My gaze was drawn to one particular ghoul in the middle of the pack. Unlike the others, he didn't just wear clothes. Over his back he wore the skin of an albino alligator. The alligator's snout rested on his head, the teeth descending around the ghoul's wizened face. The skin was held on by straps, some of the white leather pulled around the ghoul's abdomen. This ghoul carried a staff which seemed to have been painted with crude colors. From the top of the staff hung a multitude of strings. Some ended in feathers, some small skulls, some teeth. Others were necklaces I didn't recognize.
"A shaman," whispered my brother in shock. "When did ghouls get shamans?"
"This is not good," said Meat. He also recognized that this was very different from our typical ghoul pack.
We had all grabbed our weapons tightly. I was not happy with this turn of events. I had just a spear gun. Single shot, long reload. Not so good for a metric fuckton of ghouls. I wished I had my katana. Or even one of Szandor's lead pipes. I had a feeling I'd be bludgeoning them with the spear gun before the end of this. Delilah, Diego, and Meat had guns at least. But would they get much use out of them? The ghouls could close the gap quickly and overrun us. If they made a move.
"What are they waiting for?" whispered my brother.
The ghouls hadn't yet attacked. Other than hissing and staring, they really hadn't moved. It seemed like there was some sort of hissing communication between the shaman and the others, but we couldn't be sure. I could tell that the ghouls hadn't been camped here. They must have been on the move when they came across us. Maybe they had been coming to investigate the gunshot. If this was their territory, they probably wanted to know what the noise was about. But the fact they weren't immediately charging at us gave the impression they might not be hostile. Or at least not a berserk sort of hostile.
"We don't want any trouble," called out Meat. We've never seen or heard ghouls communicate other than hissing to each other, but there's been some evidence that they understood what we say. Or maybe not. Maybe they just reacted to the tone of our voices, like the way Tor's dogs did when Szandor would swear that they understood his words. Still, it was worth the risk to try to parlay.
There was some hissing in reaction to Meat's attempt to talk. The shaman ghoul turned his head, cocking it left and right and peering at us in the light, as if trying to discern our words by looking at us.
"We have no quarrel with you," said Jericho. His voice was strong but calm. "Let us pass."
There was more hissing. The shaman was still unimpressed.
Fala stepped to the front of the group. "We come with greetings from the Appaquagh!"
The reaction to this was much greater. Shock showed on the shaman's face; it was a look that screamed confusion to me. Then his eyes narrowed and he began making what seemed like a croaking. But it wasn't just a croaking. The shaman was speaking words. They were in no language I could recognize and they seemed distorted by the croak sound, but they were definitely words.
"Holy fuck, ghouls can talk," said Szandor. It wasn't a surprised exclamation. While there was some surprise in it, his tone was more in the range Of Course They Can That Seems To Fit With Every Other Fucking Wrong Thing Today.
Of course it was shocking. We had never seen ghouls talk. They seemed human-like, but until recently we had never noticed anything really human. We had only ever seen them hiss or screech to communicate. If they could talk... that changed everything. Were they much closer to humans than we thought? Were they somehow actually human? There were so many new questions. I'm sure some of the others had that same moment of doubt. Meat and Szandor at least. Diego probably had few encounters with them, Jericho didn't care, and I had no clue what Delilah thought of ghouls.
But Fala had a reaction to the Amazing Talking Ghoul even stronger than ours. But I don't think it was because of some revelation that ghouls could talk. It seemed much more about what the ghoul had said.
Fala paled, her expression shocked. "I understood that," she said breathlessly. There was disbelief in that tone. She hadn't expected to hear what the ghoul said. She hadn't expected to understand it.
"Is that bad?" said Szandor. "This seems bad."
Then Fala said something in a language I didn't understand. I couldn't remember hearing that sort of sounds in any movie. I went out on a limb and guessed it was whatever language her Appaquagh forefathers had spoken. Her voice was weak, tentative, and stumbling. It still sounded better than the croaky shaman.
