The ghoul racing toward her seemed to stop in mid air as she raised her hands, threw them forward, and spat the built-up energy at him. It was that simple, it was second nature. Not something she had to learn.
The energy hit him square on, her aim perfect. It sizzled and spat with darkness as it touched him. It burst inside him like dark fire. His face wrinkled as if in concentration' and kept wrinkling. He had looked ageless before but as the energy'her energy'ripped through his flesh he took on the countenance of an old man. His skin crinkled, turned papery, tore away from his bones. As it fluttered away on the wind it turned to fine powder, like talc.
He collapsed on the boardwalk, mere paces from her, his skull crumbling like old pottery. She had aged him to destruction'what remained of his head could have been a thousand years old.
She stood there forever, waiting for time to start up again. It didn't. She had no breath, no pulse to measure its passing. The sun failed to move across the sky. There had been more ghouls in the boarded-up warehouse, at least two more but neither of them appeared to confront her.
She supposed she had passed the test.
A door in a nearby building creaked open on rusted hinges. She heard maniacal laughter echoing all around her, but had no idea who it belonged to. Time started up once more.
Monster Planet
Chapter Seven
He was supposed to be dead'he was always dead, in her memory, in the stories they told about him. He was dead. Jack wounded him, Jack had turned and turned on him and bit him, infection had set in, Ayaan had sanitized him. It was the story of her life, of her origins.
None of it was true. Thank God.
His dead arms went around her in a feeble kind of embrace. She might have been held by a human-shaped agglutination of popsicle sticks and pipe-cleaners. Sarah pressed harder against him, against his woolen shirt that smelled of death and his dry, dry skin that cracked and peeled against her cheek. Disgust, even horror lost out to the feeling, the one, pure feeling that sang in her. She had never felt something so primal and focused before, except maybe the fear of death, and that was old to her, and this was new.
Somewhere in the twelve year gap between their meetings she had lost him, he had turned a corner in her memory and disappeared from view. Now she had made another right, and another, and in the labyrinth their paths had crossed again. Her age'his condition'none of it was particularly important. They were just a father and a daughter, he was still the man who had taken her to meet the Bedouins and let her pet their camels, she was still the child who loved butter pecan ice cream and Arabic-language cartoons from Egypt on Saturday morning.
The scuttling bug-like skull crawled up the wall behind her father, into her field of view, but she just shut her eyes and went back to the place where they were family, a family again, and all the walls between them shifted and rearranged to make paths and routes for them to reach each other.
There was someone else in that maze, someone neither of them could see, and of course it was Helen. Her mother, his wife. Helen who had turned and who was maybe still locked in a bathroom in Nairobi, beating against the door, trying to get out to find something to eat. She was a wispy kind of ghost, a distant presence even in memory, however, and it was easy enough to ignore her rattling her chains somewhere in Sarah's peripheral vision.