Monster Planet(83)

If only it were that simple.

Ayaan stormed away from him, but only for a few paces. She was alone, all alone in the midst of monstrosity. She was enmeshed in secrets and lies and plans she didn't have a hand in forming. She could not afford to give anything up. 'What about you?' she demanded, staring at Nilla. 'What's your part in this?'

The blonde lich turned to face the sun. 'I've already told you, I'm nobody. And that's what makes me special.'

Ayaan shook her head and dropped to sit on the sand. She hated nothing more in the world than riddles. Studiously she tried to ignore them. She stared out at the water as it broke on the sand. The sun had moved visibly across the sky by the time she noticed something flailing in the surf, something yellow and red and black with a bit of silver on one end and white spars sticking out of the sides.

Its limbs extended and then dropped, digging deep into the sand. It reared up, water pouring from its orifices and crevices and nooks and crannies. It had been human, once. It looked like a portioned chicken. The silver bit had been a helmet, strapped to its head. It had slipped down to cover one of its eyes; the other eye socket was empty and raw as if it had been gnawed on. Long strips of its skin had come off in the water while the salt had washed its exposed bones quite clean. It was the ugliest thing Ayaan had ever seen.

'What now?' she demanded.

The brain answered.That's one of Amanita's foot soldiers. If it came here on its own that can only mean one thing. She must be dead.





Monster Planet





Chapter Three


Back on Governors Island the living came before Dekalb, one after the other. As he healed each of them he sank lower and lower in the lawn chair they'd set up for him but the survivors didn't seem to care. One by one they came up and he put his hands on their shoulders and when they walked away they breathed easier and their skin looked clear.

It seemed to surprise no one on the Island that Dekalb could heal them. It was lich magic that had infected their crops, their buildings, their bodies. Of course it was lich magic that would undo the blight. Sarah wondered if they expected her father to clean the mildew off the buildings, too. Did they want him to go around the gardens in the middle of the island and heal each individual stalk of winter wheat?

'I'm getting hungry,' he said, when she stopped the line momentarily. He had slipped down so far in his chair his hands lay across the ground like discarded bones. His head rolled around on his chest. 'But don't worry, pumpkin, this will all be fine. When I'm done we can find a house for you.'

Sarah stood up and looked at the ones who had already been healed. They were gathered in a joking, laughing knot, their hands on their knees, their mouths open and wet as if they were practicing being healthy again. 'You guys,' she said. 'Help me out, will you? He needs food. Meat, if you have any.'

'I'm not wasting my time hunting up grub for some f*cking ghoul,' one bearded man shot back. 'Not after years of them hunting me.'

Sarah sighed, exasperated, but her father clasped at her wrist. 'Honey, go easy on them. They've lost so much. They don't have what we have now.'

She left him there with the living still crowding in, demanding their turn with the healer. She headed toward the warehouse buildings at the south end of the Island'there had to be something there for him. On the way she touched the soapstone. 'Is he behaving himself?' she asked. She had left Ptolemy in charge of Gary. The skullcrab hadn't made a threatening move since the time it paralyzed her but she hadn't lived to the ripe age of nineteen by being stupid around the dead.

he quietly in speaks in riddles and riddles sits speaks in quietly,the mummy told her.

Sarah let it go. She crossed through the cool, shadowy interior of Liggett Hall, which bisected the island, and came out into the verdant fields beyond. The southern part of the Island remembered what it had been before the Epidemic, a sprawling Coast Guard base. Three piers stood out into Buttermilk Channel, their names drawn from a naval alphabet: Lima, Tango, Yankee. The old ball fields might have been turned into farmland but basketball hoops still stood in the middle of green pastures, listing a little in the sun and the wind like emaciated scarecrows.

To get to the warehouses Sarah had to pass by the strangest of the Island's structures, the commercial facilities off Tango Pier. There was a hotel, a laundromat, even a supermarket with shelves bare so long they sagged under their own emptiness. Vending machines once full of ice cold Pepsi stood forgotten or vandalized on every corner. Weirdest of all was the burnt-out shell of a Burger King restaurant, something Sarah had only heard of before in her father's bedtime tales of a decade earlier. Metal signs creaked in the evening breeze down there and old neon tubes stood lifeless and cold. The soft and rusted shapes of cars lurked in the weed-choked parking lots.