“Fall back, get out of sight,” Gabi hissed. “We don’t want them knowing we’re here.”
“Too late,” Marcello grunted, and they could all hear the sound of his sword clearing its sheath.
The other four followed suit, drawing their respective weapons, abandoning stealth and running full tilt down the alley.
“Kyle,” Gabi shouted, “spread out your men and keep the other exits covered, and keep Athena working on the counterspell. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”
They leapt an eight foot wire fence at the end of the alley without pausing and rounded the corner into a grimy, unlit parking lot. Marcello was backing towards them, his sword out, swinging menacingly in front of him and a wicked looking dagger in his left hand. Pouring out of the ground came hulking, misshapen human forms, hissing, grunting and snuffling. As the pale moonlight bathed them in an eerie, blue glow, it was clear that there was no consciousness behind their flat, dead eyes, no thought behind their jerky, uncomfortable movements, simply mindless hunger.
“Ghouls,” Gabi breathed in horror, “dozens of them.”
“What the fook?” Fergus’ revulsion was clear in his voice as the smell of rotting meat rolled over them like a tangible cloud.
“They’re Ghouls,” Gabi repeated, “humans who’ve been bitten by Demons, they become mindless, hungry…things. I’ve only come across two before. They’re very hard to kill. They’ll eat anything that comes near their mouths, so keep your body parts away from them. Not very clever but they don’t bleed out and they don’t seem to feel pain.”
“How do we kill them?” Julius asked tersely, sizing up the horde that was spreading out and lumbering towards them. He’d heard stories of Ghouls but he’d never encountered any, they were enough to make even him shudder.
“Only one way I know of for sure. Kyle?” she called, “We need Lance here and as many flame throwers as Byron can find. Now!”
She addressed her small group without looking at them, once again the cold, hard Angeli Morte. “We’ll have to fend them off as best as we can until the flame-throwers get here. Chop off limbs and heads, but be aware that chopped off bits keep moving; they can still do damage, especially the mouths.”
Alexander’s voice came over the comlink for the first time. “We’re on our way,” he said, but Kyle’s voice broke in before he could say any more.
“Athena’s almost done, Byron’s got the message about Lance and the flame-throwers. Lance should make it here in about fifteen minutes; the flame-throwers will be closer to twenty.”
“Oh,” Gabi gasped and swayed on her feet.
Julius caught her arm and steadied her without taking his eyes off the Ghoul army.
“The warehouse,” she said shortly by way of explanation. “Lex, stay where you are. The warehouse is full of Demons, I count five, no six, and at least three Vampires. Ahhh,” she shook her head in frustration, “They’re moving too much. They’re heading for the street-side entrance. We’ll hold the Ghouls here, you and Kyle need to stop the Demons inside getting away, keep Athena with you to banish them if you can’t kill them.”
She didn’t hear whether Alexander agreed or not as the first of the Ghouls rushed them and the onslaught began.
The Demon-infected humans might have been ungainly, uncoordinated and lacking in anything except the most basic of intelligence, but they made up for it with speed and strength and a complete lack of reaction to pain. Gabi and the Vampires were faster and stronger but hugely outnumbered. The small group set their backs to the wall of an adjoining building and began chopping limbs, stabbing, spearing, beheading. Their world narrowed down to a blur of hands and mouths and crude metal weapons. The Ghoul army soon began to look like something out of a cheap horror movie, cuts and gashes, missing limbs and gaping wounds as the defenders set about cutting them to pieces.
Gabi found herself sparing regular glances at the rough tarmac looking for groping hands and gnashing mouths. She was intensely glad that Ghoul saliva didn’t affect like Demon saliva did as she already had several sets of tooth marks on her calves, and her ruined boots would have to be binned after the fight. It was all out slaughter of the Ghouls, but for each one they cut down another took its place and the arms and hands of the first began moving towards them or moving towards the bodies they had been severed from. Headless, limbless bodies careened around crazily, bumping into others or rolling around on the ground. Gabi had noticed some of them picking up the severed pieces, and it looked as though the pieces were trying to reattach themselves. They didn’t spout blood when you dissected them but seemed to ooze thick, red gore instead; the ground was getting coated in it and was becoming slick and slippery.
