Monster Planet(85)

But of course Marisol was tough. Ayaan had recognized it when she'd stood on the Island and looked at the bleak future facing the survivors. Marisol was tough and she could make hard decisions. Sarah handed the woman her son and watched as she laid him down gently in the worm-riddled earth. Then Sarah reached down and helped Marisol climb up out of the grave. Together they pushed the dirt over the boy, concealing him forever from view.

Marisol didn't say any prayers or offer the boy a eulogy. Her obvious grief, written in the streaks of dirt on her face, was eloquence enough. Sarah sat and watched her and wondered why she didn't feel just as strongly about Ayaan. Maybe because it wasn't real to her yet. Maybe it was because Ayaan hadn't stopped moving yet. After about half an hour of just sitting and mourning Marisol turned and looked at her. 'What do you want?' she asked.

Sarah understood what she was being asked. Why had she come to Governors Island, and what would it take to get her to leave? 'I won't lie to you. I'm on a dangerous journey and no good is coming of it. Originally I was on a rescue mission. Now I'm after revenge.'

Marisol smiled, a quiet, overworked smile. 'Jack taught me about revenge. He said it was the only form of suicide accepted by the Catholic Church.'

Sarah shrugged. 'Okay, maybe revenge isn't the word I want. We used to call it sanitation. The woman who raised me is dead now. Undead. It's my last duty to her to put a bullet in her head.' She looked down at the fresh grave. That had been Marisol's last duty to her son. It was the same. She wanted to say as much but she knew the words would profane Jackie's death. 'I need guns, and I need soldiers. Right now though I need some meat to feed my father.'

Her father'wasn't it also her duty to sanitize him?

No. She would never think about that again. Anyway. Ayaan had told Sarah a hundred times what she wanted done if she ever turned into one of the walking dead. She had left explicit instructions. Her father seemed to want to go on.

She refused to explore that thought any further.

Marisol helped her find what she needed in the main stores. An economy-sized bag of pork rinds, guaranteed not to spoil for decades to come. They brought it north, into the half of the island where a bonfire was already being built, where lights were coming on in the houses and the sound of playful violins and acoustic guitars hung in the air like the music had gotten caught in the tree branches. They found Dekalb slumped forward across his own knees, still sitting in his lawn chair, while all around him living people set about making a communal dinner. The lich took the pork rinds from his daughter and tried to tear open the bag but he just didn't have the strength. Sarah did it for him. As she handed the bag to her father she looked at Marisol, and Marisol looked back. It was a lot more comfortable, the silence that passed between them, than it had been before.

'We need to find you a house,' Dekalb said around a mouth of what looked to Sarah like dirty pink styrofoam. 'If you're going to stay here with me you'll need a proper house. You can't live in the ventilation shaft with us, it's not healthy.'

Sarah's brow furrowed. 'Daddy, I didn't plan on staying,' she said. 'I've got work to do. Important stuff.' She felt like an infant as the words came out of her mouth.

Dekalb shook his head. 'It'll wait,' he told her. 'We have way too much catching up to do. And there's the question of your education. Marisol, what about the officer's quarters over by the schoolhouse, what's available over there?'

'Dad!' Sarah interjected, 'I''

He pushed his hand into the bag and rustled it in his annoyance. 'I will not let you be put in danger again,' he told her. He drew out a handful of rinds and shoved them into his permanently stretched-out rictus. 'Who's the grown-up here, after all?'





Monster Planet





Chapter Four


The giant truck rocked up on one set of giant tires as it crushed an abandoned car on the interstate, a thousand tiny glass cubes exploding from the crushed windshield, rotten struts and shocks popping and collapsing and squealing and then it was over. In the bed of the truck Ayaan held onto a roll bar until the truck stopped bouncing and then clicked on her walkie-talkie. 'Bring up a wrecking crew,' she said. 'The flatbed won't make it past this one.'

A few dozen living men in blue paper scrubs came rushing up with prybars and sledgehammers. They made short work of the rusted-out car, taking it to pieces and hurling the wreckage into the undergrowth on either side of the road. They had to move quickly. Behind them the Tsarevich's flatbed trailer was surging forward, its ranks of wheels turning in fits and starts as the giant vehicle moved forward one staggering step at a time. A hundred corpses heaved at it with their shoulders, their bent backs, their straining fingers. On top six more ghouls turned the cranks of giant flywheels, feeding storage batteries so they would have electricity for the night to come. Living gunners crewed heavy machine guns mounted in pintles at two positions on the flatbed. The green phantom sat strapped into a chair on a high superstructure from which he commanded a good view of their surroundings and everything that happened in the column of vehicles. At the back of the flatbed the Tsarevich himself reclined in his yurt, quite hidden from view. There were plenty of rumors that claimed he was actually not in there at all, that the flatbed was a complete ruse and that he was hidden elsewhere. Ayaan wouldn't have blamed him for being a little cagy.