The Ghoul King

by Guy Haley

  I saw the light even through my eyelids, through my mother’s body. A glaring light, brighter than the sun come down to earth.

  There was this sound in the earth, like snow sliding off a roof in winter all at once. Soft almost. Then a terrible shaking, and a howling roar. Moments later a blast of hot air ripped at our clothes, sending the windchimes in the trees into a frenzy of ringing. There was this rushing, breathless rushing, and a rumbling that went on and on. My mother let go then. And I saw. The spires were gone. Over Old Columbus towered a cloud in the shape of a mushroom, taller than the sky and unfolding so that it seemed it would not stop until its cap had covered the world.

  Bright streaks burned through air, heading toward the city, glittering like the fiery swords. Divine vengeance. The wrath of the angels.

  “Oh my God,” said my mother.

  She picked me up and ran, threw me into the house. By that point I was crying. All the animals were lowing and neighing and clucking.

  “Keep your eyes closed!” commanded my mother. She scrambled in after me, slamming the door, pushing me toward the cellar.

  “Where is Daddy?” I said.

  My mother was crying. My brothers, sister, and my father were out working the fields. It was fall, and they were plowing for the winter wheat. She half threw me down into our cellar, a nice place, not damp but dry and earthy with the smell of potatoes sacked up for the winter. I liked it in there. It felt safe. We hid there two or three times before, sheltering from rare Ohio tornadoes.

  A cellar ain’t gonna stop the fury of God.

  Another explosion, louder than the first. The house shook. The wind picked up, rattling the windows and the shingles, hooting like a phantom as it rushed past. A door banged. Glass broke. Then another explosion, and another and the earth shook like it was going to break apart.

  The angels of Pittsburgh were wiping the Dreaming City of Columbus off the Earth. They told us that the angels there had fallen, that they had become corrupted by the sinfulness of the Earth and the people that dwelled upon it. They said the angels of Columbus had abandoned God. But they helped us. They saved us. They taught us things that made life better. The angels of Pittsburgh have done none of that. You’ve brought nothing but suffering.

  You might think I’m a fool to say that, here in front of an angel’s oracle, speaking right to the ears of the angels themselves. Does it matter? It’s too late for anything but the truth. I saw what happened to the people who got caught in the fallout plume from the bombs. Rotted from the inside out, their lands sterilized. Black rains fell for three days after the bombs. When me and my mother went outside, all our animals were dead, and the plants were dying. Two of my brothers went blind. My father died three years later. My sister survived fifteen years, but when she married she produced only monstrous offspring. And why? Because one city of angels disagreed with another city of angels on the appropriate level of suffering on the Earth.

  After what I saw in the wake of the bombs, I decided then, when I was so young, that I would be a healer.

  This is why when Rachel came to me I did not turn away. I do not like to see suffering. I may be a fearful man, and my actions have led to the suffering I wanted to avert. But I am not a monster. If the knowledge is there to save people, and it is denied us, then that is wrong. It is my duty to help the sick as best I can, to the best of my ability. That is an oath I took before God himself when I trained to be a healer, but an oath to God never was going to be good enough for the angels of Pittsburgh.

  * * *

  It took a day to cross the fallout zone. When Columbus fell the plume had coursed out southwest and was narrow close to the city. Either side of it, the land was cleaner. Even so, where it’s not been decontaminated it is still dangerous. It was a brief respite. We came to the plains of glass, near to the center of the explosions and then our counters went crazy. Rachel handed out pills to us. They probably wouldn’t do anything. Quinn declined them. He’d been looking pretty poorly handled before, but already his wounds from the arena were fading. None were severe, just scratches, but even scratches don’t fade away in a day or so. If he hadn’t have been so damn dirty, it’d have been really obvious that he was healing far quicker than any man has a right to. I got the feeling he didn’t need those pills.

  The broken spires of Columbus look impressive far out. Compared to what we can build in this sorry era they’re titans. Close up they were sorry stumps, skeletal frames flayed of their glass skin and shaggy with vegetation. I remember there being scores of them before the bombs. There are seven left, none of them taller than three hundred feet anymore, where once they scraped the sky.