The shaman was surprised by this as well. He seemed to blink his eyes in shock. Then he responded with croaks. It was now very apparent that despite the differences in pitch, Fala and the shaman spoke the same language.
Fala responded again to the shaman. Her voice was less tentative now. Of course I didn't understand any of what she said, but I did hear her say a familiar word: Jagherherawagh.
What had she said? Was she saying we were looking for Jack? Was she asking for directions? Or did she ask them something far darker? All I know is that the name got the ghouls' attention. All of their attention. Where before, only the shaman had been interested in Fala, suddenly the rest of pack was involved. All ghoul eyes fell on Fala. Shock was written across the shaman's face again. He took a long moment to look over Fala.
Had she somehow gained their trust? Had she intrigued them? Were we now part of the tribe?
No such luck. The shaman's eyes narrowed and I knew things went bad. His lip curled, revealing his rotted teeth, still sharp even after the decay. In his hissingly croaky voice, he snarled a single word at great volume.
"Jagherherawagh!"
There was a second of silence, then another ghoul snarled the name, their voice also something between a croak and a screech. Then another. And another. Suddenly the entire ghoul pack erupted in that name. They began chanting it over and over, raising their spears to punctuate the repetitions.
To say that us hunters got uncomfortable was a vast understatement. This was like the scene in King Kong right before Kong shows up. Except we were hunting a man-eating sea serpent, so I doubt things would go so well for us. We had neglected to bring a Fay Wray.
And then the obvious thing happened. I had one of my signature Bad Feelings. It was another hot flash, another throbbing scar moment. I acted before I truly discerned what it meant, knowing only what I needed to do. It wasn't Jack. I ran forward and grabbed Fala's arm. I yanked her backward, throwing her into Jericho's arms.
A second later a spear landed with great force in the spot where she had just stood.
"Run!" I yelled.
The ghouls' chant turned into a screeching battle cry. Their faces twisted into snarling masks of rage. Their crouched forms leaped into action, charging toward us. At once we all turned and began running. We only had one direction available to us, back the way we came.
The screeching followed, a howling that erupted from the darkness behind us, as much a pursuer as the ghouls themselves. We heard our breathing and the pounding of our boots the loudest, the screeching nearly as loud. But behind that piercing sound we heard their bare feet hitting the wet cement with a flapping sound. As there were at least thirty of them, it was its own percussion as we ran for our lives.
"Holy shit! Holy shit!" said Szandor as he ran. Similar curses came between breaths from some of the other hunters. We knew we were outnumbered. If we were to stop and make a stand, it had to be somewhere other than out in the open. We also had to make sure we didn't trip or lag behind. I had wondered if Jericho's leg would be able to handle it. His steps were louder, but he was able to move quickly. But one look at the man himself and I could see the effort and agony it took keeping up with us at that pace.
Our chests heaving, our legs burning, our packs heavy, and flesh eating monsters with spears at our backs, we ran. It was a sprint at first. I don't know how long we actually ran. It seemed somewhere between an eternity and two minutes. Few experiences in my life had gotten me that scared. I had fought many monsters before, but I had never run from an a
rmed pack of them. The fear I had felt in front of Jack was different. In front of that massive beast, it was a primal fear, some ancestral instinct that prey feels in front of an alpha predator. What I felt now was a different fear. It was an anxiety, a sense of danger, of not knowing whether to turn and fight or to get hunted down when my legs gave out. It was the fear of getting stabbed, dog piled, and then eaten by a pack of angry mutants. Ghouls had never been something of major concern before, but now they were giving me a panicked fear.
I don't know if we passed the door we original came to this tunnel from or if someone in the lead found a side tunnel we had missed. All I know is that suddenly the rest of the group was turning right into a narrower tunnel. Coming last, I turned as well. Or I tried. My boots had other ideas on the matter. They slid on the damn concrete. Had I not been pursued by a murderous mob, this might have been a comical Breakfast Club-esque moment as I skidded in place while trying to make the turn. Finally my boots got traction and I surged forward in the new direction. Had this cost me time I didn't have?
