Monster Planet(60)

Which was just silly. Who knew what real danger lay inside the city, and she was freaking out over a mushroom. Sarah drew her Makarov but left the safety on. She moved toward a mansion, a confection of brick and columns now slathered with yellow mold. Its antiquity and decrepitude bothered her for some reason and she moved past it quickly.

Beyond the mansion the towers of Manhattan started up almost immediately, leaping up into the air like impossible trees or... or mountains... or straight-sided pyramids, maybe. She had actually seen the Great Pyramid. It was the closest reference point she had, but it meant little. The flat sides of the buildings looked wrong to her, the metal and glass construction only softened by a heavy growth of moss and dark slime. The windows kept snagging her eyes. Ayaan had taught her to look at openings, at windows and doors, anywhere an enemy might hide. But there were hundreds of windows to keep an eye on'thousands! Clearly urban warfare required a different mindset.

She knew one thing that still made sense. Stick to the shadows. Keeping her head down she ducked into the shade of an enormous tower and jogged down a sidewalk towards an intersection. Trees that reached four or five stories high clotted the crossroads. Sarah slid in between their close-growing trunks and hunkered down to have a good think, to plan her next move.

A ghoul emerged from a doorway nearby and sniffed the air.

It happened just like that'she had just ducked down, was still, in fact, in the process of sitting and getting comfortable, when the ghoul appeared. It had no hands, just wicked claws, and it wore a flat doughboy helmet. It had to be a museum piece, judging by the rust and the flaking metal at its brim. It cast the ghoul's eyes in darkness so she could only see its surgically altered jaws and the broken lump of cartilage which had been its nose. It sniffed again'she wondered how good its sense of smell could be with that damaged lump of meat in the middle of its face. Maybe if she stayed perfectly still.

From up a street to the west she heard the sound of an air horn. The blast jumped from one building facade to another and shook the leaves of the trees, made the glass of the few unbroken windows rattle in place. The broken-nosed ghoul stood up straight and moved its stumpy arms in front of it briefly, as if it were a boxer ready to guard against a blow. Slowly, on stiff legs, it moved toward the noise of the horn. Slowly'this was not one of the super-speedy dead she'd seen in Egypt. At least she had that.

Once the ghoul was gone she stood up and moved to the doorway it had vacated. There was no movement beyond and she stepped into a tiny shop, its front of plate glass obscured by vines and fungus so that only a few rays of green light slipped inside. In the back a pile of cardboard boxes had transformed over time, losing their shape, bursting open at the sides, and now small round greasy knobs of fungal life were devouring them. Nothing. She turned around to leave the shop and found herself surrounded.

It must have been a trap. The first ghoul must have smelled her after all, and the air horn had been a signal for reinforcements.

Too shocked to scream she lifted her pistol and started firing. Ghouls filled the broad space between the buildings, dozens of them moving left or right, some of them toward her, some away. One of them came at her, his grey body naked but his head covered in a brightly-painted bicycle helmet. 'Fuck,' she screamed, lacking the time to be more inventive. She shot at his knees but it wasn't enough'he was on her, his stink smeared across her senses, his bony forearms weaving in the air over her, an incantation of death. One arm swung down in a wide arc and knocked the pistol out of her hand. Doom pressed hard on her sinuses, the taste of adrenaline filling her mouth.

Then something weird happened.

He crouched over her, his spikes mere inches from her skin, and then he stopped. He stopped stock still, his chest not even heaving for breath. He was so still he might have been no more than a pile of badly decomposed meat, or perhaps a picture of a dead thing. Sarah looked up and saw the others, the other ghouls, had all stopped still too. They were facing her, a crowd of them facing her and not moving. Sarah could hear water running somewhere, and she could hear the leaves of the trees rolling in a gust of wind, but that was all. Nobody moved a muscle.

'They join us may if so wish.' The voice came out of the ghoul on top of her. It sounded mostly like a human voice, with a touch of a Russian accent. There was a whistling sound underneath it, though, as if breath were leaking out of punctured lungs even as the ghoul tried to talk. 'The ones on island. You, as well, join us if you wish. Only death otherwise. I spare you for this, to make choice. Is good to have choices. You be herald, take good news to island peoples. Take news of choice.'