Monster Planet(71)

The tarpaper beneath her started to vibrate. It had to be a hallucination, she decided. Not enough oxygen was getting to her brain and it was starting to break down but she couldn't let that stay her hand, she couldn't...

It wasn't a hallucination. If it was it was the most convincing one she'd ever had. The whole roof was shaking, the whole building. She focused on the black rectangle of the doorway, she focused on the green splotches that were blossoming on her sweatshirt, anything to keep her mind steady.

The stairwell door split into pieces and then disappeared into a yawning gulf of empty space. Down, it went down. Half the building collapsed with a sudden roar like the world's back breaking, a prolonged snapping and squealing and rumbling as stone and brick and steel twisted in on itself and cascaded down the stairs. The wooden beams supporting the upper floors had given way to fungal rot and half the roof just fell in and Sarah was in the air, her feet weren't touching anything, and something pinched her arm, she looked, and half the roof was on top of her arm and then it was gone, half of the building and half of the roof was gone.

Sarah was a little surprised that she didn't go with it. She was on a part of the roof that remained, tilting down at a slight angle but stable for the moment. She was lying on her side under a heap of rubble and her right elbow was shattered. There was blood, a lot of blood, and pieces of bone sticking out of her arm. Oh no, she thought, but there wasn't a lot of emotion there. She was too stunned. She would get infected, she knew, wounds like that always did. She would get a secondary infection and there were no more antibiotics in the whole world. She was going to die.

The demon'the lich'the monster put one hand up on the remaining part of the roof and hauled herself up to stand over Sarah. She had no mouth. The monster had no mouth. Was it going to eat her? Or maybe they would just make her one of those handless ghouls she'd seen.

The monster leaned forward. Pieces of mold and fungus fell from it, vegetative debris that pelted Sarah's chest and face. Sarah couldn't breathe. This close... this close the monster could kill you just by default. Sarah's lungs were full, her chest kept heaving like it was trying to vomit something out but she was stuffed full of softness and dampness. She was choking to death on mold and slime. She felt like someone had pushed rags down her throat until she couldn't hold anymore.

The monster reached down and touched her face with one enormous hand. The fingers stuck to Sarah's cheek where they touched and made a wet suction-cup sound.

You can hear me, can't you?the monster said, inside of Sarah's head.You have the gift.

Sarah tried to nod. She couldn't move the muscles of her neck, they were too clenched with the effort of trying to get some oxygen in her lungs.

You can hear me' I can't tell you how much I need someone like you. Someone to talk to. I can't save your life, now. But I can bring you back to be with me. I won't let them change you, not so much. Would you' would you like that, to be my... friend?

Sarah lifted her left arm. It was hard. The arm fell back to flop on the tarpaper. Try harder, she told herself.

She lifted her left arm, with the Makarov's incredible weight in her unwieldy hand, and shoved the barrel into the thick layer of mold and fungus over the monster's forehead. She squeezed the trigger, waited for the weapon to cycle, and squeezed again. Cycle. Again. Cycle.Again.





Monster Planet





Chapter Eighteen


Ayaan fired a bolt of dark energy into the legs of an oncoming ghoul and the meat slid right off her bones. The sinew and cartilage beneath darkened and cracked and she fell face forward across the packed dirt of the barnyard. The wizard just laughed.

'There's more where she came from and look, even now she does my will.' It was true. The now legless ghoul kept coming for Ayaan, her skinned hands digging into the soil with slow but total determination.

Ayaan spun around and blew the head off a tall ghoul that had been creeping up behind her. Flesh peeled off his skull in dry strips and fell away, his black tongue flopping to the ground in one piece. He went down for good'but while she had watched him die others had flanked her as she had known they would.

Skinless hands closed around Ayaan's flesh, pinching her mercilessly. The eyeless dead wrapped their arms around her and lifted her off her feet. She kicked and struggled and threw her center of gravity around but every time she slipped out of their dry grey arms another would come up to grasp at her hair or her wrists. She managed to get one quick shot off that seared a ghoul to death where he stood'the naked muscles of his chest and neck withering visibly, the individual strands of fibrous tissue splitting and peeling and blowing away like dandelion fluff'but it wasn't enough.