by RA Williams
As Gaele grasped the rail to the wheelhouse stairs, the steamer shunted sideways, floundering in the bubbling whirlpool at the bottom of the cataracts. With that, Margoux was doomed. Even if he could muster full power, the old riverboat wouldn’t be able to make enough steam to extricate itself. Twisting in the torrent, the steamer slammed bow-first into an outcrop of massive boulders, churning torrents shearing away her bow. Instantly, the shallow hull began to flood. The only thing left now for Gaele was to abandon the ship.
Struggling to the port side, he found Balthasar wearing thick leather gloves. He was hefting heavy trunks over the side of the foundering riverboat onto a spit of boulders separating the waterfalls from the station landing.
Grasping the sleeve of the major’s serge jacket, Gaele shouted over the roar of the cascades, ‘For God’s sake, Buster, what have you done?’
Feral eyes stared back at him. ‘Disembark with all haste!’
‘You knew something terrible had happened here!’
‘I knew before we set sail from England, Mssr Gaele,’ he hollered back, heaving another trunk from the shuddering steamer as the waters ground the boat to pieces. ‘If you stay here another moment, it won’t matter.’
Bristling, the Belgian pulled the rifle sling over his head. Securing Henry across his back, he leaped from the steamer just as it was dragged from under his feet. Stern-wheel flopping, Margoux was pulled into the swirling whirlpool and torn asunder, taking anyone remaining on board to their deaths. Gaele, bounding across the slippery boulders to the riverbank, was on dry ground in seconds.
The deluge intensified – and with it came a swarm of wicked beasts. Not ten yards in from the riverbank, a beast collided with a pair of grenadiers who had also managed to escape the sinking steamer before she went down. Taking one of the men roughly to the ground, it tore open his stomach with frenzied strikes. The soldier beat upon the beast’s head with his fists, screaming as his sweetbreads were devoured.
Unholstering one of his revolvers, Gaele put a bullet in the soldier’s head. There was nothing he could do to save him. Disturbed from its goring, the fiend reared up, chewing grotesquely, its ashen skin bubbling. He fired again, putting a .45-calibre slug between the beast’s eyes. At such close range, the heavy round took its head off, leaving behind indistinguishable pulp, the fiend’s emaciated body quivering as it collapsed into the mud.
The surviving grenadier, young and bare-headed, dashed towards him, crying out, ‘Monsieur, I’ve lost my section. Let me stay with you.’
Brum-brum-brum. Brum-brum. The Belgian turned towards the station director’s villa.
Under cover of the veranda’s partially collapsed eaves, a Lewis gun emplacement poured fire into the sky. Grasping the grenadier by his webbing, he pulled the boy towards the building. As they made the veranda steps, a whooshing gust ripped the grenadier from his grasp. Taking him in its spindly arms, a fiend took flight. The Lewis gunner unleashed a stream of thirty-aught-six rounds into it, causing the beast to drop the soldier back to the ground. Khaki drill jacket torn by the beast’s talons, the young grenadier tried to keep crawling forward.
‘For God’s sake, help me!’
The Belgian lowered a hand before the Lewis crew, watching the wounded fiend spinning in the mud like a crazed dervish.
‘Do not fire. Our lad is too close.’
He took careful aim with his pistol, slamming a bullet through the beast’s head in a spray of skull shards and curdled brains.
‘Come along, jeune homme,’ he shouted, hand outstretched. He had just got hold of the soldier’s fingertips when the boy was ripped away by yet another fiend, vanishing into the rain-filled sky with a yelp.
Gaele removed his helmet and looked out from under the safety of the veranda’s eave. A beast fluttered towards him, its movement deranged, confused even. The Lewis gunner opened fire, the barrel’s cooling shroud hissing as raindrops struck it. Knocked from the air, the beast released a hyena-like howl. Even riddled with thirty-aught-six bullets, its talons reached for him. Gaele had only seen such unrelenting attacks from river predators. A hungry crocodile, having tasted human flesh, ignored even mortal wounds just to taste it again. The fiends exhibited disturbingly similar behaviour.
Gaele’s rescue party was being hunted.
‘In the name of God, what are they?’ the corporal at the Lewis gun bellowed, emptying the ninety-seven-round ammunition drum into the beast. Flailing about in the mud, it continued to drag itself towards them. The loader’s hands shook as he fumbled to insert a fresh ammunition drum into the gun. ‘Get that bloody drum in!’
