Monster Planet(107)

Nilla vanished without fanfare as she crossed the line. She turned invisible. The female cultists in her train looked frightened for a moment but she must have spoken aloud to them because they kept walking.

'He's coming,' someone said in Russian. 'He is ready,' someone else shouted. Some of the cultists dropped to their knees as the flap of the yurt was drawn back. The ghouls kept working'they didn't even look up.

A young girl, maybe twelve years old, stepped out of the yurt. Her head had been shaved and she had a fresh cut on her cheek. She wore a silk dress stained with blood in a couple of places. Ayaan barely recognized her at first but slowly her brain worked it out. It was Patience, the girl she had taken away from the farm in Pennsylvania. By the look of things she was the new Cicatrix.

A hand appeared out of the darkness of the yurt. A length of twisted forearm. The Tsarevich hauled himself forward, pushing his misshapen skull out into the light. He couldn't walk. His legs were two different lengths'his left was nearly a foot longer than his right'but clearly he intended to emerge under his own power. Inch by inch his deformed flesh hauled itself out of the yurt.

The green phantom waited at the side of the flatbed with a shiny metal shopping cart. The Tsarevich lurched forward and slid down into it, his off-center hips jamming down into the metal basket. His shorter arm reached forward and his fingers wove through the bars while his longer arm draped over the side of the cart and nearly dragged his knuckles in the dirt. The green phantom pushed him forward with visible effort, toward the scaffolding.

'What's that?' someone said, and Ayaan assumed they'd never seen the Tsarevich before. She almost laughed. She had been holding her breath'except that she had no breath to hold. Her chest had locked into rigor with anticipation. 'No, seriously,' the voice called again, and she turned to see who had broken the tension. 'What is that?'

She looked'everyone looked'and saw someone walking towards them from the far side of the valley. A clearly dead person whose face was a bare skull. There were scraps of skin adhering to the bone, and a pair of prominent eyes in the sockets, and a wispy lock of hair or two. The figure was perhaps six feet tall and extremely thin'except for the skull its entire body was wrapped up in a heavy olive drab blanket.

It glided forward, rolling a bit, because it didn't have any feet to walk with. Sharp-looking ends of bone stuck out of the bottom of the blanket. Instead of walking forward it sidled forward in the manner of a crab.

'Dad,' Sarah breathed. But Ayaan knew the figure wasn't Dekalb'it couldn't be. For some reason she felt like she recognized it, though it was unlike anything she'd ever seen before.

'Get a sniper over here,' Ayaan shouted but it was too late. A female cultist in a paper smock approached the strange figure. She had a pistol in either hand and she raised them to shoulder height. She demanded that the creature stop at once. 'Come on, we need a fire team!' Ayaan yelled. She half-turned to relay her instructions to Erasmus but that would mean taking her eyes off this new enemy.

The woman with the pistols opened fire, her handguns barking like angry dogs. Bullets tore into the green blanket and spun the stranger around in a circle. It fell over not like a human being falling to the ground but like a camera tripod being knocked over. And then it got back up, bending in all the wrong places.

The blanket slid off its slender frame. The creature had no body, only six enormous jointed legs of yellow bone that flashed out like the fingers of a giant hand. Two of them snapped outward and neatly impaled the living woman. They flicked in different directions and she came apart in halves.

Screaming and shouting and general alarm rolled around the encampment. Cultists and ghouls rushed to the attack. Snipers climbed up into the rocks surrounding the valley while a team of rifles rushed forward to kneel in the dirt before the Tsarevich, protecting him.

Someone brought out a machine gun, a crew-served RPK-74, which looked like a big AK-47 with a reinforced stock. A teenage boy fed long curving magazines into the weapon as its operator lay prone on the ground, angling the barrel up on its tripod. The operator tore through an entire magazine of forty-five rounds in a few seconds.

The monster took another step forward and fell on its face, three of its legs crumpled beneath it. Chips of bone fell from its body. One of its eyes burst and jelly dripped out of the socket like ugly tears. Ayaan closed her mouth. It had been gaping open. The thing was dead. Its skull had been punctured in a dozen places.

Somebody cheered.

Then the monster stood back up. A new eye opened in the empty socket. Its broken legs fused themselves back together. If anything the beast looked bigger'it looked like it was ten feet tall. It surged forward fast enough to impale half a dozen ghouls. Around Ayaan the living began to panic. They ran in every possible direction, some of them throwing away their weapons. Disorganized and panicked they posed no threat to the monster. It came right towards Ayaan. It came right for her.