Ghouls (2 page)

He listened.

A scuffling to his right. Panting. Boots scraping over the jagged stone ruts of the ridge. He jerked at the crack of still another pistol shot, and automatically he turned over the Jeep’s engine. Leaning out, he raised a pair of IR
monoculars
to his eyes, focused, then combed the strange green field across the slopes through which Sanders and his men would make their escape.

Top of the ridge, a tiny, desperate figure appeared, at first just an insect-shape in the IR’s circle. It was a man scuttling down the incline.

Then came a scream, bestial, hell-bent. A howl of rage.

The figure coming down the ridge was Sanders, his automatic pistol in one hand, a green metal ammo box in the other. He was scrambling, then leaping into the Jeep a blurred instant later, yelling, “Go! Go! Move!” and as the colonel ineptly jammed the Jeep into gear, Sanders snapped another clip into his pistol, hung out off the roll bar, and began firing more shots behind them. The colonel sped down the crude road, slammed back and forth in his seat; he prayed they didn’t lose a wheel or break an axle over this trench of a road. Brass flew as Sanders pumped off his remaining shots. The colonel locked his eyes ahead; he was grateful not to have to see what Sanders was shooting at.

Five miles later, the colonel stopped the Jeep, parked with the motor running. The headlamps dimmed in the sudden deceleration. He gasped when he turned. Limned in moonlight, Sanders sat back stonily in the passenger seat, face staring up. His chest heaved to take in air. He’d lost his steel pot, lost his submachine gun, his clip satchel, and his light. He let the empty Colt .45 clatter to the floor. Lashed to his calf was a Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife, and one WP grenade still hung from his web belt like a powder-gray cola can with white stencil letters. From a gash in his arm, blood soaked blackly into his field shirt. Bright-yellow earplugs stuck out of his ears, a ludicrous contrast to his eyes, which were rimmed by the white of trauma.

The colonel’s gaze flicked from Sanders’s face to the metal box on the floor.

“Bastard,” Sanders breathed. He stared up, not at the colonel.

“What?”

“Goddamn bastard. You said there’d only be three or four.”

“So?”

“There were a dozen.”

Silence. The colonel gulped as if swallowing gravel. Fatal misinformation. “O’Brien,
Kinnet
. What hap—”

“They’re dead,” Sanders’s voice leaped, a suppressed shriek.

“How can you be sure? Maybe they’re still back there waiting for us.”

“They’re dead,” Sanders said, breath returning. He spoke like a man just saved from drowning. “Both dead. I saw them. Ripped apart.”

The colonel looked away, feeling the inert cold of the M3 submachine gun still cradled in his lap. These men, he knew, were Sanders’s friends. “Sergeant, I’m sorry. I didn’t think there would be more than three or four… A dozen, you say?”

“At least.”

The colonel found this hard to believe. “But the guns, the grenades—you had enough to wipe out a company of men.”

“They’re not men,” Sanders said. “And the guns, the grenades…all useless. We’re lucky if we killed five of them.” Sanders patted at his wound, unconcerned at the amount of blood. “And they’re fast. My God, they’re fast. I think—I think they were actually dodging the bullets. When we finally got out of there, I lobbed in enough willy-peter to stop a convoy… A wall of fire, and they
still
came. They were on us again in minutes… Everything went wrong. I still don’t know how I got away.”

The colonel could say nothing. He diddled unconsciously with the bolt-flap on his M3.

“I don’t know what the fuck’s going to happen now,” Sanders said. “I can explain the missing weapons to the CO. I’ll say some ’
Rabs
busted into the gun vault or something.”

“And the rounds? The grenades?”

“I’ll list them as expended for training. It’s easy, no questions asked.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“O’Brien and
Kinnet
. Sooner or later
someone’ll
find their bodies. What then?”

Sanders obviously had not yet surfaced from the aftermath of his panic; he’d forgotten the fine (and the excruciating) details. “Sergeant,” the colonel said. “Evidently it’s slipped your mind.”

“What has?”

“The bodies will never be found.”

Sanders looked abstractedly into the windshield, thinking. Then, he said, “Oh…right.”

“So you can see, we have nothing to worry about; it will look like O’Brien and
Kinnet
went AWOL. There’s nothing to tie us to them; no one will suspect us of having anything to do with their disappearance.” Again the colonel stole a glance at the ammo box on the floor. He couldn’t stand another second not knowing. “The box,” he said. “Did you get—”

Sanders nodded, closed his eyes. “I got ’
em
.”

