Monster Planet(61)

'You belong to the Tsarevich,' Sarah said, so frightened she thought she might urinate in her pants. She could still talk. It was pretty much all she could do. 'I've heard he recruits the living.'

'I work not for our Lord,' the ghoul said. It didn't shake its head or use any gestures. Its arms remained around her, ready to impale her, but it just spoke to her in that flat tone. 'I belong to his Lady.'

One of the trees in the square rolled over. No, not a tree. Something huge and plant-like though, something vaguely humanoid in shape but enormous, dark, covered in patches of filamentous mold and club-like fungi. A walking compost heap. It moved a yard or two closer and Sarah felt an odd prickling between her toes, in the places where her shirt bunched up against her side. Something tickled her throat and she coughed.

'Is not by intention, but only is because she is near. You die in seconds, if don't choose right,' the ghoul told her. 'Our Lady's touch is bad thing for living. So you say... what?'

'I... I say,' Sarah said, and coughed again, coughed and coughed, a long, asthmatic series of coughs that brought up dark mucus. 'I say...'

A bright flash of light swooped up the sidewalk and smashed in the ghoul's face with one bandaged fist. The dead man's maxilla shattered and dried brains flew from his ruined head. The ghoul's body fell away and Sarah was free. Ptolemy's painted face turned to look at her.

'Thanks,' she said, picking her Makarov up off the weed-cracked sidewalk. Then she realized he wanted more. He wanted direction. 'Let's get out of here,' she said, and then she ran, with the mulch demon right behind.





Monster Planet





Chapter Thirteen


Ayaan had at first believed that the giant truck was just one more example of the Tsarevich's personal style but she quickly saw there was a method to his madness. The roads leading away from Asbury Park had been engineering marvels, once, a web of immaculately paved highways that connected every part of America to everywhere else.

Twelve years later they were a broken field of rubble. Arches and overpasses had collapsed, potholes had opened up as cracks in the earth and then widened to become great fissures in the concrete, deep holes within which lurked rusted twists of rebar that could slash a tire to ribbons. Every fleck of water on the road could be a puddle or it could be a deep hole in the earth big enough to swallow them up. Mud and dirt had spilled across the roadway, blocking it in places, washing it away entirely in others. Plant life sprung up from every pit and pock mark. Here and there a simple crack had been opened up by a line of trees, running at crazy angles across the road, their roots hurling up fist-and head-sized chunks of paving material.

Erasmus kept the truck moving at a steady five miles an hour and stopped every time an obstruction presented itself. Still Ayaan was thrown around in her seat like a doll in an empty suitcase. She held on to a thick metal handle mounted on the dashboard and tried to keep her head from cracking against the window every time the car bounced over another piece of rubble.

The truck could just as easily have gone off-road but conditions out there were far worse. Looking out the window Ayaan was startled to see that New Jersey'a place she had always associated with toxic chemical plants and forgotten factories'was apparently one vast forest that went on forever. The trees did part from time to time but she saw no cities, just burnt-out electrical sub-stations and mazes of housing developments as convoluted as the passages of the human digestive system. It was hard to find a single house still intact. The roofs of the houses fell inward on themselves, or their walls had devolved into unorganized piles of bricks. They passed through great zones where fire had taken its toll and ashes whipped through the air as thick as snow. In other regions it looked to Ayaan like a massive earthquake had tried to suck the suburbs down into the very belly of the earth. A fault line ran through one neighborhood of Trenton, a vast and inclined plane of ground at the bottom of which glass and brick and steel had collected in a kind of homogeneous mass, a stagnant pool of sharp edges.

After about six hours of rumbling and rolling over the fragmented highway they stopped to stretch their legs. This was mostly for her benefit, Erasmus told her'she was still newly dead and prone to fits of rigor mortis. He must have seen the look on her face when she heard that, even if she had quickly hidden her mouth with her hand.

'Everybody pays,' he told her, his voice weary. Then he popped open his door and leapt down to the hot black surface of the road.