The Ghoul King

by Guy Haley

  It seemed to go on forever, that hellish pursuit, ghouls snapping at my heels, but the fuse was set for thirty seconds, and duly it went off, bringing the chase to a tumultuous end.

  The explosion deafened me. Even so far as we had run, the shock wave buffeted us, sending me staggering. The thunder of collapse sounded from behind us. But still the ghouls were there, and they leapt at us. A hand gripped my ankle so tightly I expected the bone to snap. A sharp tug had me sprawling and I screamed. I rolled onto my back, groping for my rifle but it had gone. The ghoul crawled up my body, filthy claws ripping my clothes and flesh as it scrabbled for my neck. Its weirdly elongated face thrust into mine, its breath reeking of carrion and blood. Those wiry limbs possessed unnatural strength. Grappling at my wrists it pinned me fast, and drew back its head to strike, mouth wide, exposing ranks of teeth like those of a predatory fish.

  A gunshot roared close by. The ghoul’s grip relaxed and it leaned sideways, half its head exploded into a fine mist, and it pitched on top of me, limbs loose.

  Yelling hysterically, I heaved the corpse off me. Quinn strode past, gun booming. Ghouls screamed as they fell. I counted six shots, each one lighting the dark corridor with fiery lightning. Ghouls were frozen in that illumination, slavering as they pushed past each other to get at us. His rounds spent, Quinn dropped his gun, switching his knight’s longsword from left hand to right. I saw it flash in the diffuse glow, each swing dispatching another ghoul. The stink of hot blood filled the corridor, and then, all of a sudden, the battle was done and there were no more. A rattling ghoul’s cry sounded somewhere far off, and then there was no noise but for my own whimpering and Quinn’s slow breathing.

  Quinn stooped for his pistol. I reached for my canteen, only to find it raked open by claws. An amount of water remained in the bottom, but the thought of drinking it turned my stomach. The nails of the ghouls must be rich with disease.

  “Did it bite you?” he said, as he wiped his sword on a rag drawn from his belt.

  “I am alright,” I said.

  “I didn’t ask if you were alright.” He discarded the rag. “I asked if it bit you.”

  “No,” I said. “I think some of its blood might have got into my mouth, some of its spittle too.” I stuck out my tongue at this realization and scrubbed at it with a fistful of my clothes, only to find them grimy and foul tasting.

  “Then you might turn, or you might not. The strain of the sickness the ghouls carry is not so virulent as that in the dead. Got to get it direct in the blood most cases anyway, but I’ve seen a man struck down by the smallest drop of infected blood splashed into his eye.” He unhooked a flask from his belt and tossed it at me. “Swill this round your mouth, gargle it, spit it out. Don’t swallow, whatever you do.”

  I was trembling so much I fumbled the catch and nearly dropped the bottle. It took me three attempts to open the flask, then spilled a measure of it down my face.

  “Slow down,” he said. “It’ll do you no good if you waste it all.”

  The liquid evaporated rapidly off my skin, burning me with the chill. When I took it in my mouth, it seared me. I swilled and gargled and gargled again, not caring for the cold pain that raked my throat.

  “Hey, that’s enough,” he said.

  I spat it out, breathing like a blown horse.

  He held out his hand for his bottle, and I closed it and handed it back. “That will help,” he said. He looked meaningfully at me. “But you can walk in front for a while. Pick up your gun.”

  I found the rifle lying by a rupture in the wall, half under the body of a ghoul. I tugged the gun free. Dead, the ghoul looked more human. The ribs were clear to see, it was emaciated, the cords of its legs and arms standing clear with intolerable tension even in death. Were it not for its distorted skull, I could have taken it for the corpse of a man.

  “There’s light,” I said, holding my hand in front of my face. “Enough to see by. For me to see by, I mean. Can you see? I suppose you’ve been able to see for a while.” I gabbled, and felt suddenly foolish for drawing attention to the difference between me and this servant of the angels.

  “That might be a good thing, that might be a bad thing,” said Quinn.

  “What do we do now?” I said as we set off walking. The condition of the corridor improved. The light grew stronger.

