Monster Planet(89)

'It's... not?' Sarah asked. She wondered what that he could know that she didn't.

'Ayaan was a devout Moslem. She hated the idea of ever becoming ritually unclean,' Dekalb said, fiddling with the sword. He was too weak to actually pick it up and brandish it. 'But she was also fiercely practical. I don't think she would like the idea of anyone going out of their way to mop up after her. Especially not if it meant putting you in danger.'

That didn't matter, Sarah thought. It wasn't a question of what anybody wanted. It was a question of duty. She went to say it out loud... and couldn't.

She left him, claiming she was going to eat breakfast with the survivors. The little house that Marisol had sorted out for the three of them (herself, Dekalb and Gary) was on the north side of Nolan Park, well away from the Victorian houses where the survivors lived. It was easy to slip away with no one seeing her. She remembered the time she'd slipped away from the camp in Egypt, scurrying over the wire. Funny that after so much time she was running away for exactly the same reason.

She went to the gardens and found a slack right away. Any of them would do. This one had been a woman and she still had breasts like empty winesacks that dangled down every time she bent over to pull up a weed. Her hair was cut with precision, perhaps done right before her death'though it badly needed to be washed Sarah could still see where it was supposed to flare out in a bob.

There was nothing in her eyes. Nothing at all. Sarah knew that look. She knew that when most people died it was their personality and their memories that went first. Everything that made them human beings. When oxygen stopped flowing in the brain the fine tracery of personhood just melted away, like frost on a window pane when the sun comes up. Now there was nobody home in this shell. It smiled at her with cracked lips, but only because it had been programmed to do so.

It was what she needed. She lifted up the noose in one hand and the fur armband in the other. There had to be a reason why the Tsarevich had sent half an army to retrieve them. 'Mael Mag Och,' she said, staring into the slack's eyes. 'Mael Mag Och, please. Please, come forward and... and make yourself known.' She sighed. She had no idea how to do this. In the past he'd always come to her.

'Mael Mag Och...Jack... please. I need to talk to you. I need advice so badly and there's nobody else. Please. I need you. I need you. I miss you so much.'

She kept at it for far too long before she finally had to admit defeat. Maybe it was her inability to concentrate. She had heard that about magic, that you had to clear your mind before it could work, that you had to approach it from a position of serenity.

She had too many thoughts in her head for that.





Monster Planet





Chapter Six


Crate after crate of MP4s lined the metal shelves of the smallest of the Island's warehouses. The small arms magazine was the best-maintained of the buildings outside of Nolan Park. Fresh paint inside and out, not a speck of dust. Someone had been busy, and it wasn't the slacks. 'We still don't trust them in here,' Marisol explained. She showed Sarah the basement, filled with collapsible cots and a gravity-fed water purifier.

'About three years after we arrived a ship came through. People, living people were onboard and I can't tell you how excited we were.' Marisol's eyes went misty with time as she remembered. 'We'd just gotten through yet another terrible winter and we were all half-dead. None of us had the energy to start digging up the baseball diamonds and start planting seeds. So when we saw the newcomers we shouted and waved and set off flares. This turned out to be a bad idea.'

'This must have been when I was still recovering,' Dekalb said. 'I don't remember any of it.' Gary perched on his shoulder like a morbid species of parrot. Sarah wished she could have left him resting in the house'this errand was one she definitely needed to be in charge of'but so far she hadn't been able to tell her father anything.

'They were pirates,' Marisol went on. 'They traveled from one enclave of survivors to the next, killing all the men, raping all the women and then killing them too, and stealing all the food. We figured that much out when they started shooting at us. I got everybody in here and sealed the door before they could even make landfall.'

There were weapons in the small, well-lit building that were advanced beyond anything in Sarah's experience. Crazy Special Forces stuff. Experimental arms. Sniper rifles that got plugged into laptop computers and fired by remote control. Unmanned aerial vehicles little bigger than cooking pots that could fly into buildings and kill everyone inside on their own volition. Sarah picked up an enormous pistol from an open crate and checked its action. It was a .45 caliber ACP, a Heckler and Koch Mark 23 Mod 0 according to its spec sheet and it had a tubular laser aiming module on top. Sarah pointed the weapon at the wall with the safety still on and flicked on the LAM. Nothing happened. Well, sure. It had been twelve years at least since the weapon had been stowed away. The batteries would have run down or something.