Monster Planet(48)

Something stirred in the corners of the big room. No, more than one something. She brought the weapon around to firing position, ready to aim as soon as a target presented itself. None did. Slowly, deliberately, she took a step toward the still-open bedroom door.

A shadow flicked across the door, slamming it shut. A shadow that moved faster than any living human being she'd ever seen. She knew what that meant. A fast ghoul'probably an entire squad of them. Which meant the green phantom had to be nearby to spur them on. 'Maybe you'll tell me your name now that we've got so much in common,' she announced, trying to flush him out.

It wasn't the green phantom who answered, however. It was the lipless wonder. 'Is test,' he told her, his voice bouncing around the ceiling, amplified electronically and broadcast from several directions at once. He could be anywhere.

'Is test,' he said again. 'Is very fair. Abilities special, some would call powers, they come out under great stress only. What greater stress than life-or-death, yes? Sometimes the lich has no power, nothing special, and then he must be put down. If he has powers then he can survive.'

'And making me do this in the dark, that's part of the fairness?' Ayaan demanded, but before she could finish the sentence something slapped her arm hard enough to make it sting. She grabbed her wrist and felt torn leather there.

Clearly the test had already begun. She could live or die by her own actions. If she was going to live she needed to shoot, and to shoot she needed to see. She remembered Sarah's gift. Ayaan would have that ability'all of the dead did. She could feel the accelerated ghouls whizzing around her, could hear them moving in the dark but she forced herself to calm down, to close her eyes, to' to feel.

It had nothing to do with the eyes, though her brain formed images of what she received. Her skin took in most of the information, sensitive areas of her body reacting with abhorrence to the presence of undead things.

And there they were. She understood, perhaps for the first time, just what ghouls were. Empty shells. Husks. Person-shaped receptacles. The energy that flowed into them and suffused them was the only thing keeping them upright. There were no minds, no souls inside them. She stared down at her own body, at her flesh wrapped up in the skin of some other dead beast and knew she was one of them. Her intelligence, her personality, were merely riding around in her' corpse.

One of the ghouls came at her, moving low and fast, bent almost parallel with the floor. Its sharpened bones flashed toward her but she could see them now, smoky and purple with stolen life energy. She ducked and spun and barely avoided impaling herself on his cut-down arms. She had time, just, to wonder if he was one of the ghouls butchered on the ship while she watched.

He came around again. She ducked and rolled away from him and watched as he skidded past her, sliding on the slick floor.

She could see them now'only three of them, their energy thrumming off the walls'but her special vision couldn't compensate for really seeing. She had little depth perception, she couldn't find their ranges in the dark. She knew it was day outside and the sun was shining'she could tell from the hole in the roof.

Ayaan waited for the next attack, a ghoul coming at her with arms flailing and legs pumping. She dropped to all fours and swung away from him, then dashed for the nearest wall. She felt old, dried-up wood, probably plywood installed over a broken window. There was no time to find a door.

With her arm bent, with her weight behind it Ayaan smashed at the wood expecting to dislocate her shoulder. Instead it gave way like cardboard and she spilled out into daylight so bright it seared her eyes.

Dead pupils, Ayaan learned, could not contract as quickly as live pupils. Her eyes throbbed with pain as she got her feet under her and ran, her boots finding the planks of a boardwalk, her muscles burning as she tried to run. The best she could manage was a sort of drunken stagger, little better than a stiff walk.

When her eyes finally started to adjust to the white light that flashed off the ocean she lifted the Kalashnikov into a firing position and sighted on the window she'd broken open. They would come from there, she figured. She had to assume they wouldn't have more ghouls lying in wait for her outside.

A ghoul wearing a fireman's helmet appeared in the window. The lower half of his face had been carved away to give him a bigger mouth, a bigger bite. His skin was the tawny color of a predator in a dusty land.

Ayaan wasted no time. She lined up her shot and placed a tight burst of three rounds right in the exposed portion of his forehead.

At least, they should have gone there. Instead none of the three even hit him. In horror Ayaan looked down at her weapon. Had it been altered somehow, had the iron sights been filed down, twisted out of alignment, something?