Through the comlink she could hear the occasional sound of grunts and groans as well as Kyle and Alexander shouting orders but pushed it all to the back of her consciousness. She’d hear if something had gone horribly wrong on their side, and she and her band of Vampires were just barely holding their own.
Nathan was the most silent of the Vampires, fighting with a single-minded intensity, always casting glances to see where Julius was, trying to be close enough to defend his sire. Fergus fought like a madman. A controlled madman, she corrected mentally as she ducked to avoid a metal fencing stake being used like a baseball bat. Fergus looked like a man who loved battle, he was grinning from ear to ear and picking up body parts to fling across the parking lot as he bellowed insults and dared the Ghouls to get him. Gabi was relieved that his voice transmitter had been turned off or broken. He appeared to be having the time of his life. Marcello was quick and agile, darting in and cutting a Ghoul down before it even knew he was close enough; he was utterly intent on his objective, but hadn’t seemed to lose the initial horror of what they were fighting. He shuddered every time he got close to one of them and had a permanent, horrified grimace on his handsome face. Julius was poetry in motion; his swordsmanship was consummate, his movements quick, lithe and confident, his expression intense and focused. He spared a quick glance her way, throwing her a ghost of a grin as he effortlessly decapitated another Ghoul and set to chopping its groping arms off.
Gabi and the Vampires were keeping to a tight, defenders formation, leaving each other room to swing but watching each other’s backs and gradually moving around the edge of the parking lot, keeping the solid walls of other buildings to their backs. They needed to keep moving to avoid standing on the bodies, limbs and entrails littering the ground they’d been fighting on. As they went, the small group fell into a routine of fight, dismember, kick and throw body parts as far away as possible, then fight, dismember, kick, fight.
At some point the waxing moon broke through the barrier of cloud and lit up the combat zone, and Gabi found her eyes drawn to the mass of attackers, she tried to count heads, well, attached heads anyway. Dozens of dead eyes glittered at her in the pale light; she gave up counting at twenty as the horror of the number of ‘turned’ humans began to dawn on her. This couldn’t be accidental, Demons weren’t often capable of leaving a human alive once they attacked; this had to be an orchestrated event.
As yet another Ghoul rushed her, she realised that it was not only men who had been infected, she’d seen some women amongst them, only recognisable by longer hair and daintier bodies, but the one rushing her now was barely more than a child. It seemed to have been a young girl. Once. Her ragged denims and dark, grimy T-shirt were sexless, but her features were refined and her hair longer than was fashionable for a boy, her body hadn’t even had time to develop curves. Gabi suppressed a shudder and shoved down her feelings of guilt and horror as the dead eyes fastened on her. The Ghoul child bared its teeth and lunged for her. She dispatched the youth as quickly as possible and kicked the arms and head away to the side of the fracas. She spun away, scanning for her next victim.
“Shit!” She cursed as she almost fell over something in the dark. Righting herself, she found a head rolling on the tarmac: mouth open in a macabre grin, tongue waving hungrily. S
he aimed a boot at it and sent it flying through the air and into the chest of a newcomer just entering the edge of the fray.
“Thanks,” the newcomer said with a grimace. The Vampires all spun towards the voice; none of the Ghouls had said an intelligible word throughout the entire fight.
“Lance,” Gabi yelled with relief. “Sorry about that,” she grinned as he kicked the head away from him back into the carnage. She wiped at a smear of gore across her face as she slashed Nex across the throat of another Ghoul. “Feel free to help out, but keep the flames,” she broke off for a moment to duck under a swinging crowbar and then spun to finish off hacking the head from the burly shoulders, “away from our allies.” She nodded towards the Vampires, who’d returned to the fight once they realised Lance was on their side.
