Monster Planet(6)

This one could have caught a hummingbird in mid-flight and swallowed it whole in the space between two wing strokes.

Getting a good look at it wasn't easy but Sarah could make out some details. The dead thing had been knee-capped by automatic rifle fire and would never walk again. It was naked, its skin grey and shrunken on its bones. Its lips had either rotten away or been cut back, revealing a pale stretch of jawbone. The better to bite with, Sarah supposed. It wore a miner's helmet, complete with a broken lamp, to protect its vulnerable cranium. Its hands... its hands had been cut off, leaving bloodless, ragged stumps. The bones of its forearms had been sharpened into vicious spikes.

Nausea washed up from her stomach into her throat but Sarah held herself together. The dead felt little pain, she knew, but somebody with better manual dexterity'someone living'would have had to perform surgery on the ghoul to achieve such a brutal reconfiguration.

'Two o'clock,' Leyla called. Sarah managed to turn away from the horror below her to see a new one in front of her. The body of an undead man stood atop a dune a hundred meters from her position. His skin had collapsed on his skeleton so that all she could see of his face was bone. At least he had hands, though they were equally skeletonized. He wore a flapping and fluttering green robe, a little like a burnoose, more like a medieval monk's habit. He leaned on a heavy walking staff that was made of three human femurs, fused end-to-end.

A lich. Not one of the mindless puppets Sarah had seen reaching for the helicopter but a lich, a real lich, a dead man with an intact brain, as smart as any human and more than likely possessing powers indistinguishable from magic. It was the greatest of the Tsarevich's crimes that he not only destroyed the living but he changed them, making them over in his own image. That he made new liches to be his lieutenants.

Sarah had survived dozens of raids against the undead and hundreds of attacks by mindless ghouls. She didn't spook easily. She'd never seen a lich before though and the apparition chilled her right to her guts.

'Sarah, I gave you an order,' Ayaan said. She wasn't looking at Sarah. She had her AK-47 up to her eye and she was lining up a headshot. The green phantom was at range though and Sarah knew Ayaan's chances of a clean kill were slim.

The robed monster raised its free hand to point at the women before it. One bony finger stabbed out at them across the sand. Sarah could feel dark energy streaming from it like light through broken clouds. Rolling up over the dunes, bouncing, bounding for them on all fours a dark shape zipped across the sand. Another came up behind its green master, launched itself at the women.

'Fall back,' Ayaan said. The women started, slowly, to come out of their battle postures. 'Everyone fall back.'

Sarah tried to move but was compelled to watch a third speeding shape jump over the dunes. A fourth, a fifth, and a sixth came along in close order. One of them wore a motorcycle helmet with the visor closed'she got half a look at it before it accelerated right for her.

A warm and yielding arm'with a hand on the end of it'scythed across her stomach and knocked her off her feet. It was Fathia, Ayaan's second in command. She picked up Sarah like a rucksack and bodily flung her into the helicopter's cargo space. Lying on her stomach Sarah looked out across the sand. She saw the female soldiers running towards her, running towards the aircraft. The accelerated ghouls, moving like time lapse movies of what they should be, were running faster.

'Get us out of here,' Fathia screamed at Osman. The pilot was already flipping switches on his control panel. One of the speeding ghouls skidded to a stop not fifty meters away and looked right at the helicopter. It saw them'Sarah could feel its attention, its desire.

One soldier, another jumped into the helicopter. Sarah watched three of the sped-up ghouls collide on top of Leyla, their sharpened talons stabbing into her again and again like mechanical pistons. Her blood spilled out on the sand and the smell of death brushed up against Sarah's nose. There were others losing their individual battles with the blurred monsters. Where was Ayaan? Sarah could hear her screaming but she couldn't see her.

'Go now, go now, go now,' Fathia chanted, leaning out of the loading door, scanning the dune for the women who hadn't made it to the helicopter. Sarah found herself chanting the words too. The fast ghoul was heading for them, galloping across the sand. If he got inside the helicopter it would take him only moments to kill them all.

But where was Ayaan? Sarah couldn't see her. She pushed her attention outward, as she'd been taught, searching for any sign of the commander. There'she heard something. 'Cantuug tan!'Ayaan's voice.She sounded distant, her words torn at by the desert wind. Had she surged forward to try to take down the green phantom? Any further instructions she might have were lost in the noise of the rotors spinning up. Before the fast ghoul could reach the Mi-8 Osman had it airborne and banking away.