Monster Planet(69)

Maybe, she thought, maybe she still had the element of surprise. She would need it'this wizard had more power than any living man was supposed to. Careful to be as silent as possible she climbed up one side of the fence and jumped down on the other.

Her foot barely nudged something round and hard as she landed. She looked down and saw a human skull there, bleached white with all its delicate nasal bones still intact. Other skulls littered the ground just inside the fence. Dark energy flickered inside every cranium.

The skull she touched gave off a blood-curdling shriek. Whether it actually made a sound or it was just inside her mind'and presumably the wizard's'she couldn't say, but the scream made her clutch her ears and duck her head.

At the center of the barnyard the wizard looked up. His wooden hand dropped a ball of fur and skin on the ground and Ayaan felt his attention hit her like a spotlight.

'This a friend a your'n, monkey-boy?' the wizard asked, looking over at Erasmus. The furry lich didn't move an inch. 'You shoulda said somethin'. I coulda redded up the place.' The wizard's face cracked in a wide, toothy smile.

Ayaan wasted no time. She dropped into a shooter's crouch and flung her hands in wide arcs. Energy spilled from her core and sizzled as it cut through the air. The wizard turned, far too fast, and put his wooden arm up. The bark there cracked and snapped and the wood underneath creaked and groaned. He reached inside the back pocket of his trousers and whipped out a pocket knife. Ayaan saw that the palm of his remaining hand was one smooth callus from fingers to wrist. He slashed the callus with his knife and then squeezed his fist until blood dropped onto the dry grass of the barnyard.

The door of the barn rattled on its hinges. Ayaan shot another bolt of death energy at the wizard but he caught it easily in his wooden hand. He absorbed the darkness into his own body with a visible shudder of delight. Ayaan raised her hands to attack a third time but then the door of the barn slammed open.

Dead people came slouching out. They were skin, skeletally thin. They were missing pieces. Very few among them still had four limbs. A few were missing all the flesh from their heads and all but the sinews of their necks. All of them had chunks of their torsos and abdomens carved away. Their ribs stuck out from denuded sides or were cut away entirely leaving them horribly lopsided. None of them had body hair of any kind. None of them had eyes, nor much skin.

Ayaan had seen plenty of decomposing bodies in her time. She'd seen human flesh gnawed on, torn apart, burned, hacked, eaten away by disease. She'd never seen human bodies systematically butchered, though. Not butchered for their meat.

'Just like prime aged beef,' the wizard chuckled. 'If you sauce it just right, it gets so you hardly can tell.' He squinted at Ayaan. 'Now, I figger I could do with a nice skirt steak for breakfast.'

The carved dead shuffled toward her, their faces unmoving, their hands up to grab and claw and tear.





Monster Planet





Chapter Seventeen


Sarah ran a finger across the top of a water heater and stared at the dust that came up, a thick felt-like layer of forgotten time.

She started to reach for the soapstone in her pocket and stopped herself. Whatever Ptolemy might have to say to her she knew she didn't want to hear. She had essentially used him as a diversion to save her own skin. He was smart enough not to appreciate that.

Ayaan was dead. Nothing mattered.

She knew what she was doing, and how wrong it was. She couldn't stop, though. Or rather she couldn't start. Leaving the basement would mean engaging the horrors outside. It would mean the possibility of dying. She'd been taught how to survive, had been taught so well, in fact, that her body would go on doing what it needed to do to keep living even if she stopped thinking altogether. It would take real willpower to go against that training, to throw herself into the fray.

In the back of the basement the building's superintendent had set up a little personal lounge: a broken-springed recliner, a coffee table holding an ashtray full of old cigarette butts, a record player and a pair of speakers. All of it dead, rotting with age, covered in dust. She found a stack of plastic crates full of old records. She took out a few and studied the album cover art. She tried not to listen for air horns or screams or sounds of violence outside. If there had been power in the basement she could have played music to block out the sounds. That might be nice. To go back in time for a little while. To pretend like her whole life had never happened yet, that it was thirty years prior. It would be nice to...