'Oh, no,' Nilla said from somewhere further into the forest. Her voice was as soft as the constant sound of needles falling through the branches. The same sound, the same softness, the snow made when it fell from the trees. Ayaan hurried on.
A long vane of metal arched up from the snow ahead of her like a pole driven into the ground. Though rust and general decay had claimed it Ayaan recognized it as the rotor of a helicopter. In a clearing ahead the majority of the aircraft's wreckage stood forgotten and ill-used by weather, a standing circle of broken titanium and steel and Plexiglas. There had been a bad fire there once, presumably when the helicopter crashed. There were human remains in the circle. Simple bones, black with soot, white where the sun had bleached them. One of them was still moving.
He wore the uniform of a soldier, faded by sunlight but still draped with insignia and medallions. He had been partially eaten, most of the flesh of his legs and arms having been torn away, and he had been burned as well. Eyeless, nearly faceless, his skull stared up at the sky. The few muscles left in his arms were straining at a jagged length of metal that erupted from his ribcage. He was trying to get himself free. He'd probably been trying for twelve years.
Nilla knelt next to his head, her hands across her face. She didn't say anything.
Ayaan understood. She came forward and put her hands on the tattered skin of the dead man's head. She closed her eyes and let a pulse of dark energy trickle through her fingers, into what remained of his brain. He fell back on his spike and stopped moving. Nilla nodded emphatically and rose to her feet. 'He didn't want to trust me, but he had to,' she said.
'Careful,' Ayaan told her. 'You're starting to turn into a somebody.'
Nilla gave her a smile that started to melt Ayaan's dead heart. The smile dropped from her face almost instantly, however. 'Am I losing my mind, or do you hear that, too?' She turned around to look at the pieces of the downed helicopter.
Ayaan stood perfectly still, more still than she ever could have in life, and made herself all one ear. She listened, and tuned out the natural sounds around her, and listened again. She definitely heard it. The sound a helicopter's rotor makes when it's moving under power. How was it possible? Was this some kind of vehicular ghost? Ayaan had seen a lot of strange things but she wasn't ready to accept that.
Then a helicopter went by over their heads so low its shadow darkened the clearing, so fast it was gone in the time it took for Ayaan's eyes to adjust to the dimness. She glanced at Nilla, then started running back toward the road. The explosions started before she covered half the distance.
Monster Planet
Chapter Nine
There were hundreds of them down there. Most of them dead, but not all. She saw golden energy sprinkled throughout the column. The vast majority of them were on foot. They trailed along for a quarter of a mile as they threaded through the narrow pass in the side of the mountain. Some of them were alive.
'Am I clear?' Sarah shouted into her microphone. Someone tapped her shoulder'that was the signal for 'affirmative'. They had practiced this, drilled it in Omaha but that hadn't really counted. The fuel depot at the air base there had been swarming with ghouls. They had flown around for nearly three hours picking off the hungry dead from the air until it was safe to land. That time nobody had been able to shoot back.
The flatbed beneath them, the same one she'd seen in Egypt, had two machine gun positions on its back. Both of them were crewed by living people in light blue paper shirts. Sarah had never killed a living person before.
In any war, though, somebody had to shoot first.