With her arm bent, with her weight behind it Ayaan smashed at the wood expecting to dislocate her shoulder. Instead it gave way like cardboard and she spilled out into daylight so bright it seared her eyes.
Dead pupils, Ayaan learned, could not contract as quickly as live pupils. Her eyes throbbed with pain as she got her feet under her and ran, her boots finding the planks of a boardwalk, her muscles burning as she tried to run. The best she could manage was a sort of drunken stagger, little better than a stiff walk.
When her eyes finally started to adjust to the white light that flashed off the ocean she lifted the Kalashnikov into a firing position and sighted on the window she'd broken open. They would come from there, she figured. She had to assume they wouldn't have more ghouls lying in wait for her outside.
A ghoul wearing a fireman's helmet appeared in the window. The lower half of his face had been carved away to give him a bigger mouth, a bigger bite. His skin was the tawny color of a predator in a dusty land.
Ayaan wasted no time. She lined up her shot and placed a tight burst of three rounds right in the exposed portion of his forehead.
At least, they should have gone there. Instead none of the three even hit him. In horror Ayaan looked down at her weapon. Had it been altered somehow, had the iron sights been filed down, twisted out of alignment, something?
No. It was her. She'd never seen a ghoul with a firearm, ever. Now she knew why.
The ghoul leapt through the window and headed toward her like a rocket. She fired again and saw dusty dried blood explode from his elbow. It didn't even slow him down.
It was her. It was her fingers, her hands that felt like formless clay at the ends of her arms. There was a reason why the green phantom took the hands of his soldiers'they were worth less as weapons than the sharpened ends of bone. And hers were the same. She lacked the motor skills, the fine muscle control it took to fire a rifle with any kind of effectiveness. She dropped the weapon on the ground. She would never use an AK-47 again, as long as she, well, lived. All that training. All that experience. How much of her had been tied to that weapon? How much else did she have?
Time to find out.
No more than ten meters separated them, a distance he could cover in seconds. If she was going to pass this test' did she even want to pass it? Let him stab her, let him destroy her, and she would be done. She had spent all her life fighting the liches. To live on, to continue to exist at any rate, meant being what she hated most.
It didn't matter. None of it mattered. She knew, because Ayaan could look into her own heart, she had mastered that skill very early on, she knew she wanted to keep going. She could no longer stay alive for Sarah. But she could continue to fight.
But how? With her bare hands? She closed her eyes and tried to think. Sarah spoke often of the life force, the energy that pervaded all living things. Ayaan had always thought of it as similar to baraka, the dangerous blessedness of clan leaders and Sufi saints. Just an old Somali superstition'but perhaps there was some reality to it. Now, after her death, she had no trouble feeling the energy all around her, the life force. A field of energy that passed through her, that wrapped her up and animated her dead flesh and kept her consciousness alive. If she were going to develop powers, just spontaneously grow some kind of mystical ability it would come from that source, from that energy, that baraka. Every lich power she'd heard of, all of their magic, was simply the ability to manipulate that field.
She reached down into it, gathered it in her hands. It made her skin tingle as she clutched at it, exactly as she might clutch at a blanket that covered her. She concentrated it, and time slowed down as she focused the energy, squeezing it down into tight hot bundles of force in her hands.