Clear plastic sheeting hung down in the middle of the room, dividing it in half. Electronic equipment filled most of the far half'radar screens, several television sets, medical equipment. High-wattage light bulbs hung from the ceiling and blasted any shadows out of the corners. On the near side of the curtain stood some old, mildew-damaged furniture and a antique silver microphone on a tall stand.
Sarah stepped up to the microphone. She had only skimpy memories of how such things worked. She had only been eight years old when the Epidemic hit, after all, and electricity had been a commodity rarer than jewels in her life. She must have seen a movie at some point, however, or even a television show in which someone tested a microphone by tapping it. Almost reflexively she reached up with one finger and touched the microphone's windscreen.
A dull roaring sound echoed around the wooden shack, a high-pitched ringing following close on its heels. Sarah ducked as if undead birds were cawing for her flesh. She looked up and saw speakers mounted in the room's four ceiling corners.
'You shouldn't be here yet. You haven't been cleaned properly.'
Sarah's heart lurched. A dead thing'a lich, one of the Tsarevich's creations'had emerged from behind the piles of electronics in the far half of the room. Its greenish face loomed up against the plastic, the curtain draping across its dead features. Sarah had never seen a human body so badly decayed. Boils and sores had replaced most of its skin, while its hair hung in sparse clumps leaving plenty of rotten scalp exposed. Its eyes looked like they'd been boiled too long, its teeth were brown and broken. She couldn't even tell what sex it had been in life. It wore a crisp green hospital gown and latex gloves and it looked at her as if it were studying a germ under a microscope.
'Filthy little child. Not one of ours, no, you're not one of ours at all. You're looking for something, looking, no, looking for some one. You won't find her, not here.' Its voice was barely human, rough around the edges, husky, wheezing.
Sarah shook her head. 'You don't know what I''
'Filthy, you've been hiding in dusty unclean places, you've been hiding for years in the desert and you shower what, once a week? If you're lucky. There's filth on you. I can see it under your nails, I can see it in your hair.' The lich leered at her. 'Sarah, you need a bath. Thirty-two million microbes on every square inch of you, chewing away happily, twenty-four seven on your dead skin cells. Imagine what they'd make of an aged slice of beef like me.'
'How did you''
The lich tilted its head to one side. 'Know your name? How did I know your name? There's always a consolation prize. I'm not one of his special ones, no, I can't bring flowers to the desert, I can't kill you from here with my mind, no, but I have my uses.' It scratched at its upper lip with one latex-covered finger, popping some blisters there. 'You'll need a good disinfecting, Sarah. All those razor bumps on your head, that pimple on your chin'infections, all of them, did you know that? Nasty little colonies of germs. Take your clothes off. They'll need to be incinerated. You just need to be parboiled a bit, get the nastiness off you.'
Sarah knew a threat when she heard one. She pulled her Makarov MP out of her pocket and slipped the safety off. 'I don't think so, asshole. I think''