A smile touched Ayaan's tight face. 'I'm glad to see you listened. Perhaps you will take another lesson. There are times, however rare, when running away is a mistake. This Tsarevich grows stronger every day. If I do not stop his evil now, when I have a chance, I may not be able to face him the next time. Today I will kill him. If he has the ability to project images of himself then it isn't enough to shoot him from the air. I am forced to go after him on foot, so that I can feel his skull breaking and know I have finished the job.'
'So let's call in some backup. Get the others in here, get some free fire zones established, maybe build a redoubt to funnel his advance''
'Sarah,' Ayaan interrupted.
'No, seriously, we can get the other helicopter down here in twenty, maybe thirty minutes, we can establish a killzone, then draw him into''
'Sarah.' Ayaan closed her eyes and shook her head. 'Please go wait with Osman.'
Stunned, Sarah finally shut up. She couldn't believe it. Ayaan had uttered the ultimate insult'she had suggested that Sarah was a liability. That she didn't want Sarah around during the fight. It was the kind of thing Ayaan would say to a child, a baby.
There was also no appeal possible. Once Ayaan had given an order she never took them back. Feeling the stares of Fathia and Leyla and the others on her back she headed back to the helicopter. It occurred to her when she was halfway there that she should have just been quiet, should have accepted Ayaan's command without question the way the others did. It also occurred to her that if she was in the helicopter she was less likely to get killed.
She was thinking such thoughts, her head lowered in dejection, when something fast and horrible smacked into her like a moving car. She fell down hard on the sand as something colorless and violent and extremely fast reared up over her, its stubby arms lifted high, its shining head sparkling in the sunlight and she knew, was absolutely certain, that in the next few microseconds she was going to die an unguessable but extremely painful death. She closed her eyes but she could still see the aura of the dead thing that was about to kill her. Its energy was like nothing she'd ever seen before. It was dark, of course, cold and hungry like any ghoul's. But instead of smoking and hissing away like ice melting in the sun, this energy fizzed and snapped like something on fire. Its shape was wrong, too, something was missing'
She heard gunfire and it fell away from her, out of her vision. One of Ayaan's squad had saved her. She opened her eyes and saw a still-moving body sliding down the slipface of a dune. Its arms pumped wildly at the air, moving so fast they blurred. Impossible'the dead lacked the energy to move like that. They were slow, lumbering, uncoordinated wrecks.
This one could have caught a hummingbird in mid-flight and swallowed it whole in the space between two wing strokes.
Getting a good look at it wasn't easy but Sarah could make out some details. The dead thing had been knee-capped by automatic rifle fire and would never walk again. It was naked, its skin grey and shrunken on its bones. Its lips had either rotten away or been cut back, revealing a pale stretch of jawbone. The better to bite with, Sarah supposed. It wore a miner's helmet, complete with a broken lamp, to protect its vulnerable cranium. Its hands... its hands had been cut off, leaving bloodless, ragged stumps. The bones of its forearms had been sharpened into vicious spikes.
Nausea washed up from her stomach into her throat but Sarah held herself together. The dead felt little pain, she knew, but somebody with better manual dexterity'someone living'would have had to perform surgery on the ghoul to achieve such a brutal reconfiguration.