Monster Planet(67)

BAM!

A whip-thin ghoul in a stained white dress hit the glass face-first, hard enough to make the whole storefront shake. Her hands like bunches of twigs came up and slapped feebly at the glass, her body pressed against it. She must have been trapped inside that store for years'she had hit the glass with her face so many times her features were completely gone, smeared together into one homogeneous dark bruise. A few strands of blonde hair still stuck to her battered skull. As Sarah watched she drew her head back and launched it once more at the glass.

WHAM!

Sarah couldn't move, could barely breathe. She was too horrified.

The air horns came again, from two directions this time. Realizing she'd been paralyzed by a relatively harmless unorganized ghoul, Sarah started to hyperventilate. A handless ghoul appeared a few blocks away, half obscured behind some trees. It hadn't seen her yet. She knew, however, that it wouldn't try to recruit her. It would simply kill her without warning, without thought.

'Go,' she said. She grabbed Ptolemy's arm. 'Go! Go take that thing out!'

She tried shoving him into the street but she might as well have tried to shove a bank vault. He turned his mildewed face to her for a moment, then shook off her arm. She couldn't meet his painted stare.

She touched the soapstone but he didn't have anything to say, for once.

He turned and started walking toward the ghoul, even as new air horns blared into life, seemingly from every direction. Sarah didn't waste any time. She ran across the street and started tugging at doors, tried prying up window panes with her fingernails. Finally she found a basement-level entrance down a flight of stairs. The iron security gate had rusted half-open, wide enough for her to squeeze through. She opened the door behind it and ran inside, into a smell of old things slowly falling apart. She closed the door behind it and turned the creaking deadbolt.

Silence. She could hear the air horns outside, more and closer than ever, but there was a barrier between her and them. She felt the still, settled air of the basement room and she dropped to a crouch on the floor, her face buried in her hands.

Ayaan was dead. Her mission was over.

If she stayed perfectly still nothing bad could happen.





Monster Planet





Chapter Sixteen


It was dark in the fire lookout atop the ridge but moonlight came in through the windows and made dappled patterns on the walls. It curled around the broken radio, glistened on the peeling finish of the enameled chairs and table. It just barely reached into the bathroom where the dry toilet had become home to thousands of spiders. From time to time, putting aside all squeamishness, Ayaan reached through another stratum of ancient webs and scooped out a handful of them from the darkness inside. The wriggling on her tongue wasn't so bad'it was the legs that got caught in her teeth that bothered her.

With every tiny life she took her body vibrated with joy. The hunger came back almost instantly but the shivering ecstasy of each new morsel was like nothing she'd ever felt before. She wondered, in the most private part of her mind, if it was what sex felt like for a living girl.

She had little to do but sit, and think, and wait. The fire lookout station offered few other opportunities to entertain one's self. She had a small telescope with a scratch on one lens. It let her study the valley below. Nothing had happened since she'd arrived, her legs aching and rubbery as she powered her way up to the top of the ridge. Nothing had happened since she'd found the lookout and installed herself. Nothing would happen, she imagined, until dawn.

Erasmus stood down there as if at attention, his spine locked in perfect posture. He stood in the middle of a barnyard. The barnyard lay in the middle of a fenced-off patch of land that sat in the center of the valley. Whatever magic had possessed the undead werewolf had drawn him directly to its dark and vibrant heart.

Ayaan suspected that whoever had laid the trap lived in the tidy little farmhouse down there. Like the barn and the silo it was protected by round wards hung from its eaves painted in bright geometric patterns.

They're called hex signs,the ghost told her. The ghost who was trapped in a brain in a jar a hundred miles away. He was standing next to her, too, just barely visible in her peripheral vision. She turned her head and there was nothing there. She looked back at the valley and he was next to her.They protect those who live inside, aye, but they need a taste of the life to keep them strong. Life's blood, that is.

Ayaan nodded. There were plenty of goats down in the pen behind the barn. It could easily be their blood that activated the hex signs, that licked out of them in purple rays.