  “Find our way to the city datacore.”

  “Rachel said it had gone.”

  “Never trust anything until you’ve seen it yourself.”

  “But what about Rachel?” I said.

  “She made her choice,” said Quinn. What he meant by that was not to become apparent until close to the end of this sorry venture.

  The Ghoul King

  THE CORRIDOR DROPPED, taking on a uniform slant down. The light grew stronger, strong as moonlight, then as evening, then lighter yet. Below us, at the end of the passageway, a rectangle of light that seemed as bright as the sun after our trek through the dark.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Quinn. I heard the oily clicks of bullets slotting into the cylinder of his gun. “Any fever, weakness, dryness of the mouth?”

  “I know the symptoms,” I said harshly.

  “Do you have them?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m thirsty though.”

  He paused at that. “Drink then.”

  “I threw my canteen away, that ghoul ripped it open.”

  I tensed, but the gun slid back into his holster, and a moment later his hand prodded me in the back. “Take mine,” he said. “Stop for a moment. I’ve seen you drink before. I don’t want you spilling it all.”

  “But the ghouls,” I said. “They were right behind us.”

  “And they’re not now.” His face had become harder since we’d fallen, and he hadn’t been very friendly before. He stared at me while I drank. I stopped before I was ready, disturbed by his regard.

  “What is that thing that Rachel has?” I asked. “She calls it her guardian angel.”

  Quinn put his canteen away, then unslung Fillip’s pack and began taking out the contents. Those he wanted to keep he put into his own knapsack.

  “That’s more right than she knows. It’s an angel’s blessing,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I thought you were tight with these ‘Seekers.’”

  “I’m no technophile. I’m a healer,” I protested.

  “Anyone who risks their life for the knowledge of the Gone Before is a technophile, no matter what they say and no matter what they’re obsessing over.” He slung Fillip’s bandolier of dynamite about his chest. There were three sticks left, each snugly held in a capped leather tube.

  “I still don’t know what it is.”

  Quinn sighed and stared at me like I was a fool. “It’s an angel maker. It’s what makes angels.”

  “How?”

  “Now that I really don’t have time to explain,” he said. “Said you believe in God?”

  “I do!” I said, and I do, sincerely. “You only have to look around the world to see his hand everywhere.”

  “Right,” he said neutrally. “But you don’t believe the angels are his messengers.”

  “They’re something else.”

  “Some might say you’re right,” said Quinn. He shouldered his pack again. Quinn always moved with purpose. He never did anything that had no reason. He had some dried meat in his hand which he offered to me. “Eat.”

  I did so, gladly.

  “Either way, what your Rachel has is no toy, and it sure as hell doesn’t have her best interests in mind no matter what it told her.”

  “Did you know?”

  “No,” he said. “I should’ve figured it out, you people running around with unsanctioned artifacts, making guns and batteries and so forth. I thought she might have come across some sort of cloak or field device, and that’s what kept you hidden, though her little friend can do that too. I missed it, because none of those things are supposed to have survived.”

&
nbsp; “The angel’s blessings?” I said, my mouth clumsy round the unfamiliar words.

  “The angels of Columbus,” he said. “Come on. We’re close to the heart of the city. If Rachel was lying, down here is what I need, then we can get out before nightfall.”

  “What if she wasn’t lying?” I said nervously.

  He turned back to me. “Then we’ll find somewhere to hole up until morning,” he said. He gave me a rare smile. “I don’t know what you think of me, Jaxon, and I don’t rightly care, but I’m not about to let you get snacked on by ghouls if I can help it.”

  We went through the door into a huge space and I was immediately occupied in keeping my footing. There were mounds of debris everywhere, much of it glass glinting in light that streamed in from above. Quinn mounted the pile half-blocking the door and moved up it easily, sending short-lived avalanches of shards slithering out from under his feet. I was less nimble, slipped about, always a heartbeat from falling. One time I did slip. Only the fact that I had my rifle braced in front of me prevented my arms from plunging deep into the glass, but I cut my knuckles.

  One more skidding step. The surface leveled out. I looked up and stopped dead at what I saw.

