Monster Planet(21)

It took six days to track the Tsarevich back to Larnaca on the island of Cyprus. He had been easy enough to track'Ptolemy could sense his lost kin, even from hundreds of kilometers away. The bunker and its scene of carnage had drawn them inexorably. That had been the easy part. Osman had dropped them at a safe distance away and then flown off in the Mi-8. When Sarah had asked him to come with her he had just laughed. 'There's a reason I learned how to fly this thing,' he explained to her. 'When you're the wheelman, you always get to be in on the getaway.' He agreed to pick them up when they were done and that was the extent of his involvement.

Alone'except for Ptolemy, who didn't have anything to say'Sarah located the bunker and found her way inside. The lights still worked but the smell of death nearly drove her away.

She still didn't know what to make of the slaughter up in the hills. Forty-nine mummies dead, assassinated methodically with a bullet in each cranium. The wounds were all in the same place, perfectly centered on the foreheads. There should have been a fiftieth mummy: there was a place for it in the concrete bunker, there were even scraps of linen stapled to the floor where it must have been imprisoned. What might have happened to it was anybody's guess.

Ptolemy had taken the massacre badly, of course.there wombs will never dead be more of dead us, no births never to dead more wombs, he had wailed, and she had felt his loss. He had a point, too. There were only so many mummies in the world and only a small percentage of them had returned from the dead'the vast majority of mummies had their brains spooned out of their heads as part of the mummification ritual. There would never be any more of them, either. The exact recipe for creating one of their kind was lost to the ages. They might well be immortal but when one of them died their total population shrank for good.

Inside the fence she kept low. It was well past midnight and anybody human inside the refinery complex should be asleep. The undead stayed up late, though, and she couldn't afford to be seen. Ptolemy slipped under the wire behind her with a feral grace, his painted face a mask of composure. He could at least still function to the extent of following her around'presumably he could fight, too. If not she was probably screwed.

'Stay low'we're going to slip in between those two big pipes there,' she told him. He could hear her just fine, even when she wasn't touching the soapstone heart scarab. Together they crab-walked through the darkness and ducked under a pipe as thick as a tree trunk. Electric light burned in the narrow alley beyond the pipe, something Sarah hadn't seen in years. It flooded the way with brilliant illumination. There was nowhere to hide in that light, no shadow to exploit.

Sarah breathed out through her mouth and closed her eyes. She looked for the dark energy of the undead. If no one was looking maybe they could just slip by. She found nothing, extended her perception and tried again. There'a few dozen meters away'she caught the golden radiance of a living human, the closest animate creature. Fast asleep, too, judging by the vibrations. Okay.

She signaled Ptolemy and then dashed across the lighted alley into the shadows beyond. More living people'all of them asleep'lay above her, tucked into sleeping bags on a catwalk. There seemed to be no real resistance to her invasion inside the refinery. Did they think one chain-link fence was enough? She supposed if you had an army of the undead to back you up then perimeter security didn't have to be your main focus.

'Come on,' she said, and touched the soapstone to make sure Ptolemy was still with her.

they rot will did perish and they rot for what perish they did, he said. Well, it was the right spirit, anyway.

A large wooden structure, clearly built by the Tsarevich and not part of the original refinery, stood at the end of a road before her. Mold spotted the wood but there didn't appear to be any guards stationed inside. She could vaguely sense some dark energy ahead of her but she decided to risk it. Ducking inside the shack she pushed a curtain away from a door and stepped into a large enclosed space.

Clear plastic sheeting hung down in the middle of the room, dividing it in half. Electronic equipment filled most of the far half'radar screens, several television sets, medical equipment. High-wattage light bulbs hung from the ceiling and blasted any shadows out of the corners. On the near side of the curtain stood some old, mildew-damaged furniture and a antique silver microphone on a tall stand.

Sarah stepped up to the microphone. She had only skimpy memories of how such things worked. She had only been eight years old when the Epidemic hit, after all, and electricity had been a commodity rarer than jewels in her life. She must have seen a movie at some point, however, or even a television show in which someone tested a microphone by tapping it. Almost reflexively she reached up with one finger and touched the microphone's windscreen.