  When folks talk about the plains of glass I’m sure they see a gleaming field flat as a tray. Truth is a lot less poetic. The glass plain is a cracked, convoluted mess, wrinkled and buckled as diseased mammoth skin. Plates of vitrified soil crunch underfoot. It’s delicate, the atomic glass, varied in thickness, and ugly as sin. Radiation readings there, so close to the epicenter of the explosions, are twice that in the fallout zone. Stay there too long, watch your genes get tied in knots. But it’s still full of plants. Less so than the fallout zone, and there are many dead trees, but life survives.

  Green mounds and broken sections of wall that somehow survived the attack slice up through the earth. The destruction wasn’t uniform. I watched the explosions, those sunbursts popping. You’d think everything caught in that would be gone, but it ain’t so. Bits and pieces of the city emerged from clumps of thorn. Where walls had been vaporized, the ground might still preserve a covering of concrete. Some buildings stood, roofless, windowless, but whole. There ain’t no accounting for how.

  I suppose that’s how the armor survived. There’s bits of machines, the skeletons of the angels’ servants, if you know where to look. Most of it’s in fragments. But there is one place we went that is a field of wonders. That came later.

  Quinn had us all stop three miles out from the spires. “Someone’s going to have to take the horses back,” he said. “Make camp and wait for us.”

  “I don’t agree,” said Rachel.

  “Don’t then. You’re wrong,” said Quinn. He got down off his mount and started to drag things out from the bundles on his packhorse.

  “What are you doing?” said Rachel. “We can tether the horses outside the town. We’ll only be gone a few hours.”

  “And if we’re not?” said Quinn. He set a full canteen at his hip, unhitched his blade hilts from one another—something I saw him do a lot—and took a knapsack from the horse. “You not noticed it?”

  We looked at each other.

  “Quiet, isn’t it?” said Quinn. He was right. There was the persistent grumble of the city falls in the distance, the sound of the wind hissing through dead grass, but nothing else. “No birds. No game. That’s not because of the radiation. Animals don’t care to avoid such places. People are more of a threat to them than the devil’s poison. It’s the ghouls. They see to anything with a pulse and warm blood, tear it up and eat it. The lands and skies around this city are silent because those monsters devour everything. Now, what do you suppose will happen if we leave half a dozen horses tethered outside a city full of ghouls while we go inside? That’ll be enough to draw them out, full light of day or not.” He pointed back the way we’d come. There one of the rare buildings stood sentinel over the remains of its brothers and sisters. Four walls made a sort of open stockade. “Put them in there, leave someone to watch over them.” He looked about the ground, then walked in a wide circle, scuffing the grass with his boot. “I don’t see scat out here. They don’t come this way often.”

  Rachel looked at Fillip for his opinion. He shrugged. “You wanted him as a guide,” said Fillip. “What the hell do I know about ghouls?”

  “Very well. Robyn.”

  Robyn’s face wrinkled in annoyance. “Don’t tell me I’m going to have to stay behind, what about Thom—”

  Rachel silenced her with an upraised hand. “You’re s
taying. Thomas is our best fighter.”

  Quinn gave her an unimpressed look.

  “I need Fillip, we’ll need his expertise,” Rachel went on.

  Quinn snorted at that and kicked a sod of yellow grass. He knelt by it and drew out a long rib bone. He showed it to us, as if we needed any more convincing. “Nope, I was wrong. They do come out this way.”

  “What about Jaxon?” said Robyn. She was young, and inclined to be whiny when she didn’t get her way.

  “He’s a healer. We’ll need him if anyone gets hurt, and I may need him to help me retrieve the correct information.”

  That took me by surprise. What information? I couldn’t credit that she’d prioritize my desire to get as much healing knowledge out of the place as I could.

  Quinn waved the bone at the sky. It was human. “It’ll be dark in four hours or so. We’re going to have to go in tomorrow. You got any ideas where you’d like to get in?”

