Monster Planet(59)

Ayaan's stomach grumbled. She didn't like all this talk of starving'it just made her hungry.

'I ended up walking to Russia. I had no idea what I was, no idea why any of this had happened. Then I was approached by the Tsarevich's agents. I... I ate one of them, I'm sorry to say. It was an honest mistake. The others assured me it was alright. They told me what I was, a lich, and they told me that when I ate a human being I released his soul. No more horror, no more apocalypse for that man. They made it sound like I did him a favor. I don't want you to think... I mean, I don't buy half of what the Tsarevich says about souls and the afterlife. But he has something real to offer. If anyone can rebuild what we had before, if anyone can end all the suffering, it will be our boy. You see? We're not all brainwashed religious freaks. I need you to know that.'

Ayaan nodded meaningfully. 'Oh, of course. Certainly,' she said. She was thinking that when the Tsarevich wanted to demonstrate his remote control, the one that could set her head on fire, it was the werewolf who had turned the knobs.

She jumped when she heard a rhythmic thumping on the roof of the cab. It had to be the green phantom, she decided, sending a signal with his femur staff.

Erasmus turned the ignition key and the truck thundered to life. He looked out at the road when he spoke next, failing altogether to make eye contact. 'Anyway,' he said. 'Thanks for listening.'

'You got it,' she told him. She was already staring out the window.





Monster Planet





Chapter Twelve


The boat touched a broken retaining wall with a hollow thud, a noise like a very deep drum being struck just once. The boat drifted a few feet further, its side rattling against the remaining blocks of the wall, and then it slid up onto sand or gravel that made a noise under the hull, a hissing, and then it stopped, beached on land. Sarah lifted her oar out off the water and looked at the tip of Manhattan. She just sat there, the oar still in her hands, and looked at the place where the wall had fallen away. Where mud had slipped down into the water, making a perfect ramp up into the open space of Battery Park.

She could have thought about how that was the city up there that had killed her father, or that it was the place that nearly killed Ayaan, but she didn't. She didn't think about anyone else at all. She watched the ground, the slope, as if it were still moving, as if she could see it sliding down into the sea. Her breath hitched. A flash of pain, very sharp but very brief, ran through the muscles at the small of her back.

In a second she would step out of the boat, step up onto the land and then she would have to face her fear. Ghouls, cultists'even liches might be up there but she wasn't thinking about them, either. She was thinking about what it meant to step up onto that muddy slope. She was thinking about what it meant to enter denied territory, as Jack might put it. She had done it before. Never so alone, though. In a second she would do it. In a second.

'Oh, wow,' she said, which was pretty stupid but it was all she could think of. Careful of the boat's rocking, mindful of the weapons strapped to her back, Sarah stood up in the boat and put one foot down on the mud. It sank in a quarter of an inch but then it gave her enough purchase to get her other foot up. Instantly she started sliding down, her feet slipping, water oozing up between her toes and she threw herself forward, dug her fingers into the yielding earth, shoved her left foot up onto a protruding stone. She scrambled and cursed and grabbed and hauled her way up into Battery Park before she could really think about what she was doing and then suddenly she was there.

The park's once verdant lawns were covered in grey growth. Mushrooms, enormous wood ear mushrooms the size of sleeping horses in serried rows lined the park, slopped over onto the concrete walkways. They lay like soporific alien pods, like the drowsing bodies of hibernating animals. She was certain they never grew that big in nature, she was certain of it. She could see their gills, the tender wet gills they kept hidden from the sun. The air was yellow with their spores, a constant vaporous discharge that spread out over the water and swept across Governors Island with the prevailing wind.

She kicked one. Big mistake. Its wet, fleshy meat came to pieces in strands that wrapped around her shoe, her ankle. Spores burst up around her like brown smoke and she had to clamp her eyes, her mouth, her nose shut or be suffocated. When the cloud finally moved on she looked down and saw the fungus knitting itself back together, so fast she could actually watch it happen, the filaments flopping against one another, sticking to one another. She yanked her foot free with a sense of real disgust.