  Shafts of light, too bright for me to look at directly, came in through a hole in the ceiling hundreds of feet overhead. In front of me, rising from mountains of broken glass, metal, rock, and concrete were three towers arranged into a hollow triangle. On each, glass pods gathered together around a central stem in bunches like an enormous beanstalk. The pods were the size of coffins, and a form of coffin they were, for in those whose interiors were not obscured by filthy residue I saw the bones of men and women.

  “Behold,” said Quinn ironically. “The home of the angels. This is the heart of the fallen Dreaming City of Columbus. You are among very few living men to have seen inside such a place.”

  I blinked at him, lost for words.

  “Do not see it as an honor. If it is ever known you have been here you will be killed, I can guarantee that with absolute certainty.”

  “Angels, so far underground? The spires and the castles of glass and light . . . I remember the city from before. I saw it every day as a boy. Angels are creatures of the air!”

  “Decoration,” said Quinn. “Venting systems. Energy generation. Defensive matrices. Broadcast towers. Above all, a statement of might. Down here, underground, that’s where the angels dwell in every Dreaming City. They feel safest buried under rock.”

  “From whom?” I said. “They are all-powerful. No nation can stand against them.”

  “They’re not afraid of men,” said Quinn. “They need protection from each other. And even then, all this is not enough.”

  I walked to the tree of coffins. Tentatively I rested my hand upon one pod. A skull, a human skull, rested only an inch from my hand against glass smirched with streaks of dried filth. A black crust covered the bottom. There was a hole in the coffin, and a corresponding hole in the skull.

  Many of the lower coffins were broken into fragments, the bones of their occupants missing.

  “They were all killed. Executed.”

  “Yes,” said Quinn. “Directly. The only way to be sure. The angels of Neork and Atlantis wanted to drop an atomic in here, but the angels of Pittsburgh insisted that their enemies be dispatched individually, so that they all might be counted, and their husks left as a warning to any other city that dared breach the terms of the Pax Angelica. More displays of power. If there’s one thing I have learnt about the angels, it is that they are hung up on the way things look.”

  I discerned a pattern in coffins on the towers. They went round in a spiral, each turn comprising three grouped together. I saw them as abominable chrysalides, into which men went and angels emerged.

  Quinn looked back up toward the corridor.

  “We should keep moving. Those ghouls will find themselves a way around sooner or later. There are doors on each facing of the room. We are not far from our destination.”

  He had no map. I didn’t think to ask how he knew.

  We descended the slope and passed between two of the towers, and a yet more terrible sight greeted our eyes. A grim platform two yards high, all the long bones, the ribs and spines, the pelvises and shoulder blades, picked clean and stacked with awful artistry into whorls, spirals, checks, and curves. Upon the platform was a pyramid of skulls, every one of them holed. Before the skulls were hundreds of broken angels’ blessings, their spindly processes sticking upward like legs. Quinn took this in his stride, and I knew then that this abomination had been planned and executed by the angels themselves, those so-called servants of the merciful Lord God, and that Quinn had known about it all along.

  Quinn went to skirt round the platform, but something was watching us. Huge, long-fingered hands emerged from the edge of the skull pile, and a long head, bigger than a horse’s, followed.

  “Quinn!” I shouted.

  The knight reacted instantly, drawing his gun, but the creature was already on the move. Bursting out from cover, moving fearlessly through the faded sunlight, came the largest ghoul I saw in that benighted place.

  * * *

  The ghoul sprang at Quinn. The knight had time to loose one shot at the beast, hitting it square in the side, before the monster was on him. It seemed not to feel the wound. With a powerful backhand blow he sent Quinn hurtling into an obsessively stacked pile of finger bones that burst outward at his impact, rattling all over the floor like dice. It stood over him and roared, spreading its arms as it howled up at the distant sun.

  The thing was gigantic, tall as two men. A swollen and monstrous patriarch to a murderous brood. A king of ghouls.

  Embedded halfway down its spine was a chromium implant, the twin of Rachel’s angelic artifact.

