Monster Planet(49)

No. It was her. She'd never seen a ghoul with a firearm, ever. Now she knew why.

The ghoul leapt through the window and headed toward her like a rocket. She fired again and saw dusty dried blood explode from his elbow. It didn't even slow him down.

It was her. It was her fingers, her hands that felt like formless clay at the ends of her arms. There was a reason why the green phantom took the hands of his soldiers'they were worth less as weapons than the sharpened ends of bone. And hers were the same. She lacked the motor skills, the fine muscle control it took to fire a rifle with any kind of effectiveness. She dropped the weapon on the ground. She would never use an AK-47 again, as long as she, well, lived. All that training. All that experience. How much of her had been tied to that weapon? How much else did she have?

Time to find out.

No more than ten meters separated them, a distance he could cover in seconds. If she was going to pass this test' did she even want to pass it? Let him stab her, let him destroy her, and she would be done. She had spent all her life fighting the liches. To live on, to continue to exist at any rate, meant being what she hated most.

It didn't matter. None of it mattered. She knew, because Ayaan could look into her own heart, she had mastered that skill very early on, she knew she wanted to keep going. She could no longer stay alive for Sarah. But she could continue to fight.

But how? With her bare hands? She closed her eyes and tried to think. Sarah spoke often of the life force, the energy that pervaded all living things. Ayaan had always thought of it as similar to baraka, the dangerous blessedness of clan leaders and Sufi saints. Just an old Somali superstition'but perhaps there was some reality to it. Now, after her death, she had no trouble feeling the energy all around her, the life force. A field of energy that passed through her, that wrapped her up and animated her dead flesh and kept her consciousness alive. If she were going to develop powers, just spontaneously grow some kind of mystical ability it would come from that source, from that energy, that baraka. Every lich power she'd heard of, all of their magic, was simply the ability to manipulate that field.

She reached down into it, gathered it in her hands. It made her skin tingle as she clutched at it, exactly as she might clutch at a blanket that covered her. She concentrated it, and time slowed down as she focused the energy, squeezing it down into tight hot bundles of force in her hands.

The ghoul racing toward her seemed to stop in mid air as she raised her hands, threw them forward, and spat the built-up energy at him. It was that simple, it was second nature. Not something she had to learn.

The energy hit him square on, her aim perfect. It sizzled and spat with darkness as it touched him. It burst inside him like dark fire. His face wrinkled as if in concentration' and kept wrinkling. He had looked ageless before but as the energy'her energy'ripped through his flesh he took on the countenance of an old man. His skin crinkled, turned papery, tore away from his bones. As it fluttered away on the wind it turned to fine powder, like talc.

He collapsed on the boardwalk, mere paces from her, his skull crumbling like old pottery. She had aged him to destruction'what remained of his head could have been a thousand years old.

She stood there forever, waiting for time to start up again. It didn't. She had no breath, no pulse to measure its passing. The sun failed to move across the sky. There had been more ghouls in the boarded-up warehouse, at least two more but neither of them appeared to confront her.

She supposed she had passed the test.

A door in a nearby building creaked open on rusted hinges. She heard maniacal laughter echoing all around her, but had no idea who it belonged to. Time started up once more.





Monster Planet





Chapter Seven


He was supposed to be dead'he was always dead, in her memory, in the stories they told about him. He was dead. Jack wounded him, Jack had turned and turned on him and bit him, infection had set in, Ayaan had sanitized him. It was the story of her life, of her origins.

None of it was true. Thank God.

His dead arms went around her in a feeble kind of embrace. She might have been held by a human-shaped agglutination of popsicle sticks and pipe-cleaners. Sarah pressed harder against him, against his woolen shirt that smelled of death and his dry, dry skin that cracked and peeled against her cheek. Disgust, even horror lost out to the feeling, the one, pure feeling that sang in her. She had never felt something so primal and focused before, except maybe the fear of death, and that was old to her, and this was new.