  “Leave that to me,” said Rachel. She got off her horse and led it back toward the ruin. Robyn rode along behind her, fuming.

  I think there was some blood relationship between those two. Not mother and daughter or sisters, not that close. Cousins maybe. Rachel was protective toward Robyn, Robyn resented it. But when we got back in the state we were in, I could tell she was glad she had stayed behind.

  * * *

  We set up camp in the building under Quinn’s direction. The walls were high and sturdy, and there were only two ways in, a door, and a crack where one wall had broken and sagged out. Quinn had us barricade the crack best we could with beams of concrete we scavenged. Every lump in that land covers the wreck of a building, and we didn’t have to dig far to find what we needed, but each time my hand dipped into that ground I wondered on the invisible poison tainting me. Thomas and me stopped up the hole, then braced our repair with more lengths of concrete. Fear of the ghouls had us stamp those beams so far into the ground nothing was going to shift it.

  “The walls are good,” said Quinn from above. He was pacing their uneven length and looking out at the plain of glass and the city ruins. “We’ll take it in turns to act sentry. Get wood, grass, anything that’ll burn. We should light a fire in the door. Ghouls aren’t fond of it.”

  Thomas, who’d started jumping up and rushing to obey everything Quinn said, jumped up and rushed off, giving the knight the sort of nod a subordinate desperate to be trusted gives to his boss. Decisive, but needy looking. Neither me nor Fillip thought much of him for that, and we raised our eyebrows at each other.

  Evening came in quick as it does this time of year. Dark at four. Fillip went to help Thomas. Robyn took up position on a corner of the wall, rifle on her knees, back to the rest of us. She looked sort of beautiful up there, with the orange sun on her face. Quinn had gone for a while, scouting out a route into town despite what Rachel had said. She’d tried to tell him not to go alone. He’d just smiled at her.

  So there was only me and Rachel in the corral. That was when I finally got to see what was inside the box.

  I saw her fussing over something in the corner. I put the last nose bag on the horses and went over to her. She had her box out on a worn cloth. I expected her to send me away, but she looked up at me and went on with what she was doing. Though the box was scratched and its polish scuffed, Rachel had spent money on it. That was some fine craftsmanship there. She ran her fingers along the edge, pressed something—I didn’t see what, only heard it click—and she opened it.

  “It’s about time you saw,” she said. She looked up at me and nodded me closer. I crouched down next to her.

  The artifact was nestled inside a precise cutout lined with dark red velvet. What I saw was like a section of spine, made of chromium, three vertebrae shaped like a person’s but larger, each one the size of a woman’s fist, and with spreading processes much wider than a human’s, more like a deer’s. The metal gleamed entirely unsullied, not a fingerprint nor mark of corrosion anywhere upon it. It looked like a sculpture and not a machine, but it was a machine, and a terrible one.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “My guardian angel,” said Rachel.

  The rushing rumble of the falls rose and fell due to some trick of the air. There were a bunch of rivers used to flow from the northeast through Columbus to join the Scioto. A lot of them disappeared in the ruins.

  “What is it?” I said again, unconvinced by her explanation.

  “I told you,” she said warningly, but she still did not send me away. She opened up a leather tool roll and took out a carefully wound wire. There was a small clip on one end that she attached to the artifact. The other had something I had come to know as a jack, from what the Seekers said. She took up another box wrapped in a cloth, and unwrapped that very carefully. From inside, she took a square black device of glass. Into this she inserted the jack, and it instantly came alive. It was a . . . an imaging device of some kind. The glass came alight and glowed with words and numbers. The light of it bathed her face. I must have moved back because she smiled at me.

  “Don’t be afraid. It’s a device of the Gone Before. Nothing that can harm you.”

  She attached a few other wires to various points on the vertebrae.

  When the angelic device was nestled in a mess of wire, she spoke to it worshipfully.

  “My helper, we approach the city. Which is the safest way within?”

  A spark cracked between the device and the wire, and I further drew back in fear. A weak voice sounded from the black glass, though I knew it originated in the chromium spine.

  “A map, my child. A map in.”

