by Sam Sisavath
“Yup, should have stuck around for the party.”
He hadn’t turned completely around before the alarm bells went off.
What…
The woods around him had gone deathly quiet.
He couldn’t hear a single insect or bird, and there was nothing moving anymore.
…just happened?
Wash put one hand on the handle of his kukri, the other still holding the Old Man’s canteen, as he walked back to the house. He made out flickers of light between the slits along one of the home’s boarded front windows, which meant the Old Man had gotten the fireplace working to warm them for the night. Lazy trails of smoke were already drifting out of the chimney.
He was halfway to the bungalow when he heard the scream.
It was the Old Man.
Shit.
Wash dropped the canteen and ran the rest of the way, drawing the machete on the third stride.
Shit, shit.
There hadn’t been any more screams since the first one. And even that wasn’t really a scream. More like a shouting grunt. But it was definitely the Old Man.
Shit, shit, shit.
Wash didn’t bother with the door handle. He kicked the whole thing in and lunged inside.
SHIT.
There were ghouls on the floor. Three of them. Pruned dark skin flicking against the fireplace light, sickly bodies resting on top of pools of black blood. One had lost its head. Another, its right arm at the elbow. The third lay awkwardly on its side, thick liquid slurping out of a hole in its chest.
Wash turned. A fourth ghoul. This one was different from the others. It was small and wearing some kind of red cloak. He might have thought it was a child if he couldn’t see its face. It was a nightcrawler, lifeless eyes staring back at him, the small blade that the Old Man usually carried as a backup piece buried almost to the hilt in its forehead. The fabric that covered its frail body was filthy, blanketed in dirt and old blood, and the smell that wafted from its body and assaulted Wash’s senses made him want to retch.
He stepped over the small ghoul and toward the Old Man, who sat against the wall next to the hearth. His legs were splayed out in front of him, and his machete, covered in thick black tar, lay on the floor between them. The Old Man was wrapping a rag around his left forearm, his heavily lined face slicked with sweat.
“How many more?” Wash asked.
“I don’t know,” the Old Man said.
“Where did they come from?”
“Hallway.” He nodded to his left. “I was making the fire when they got the drop on me. Guess I didn’t smell them in time. It’s all the damn smoke.” He wrinkled his nose. “Plus, the olfactory, she ain’t what she used to be, kid.”
“You gonna be okay?”
“I’ll be fine. Go make sure that’s all of ’em.”
Wash hurried into the back hallway toward the two bedrooms they’d checked earlier. The first one, that the Old Man had searched, was empty. Wash made damn sure of that by searching every corner. The other, smaller one that he’d taken earlier was similarly empty, except the closet in the back was open, and Wash swore it was closed the last time he was in here.
He moved cautiously toward it, kukri in hand.
“Kid!” the Old Man called from the great room. “You good?”
“I’m good!” Wash shouted back.
“What’s taking you so long?”
“Just finishing up. Hold your horses!”
Wash concentrated on the closet door. It was halfway open, and as he neared, he could smell it.
Thick, rotting garbage prodding at his nostrils, rubbing at his exposed skin.
Ghouls. It was ghoul smell.
But how had he missed it earlier? How?
He saw how when he pushed the door open wider with the blade to get a better look inside: There was a trapdoor near the back that he had missed that was now open, and the smell (God, the smell!) was coming from inside. Deep, deep inside. He couldn’t see how deep or what else was down there from his angle. It was lightless and dark and…
Wash knocked the trapdoor closed with the kukri and stepped back. He closed the closet, then grabbed the pallet and pulled it over and raised it from the floor until it was pinned against the door.
Then he rushed back outside.
The Old Man had finished wrapping his forearm with the rag. The white cloth, already dirty from sweat and use, had now turned a bright shade of pink.
“Where’d they come from?” the Old Man asked.
Wash stared at the Old Man’s bloody rag.
“Kid,” the Old Man said. “How did they get inside?”
