X.
"You know," Dr. Seward mused, "when I moved to London from New York, I thought to have less violence in my life. Somehow, I doubt watching two wolfmen battle walking mummies qualifies."
They were huddled behind the ruined walls and rubbish of what remained of a small Arab settling on the island of Philae, between the Roman temple on the southward side and the mighty Egyptian temple that rose above the island from a high mass of granite rocks. These days, only two older women and two girls were still living on Philae, and they had been convinced through an almost embarassingly small sum of money to leave. Which had been a necessity, for by now Malcolm knew it usually took no more than a few hours for Dracula to raise some creatures of the night against them once they'd alerted him to their presence anywhere near one of his relics.
"I do not understand how they can walk," Victor commented. "Mummification includes the complete removal of the brain through the nose, this we know. How is it they can walk without a central nervous system?"
The two scientists stared with undisguised fascination at the sight in front of them in the pale moonlight. Despite himself, Malcolm felt amused. The larger part of him tried to think of a way to deal with the mummies if their first line of defense proved unsuccessful. The problem was that as opposed to vampires, who according to Victor did retain a central nervous system, bullets did not affect them.
As if reading his mind, Catriona Hartdegen, who crouched at his other side, indicated the blade she held with her chin. True, removing limbs would immobilize the creatures, as they'd seen when the creature Ethan had transformed into had torn the legs of one, along with half its throat. But the blade Catriona held was good for fencing, and that was what she was an expert in. Striking hard enough to sever a limb didn't need her lethal elegance, it needed brute force and a machete. The memory of his last visit to the Kongo came to him, of hacked off right hands by the hundreds, Belgian soldiers carrying baskets full of rotting flesh away and Sembene saying "Is this what you call civilisation, Malcolm?"
"However they do it," Malcolm said, focusing on the present, and the gory spectacle in front of them, "even if they are all stopped, we have another problem. I do not think Ethan and Kaetenay can be reasoned with in this state, not until the sun comes up. And we'll be on an island left with them."
The usually silent John Clare was poised to tackle any of the mummies managing to outflank both Ethan and Kaetenay. Previous battles had shown he was by far the strongest member of their party. He turned around, and looked at Malcolm.
"I will keep them from you," he said quietly.
"Without killing them?" Victor asked sharply. They were on the run through Egypt together, hurrying from one ancient settlement to the next while trying not to either get arrested by the British military or the Khedive's police, and trying even harder not to get killed by whichever creatures Dracula summoned against them from afar. As such, the opportunities for creator and creation to avoid each other had shrunken into non existence. The tension between them had correspondingly increased. Apparently there was a lot each blamed the other for, without either of them wanting to talk about it in front of the others.
"Before you made me who I am, creator," Clare said, "I was a man trained to restrain the most desperate predators of all - other men." His face which the full moon bathed in light that heightened its unnatural whiteness grew softer. "And women."
"Then you remember now?" Victor asked, distrust, guilt and resentment that usually colored his voice when talking to John Clare making room for pure curiosity, the same he'd shown when wondering how the mummies were able to move. "These memories must be engraved on a cellular level. I wonder, though, why they came back so much quicker to..."
Abruptly, he grew silent.
"Really, Doctor, we have all guessed by now you experimented more than once," Dr. Seward said acidly. "Don't stop on our account."
Malcolm was still debating with himself whether to interfere when an instinct honed in years among all types of beasts told him there was a suspicious lack of nightly noise, the roars from the two wolfmen and the sound of torn limbs excepted. When the sun had been setting, they'd heard insects, birds and especially frogs, as was normal for an Egyptian night. But not now. If they'd been on the steppe, he'd have assumed a lioness was close, but they were on an island with no large cats anywhere. He closed his eyes and tried to discern something, anything.
Then he heard Dr. Seward say, her American accent very pronounced: "Oh, come on!"
She wasn't talking to or about Victor anymore. When Malcolm opened his eyes again, he saw what had happened to the frogs. They'd left the banks of the Nile, it seemed, had ceased their quaking, and were now fast approaching, undeterred by the fighting going on, hopping relentlessly towards them.
"But - frogs? They can't even bite!" Catriona said, confused.
"They can fill your nose and mouth and stop you from breathing," Malcolm said tonelessly. "If there are enough of them."
"The plagues of Egypt," Ferdinand Lyle murmured, sounding half awed, half terrified.
"Well, at least there's something to strike and shoot at now," Catriona said. She was right. Holding his breath, Malcolm took aim.