Drawing Henry from his back, Gaele cycled the lever action, raising the repeater. The rifle bucked; a .44 round squealed as it left the barrel. Crashing into the fiend, the bullet opened its stomach, maggots belching out from within.
‘Verdomme,’ the Belgian cursed in horror, watching the fiend twist and cringe in a seizure. ‘What must be done to kill them?’
‘Off with its head,’ shouted Buster Hadley, climbing over the veranda railing from the deluge, a peculiar spike in his gloved hand. ‘It’s merely a Huntian. Lop its head off.’
Unsheathing his machete, the Belgian moved guardedly from under his protective shelter. Rain pelting his face, he pushed the Huntian to the ground with his boot and hacked through the puckered flesh of its neck. The beast shuddered, purging a viscous gunge as the blade struck its spine. A few more whacks and its head rolled away.
The beast was finally dead.
Turning back, Gaele quickly climbed the railing and retreated, soaked to the skin, into the protection of the veranda.
‘They attack like Stoßtruppen,’ he said.
‘When did you fight off stormtroopers?’ asked Balthasar.
‘In France. In the Great War.’
‘These are not Stroßtruppen. They are Crimen. And they’re swarming. Hungry,’ Balthasar said.
‘For what?’
‘Your flesh.’ Looking towards the station annexe, Balthasar said, ‘I need to have a look in there.’
‘Them ghouls will tear you to bits,’ said a frightened grenadier, huddled on the veranda.
‘That’s not in the plan.’ Then, jumping from the veranda, Balthasar disappeared into the blinding rain.
A beast flew helter-skelter through the deluge. The Lewis opened fire, but the gunner couldn’t get a bead on it.
‘What is your name?’ Gaele asked him calmly.
‘Lathbury, sir.’
‘Lead them, Corporal Lathbury. Allow these Crimen to fly into your fire, not your fire into them.’
‘Aye, sir,’ the corporal acknowledged. Aiming again, he let loose. Colliding with the wall of bullets, the fiend howled as it fluttered to the ground, Lathbury finishing it off with another spray of thirty-aught pulping its head.
‘What in hell are they?’ the loader asked, inserting a fresh drum into the gun.
‘They are Crimen,’ Gaele replied, taking aim. A powerful boom from Henry and a wraith’s head dissolved in a puff of gore. ‘And they can be killed.’
Through the mess of the beast’s carcass, he recognised the tattered remnants of a khaki drill tunic. Then he understood: the beast was once part of the mapping expedition Gaele had been sent to find. He didn’t have time to think about what he was witnessing. Instinct and adrenaline took over. It kept him alive. Across the parade ground, he saw Buster on the station annexe veranda.
‘Major,’ he shouted. He could not gain his attention over the peals of thunder.
Making a dash across the open killing ground, a crackle of rifles drew Gaele to the side of the customs shed. Catching movement from the corner of his eye, he was just able to raise his machete as a beast came down upon him. Knocking the fiend to the ground, the machete’s sharpened blade split it open from chest to groin, a twisting pile of innards bubbling from the wound. Sliding under cover of the shed’s drooping roof, the Belgian shouted to the expedition’s sergeant major, ‘Clarke. Finish it.’
‘Right, lads, kill me something,’ the sergeant major ordered. Sixteen rifles fired as one, Crimen bucking as .303 bullets inflicted ghastly wounds upon them.
‘Get your men to the Lewis emplacement.’
‘Mssr Gaele, I’ve fifteen lads remaining. They’re all that’s left of the Royal West Kent Regiment’s 5th Battalion. You expect me to order them to break cover?’ protested Clarke.
‘Have you seen Barasa and Adongo?’ the Belgian asked.
The sergeant major shook his head. ‘Who?’
‘My adopted sons. Have you seen them?’
‘No,’ Clarke affirmed. ‘I got fifteen adopted sons of my own here to look out for.’
Gaele had kept his adopted native sons with him since rescuing them as children. They were Loango. Fierce warriors. His odds of survival were better with them than the British.
‘The Lewis gun will cover you,’ he told Clarke, pulling on his helmet. Turning his attention to a Crimen writhing in the mud, he stepped forward and fired a bullet from his pistol into its brain. It went rigid, legs and arms curling up and stiffening like a dead cockroach.