A bloody rag…around the Old Man’s arm…
“Kid!” the Old Man shouted.
He looked up at the Old Man’s face. “What?”
“How’d they get inside?”
“There was some kind of cellar in one of the closets. They were hiding in there.”
The Old Man looked back at him for a moment, not saying anything.
“I missed it,” Wash said. “I didn’t check the closet close enough. I missed it.”
“Well, shit,” the Old Man said. He sighed, placed his bandaged arm in his lap, and leaned his head back against the wall. “It happens.”
“I missed it,” Wash said. Then, his eyes focused in on the Old Man’s arm. “It bit you.”
He glanced back at the ghoul with the red cloak. Nightcrawlers rarely kept their clothes on. The transformation made them immune to just about every part of nature other than sunlight, so to find one still wearing something, anything, was an oddity.
“It wasn’t one of them,” the Old Man said. Then, off Wash’s confused look, “The one in the cloak. It wasn’t like the other three. There’s a reason I put the knife in its forehead.”
Wash looked back at the cloaked ghoul. He walked closer and crouched next to it, then got a better look at its face.
It was malformed, its cheeks gaunt and the sharp edges of its skull sticking out from its flesh. But there was something very different about it that made it stand out from the other three bigger ghouls.
Wash glanced back at the Old Man, who read his face and nodded. “Yeah, it was a Blue Eyes.” The Old Man lifted his bandaged arm. “It got me before I could kill it. Damned things are just so fast, and I’m getting old…”
“Shit,” Wash said. Or whispered. He wasn’t sure which.
“Yeah.” The Old Man put his arm back down and seemed to shrink before Wash’s eyes. “There’s no getting around it. It’s in me. The bad blood. I can feel it moving through my veins. Shit is right, kid. Shit is right…”
Wash sat down on the hard floor. Or he toppled slightly backward and fell on his ass. He hadn’t looked away from the Old Man the entire time. He couldn’t.
There was sympathy in the Old Man’s eyes when he smiled at Wash. “I’m not going to ask you to do it, kid.”
“Do what?” Wash said. At that moment, he wasn’t sure if he didn’t know or if he was just pretending he didn’t.
The Old Man was still smiling. “Get me some water.”
“Water?”
“I’m thirsty.” He licked his lips. “Damn if I’m not thirsty all of a sudden.”
“There isn’t any. The well’s empty.”
“Not outside, kid. In my pack. In the corner,” he said, motioning with his head to where their packs were leaning against the wall next to the front door.
“Oh,” Wash said, and got up.
“Kid,” the Old Man said from behind him.
Wash stopped and looked back. “Yeah?”
“I don’t blame you. Okay? I don’t blame you. And you shouldn’t, either. It’s done. Move past it. Next.”
Wash didn’t reply. He didn’t know how.
“Say it,” the Old Man said.
“Next,” Wash said.
“Good. Now, go get me that water. Damn, don’t think I’ve ever been this thirsty in my life.”
Wash nodded and turned back around. He
stepped over the dead ghoul—the one with the red cloak—and avoided the others. He wasn’t sure if he was moving in slow motion or if the world had just sped up on him. Every step took a lot of effort, and he had a hard time breathing. There was something in his chest—a living, breathing thing, almost like an animal trying to burrow its way out. Digging and biting and chewing—
Click! from behind him.
Wash turned around.
The Old Man had his SIG Sauer in his hand, and the click Wash heard was the pistol’s hammer being cocked back. The Old Man had the gun pressed against the side of his temple.
They locked eyes.
“Don’t,” Wash said. “Please.”
“I’m proud of you, kid,” the Old Man said, just before he pulled the trigger.
Two
Sonofabitch.
The girl in the dark red cloak was a slap in the face, a reminder of all the terrible things that had happened between them, as if Wash could ever forget, even if he wanted to. Which he didn’t, because it was the memories that drove him. The good, the bad, and everything else in-between. They were the reasons he was out here, hurting but pushing through.
