Monster Planet(9)

In that half-awake state her esoteric senses were at their strongest. She dreamed of the dark flicker of energy beyond the wire before she saw it. When she saw it adrenaline blasted through her veins and she nearly fell out of her perch.

It wasn't an army. It was just one ghoul. Still, she reached for the whistle around her neck. The slaughter on the dunes had started with just one ghoul attacking her. Maybe there were more nearby. Maybe hundreds of them. She couldn't feel them, couldn't sense their energy, but'

The single ghoul below her came to a lurching stop and looked up, right at her. It raised one hand to its mouth, placed a rotting finger against its lips. Asking her for silence. Then, with its other hand, it beckoned to her. Slowly, it turned around and headed back out into the darkness.

Shit,Sarah thought.

She had been summoned. She couldn't imagine worse timing.





Monster Planet





Chapter Five


Author's Note: Judging by the comments recently it appears a lot of readers are unfamiliar with just how Sarah came to have her particular power. That story appeared in a “Teaser” I posted after the end of Monster Island . It was pretty easy to miss, and I never really gave it much thought myself since it wasn't supposed to be an official part of the story. I hope that clears up some confusion. --David Wellington

Getting over the palisade wasn't easy.

Ayaan had designed the wall to be impassible to hungry ghouls: two thicknesses of concertina wire wrapped all the way around the camp, creating a dry moat three meters wide between them. Inside the aisle between these two impediments the soldiers had dumped a jumble of broken concrete and rebar, the rusted iron turned outward to impale careless intruders. There was no gate in the palisade anywhere'you left the encampment the same way you came back, via helicopter, or you just stayed put. A smart human could get through the mess eventually if he had a pair of very sturdy bolt cutters and plenty of time. Even then he would leave obvious signs of his passage.

The first time Jack had come to her in Egypt Sarah had left him waiting in the desert for days while she figured out how to escape without being detected. She couldn't just ignore his call. He had taught her how to see the energy of the dead, her one true talent. Without him she would have perished long before. She couldn't tell Ayaan about her comings and goings either so she'd had to be crafty. She had volunteered for her current job of cleaning and fueling the helicopters. When the pilots weren't looking she had stolen one of the kevlar blankets they used to armor the interior cabins of the Mi-8s. Sarah had stripped the heavy blanket of its inset metal plates and then draped the remaining kevlar over the wire, then scrambled up and over her makeshift stile. It took impeccable timing to make sure she wasn't seen.

She had repeated the stunt many times since. Often enough to get away with it, even with the camp on heightened alert. Once she was out on the open sand, though, she began to feel a very familiar fear. Unprotected by Ayaan, unable to properly defend herself she would be easy prey for any wandering ghoul who happened to smell her on the wind. Anyone else probably would have been eaten years ago. Sarah's special relationship with Jack was something she hesitated to count on but it kept her alive.

'Sarah,' he called to her, his voice low and sharp. She had been moving carefully up the slope of a dune that ran parallel to the wire and she dropped to hug the sand, terrified. 'Sarah, hurry up. We don't have much time.'

He came to her as he always did, in the body of a dead man. It was never the same body twice but she could tell it was him because intelligence clearly guided its actions. This one was white and was missing the flesh from one side of its face. The body wore a blue jumpsuit with a striped blue-and-white shirt underneath. It looked like a sailor. It had to have been one of the Tsarevich's troops, she decided. Jack leaned down and offered her his hands but she shook her head and got to her feet on her own. She couldn't afford to smell like death when she went back to the camp.

'Jack, I don't know what you're doing here but this is a really bad time,' she protested. 'Fathia will make my life hell if she finds out I'm missing.'

'Oh, will she now? She'll make your life hell?' Jack's borrowed eyes glinted in the first blue rays of dawn. 'You know a lot about hell, do you? You can't know what hell is like, not when you still have skin to keep you warm and bones to keep you standing upright.'

Sarah bit her lower lip. 'I'm sorry,' she tried. 'I didn't mean''