  I raised my rifle and fired. I was shaking awfully, but by some miracle the bullet smacked into the rippling muscles of the ghoul king’s back, close by the angel’s blessing. Its head whipped round like that of a hunting dog, its long, powerful neck snaking out to find me. Bat-like nostrils flared in its flat face and it hissed at me through teeth as long as my fingers.

  I managed to pump the lever of the gun, chambering another round, and fired again. I aimed for its head this time, hoping for a killing shot. I was alarmed greatly by the lack of effect the bullets had upon its body, and thought only a hit to the head would kill it. But the target was small, and my aim compromised by terror. A coffin cracked behind it, a fresh bullet hole next to the one that had slain the occupant.

  Snarling, the ghoul king abandoned its attack on Quinn and bounded toward me on all fours, its muscular arms flinging handfuls of broken machinery and bone behind it as it came. I fired again, hitting it in the shoulder. I may as well have shot a wall of earth. I turned and fled. There was no way I could outpace such a beast, and it caught me in three easy strides, flinging out its hand to catch me across the back. Much of the impact was taken by my pack. The ghoul king’s talons ripped the cloth and sprayed my equipment across the room. The tips found their way through, opening the skin of my back, the burn of those claws! Each filthy with old blood. Although it was but a glancing blow, the force of it spun me around, and I fell onto the heaped glass and trash of the angel’s city. The ghoul king reared above, roaring out an inchoate rage against what it had become. Was it born like that, I wondered, or had it once been a man? Did the machine embedded in its flesh have anything to answer for its condition? It swiped at me, and I scrabbled backward, knowing that my time was done and that I was soon to meet my maker, but still I fought for my life, hoping for a few more breaths. Its brutal hands flung debris in glittering arcs through the air. I still had my gun, and I pointed it at the thing’s head, but with a growl at my impertinence it snatched the weapon from my grip and broke it in two, barrel, stock, and all as if it were a twig, the metal snapping as readily as the wood.

  This was it. I was doomed. I had chance for a moment’s reflection on my life, and I was ashamed of how little I had achie
ved.

  The throaty report of Quinn’s gun boomed, then again, and again. A steady drumbeat of death to Quinn’s advance. The ghoul king jerked, clawing at its injured flesh as Quinn put five bullets in a close group around its heart from behind. It turned, wavering on its feet. Quinn reloaded so quickly I would not have thought it possible had I not seen it, dumping bullets into the cylinder and snapping it shut quick as a street magician palms a card. The ghoul king launched itself at the knight, and he fired again, six bangs rolling around that chamber, loud as cannon fire. The thing barreled at him as it had at me, enraged beyond all reason. Quinn stood steady, blood poured from his nose, but not a shot missed. The ghoul king reared up to strike, bloody from its many wounds. Quinn held his ground, putting a bullet between its eyes as it came at him. Finally it fell, skidding along the glass to halt at Quinn’s feet. It panted as it came to a halt, and then its chest rose no more.

  “Get up!” he said, reloading his gun again. “Get up before it does!”

  “But, but, you killed it!” I got up, wincing at my hurts. I tottered forward three steps, then fell down and was violently sick.

  “No gun or sword is going to put this down.” He pulled out a stick of dynamite and patted about his pockets. His kit was ragged. Most of his pouches had been torn away, and the links of his mail parted in three parallel lines where the ghoul king’s claws had gouged him. He found no means of ignition on his person and looked at me.

  “I haven’t got any matches. My gear’s scattered.”

  The ghoul king’s lips parted. It took in a shuddering breath.

  I am not one given to profanity, but this was one time where I could express myself no other way. “You put a fucking bullet in its skull!” I said. “How is it still alive?”

  “That thing, on its back. Right now it’ll be closing up the holes in its heart, and spinning it a new brain. Quickly! If we can’t blow the damn thing up, the best we can do is get out of its goddamned lair!”

  “Cut its head off!”

  “Won’t make a bit of difference,” said Quinn. “If I did, it might well be worse. The angel’s blessing on the back will take direct control, and we haven’t got the time to prize that thing out of the ghoul’s spine. We have to run.”