The colonel clenched his teeth—the world stood still for him. His very life stood still.

Sanders reached down and picked up the box, stiff from the pain in his arm. “This is all that would fit; take ’
em
or leave ’
em
,” he said. “It’s better than nothing which is what you almost got—” and then he passed the box to the colonel.

Could this really be? The box felt heavy and unevenly weighted. Blood slickened the handle. The colonel unsnapped the lid.
No, no,
he thought.
It’s a dream, it’s a dream.
When
he raised the lid and looked in, his mind effused a thousand visions. He saw the glory of kings in the box, the power of alchemists, wisdom, fortune, greatness: all his, and more. In the box he saw history.

“You got what you wanted,” Sanders said.

Still aglow in the vision, the colonel said, “Yes,” in a voice that was dry and long as the desert. Trembling, unbelieving, he
resecured
the lid and gently placed the box in the back. “You did it, Sergeant. You pulled it off. Outstanding.”

“So you got something for me now, right?”

The colonel reached again to the back. “It’s unfortunate, of course, about O’Brien and
Kinnet
. Your grief is mine… But at least you won’t have to split any of this with them.” He passed Sanders a brown, scuffed briefcase with frayed corners. “As promised, Sergeant. Twenty-five thousand.”

A grin like a cut tightened Sanders’s face. Had he forgotten his dead friends this easily? He placed the briefcase across his knees, opened it—

—and turned, glaring. “What’s this shit, you motherfucker? I stuck my neck out a mile for you back there, and now you’re gonna shaft me?”

The briefcase contained not money but old copies of the
Army Times,
some Arabic newspapers, and several recent issues of British
Penthouse.

Now the colonel was holding his M3 chest level, pointing the dull, eight-inch barrel at Sanders’s heart. “I’m sorry, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m very, very sorry. But for this to work, no one can know. Not even you.”

And before Sanders could plead or even move, the colonel squeezed the trigger, and ten .45 hardball rounds slammed into the middle of Sanders’s chest and literally blew him out of the Jeep.

Gun smoke eddied up, unfurling. The colonel coughed. He was surprised at the weapon’s sluggish cyclic rate and imprecise action. The air around him was hot and filled with grit.

He waved the smoke away vigorously, then slotted the vehicle into gear and drove off.

— | — | —

PART ONE

ghoul (
gōōl
) noun [Ar.
ghāla
,
also
ghūl
]

-roughly from the verb transitive
to seize,
more accurately
to take up suddenly

-feminine form
ghalan
,
also
ghalen
(though this is an erroneous usage since by most mythological sources the
ghāla
is sexless)

-plural form unclear

-VARIATIONS: (chiefly European)
goule
,
ghoule
,
and
ghool
;
also (rare)
ghowl

-SOURCE: pre-Islamic

—from “Rudiments of Terms,”

The
Morakis
Dictionary of World Myth

Go to sleep you whining, fat brat, or else,

tonight, you’ll be eaten by rats.

There’s a vampire in the basement,

There’re goblins in the walls,

a werewolf in the closet,

and ghouls in the hall.

—from “The Babysitter” by PHILIP STRAKER

— | — | —

CHAPTER ONE

“Yeah, Chief. This is Kurt.”

“Hot damn. I’d never have fucking guessed.”

“The dispatcher just radioed me. Told me to give you a landline.”

“Uh huh. That was a half hour ago.”

“It’s not my fault they wait a half hour to relay their calls.”

Bard’s words were suddenly garbled, smacking. He was often known to engage in conversation with his mouth full. In fact, he was often known to have his mouth full on any occasion. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. That’s the price we pay for being on the county
commo
band. What good’s a police department without its own communications system, will you tell me that? Maybe one day this tight-fisted pockmark of a
town’ll
cough up the funds for our own dispatcher and frequency. Fucking county acts like our business isn’t important.”

“Okay. So what’s so important?”

“On your way back to the station, I need to you to pick me up a box of doughnuts. The chocolate-covered kind, the big ones.”

“Now that’s what I call important police business, yes, sir.”

“Well, it is. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten all day.”

“But you’re eating now. I can hear you.”

“Just shut up and get the doughnuts. And grab this month’s
Hustler
while you’re at it.”

“I’m not going to buy a skin magazine in uniform.”

“You will unless you’d like to wear the uniform of some other department. Baltimore City’s hiring, if you don’t mind the lowest starting pay in the state and the highest murder statistics. Or, hell, I’m sure a guy with your experience could walk right into a nice cushy foot beat in Southeast D.C.”