Monster Planet(121)

Sarah gasped. She could barely think straight. 'It's what you taught me to do.'

'I did not,' Ayaan said, very slowly, 'teach you to talk. I taught you to shoot. I hope you will remember what it takes to kill a lich. I hope you remember how you will have to mutilate my corpse. You will need to smash my head to powder, are you prepared for that? My body should be burnt, or crushed with heavy stones.'

'You think I can't do it,' Sarah said.

'I'm betting on it, actually.' Ayaan considered her with a long, cool look. 'I think you haven't prepared yourself psychologically for this. I think that you will be haunted by it for a very''

Sarah squeezed the trigger. The noise of the gunshot bounced off the walls of the valley. When Osman found her, several hours later, she had burned Ayaan's body with gasoline and spread the ashes on the wind. Only the heart remained. It refused to burn. There was no magic in that'a human heart was a hard lump of dense muscle tissue and not very flammable. Sarah held it in her hand when Osman came for her. She was hoping to hear Ayaan's voice in her head. She was hoping that Ayaan had become a ghost like Mael Mag Och.

She was also hoping that nothing of the sort would happen. In that she got her wish.

Osman took one look at the charred organ in her hand and rubbed his head with his long fingers. 'You can't bring that on my helicopter,' he said. 'No way.'

Sarah dug a little hole in the ground near the valley of the Source and buried the heart. It was the closest thing to a grave Ayaan could have. Sarah remembered what Ayaan had taught her about baraka, the dangerous blessedness of the Sufi saints. It was said you could invoke baraka when you stood by the tomb of a powerful person. Sarah wondered if in some future generation warriors would come to where the heart was buried and from it gather some strength. She left no marker, no gravestone. Those future warriors would have to find the burial place on their own.

She strapped herself into the co-pilot's seat of the Jayhawk and they lifted up and away. Osman carried her off over a green world, a world of trees and rock and water and no people. An emptied-out world where even the dead were in scarcity. A truly silent, truly haunted place.

It was that kind of planet. It was going to be that kind of planet for a long time to come.

END OF MONSTER PLANET

The BIG ANNOUNCEMENT... now with Acknowledgements

Hello, everyone, and welcome back. If you're looking for the acknowledgements, skip down to the bottom.

I have a lot to say today. Some of it is more important than others. If you're impatient, just skip to the BIG NEWS. You'll know you're in the right place. For those of you still here I'd like to say thanks again. Thanks for reading the books, and for helping me learn how to write effective serialized novels. Thanks for your comments and your emails and your good thoughts. It really made a difference and it made this project a joy to write.

I've been tallying up your emails to see what kind of epilogue you'd like for the story (keep 'em coming, folks) and I have to say I'm a little surprised. I wanted to know whether you'd prefer Gary or Sarah to win, but the vast majority of entries haven't mentioned either of them. Most of you, it seems, would prefer to see Bannerman versus a great white shark, with the shark winning. You're a very strange bunch of people.

In other news... don't stop watching this space. It is my intention to always have something here for you to read. Starting soon I'm going to start a blog on zombies and horror in general. I'll review movies and haunted houses and books and so on: whatever I find interesting, which I hope you will also enjoy. I'll send a notification when the blog is live.

In the coming year there will also be a new serialized book here, though it won't be a Monster Island book and that's all I'm saying. If your signed up for email notifications you'll get one when the new book starts. And whenever we have big news.

AND NOW... THE BIG NEWS!

Well, most of you guessed already. I got a book deal! Monster Island will be released in April of 2006 by Thunder's Mouth Press. I'm extremely excited and I have all of you to thank for it, all of you who legitimized my silly zombie stories by actually reading them.

Don't rush out to Amazon.com yet--there's nothing there right now. And when it does appear there, hold off on ordering. In order to launch the book we want to coordinate the orders so that they all happen around the same day. We don't know yet what the exact on sale date of the book is, but when it happens, if you're signed up for notifications, you'll get an email telling you the book is available. And when it is, we'd like for you to buy the book that very moment to improve the sales ranking. The idea is to pop the book on the online booksellers so that reviewers (and who knows, maybe even movie studios) take notice.