So why did he stop in the middle of the road anyway? It wasn’t because he didn’t have any choice. He did. Three, to be exact. Would she have chased him if he fled left or right or turned and retreated the way he’d come? Maybe, but he thought he could outrun her on the Quarter Horse. The animal was well-rested, and Wash hadn’t been pushing it very hard since they left Kanter 11 behind.
So why, despite knowing everything, had he stopped anyway?
Because it sent her, that was why, and Wash was going to be damned if he ran away from it.
Not here. Not now. Not ever.
Wash halted the orange-brown horse about ten feet from the girl. He knew she was a girl—or used to be one, anyway—because she was small, barely five feet tall, even though she looked slightly hunched over as if she were suffering from a lifetime of poor posture. The cloak, up close, was a much darker shade of red. Almost blood-red.
There were no woods around him or trees for miles. Which was how he had spotted the solitary figure from a distance. He thought she would move when he neared, spooked by his appearance, but she hadn’t. She remained slightly turned, with her back mostly exposed to him even now. He couldn’t see her face or tell what she looked like with the hood draped over her head, and there was really no reason for him to think she was a she at all.
Except he knew, because this was a call back to that night, when everything changed.
A soft wind howled from somewhere to his left, pushing against the girl’s cloak until it hugged her thin frame. Wash couldn’t make out arms or legs, just the shape of a small person. A small, bony person.
Wash held the reins of the horse with one hand, while his right dropped slightly to his holstered sidearm. A Kahr 9mm, courtesy of Marie’s people. The kukri was sheathed on his left hip should he need it, but at a distance of ten feet, Wash could nail his target without even trying. And the mag was fully loaded with silver-tipped rounds.
The horse seemed to sniff the girl and must not have liked what it smelled, because it began shuffling its unshod feet. The animal was agitated, and Wash didn’t blame it. There was something very not right about the girl, even if he couldn’t see any part of her because the red-tinted fabric covered her body from head to toe.
But there was no hiding the smell. It was strong and tainted the air, reaching out across the cold night air and caressing Wash’s face, making his nostrils twitch. His wounds, still healing days later, tingled at the nearness of that familiar stench.
Rot. Vomit. Death.
“Where is it?” he asked. His voice was even-keeled. Calm. Unhurried. Unafraid.
Because he wasn’t afraid. You couldn’t get rid of fear completely, but you could master it, temper it at the crucial moments so it wouldn’t interfere. Wash had begun doing that during The Purge, and the Old Man had taught him the rest.
When the figure didn’t answer, Wash said, “It sent you, didn’t it?”
The figure moved. Slightly. It turned its head to the left, as if it were sneaking a look back at him. Except it stopped partway, eyes and face still hidden underneath the draped hood.
Wash let his fingers brush against the grip of the Kahr. The semiautomatic was cold to the touch, but maybe that was because he hadn’t had any reason to reach for it in the last few days. The first day with the weapon had been spent testing it, getting a feel for its smooth double-action trigger and recoil. That get-to-know session had cost him exactly one full magazine. He hadn’t wasted any more since.
“What’s the point of this?” he asked the girl. “Are you just going to stand there all night or what?”
He was still sure it was a girl underneath the cloak. The height, the size—everything pointed to a kid. A kid. Why had it sent a kid to intercept him? Was this all just to remind him of that night—
The horse felt it first—the ground around him moving as something (somethings) underneath the surface began crawling their way out. The Quarter Horse lifted its head and let out a loud snort.
Wash tightened his grip on the horse’s reins even as he drew the pistol, the thoughts It’s a trap. You knew it was a trap, and you walked right into it anyway. You idiot! You goddamn idiot! racing through him.
But it was too late to turn back now. The air was suddenly suffocating, every inch of it filled with that familiar aroma of stinking garbage.
Of death. Of ghouls.