‘These beasts can be killed, Sergeant Major.’
Moving along the station’s perimeter, concealed by the encroaching jungle canopy, Gaele looked across the parade ground to the derelict station annexe, where he had last seen Buster Hadley. Typical of most colonial annexes, it contained a series of offices set along an inner hall, with a larger open reception at the opposite end used by station staff. Most of its shutters were drawn, and like the villa across the parade ground, a veranda encompassed the entire annexe, protected by broad zinc eaves.
There was no cover for fifty yards between the jungle fringe and the annexe, except a flagstaff and a pile of wooden sleepers. Breaking from the treeline, Gaele charged through the puddles of mud. Keeping low, he crossed the parade ground without incident, climbing over the annexe’s splintered wooden railing.
Smashed Lloyd Loom chairs were strewn across the veranda, amid them an eviscerated grenadier. Looking closer, Gaele recognised the frightened face of the boy he had tried to pull to the safety of the director’s villa.
‘Poor fellow,’ he said, trying so hard not to think of his own boys out there as night approached.
Arterial spray along the wall of the annexe led to a door ripped from its hinges. Gaele peered inside its empty frame.
Within was a small ransacked office, fragments of soiled clothing hung over an upturned table. Slipping inside, he put his back against the inside wall, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the murky interior. He crossed the room cautiously, a stench from the hallway beyond causing him to retch. Eyes adjusting, he saw an abattoir. Blood and excrement were smeared along the walls, pieces of decaying bodies littering the floor. At the far end of the hallway was another open doorway, devoid of perceivable light. An unexpected cooing sound, given the situation, came from the darkness, almost a note from a boys’ choir.
Raising his repeater, he advanced.
There was movement. He fired, the flash from Henry’s muzzle revealing Crimen. Greasy from a feeding frenzy, they choked the narrow hallway. A .44 round slammed into the lead beast, throwing it sideways, the others clawing their way over it in the confined space, hurling themselves at him as he retreated over rotting corpses. He just made it into the wrecked office before taloned hands grasped the door frame. A gaunt beast in soiled British uniform pulled itself round the door, mouth gobbing a foetid slime. Before Gaele could take aim, the beast was violently pulled back into darkness. A racket of savage violence ensued. Unintelligible shrieks, followed by cursing he understood perfectly.
No sooner had the Belgian retreated to the veranda than a wraith crashed through a shuttered window, landing in a heap amid broken window frame and glass shards. Captain Hamish Taggart, his khaki drill splattered with gore, climbed over the sill after it, rifle slung across his back. In his gloved hand, he held an engineer’s hatchet soaked with feculence. He glanced at Gaele without acknowledgement.
Taggart was gone. Now there was only the Mohawk.
The wounded Crimen regained its feet. Unlike the malnourished beasts Gaele had witnessed before, this was robust, coal-black, over six feet tall and strapping, with a head full of woolly hair. The Mohawk closed with it, satisfaction marking his face. The beast snarled, powerful wings splintering the veranda’s floorboards.
‘You need to wash your teeth,’ the Mohawk ridiculed, launching his hatchet into the fiend’s skull, cracking it open from hairline to the tip of its nose. Howling, the ferocious creature attempted to advance, but its wings became entangled in the eaves’ supports. Grasping the handle of his hatchet, the Mohawk wrenched it out in a spray of mottled brain matter. Hacking at the wraith’s neck like a lunatic lumberjack chopping down a tree, his hatchet divided the fiend’s ashen skin, exposing decaying tissue underneath. It shuddered, wings going berserk. Another strike from the hatchet severed its spine, and the beast collapsed upon itself. A final blow and its head rolled free, obsidian blood jetting from the severed arteries of the stump.
The Mohawk looked to Gaele now with a flash of recognition.
‘Hello, me old china. Scrappy, ain’t they?’
‘However did you know that taking the head off silences the beast?’
Wiping the spillage on his face away with his sleeve, the Mohawk replied, ‘Taking the head always kills the Guilty.’
His response suggested to the Belgian that this was not his first encounter with the beasts. Raising his repeater, Gaele leaned forward, looking through the smashed shutters of the window, expecting another strike.