“Sure thing, Hellcat,” Lance replied, lazily kicking away a Ghoul who rushed towards him.
In the next instant, a Ghoul near the back of the fray emitted a loud unearthly yell and began smoking; within seconds, he was engulfed in flames. The rest of the mindless creatures didn’t seem to even be aware of one of them standing burning in their midst; they simply moved around him, though they seemed to take care to avoid the flames.
“Holy fook,” Fergus exclaimed, pausing to look at the suddenly burning Ghoul in astonishment. He glanced back to Lance with gleeful amazement. “Now that’s a handy talent to ‘ave,” he shouted with approval.
Lance gave the imposing Vampire a self-mocking bow just as another Ghoul burst into flames.
Fergus roared with laughter and renewed his attack on the ragged remains of the Ghoul army.
Gabi could feel the muscles in her arms beginning to burn. It wasn’t often they had to fight such a sustained battle, usually by this stage whoever they were fighting would’ve backed off to regroup giving both sides time to catch their breath, but the Ghouls simply kept coming, and would until the very last one had been cut down and burned.
“Kyle,” she called, “what’s happening on your side?”
His voice came back, sounding a little breathy. “One Vampire made a run for it; Liam and Alex are chasing him down. We’re dealing with the last of the Demons, the other two Vamps are dust,” he reported.
“Alexander,” Julius’s voice didn’t betray a hint of the fight he was in the middle of. “Take that one alive.”
“Yes, Boss,” Alexander replied with mild sarcasm, “we’re trying. But he’s not making it easy. Ahh, I think we have him cornered now.”
The first of the burning Ghouls collapsed onto the tarmac and disintegrated, another five or six were burning where they stood. Gabi glanced around, assessing how many were left. They seemed to have stopped pouring from the hole in the ground but she couldn’t know if there were more inside. Ghouls didn’t show up on her radar like Demons and other supernaturals did apparently. She started making her way to the underground entrance to try and look inside.
“The flame-throwers are three minutes away Gabs,” Kyle’s voice echoed in her head. “We’ve cleared the warehouse. Charlie is going to stay with Athena out front and wait for the flame-throwers. Quentin and I are on our way to you.”
“Watch your step when you get here,” Gabi warned with a grunt as she kicked another head away into the darkness. Then she ducked into the shadows away from the main fight, grateful for the clouds that once more obscured the moonlight as she rounded the dwindling horde and made for the gaping hole in the ground. She heard Julius curse suddenly, as he realised she had slipped away.
“Gabrielle, what are you doing?” he demanded over the comlink.
“Don’t worry,” she replied, “I’m just going to see if that’s the last of them. I’m sure you’ll hold your own without me for a minute or two.”
She rubbed briefly at a numb spot on her left shoulder where she had taken a hit by a crowbar. She’d hardly felt it at the time, but the numbness was wearing off, and a deep ache was creeping in. She reached the entrance and peered inside. It was dimly lit, obviously Ghouls didn’t have the best night vision, and she could see a short flight of rudimentary wooden steps leading down into a narrow passageway crudely dug out of the earth. She couldn’t see further than a few metres where the passage hit a T-junction, one side heading straight towards the warehouse, the other leading away from it.
“Damn,” she swore softly; realising she was going to have to go down and check. She looked up to see if the rest were holding their own and flinched as a shadow moved next to her.
“Just me,” Julius said quickly as Nex came up.
“Don’t you know better than to sneak up on a girl in a Ghoul fight?” “You’re not going down there alone,” he said, his tone brooking no argument. Which only made Gabi want to argue, of course.
Fortunately, common sense prevailed and she simply said, “Fine,” and started down the steps before he could get in front of her. She heard his faint exasperated growl as he followed her. She peeled the small voice receiver off the skin behind her ear and tucked it into a pocket; the litany of shouts and commands was getting too distracting.