There were a half dozen of them—their black flesh gleaming against the flood of moonlight—clamoring clumsily out of the holes they’d dug into the ground on both sides of the road. He hadn’t noticed how the ground had been tampered with, because it was so dark and because he was too focused on the figure in the road. Just like it had intended.
The world slowed down to a crawl like it always did when death was in the air, and Wash spun the horse around even as the animal continued to snort loudly, bursts of white clouds expelling in slow motion out of its nostrils with every alarmed breath.
The first creature to reach the surface ran at him, wet, damp dirt flinging off its shoulders and hairless domed head. Dark eyes focusing, twisted mouth opening wide to reveal jagged yellow teeth. It was fast, but it wasn’t quick enough to dodge a bullet.
The Kahr slid easily out of its holster, and Wash fired from the hip. He caught the first ghoul in the chest with the first shot. The 9mm round punched through its sunken torso and kept going, exiting out its back and vanishing into the night air. The nightcrawler, all tainted life suddenly snuffed out of it, continued forward, its momentum driving it. Then it lost all steam and slammed into the ground at the horse’s feet.
That spooked the horse, and the animal began shuffling its feet wildly to get away from the corpse. The agitated movements threw Wash’s aim off slightly as he fired a second time, still from the hip, at two more ghouls.
One creature’s head exploded like a ripe watermelon as the 9mm round drilled through its face, smashing its nose in the process, while it was still pulling itself up from the ground. Wash missed with his third shot but not his fourth. He clipped a ghoul in the shoulder blade, and it fell back into the hole it had been hiding in all this time.
The Quarter Horse continued to move wildly, and despite Wash’s best attempts to keep it under control, he realized quickly that it was a lost cause. Wash acted before the frightened horse could throw him off, launching himself in the same direction as the dead ghouls he’d just killed. There were more ghouls scrambling out of holes on the other side, and he didn’t want to land right in the middle of the pack. This way, he’d get a few seconds to gather himself—
Pain crackled through his body as he hit the hard ground and rolled over, the smell of rotting flesh from nearby dead ghouls tearing at his nostrils. He gritted his teeth through it all—or as much of it as he could, anyway—and still might have let out a loud scream anyway.
Then
he was rolling and scrambling back onto his knees. He spun around to search for the rest of the ghouls that, by now, would have already managed to dig themselves up from their hiding places.
“Four rounds! You have four rounds left, kid!” a voice shouted inside his head. It was the Old Man but not really the Old Man. An imaginary version of him, reinforcing things Wash already knew. Like right now, reminding him that he had only four rounds left in the Kahr. The magazine was limited to eight bullets, and he had already wasted four on three ghouls. Four on three ghouls.
“You’re supposed to be more accurate than this, kid,” the Old Man said.
Yeah, yeah, Wash thought as he watched the horse whirling around, puffing clouds from its flaring nostrils, before it took off down the road.
“That’s not good,” the Old Man said.
No kidding! Wash thought, when he glimpsed sudden movements from the corner of his eye.
The girl in the cloak!
He spun in that direction, the Kahr still at waist level, as she came at him.
He could see the creature in all its glory now, especially the piercing blue eyes that flashed inside the lightless interior of the hood. A blue-eyed ghoul. Not the blue-eyed ghoul Wash had been hunting, but another one.
It was fast. So, so much faster than the three black eyes he’d killed seconds earlier.
Goddammit, they’re fast!
It disintegrated the distance between them in the blink of an eye, the cloak fluttering around it as if alive, revealing its skeletal frame and deformed joints and—the eyes. All Wash could focus on were the eyes. So much so that he completely ignored the three figures on the other side of the road as they began moving toward his position.
He fired at the blue-eyed ghoul. Wash didn’t bother to lift the pistol for a better shot. He didn’t need to. He’d been shooting from the hip since he had learned to hold a gun, and he did that now.
Bang-bang-bang-bang!
All four shots, as fast as he could, and he didn’t stop pulling the trigger until the gun’s slide snapped backward and locked on the fourth (and last) bang!