"Mikkel!" said Szandor, turning his head to see me lagging behind.
"I'm fine, keep going!" I gasped, not wanting my brother to slow down for me. His pause already made him next to last in our panicked train of survival.
We ran through this shorter tunnel before coming out in an incredibly large chamber. The others had paused just a moment to shine some lights and get their bearings before running, so I had a glimpse of the fullness of this space. This chamber dwarfed any others we had been in. At least a few hundred feet across, this round chamber looked to be a gigantic basin or holding tank. If there was a ceiling it was high above us. If there was a floor, it was far below in the unfathomable darkness. A metal grate bridge was the only way across the room. And it wasn't a big one. The black metal crosswalk was maybe eight feet across. Water fell in the center of the chamber from pipes on the sides of it, but not a stream, more of a continuous drip.
When I finally made it to the bridge, the others were already running across, their boots making a clang whenever they came down on the metal. I didn't stop in my run, catching up to Szandor as we ran for our lives. The ghouls were right behind me; they must have overtaken me on the turn.
Szandor and I sprinted, our boots also slamming down hard on the bridge. Something in that resonance sounded off to me, especially as we reached the middle of the walkway. With my LED light, I could just vaguely see that the metal was less black here and more orange. The ugly orange color of rusted and weakened metal.
Then there was a cascade of events.
First a hot flash and my scar throbbing.
Then my foot coming down hard on something that wasn't as solid as it had been anymore.
Next was the squeal of metal as it bent and tore.
Then the bridge fell out beneath me as my brother, the ghouls directly behind us, and me fell through space.
A Warm Place
Falling is a strange feeling. Without the frame of reference of ground, there's a profound disorientation. There's the rush of the air and that sick feeling in your lower abdomen that says something is really wrong. You might also feel some of these sensations if you jumped or otherwise chose to fall. But when you don't choose, there's panic. Nothing else matters but that panic as you reach out, floundering, trying to do anything to make the fall stop. You cling to the first thing you find. You are looking for that single anchor point, that single solid thing to make the rest of the world make sense.
As ghouls fell into the void below me, I grabbed out wildly. Just swiping in the air for anything I could find, anything that had any solid mass. This should have been impossible. Shock, the vastness of space, not even knowing what I was grabbing at, should have made my hands empty. But maybe there was some intuition in the Bad Feeling I got. Maybe I was just lucky. Though this was such a long shot it seemed like even my luck got lucky.
Somehow I grabbed my brother's boot. I felt the leather, laces, and grime as my arm tensed as much as I could to stop my fall. Then the rest of my body snapped still, pulling at my arm. Pain ripped through me, but I didn't think I dislocated my shoulder. With great effort, I pulled my other arm up to make my hold two-handed. In that moment, nothing mattered more to me than holding onto my brother's boot. I ignored the gunshots, the screeches, the shouts, and even the spears which whizzed past me into the darkness. Only the boot.
The center section of the bridge had collapsed and fallen down. Szandor, who had been right in front of me, had fallen too. He lacked the intuitive warning I received, but my brother's survival instinct has always been extremely strong. Maybe that's his super power. He can survive anything if he gets to complain about it later. When we fell, Szandor had grabbed the end of the dangling catwalk. With a death grip that was trying to ward off... well, death, he held onto that piece of metal. And I held onto his boot.
Szandor shouted and screamed, probably from pain, but he knew he needed to hold on. He was keeping us both alive. But help didn't come immediately. It seemed like the others had other things to take care of first by the sounds of their shouts and shots. So eventually Szandor quieted and just focused on holding on. My brother and I are in good shape, but nobody would ever think of us as super strong. So Szandor holding on while I was dangling from his boot hurt like hell. I know because he told me so later.
