Monster Planet(18)

They were enrapt. Leaning forward, propping their faces in their hands, their eyes were wide. Some of their mouths had fallen open.

'Soul is... still in body, after our death. Is remains. As you can... see.'

A woman wearing a headcloth and a peasant dress broke down in tears, the scant moisture running down the canyons of her wrinkled face. A boy near her covered his mouth with one hand and looked around. When his eyes met Ayaan's she read there what was going on.

Hope. The bastard Tsarevich had given them all just a little bit of hope. Enough that they could let themselves believe. He was offering them a solution to the central problem of the age, and they, by the looks of them, were seriously considering buying in.

'I live... forever... I feel no pain. You see this, is real. You serve... him too and reward... is yours. For everlasting. You will see.' The dead man raised his bony arms to beckon to them, to beg them to come into the fold. To live forever with no pain.

'Blasphemy!'

Ayaan spun around and saw one of the prisoners had risen to his feet. A big Turkish man with a mole on his chin and a mustache so thick and bristly it looked like he'd glued horse hair to his face. He had a tiny book in his hand, a leather-bound book with gilt edges that had to be a Koran. 'Blasphemy!' he shrieked again. He was speaking broken Russian, just like the animated corpse. 'God made man in his image, this is to mock the Creator!'

A pair of living men carrying rifles came running down the aisle and grabbed at the Turk, hitting him savagely in the face. They couldn't stop him from shouting even as they dragged him down toward the stage, toward the bath tub standing near the drain.

''Allah is the Guardian, and He gives life to the dead, and He has power over all things!' Allah! Not this imposter wizard!'

He ducked under the arm of one of the guards, still shouting chapter and verse, and shoved the dead man across the stage. The ghoul didn't even look confused, he just stood there with his arms out and open wide.

'Here, listen, all of you, to the word of the Prophet: ... Most certainly I will bid them so that they shall alter Allah's creation; and whoever takes the Shaitan for a guardian rather than Allah he indeed shall suffer a manifest loss!'

The guards seized the Turk again, each of them getting an arm and dragging them behind his back. The Koran fell to the drain, its pages askew. Without any preamble the guards frog-marched the Turk over to the bath tub and shoved his face down into the clear water.

Ayaan hugged herself. If she protested or rebelled now she knew she would simply join him down there where foaming water was already slopping into the drain. The Turk kicked wildly and fought his captors but he couldn't breathe water like a fish. His spasmodic movements grew disorganized, then weak, then stopped altogether. Ayaan saw the efficiency in this method of execution. The Turk's body was preserved largely intact with no bullet holes or broken bones. The guards released him once he stopped writhing and slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. His eyes were bloodshot and water streamed from his mustache, slicked it down across his mouth.

There was silence in the amphitheater as he looked down, studied his hands. As his body shuddered and water fell from him. He didn't move for a very long time.

He stepped forward, clearly dead, and looked out across the crowd, making eye contact. He opened his mouth and vomited out a great quantity of water into the drain. Then, choking on the words just a little, he began to speak.

'I am called Emre Destan. I... was a baker... in Turkiye, in Tarsus. Now I... I serve the Tsarevich. I serve him in eternal life.'

Ayaan looked at the spectators again but to her surprise she saw there was no change. They still wanted to believe'they still did believe. The bath tub, the sudden execution, hadn't changed their minds at all. Why would it? That was the way their world worked. But here there was more, a suggestion, a promise that they could live, that they could survive in their own bodies. That they could meet this new world in their old flesh and still be spared.

The first ghoul, the Ukrainian, smiled warmly for the audience. 'Is real... you see,' he said again, and again.





Monster Planet





Chapter Ten


'Was no accident, of course. We target you. You're quite celebrity famous in some circles.' The scarred woman palmed the wheel and threw the Hummer H-2 into second gear to get up a rugged hill. 'We were in neighborhood anyway.' The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever want. No one else was using it.