‘Dark as Satan’s arsehole in there,’ said the Mohawk, regaining his puff. ‘Never seen so many goblins.’
Looking over the muck fouling the Mohawk’s khaki drill, Gaele realised he had gone barking mad.
‘You have seen this before?’
‘Oh yes,’ the Mohawk said, his reply disturbingly jolly.
Brum-brum-brum. Brum-brum. Gaele looked through the deluge to the director’s villa. The gunfire opened up with the failing light of day.
‘We do not have much time,’ he told the Mohawk. ‘We’re losing the light.’
‘It will be ever so sporting round here, then.’
Brum-brum-brum. Brum-brum. A pair of grenadiers broke cover, rushing across the parade ground towards the villa. Crimen pounced, swooping in on them. The first soldier managed to duck out of the way. The second not so lucky. He was lifted free of the ground, legs kicking wildly. A volley of rifle fire. The guardsmen’s aim was spot on; the beast crashed into the villa’s roof and rolled down its side, releasing the soldier. More terrified than injured, the soldier crawled up into the safety of the veranda.
‘What is there to do? Try holding out until the morning?’ asked the Belgian.
‘I’ve been unleashed, Monsieur,’ the Mohawk said with a snigger, tucking his hatchet into his belt. ‘By morning, there won’t be a Crimen I haven’t chopped to pieces.’
Gaele smelled smoke. He turned to see flames licking at the shuttered windows of the annexe. ‘Have you set the building alight?’
Before the Mohawk could reply, Balthasar Hadley burst through a closed door, black smoke trailing behind.
‘Here they come,’ he said, and an instant later, a mass of entwined wraiths thrashed their way from the burning structure. Feet tipped with curving talons tore into Balthasar’s shoulders. He pivoted as he fell down the veranda steps, and a beast’s claws raked off strips of his flesh.
Without even registering his grievous wound, Balthasar took hold of the fiend by its leg, heaving it against a mahogany tree with such magnificent savagery that the fiend came apart. Colliding with another, he grasped it by its forearm and snapped it in two. The beast yowled. Rage seethed in Buster’s eyes as he tore its membranous wings away. Drawing a slab of rock from the muddy parade ground, he stove in its head with a single smack. It whimpered.
In that moment, Gaele actually pitied the beast. It was
prey to an even more formidable beast.
Producing a burnished spike from the thigh pocket of his khaki drill jacket, Balthasar poniarded the fiend, holding tight even as its sloughing skin came away in handfuls. A final push and it sank into the mud, body haemorrhaging black ooze. Gaele watched the vile perfection with which Balthasar took the fiends to pieces. There was something horrifically noble in his bloodletting.
‘Ah ha, Buster!’ the Mohawk shouted to Balthasar with glee. ‘I see it now. I’m not the only one whose primeval instincts are thinly buried.’
From the flames of the burning annexe came a horde of Crimen.
‘Wigs on the green now,’ Balthasar shouted back, kicking aside the dispatched beast as he prepared to engage them head on.
The Mohawk leaped from the veranda onto a Crimen, like an unbreakable American Indian on a bucking bronco. Unholstering his Webley, he thrust the pistol’s barrel against the beast’s temple, firing. The side of its head blew out as it collapsed in the mud and went still, the Mohawk howling with rapture, ‘Huzzah!’
With two killers beside him, Gaele took the moment to pull cartridges from his bandoliers and reload Henry.
‘Where are your sons?’ asked Balthasar.
‘I don’t know,’ Gaele replied, dropping the trigger guard to inject a round into the chamber. ‘It’s chaos out there.’
‘These Crimen, they have received stimulus,’ said Buster, tossing a beast against the side of the annexe. ‘It’s going to get very messy.’
A wraith lunged at Gaele, knocking his gun from his hands. Shifting his body, he managed to twist sideways as its weight smothered him. Gaele pummelled the beast under its chin, greasy suppurations sliding from its unhinged jaw. Slipping his machete from its sheath, he momentarily relaxed, allowing the beast’s sore-encrusted mouth to draw close, carnassials gnashing at his ear. With the machete to its neck, he sawed back and forth, the sharp edge of the blade severing the beast’s spine, a painful howl cutting short as it fell limp. Then he heard a shot, and the fiend’s head vanished in a spray of foul ooze.