We speed-slither for hours. A sandstorm rages around us and we cling to our mount and tear through the heart of it. It’s like tobogganing through a blast furnace.
As the storm ebbs, I see that the terrain has changed. Rock outcroppings poke through the sand and soon give way to great boulders which hunch in the moonlight. Hills and mountains rise in the distance, and soon the crumbling remains of towns and small cities appear. We pass silent urban graveyards where the sand has swallowed fallen skyscrapers, and the tops of minarets jut up like the desperate limbs of drowning swimmers between waves of gravel and rocks.
Damascus, Morgan tells me.
It seems incredible that a thriving metropolis stood here for millennia. Is Paris like this? I ask the Gorm. And then I hesitate. And what about New York?
Gone, all gone, he replies simply, and then he tenses.
Shadows scuttle around the ruins. Humans! Desperate women and children emerge from hiding places and hold out hands as we speed by. They’re begging for food and they look like they need it—haggard faces, unprotected from the glare. Stick-thin bodies poking out of ragged clothes.
Can we stop and give them some water? I ask Morgan.
We can’t help them, he answers. They were fools to show themselves. And then I hear true panic in Morgan’s telepathic warning: Get down! A Jasai!
I see him duck his head so that he’s practically kissing the nematode. Something he saw terrified him. I can’t stop myself from glancing back at the beggars.
They’re also reacting. Fleeing in all directions. Mothers pulling small kids along. But they only get a few steps. A tall man dressed all in billowing black, like the ghost of death itself, hurls himself at them from atop a boulder and for a moment in the moonlight I see his wild eyes. Then there’s a tremendous explosion.
I duck my head and hug the nematode’s back. The shock of the blast almost flips our mount, but luckily for us giant worms have extremely low centers of gravity. We’re soon speeding away from the explosion. I look back and see that where the women and children stood, only a large, smoking crater remains.
What’s a Jasai? I ask the Gorm. A Dark Army killer?
Dannite. They’re a recent splinter group that appeared after the war against the Dark Army was lost. They want to force the end.
The end of what?
The human species. They revile humans.
But if they’re Dannite, they are human, I object.
Yes, Morgan agrees, they blame themselves for what’s happened to the earth. According to their fanatical founder, humans are abominations in the eyes of God, responsible for every wretched thing that’s happened to the once beautiful earth. Dann claimed that the planet could be saved and healed. Jasai preaches that Dann was wrong, and that humanity’s last duty is to remove its own foul presence.
So they’re a suicide cult?
An annihilation cult. They don’t want to just kill themselves. They want to take the entire human race with them. They believe that’s the only way to atone for the damage Homo sapiens has wreaked.
I shiver, and almost slip off the worm’s back. Has it really come to this? The human race so appalled by its own conduct that it’s bent on exterminating itself?
The nematode gathers speed and we race through the darkness. The ruins fall away, and at the first light of dawn we come to what was once a marsh. The waters have long since dried up, and all that is left are the desiccated husks of reeds, and ghostly outlines of ancient water courses on gravel.
The nematode stops and we dismount.
What’s the matter? I ask. Is the dawn spooking it? Is it going to dig a burrow for us to hide in again?
It refuses to go any farther, Morgan informs me. And it also doesn’t want to stay here.
Why not?
Kill zone.
Offer it an egesta, I suggest.
Morgan takes a handful of egesta and holds them out in his palm.
The giant worm shuffles close, obviously hungry and tempted to accept a hearty breakfast. Then it reconsiders. The nozzlelike mouth twitches and shuts tight.
The nematode turns and begins to slither back the way it came, leaving Morgan and me all alone in the ruined earth’s most feared kill zone.