  A schematic replaced the images on the screen, green light on blackness. The way it scrolled around made me queasy and I had to look away.

  “The facility I require is deep underground. The medical area of the city,” said the voice. “This was a critical facility, was deeply buried, and will not have been damaged by the attack. Take me there, and all you wish to know shall be yours for the taking.”

  “What about the datacore?” said Rachel, frowning.

  “Gone. Taken by the angels of Pittsburgh. But do not fear. Repair me. Return me to functionality, and I shall be able to retrieve much of use.”

  Noise approached, voices. Quinn, Fillip, and Thomas speaking quietly. Robyn stood on the wall and waved. Rachel looked up sharply, hurriedly unplugged the device, and clicked the box closed. Rachel gave a questioning look to Thomas and Fillip, but they both looked to the knight, and it was him that spoke.

  “We’ve scouted all down the east bank. The terrain is hard, right the way around,” Quinn said. “The Scioto breaks into a broad marsh across the valley bottom. I can’t see a way in that won’t leave us open to ambush. The whole of the surface has been leveled, the spires aside. Underground, it will be a maze.”

  “Then lead us through!” said Rachel sharply. “You have the knowledge. You have been inside a Dreaming City.”

  “I have,” admitted. Quinn. “But a different city, one that hadn’t been comprehensively nuked.” He paused, not sure if they knew the term. They were technophiles. They knew the term. “I’m not saying I’m not going to do it, I’m saying it’s not going to be easy.”

  “I said I’d handle it.”

  “How?” said Quinn.

  Rachel hesitated. “I have a map.”

  She held up her device and tried to hide the box behind her. Quinn squinted.

  “Where’d you get that from?” He gave the device only a cursory glance, but looked at the box a long time.

  “You don’t need to know. It’s good.”

  “The map is out of date,” said Thomas. He was getting nervy. So much for his tough-guy reputation. “Pre-atomic bomb out of date. And there’s worse. Quinn found ghoul scat. Everywhere. This place will be crawling with them come nightfall.”

  “Columbus is known for its ghouls. We have protection,” said Rachel.

  “Against teeth, against claws?” Quinn hunkered down. “Have you ever fought gh
ouls?” He looked at us all in turn. None of us had. All but Thomas and Rachel looked away from his piercing stare. “They do not stumble around looking for an easy meal like the dead. And there are a lot of them here. You might want to think about turning back.”

  “We’ve all heard the stories, mister,” said Thomas, managing a touch of defiance, but he was scared. “They’re animals, that’s all.”

  Quinn stared hard at Thomas. “The stories mean shit. This is real. This isn’t a fireside entertainment. You go in there, and they will rip you apart and eat your liver while you watch, and they’ll know how to trick you to do it. They are not dumb.”

  “We’re going in. In daylight. This way.” Rachel pinched at the glass. A section of the map expanded. Such things the angels deny us, and you wonder why we are discontent. “There is a lake here, where the plaza once was. We can get in that way. We go in from above. We have ropes.”

  Quinn huffed out and dropped his head.

  “You don’t have a chance of getting in there. Not like this.”

  “How then? You’re going in, aren’t you?”

  “I have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to. You don’t.”

  “I do,” said Rachel. Her hand went unconsciously to the box.

  “What are you after, exactly?”

  “Medical. That part they always kept the safest.”

  “Why not the datacore? There’ll be more than you can possibly use in there.”

  “Because it’s gone. Cored out and dragged off to Pittsburgh.”

  “You shouldn’t know any of this,” said Quinn. “You know far too much of things that are not safe to know. The angels will get you for that, sooner or later.”

  “What? You think we should do nothing, be like the rest of the cattle?” said Rachel. “Thomas here watched his entire family die of the sickness. He had to put them all down, wife, son, and four daughters as they turned. Robyn’s family got the cholera. Sure, Fillip there is in it for whatever he can find, Bernadini was too. But Jaxon, he lived through the fallout years after the war between Pittsburgh and Columbus and the Emperor of Virginia. Ohio was a savage place then.”