And so for a period of time which probably was minutes, I dangled. All the light was above me and I had only my personal LED. But I dangled in a vast void where the darkness was far stronger than the light. I could only see myself and Szandor, who still had his own LED. In the suffocating darkness around us, nothing else was close enough to see. Though I had been distracted by other noises, I hadn't heard the catwalk or ghouls hit bottom. I'm sure they did, but it might have been so far below that the sound had come far after it happened. As soon as I fell, it was like the volume on everything else had been turned down. All that registered in my mind was the void and my brother. I looked down into the deep darkness below me, dangling by the boot of someone dangling by a broken piece of metal and wondered if this was it for me. Were we going to end years of monster hunting by falling to our deaths?
Fear. It's a funny thing being afraid. It's one of the most basic human emotions. It's something we feel with our bodies. Oh, we feel it in our frantic emotions, in the cold locking of our minds, but fear is almost a body emotion. We will shiver, tense, and fill with adrenaline sometimes without even realizing we're afraid. Sometimes we seem almost the last to know we're afraid, our bodies having prepared for fight or flight long before the realization comes to us. And when you can neither fight nor flee, it's something your body and emotions can't deal with. Shutting down is a real danger, as is some type of nervous breakdown. But sometimes, something very different happens.
Have you ever been so afraid, have you ever felt so much fear, that is flipped to its opposite? I stared down into that black abyss, one handgrip and bootlace away from death itself, and was more afraid than I had ever been in my life. And in that moment I felt so much fear, so much more that I could deal with, and was so mind-numbingly afraid that somehow I pushed through it. And on the other side... there was no fear. Instead, I felt something so surprising that I still look back and wonder if it was some hallucination of a dying brain.
I felt love.
It wasn't some torrid passion, it wasn't the starry eyed happiness of finding some you can spend the labors of your heart on. First and foremost, it was peaceful. It was calm and it was caring. My mind immediately went to the feeling I always got from Mom. She'd come home from work, having given eight year old me the responsibility of caring for my six year old brother after school. She'd smile and touch my head, saying, "Good job, Mikkel." It was the love of that touch, the joy of hearing those words, the warmth of someone caring for you more than anything in the world.
And somehow, what I felt was more than that. This was the love and affection you'd receive from a lifelong partner. I bet people who had been marrie
d and in love for fifty years felt this. This feeling was big, so big, that it felt larger than anything I'd ever expect from another human being. It was a love I felt in my bones, my skin, in a warmth in my scar that wasn't painful. This was a love that sank down into me and became part of my DNA. Though the intensity eventually faded when I left this place, in a way, it never left me.
Szandor didn't get any of these feelings as he hung on. What he does remember are the whispers. I heard them too. We couldn't make out what they were saying because of so much other noise. But layer upon layer of the soft hissing of whispered words seem to echo up from below us. I don't think it was sinister, but I admit I was in the midst of my love experience and that may have biased me. I don't know where those whispers came from. I can't imagine anyone was down at the bottom nor how whispers could travel up to us when so many other noises were going on. But as long as we both dangled, we heard them.
Eventually, it was all over. Someone started pulling Szandor up, which pulled me along with him. As I was raised, the feeling and the whispers dropped away. I was only half conscious of reality, as if I viewed everything from far away. I felt vaguely like a fish in a fisherman's cooler - they had just opened it up and were pulling us up out of it. I remember feeling hands on me and the world changing orientation as they laid me flat on my back. I looked up into Meat and Delilah's concerned faces. Someone had to pry my hands off of Szandor's boot; I hadn't even been aware that I was still holding onto it.
I breathed, almost unaware how tensed and locked my lungs had been, how my breaths had been shallow ever since I fell. My chest rising and falling, I stared up at their faces and then when they moved away, I looked into the blackness above us as well. I remember hearing Szandor talking loudly about how we dangled, trying to burn off his adrenaline and somehow get back to normalcy. After a while, their attention returned to me.
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