'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 fucking 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.