Monster Planet(22)

A dull roaring sound echoed around the wooden shack, a high-pitched ringing following close on its heels. Sarah ducked as if undead birds were cawing for her flesh. She looked up and saw speakers mounted in the room's four ceiling corners.

'You shouldn't be here yet. You haven't been cleaned properly.'

Sarah's heart lurched. A dead thing'a lich, one of the Tsarevich's creations'had emerged from behind the piles of electronics in the far half of the room. Its greenish face loomed up against the plastic, the curtain draping across its dead features. Sarah had never seen a human body so badly decayed. Boils and sores had replaced most of its skin, while its hair hung in sparse clumps leaving plenty of rotten scalp exposed. Its eyes looked like they'd been boiled too long, its teeth were brown and broken. She couldn't even tell what sex it had been in life. It wore a crisp green hospital gown and latex gloves and it looked at her as if it were studying a germ under a microscope.

'Filthy little child. Not one of ours, no, you're not one of ours at all. You're looking for something, looking, no, looking for some one. You won't find her, not here.' Its voice was barely human, rough around the edges, husky, wheezing.

Sarah shook her head. 'You don't know what I''

'Filthy, you've been hiding in dusty unclean places, you've been hiding for years in the desert and you shower what, once a week? If you're lucky. There's filth on you. I can see it under your nails, I can see it in your hair.' The lich leered at her. 'Sarah, you need a bath. Thirty-two million microbes on every square inch of you, chewing away happily, twenty-four seven on your dead skin cells. Imagine what they'd make of an aged slice of beef like me.'

'How did you''

The lich tilted its head to one side. 'Know your name? How did I know your name? There's always a consolation prize. I'm not one of his special ones, no, I can't bring flowers to the desert, I can't kill you from here with my mind, no, but I have my uses.' It scratched at its upper lip with one latex-covered finger, popping some blisters there. 'You'll need a good disinfecting, Sarah. All those razor bumps on your head, that pimple on your chin'infections, all of them, did you know that? Nasty little colonies of germs. Take your clothes off. They'll need to be incinerated. You just need to be parboiled a bit, get the nastiness off you.'

Sarah knew a threat when she heard one. She pulled her Makarov MP out of her pocket and slipped the safety off. 'I don't think so, *. I think''

'You think you can kill me from there and you're right, you can. One shot to the head.' The lich pushed against the plastic curtain, moved a step closer to her. Despite herself Sarah took a step back. 'Why don't you? Why don't you kill me right now? I won't stop you, I won't even try. It's this skin.' The lich ran the knuckles of one hand across its leprous cheek. 'I'm not one of the special ones. I wasn't brought back quite right. They tell you all about life eternal, you know, they tell you your body is good forever but they can't stop it. They can't stop the rot, you can't stop the rot no matter what you do. There's not enough bleach in the world. Now. Clothes off. Or shoot me in the head. I don't care either way.'

Ptolemy swooped out from behind Sarah'he moved faster, nearly as fast as one of the accelerated ghouls that got Ayaan'and grabbed up the plastic sheet in both hands. He tore it off the rings holding it to the ceiling and thrust it away. The mummy grabbed the lich and wrestled it around into a headlock, its face peering up at Sarah, its rotten eyes wobbling in their sockets. It smiled broadly.

'That's the way, big boy. Come on. Squeeze me harder. You think I want to live forever in a rotten old shell like this?'

'Wait,' Sarah told Ptolemy. 'You'd just be doing it a favor.' She stepped closer and put the safety back on her pistol. 'We need information. We need to know where Ayaan is being kept. You can read my mind, you know who I'm talking about.'

'Oh, I know indeed, but you don't think I'd give up that kind of dirt for nothing, do you? Let me have a little taste, first. Let me chew on one of your fingers.'

Sarah grimaced and looked at the mummy. His painted face didn't offer any inspiration. She had an idea of her own, but it wasn't exactly the kind of cautious, well-thought-out plan that Ayaan would have come up with.

What the hell. 'Hold him down, hold his head down,' she told the mummy, and Ptolemy obliged. Scowling she stuck a finger in her mouth, licked it a couple of times. She held it up to the light, caught a glint off the glob of saliva there, and jabbed it into the lich's rotting ear. Its waxy skin split under the pressure and she felt thick, viscous fluid swell up around her fingernail, but she knew the lich was more afraid of her than she was of it. 'How many germs in a gram of human spit?' she asked, but the lich was already screaming.