They hit her then, the zealots, cultists large and small falling on her like a rain of bodies. The blade bit and chewed of its own volition'she didn't even know how to turn it off'but the bodies kept coming, kept piling on. Someone kicked and smashed at her wrist until she let go of the chainsaw. It became hard to breathe and her vision dimmed. Time stopped altogether.
Was the price of a pawn worth it, she wondered, if you only took a rook? It had to be. It had to be.
Monster Planet
Chapter Twenty
They found their first trace of the Tsarevich's ship a week out of Gibraltar, in the middle of the Atlantic. Osman turned to Sarah and asked what she wanted to do'storm the bigger ship in the middle of the ocean or wait to see where it made landfall? She bit her lip, unsure of what to think, and chose land to buy herself some time.
Crossing the Atlantic nearly killed them. The waves grew taller than the tug and when storms shot across their bows the water rose, and rose, and threatened to capsize the little boat. Osman got them through, with skill and the creativity born of self-preservation, but it was always a close thing.
They followed the Tsarevich long after they ran out of food. Sarah at least knew what to do in the face of hunger. Ptolemy took the lion's share of the steering after that. Sarah and Osman spent a lot of time asleep. Eventually they saw seagulls again. Landfall turned out to be half a world away from where she started. A new continent, a new hemisphere, a place where they measured distances in miles, not kilometers.
For most of a day they hung back, keeping the Tsarevich in radar range but out of sight just over the horizon. He was looking for something. His ship hugged the coast line but cast back and forth as if her pilot were trying to remember where to put in to land. They passed north past a jungle, a riotous, overgrown beach where grass grew three meters tall. They passed dead villages and towns and resorts like empty tin cans strewn along the sand. Still they headed vaguely north, past a sandy spit that ran for miles, studded with the ruins of houses, crowned with an enormous, dark light house. Finally the larger ship came to a halt and Osman touched his controls, locked his wheel, cut the tug's throttle. The Tsarevich's ship had put in at Asbury Park, in New Jersey.
'You know we're only about sixty kilometers from'' Osman began.
She grabbed the chart away from him. 'Yeah. I know.' Sixty kilometers made about forty-five miles from New York City. She could read a map.
New York was where her father died. He'd been born there, too. He had fled it as a teenager, come back to it as a man and saved a lot of people and then he died. Sarah knew something about dealing with ghosts. She knew to stay away from them, if she could, that what they had to offer came with a steep price tag.