'You think you can kill me from there and you're right, you can. One shot to the head.' The lich pushed against the plastic curtain, moved a step closer to her. Despite herself Sarah took a step back. 'Why don't you? Why don't you kill me right now? I won't stop you, I won't even try. It's this skin.' The lich ran the knuckles of one hand across its leprous cheek. 'I'm not one of the special ones. I wasn't brought back quite right. They tell you all about life eternal, you know, they tell you your body is good forever but they can't stop it. They can't stop the rot, you can't stop the rot no matter what you do. There's not enough bleach in the world. Now. Clothes off. Or shoot me in the head. I don't care either way.'
Ptolemy swooped out from behind Sarah'he moved faster, nearly as fast as one of the accelerated ghouls that got Ayaan'and grabbed up the plastic sheet in both hands. He tore it off the rings holding it to the ceiling and thrust it away. The mummy grabbed the lich and wrestled it around into a headlock, its face peering up at Sarah, its rotten eyes wobbling in their sockets. It smiled broadly.
'That's the way, big boy. Come on. Squeeze me harder. You think I want to live forever in a rotten old shell like this?'
'Wait,' Sarah told Ptolemy. 'You'd just be doing it a favor.' She stepped closer and put the safety back on her pistol. 'We need information. We need to know where Ayaan is being kept. You can read my mind, you know who I'm talking about.'
'Oh, I know indeed, but you don't think I'd give up that kind of dirt for nothing, do you? Let me have a little taste, first. Let me chew on one of your fingers.'
Sarah grimaced and looked at the mummy. His painted face didn't offer any inspiration. She had an idea of her own, but it wasn't exactly the kind of cautious, well-thought-out plan that Ayaan would have come up with.
What the hell. 'Hold him down, hold his head down,' she told the mummy, and Ptolemy obliged. Scowling she stuck a finger in her mouth, licked it a couple of times. She held it up to the light, caught a glint off the glob of saliva there, and jabbed it into the lich's rotting ear. Its waxy skin split under the pressure and she felt thick, viscous fluid swell up around her fingernail, but she knew the lich was more afraid of her than she was of it. 'How many germs in a gram of human spit?' she asked, but the lich was already screaming.
Monster Planet
Chapter Twelve
Sarah tied the dead thing's hands with a length of electrical cord. Ptolemy kept the lich in a sleeper hold as she lead the two of them carefully out of the shack and through the streets and passages of the refinery. 'It's alright, come out! You've been liberated,' she shouted as bleary faces looked down at her from the catwalks. The Russians looked confused and bewildered, mostly.
A rifle shot rang out and Sarah rolled under a massive pipe. Ptolemy pulled their captive into the partial cover. Sarah was the only one breathing, the only heart beating in that little space but she made up for the other two. 'I guess they didn't want to be liberated,' she said.
'Oh, you're doing them such a favor, little filthy. Oh, ho ho,' the lich chortled. 'The Tsarevich gave these little crumbs of humanity a real life. He gave them something to believe in, and now you're going to take it away. He fed them, clothed them''
Sarah stared at the lich. It had already told her what she needed to know and far too much besides. 'Ptolemy,' she said, 'keep that thing quiet so it doesn't give away our position.'
The mummy got her drift. It tightened its hold on the lich until the evil thing's neck crackled and popped. Its glinting eyes stood out a little further from their encrusted sockets and some of the boils on its cheeks popped open and spilled out a little pinkish fluid. Hopefully Ptolemy had crushed its larynx.
'Alright, I'm going to try again,' Sarah told the mummy. She slipped off the safety of her pistol and ducked back under the pipe. In the shadowy street she would be nearly invisible with the hood of her sweatshirt up.
The lich had explained to her, under certain prodding, that she had arrived too late. The Tsarevich'and Ayaan as his prisoner'had left the refinery behind. He had taken all of his undead minions with him, leaving only the rotting sexless lich as a protector for the living people he had abandoned. There wasn't a ghoul in kilometers. Which should have made her job easier.