks. Then he disappeared.