The corridor was just wide and high enough for her to move comfortably, meaning it was too narrow and too low for Julius. It didn’t make him move any less gracefully, but it did make him hunch his shoulders and try to pull his head in like a tortoise. Her self-satisfied smirk lasted until she cautiously peered around the first bend. The corridor to the left ran for another few meters and ended in a short flight of steps leading up to a solid looking metal door; that would lead into the warehouse she was sure.
The corridor to the right grew slightly wider and extended in a straight line as far as she could see in the dim light thrown from a few make-shift fluorescent lanterns hanging from the ceiling. On either side of the corridor, crude doorways were hacked into the hard-packed earth walls. There were dozens of doorways, spaced about four metres apart, each sporting a rough, wooden door. Most of them stood open but a few were still shut tight. She felt the cool, muscled weight of Julius’s body as he pressed close to her to peer around the corner too. She felt her mouth fill with saliva and the now almost familiar ache in her canines as his scent enveloped her. She forced her mind back to the dank, earthy passageway and its closed doors.
“What do you think?” he asked quietly. “More of them behind the closed doors?”
She looked back at him. “Let’s go find out.” They moved cautiously into the wider passage and crept to the first door, which was standing open. They peered in, assessing for danger with all of their senses.
“Seems clear,” Julius murmured softly.
Gabi nodded agreement and they warily entered the underground room. It had also been hacked out of the bare earth, it was damp and cold and lined with rows of what looked like crudely made bunk beds. There was an open hole in the ground in one corner, and Gabi and Julius could tell what it was for without going to check. The stench was almost enough to be a physical force. The floor was littered with bones and small skulls, nothing looked human, probably dog, cat and rat, Gabi thought with shiver of revulsion. Having quickly established that there was no threat in the empty room, they moved to the first closed door. It was bolted shut from the outside by a thick steel rod. They paused to listen carefully. Gabi knew Julius’s hearing would be better than hers, so she looked at him expectantly after he’d pressed his ear to the roughen wood. Gabi could hear sniffling and what sounded to her like quiet moaning.
“How many?” she mouthed at him.
“At least three,” he mouthed back.
“Ready?” she whispered, settling Nex comfortably in her right hand and pulling another knife from a thigh sheath.
Julius pulled her hand from the bolt. “My turn,” he said, putting his own hand on the bolt and drawing it back before Gabi could do more than roll her eyes. They burst though and shifted into defensive crouches either side of the door, ready for anything.
Nothing happened.
There were three figures huddled on two almost bare pallets. None of them
moved to attack. One whimpered in fear and another began crossing itself repeatedly, muttering what sounded like the Lord’s Prayer. The third just sat still like the proverbial deer in the headlights. There were two bodies lying in a far corner of the room, well into decomp by the smell of them. The live ones were sitting on a couple of filthy, threadbare blankets and were dressed in dirty tattered clothing. Their hair was dishevelled, matted and all three were male if the ratty facial hair was anything to go by.
“They’re still human,” Gabi whispered, not sure if she was speaking to herself or Julius.
“They could still be infected,” Julius warned. “Maybe they haven’t had time to become fully Ghoul yet. How long does the transformation take?”
“I don’t know.” “How long have you been here?” Julius demanded of them.
They all just looked at him in utter terror, not one of them could get a word out, and the one who had been moaning began to cry softly.
“Bugger, they’re scared shitless,” Gabi cursed roundly. “We’ll leave them here for now. Byron will know what to do with them. Let’s carry on and see what other horrors this crypt holds.” They backed out of the cave-like room and Julius shot the bolt back in place.
As they headed towards the next doorway, the acrid stink of burnt flesh, hair and clothing came wafting down from the entranceway. Apparently, the flame-throwers had arrived.
They checked three more open rooms and found all of them in much the same state as the first, give or take a body or three. Gabi had begun holding her breath whenever they entered one — the stench was stomach churning, she was sure she wouldn’t feel like eating for a week.
The next door they came to was closed. The sounds from the other side seemed familiar, almost identical to what they had heard from the other occupied room. If anything, the sniffling sounded more like crying. They didn’t let up their guard and entered the same way as before, quickly and ready for anything.
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