Edward Lee - Ghouls

“About what, exactly?”

“What I need to know,” Glen said, “is how do you tell a girl you love that she needs to see a psychiatrist?”

Now Kurt was totally thrown. “That’s tough, I gotta admit. But what makes you think she needs that kind of help?”

“I love this girl, I know her inside and out. I can’t tell you who she is—you’ll just have to take my word for it. She’s probably the most rational person I’ve ever met, and she’s very, very smart… And this morning she told me the nuttiest thing I ever heard in my life.”

“Well, what? What did she tell you?”

Suddenly Glen looked as though he were staring a thousand yards into the distance. “Something crazy,” he said. “Something impossible. And the worst part of it is I’m beginning to believe it myself.”

— | — | —

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

a grin like a cut tightens your face, have you forgotten your dead friends this easily? you place the briefcase across your knees, open it—

—and turn, glaring, caustic glimmers in your eyes, “what’s this shit, you motherfucker? i stick my neck out a mile for you back there, and now you’re gonna shaft me?”

the briefcase contains not money but old copies of the army times, some arabic newspapers, and several recent issues of british penthouse.

now the colonel is holding his M3 chest level, pointing the dull, eight-inch barrel at your heart. “i’m sorry, sergeant,” he says. “i’m very, very sorry, but for this to work, no one can know, absolutely no one. not even you.”

and before you can plead or even move, the colonel squeezes the trigger, and ten .45 hardball rounds slam into the middle of your chest and literally blow you out of the Jeep, the impact crushes the air from your lungs, as if you’ve just been struck in the chest by a railroad tie. you hear your ribs crack, and a drone like a tuning fork, distant at first but then suddenly so loud you feel your head might split, on your back now, legs jackknifed and arms aslant, you raise your head to see the Jeep pulling off into the cool, crystal night, next, you are a tiny figure plummeting through a dozen stratas of black at hellish speed, like a nightmare of being thrown off an airplane with no chute. you feel yourself fading, fading—drifting across the blind terrain of dust and smoke and nihility. you lose consciousness

time passes, but how much you cannot know, your only measure is the hard, silent black

it occurs to you, at some point, that you have died

but then sentience sifts back in notchlike stages, and you sit up and find yourself whole and alive, your chest is a flaring plot of pain; the blunt trauma of the bullets makes it hurt just to breathe, but you smile in spite of it, grateful to have deceived death so totally, the vest— you owe your life to the vest, if you hadn’t worn it, you’d be dead.

you pick yourself up and start to walk, grindingly at first, but then with increasing confidence, eventually your stride falls into a steady rhythm; the shock of being shot and living soon recedes, and your pain shrinks to almost nothing when you begin to realize the depth of your rage.

you can only think of the colonel now.

the colonel.

he’d intended to kill you all along, and the marines too, if they’d survived, somehow you find that harder to believe than the scheme itself, the ghala were real, a myth forged by centuries, but you don’t care, you don’t care about anything now, except the colonel.

you can’t wait to see his face.

the idea of murder doesn’t set well with you. though you’ve killed many men in war, you’ve never committed murder, but you won’t kill the colonel, no matter how much he deserves it. though you may well make him wish he was dead.

heading him off at the airport should be easy, but you must hurry, you walk faster, harder—soon you are trotting along the desolate road, your senses focus only on vengeance, and you are so swept by rancor that the prospect of being followed never crosses your mind, and why is that? how could you let one man make you forget all you’ve learned?

but you are being followed.

being stalked.

and when your stalker strikes, it is with such speed that you have no time to react.

a blur flutters behind you there is no sound suddenly you are jerked backward and pinned to the ground by a figure that is only vaguely human a cold slick hand presses your face as if to flatten your skull against the road between the fingers you glimpse the features of a monstrosity features made mercifully unclear by shock and darkness your pistol is in the Jeep you recall and you draw your knife but not before the thing’s other forklike hand is ripping at you with quickness beyond that of any man then the fingers sink popping into skin and begin to separate the flesh from your face like someone tearing strips of wallpaper you scream through a well of blood one eye seeing red and bury your knife hilt-deep into the thing’s furrowed abdomen.

its blood is black and pumps out in a rill of glistening ichor, but the man-animal’s hand holds fast to your face, still tearing, you thrust the knife again, deeper, twisting, then jerk the pin of your last grenade, the spoon flies, the thing’s jaws draw open impossibly wide—it howls its pain high into the night, and with the last trickling of your strength, you stuff the grenade canister into its maw.

you run faster than you’ve ever run. four to five seconds later the grenade goes off and engulfs the thing in a splattering burst of white phosphorus.

you stagger forward, delirious now from blood loss, you pull off your fatigue shirt and press it to your face in an effort to control the bleeding, your progress grinds to an off-balanced shuffle, you sense only faint, fragmentary things, the road beneath your feet, the sputtering heat behind you, and the necessity to keep moving, the vision in your good eye begins to melt, rimmed with black dots and spangles like shavings of steel, but through this you see twin spheres of intense white light which seem to be advancing toward you, swelling in size, a deafening roar-fills your head, and you must shield your eyes.

the twin spheres stop, they stare back at you, blazing; they hover like disembodied eyes, headlights? you stand before the glare and dumbly clutch the shirt to your face.

two sharp silhouettes emerge from the blaze, curious stick-men backed by light.

voices switch back and forth.

“check this shit out. is he one of ours?”

“looks like a jarine.”

“no, his belt is black, jarheads have tan belts, this guy’s army, from the support garrison.”

“look at him. he’s hurt.”

“probably fucked over by ‘rabs.”

“ ’rabs? this far out? this is no-man’s-land.”

“it’s those fuckin’ bedo tribes, goddamn animals, they’re always ripping our people off and cutting them up. come on, we’ve gotta get him back to the caz.”

timid, the figures move in. are they afraid of you, or just unsettled by all the blood? they lead you forward, into the light, one is an E-2, the other a tech sergeant, both are air force security police.

“hey, this grunt’s bleeding buckets, serious.”

“holy shit, it’s sanders.”

this voice you recognize, van holtz, the fourth man.

“you know this bullet-stopper?” the E-deuce says.

“he’s a friend, a good friend,” van holtz answers, “he won DSC and a bunch of other shit in Vietnam, i owe him bigtime.”

“the guy’s obviously into some deep shit.”

“I don sizost care, we’re gonna have to stand for him.”

“I ain’t covering for this grunt, he could be a dope mule for all i know, or running guns.”

van holtz is adamant, “you’ll cover, asshole, you’ll back up every word i say to the brass, unless you want to walk a pipeline in alaska for the next six years, understand?”