Squinting, she adjusted her grip on her OICW and glanced over her shoulder. The mummies waited patiently behind her, their shotgun barrels pointed at the sky. Ptolemy stood to one side of them. He shook his painted head back and forth'he had no better idea what was going on than she did.
Directly ahead the valley was carpeted with bones and moldering bodies. None of them moved. Skulls stared up at random angles at a lifeless sky. Femurs and humeri stuck up like fence posts. Heaps of pelvises and spines and xyphoid processes and metacarpals and phalanges made narrow hummocks, obscuring the soil beneath. Thousands of people had died in this valley, or at least died somewhere else and come here to fall down. No one had buried them or done anything with their corpses. They had been allowed to just rot away.
The freshest ones formed a perimeter, a wide semi-circle of stinking carrion. Toward the middle where the ground began to rise the bones were the oldest, broken and beige with time and neglect. No plants grew there, no birds flew overhead.
Sarah figured it had to be the Source that drew the bodies to this place. It was so bright she had to shade her eyes when she turned to face it, so close she could feel its energy like warmth on her skin. The dead had come for years, pilgrims to the place where the Epidemic began.
Sarah stepped over the corpse. It took a real act of will. For all of her life, at least all of her life that she could remember, rule one had been to never turn your back on a dead body. It was how you got killed. This one wasn't hurting anybody, though. She stepped over it and dug her boot through a pile of bones to touch the ground beyond. She took another step, careful not to put any weight on the carpet of bones. Nothing happened.
Did the dead come so far just to stand around, to just wait to fall to pieces? Did they come because it felt good to be surrounded by that energy? Did it nourish them? Sarah had a lot of questions. What was that smell?
She turned and saw that one of the mummies had followed her into the bones. He stood there motionless, as dead as a statue, his shotgun braced on his shoulder. She sniffed the air. He smelled like warm apple pie. Sarah tried to remember when she'd ever had the chance to smell a piece of apple pie. Maybe with her father, before the Epidemic. Her father'just thinking of him sent a jagged length of metallic guilt stabbing through her heart. What she'd said to him had been unacceptable.
Burning apple pie. Apple pie? Maybe pumpkin pie. Hot spices. Burning spices. A trickle of white smoke wafted out from the mummy's chest. With a hissing sound a piece of the wrappings on his head fluttered open and more smoke came out. The smoke smelled pungent, like incense. Like burning spice.
No way,she thought. 'Back!' she shouted. The mummy didn't move. 'Get back!' she said, and shoved him backwards. She slapped at his pectorals, at his forehead and he rocked away from her as if there was no volition at all in his body. She grabbed the soapstone scarab in her pocket. 'Ptolemy. Don't let them come any closer.'
warms it the source consumes us it consumes even warms as it warms consumes us,he sputtered.
'Just stay back!' Even as she said it, though, another of the mummies'one with a poorly painted face'stepped forward. They wanted it. They wanted to be closer to the Source. It drew them just as it must have been drawing ghouls for years. And when they got close enough, when the energy in the air was thick enough, their bodies literally burned out from overexposure. The one thing they wanted more than anything in the world would kill them if they got too much of it.
A flash of motion on the far side of the valley startled Sarah. She flicked off the safety of her weapon but nothing appeared to attack her. It could have just been the sunlight bouncing off snow or a pile of bones falling over in the breeze. It could have been lots of things. She glanced back at the mummies and saw that they had all taken a step closer to the Source.
'No, listen to me,' she said, and moved to push the nearest one back. 'You guys don't even eat living things. How can you want this so badly?'