Monster Planet(86)

The attack on his person had shaken him badly and the death of Cicatrix had left him without a familiar supply of food. Once the Tsarevich had learned that Amanita was also dead, well, something had changed. He had gone from being hurt and confused to being galvanized. He had moved quickly to get his people on the road. He'd had plenty of enthusiastic help, too. The living and the dead had worked side by side to get vehicles ready, to pack up their supplies and belongings, and do whatever it took to stay near the prince of the dead. Where they were going and what they would do when they arrived was still a complete mystery to them. Ayaan, who only knew a little more, found she had too much work to get done to be asking a lot of questions anyway.

Behind the flatbed a fleet of hundreds of barely-functional cars and buses followed, their engines blowing blue smoke across a landscape that had reverted to the primeval. Ayaan remembered a time when cars were commonplace, even in her native Somalia, but she had forgotten just how noisy they were and how much of a mess they made. Most of the vehicles hadn't seen use in over a decade and many were so badly rusted they fell to pieces after only a day or two. It didn't matter. The Tsarevich had all the gasoline he could ever use from his refinery on Cyprus, and there was no shortage of abandoned cars.

Ayaan had been on one of the missions to collect vehicles. Regardless of what she'd lived through and regardless of what she had become it had still spooked her. The cars had been waiting for them, parked in orderly rows outside of shopping malls and airports and stadiums. They had been left there intentionally and their owners had fully expected to come back and reclaim them at short notice. Every vehicle had been personalized in some way'a faded bumper sticker, a graduation tassel hanging from a rear-view mirror, a paint job with simulated flames. Personal effects littered the passenger seats, fast food wrappers were stuffed into the leg wells. The doors were all locked, the windows rolled up tightly. The batteries were long since drained and the gas had evaporated out of their fuel tanks, but those two problems were readily solved. The cars still worked, at a fundamental level. But no one had ever come back. The cars were forgotten. Left for dead.

It had spooked her not for the presence of any real horror but for the absence of any normality. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that ninety-nine per cent of the world's population had died in the first months of the Epidemic. Surrounded by ghouls and cultists and liches it was easy to pretend that the world hadn't been emptied out. Standing in a parking lot bigger than the village where she'd been born, however, watching the sun gleam from every piece of glass and mirror, Ayaan had been forced to accept it, to accept everything that had been lost.

The cars had been given a kind of afterlife now, she supposed. Each car held a single living person'the driver'and as many handless ghouls as could be stuffed into the rest of the interior, the back seat, the trunk. The green phantom and the Tsarevich kept them docile, but Ayaan kept wondering what the drivers must be thinking. Were they pleased with themselves, were they secure in the knowledge they were doing a holy duty? Or did they worry every single second that one of their passengers would break the spell, wake up and look around and realize just how hungry they were?

Ayaan looked forward and saw the road obscured ahead by the branches of a weeping willow. The tree's roots had torn up the asphalt and sent cracks running through the blacktop in every direction. 'I need a lumber crew,' she said, and living women with chainsaws came running forward. Ayaan tried not to think about the last time she'd seen a chainsaw.

Behind the ghoul-filled cars came tow trucks and fuel tankers and 18-wheelers containing mobile mechanics' shops and crates full of spare parts for the cars as well as kitchens for both the living and the undead. Behind the support vehicles came the stragglers'those living who didn't know how to drive, mostly, a tailback of them that receded into the distance. They kept up as best they could. The column of vehicles moved forward only a few miles an hour but it never stopped. The wrecking crews and chainsaw teams cleared debris while a pair of steam rollers and road graders were available if the way became truly impassible. Whatever the Tsarevich hoped to find out west he intended to get there in a hurry.

There would be serious obstacles to come, Ayaan knew. Rivers to ford. Mountains to climb. There would be weeks of slow going ahead of them. So far not a single person had complained.

Well. There was Semyon Iurevich. Though he didn't complain so much as beg for forgiveness and for an end to his unlife. Even over the noise of the cars and the chainsaws Ayaan could hear his screams.