Edward Lee: Ghouls

GHOULS

by Edward Lee

GHOULS

© 1988 by Edward Lee

For this edition, I’d like to acknowledge the following for their invaluable input which led to this book being published and for essentially beginning my career as a novelist: Amy Stout, Wendy McCurdy, Pesha Finkelstein, Adele Leone (RIP) and Roberta Grossman (RIP). I am unendingly grateful to you all.

E.L.

Dedication:

For (my) Betsey

-hypnagogically

and

f o r e v e r.

— | — | —

PROLOGUE

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 1978

The colonel measured time with cigarettes.

He smoked one every fifteen minutes, so by the accumulation of butts on the step panel, an hour and a half had passed.

An hour and a half?

His mouth opened slowly and he blinked, touched by the faceless reality. It seemed he’d been sitting here in the Jeep for days, waiting for them to come back. Dementatus proximus, he thought. Only an hour and a half. He felt caught on the grapnel of a convulsive, tilting nightmare, where time ticked backward and the world revolved in reverse.

He tried not to think about the screams.

By his watch it was 0314 hrs. Had the battery run out? He was sure he’d replaced it recently; Sanders had made him replace it, had made them all. Still, something warped the colonel’s perceptions of time and proximity. The night and so much waiting had wrung his senses to distortion, leaving nothing real. The moon pulled at his brain. He looked down at the submachine gun across his legs and wondered what the old Army levermen must’ve felt while tying thirteen perfect knots into the hanging noose. The gun lay in his lap like something stillborn; he scarcely touched it. “M3A1,” Sanders had earlier explained to him. “Simple, sensible, few moving parts. It’s the least expensive weapon in the Army inventory, and the most reliable.” To the colonel, though, it seemed flimsy, cheap; its finish looked and felt like dull gray wax. “And it never jams,” Sanders had added. “Dent it, bury it, piss in it, pour sand in the chamber, but it never jams.” The colonel hoped he didn’t get the chance to test the validity of that particular claim.

He wondered if Sanders and his men were dead.

There had been sounds of battle, not twenty minutes before. The slow, pathetic sputterings of their greaseguns, anguished shouts in the distance, and then the grenades (six of them, the colonel had counted) exploding through the dead night air amid a trail of fracturing echoes. Had everything gone as planned? He was to consider the grenades a signal, a certain cue to be ready to move. “If you hear the grenades,” Sanders had said, “then you’ll know we’ve made it out of there. But if you don’t hear them, don’t wait for us. We won’t be coming out.”

The grenades were a good sign, an indication of success; but only minutes later there had been more sounds, more heated gunfire. And then the screams.

Screams of pain, of terror—human screams, but in unison with screams that were significantly less than human.

The colonel knew then that something had gone wrong.

He thought about starting up the Jeep and driving out of there while he still had time. Maybe the plan had failed. Maybe he was sitting there waiting for dead men to return. Or worse, maybe—

A gunshot rang out. (A pistol, he thought. Sanders took a pistol, too.) It was something, anyway, a shred of promise. The shot meant that at least one of Sanders’s team was still alive.

The colonel decided to wait ten minutes more.

He lit another cigarette and nearly smiled, remembering how Sanders had warned him not to smoke. Some nonsense about light discipline. Always wear a watch with a cover. Never wear a watch that ticks. Bury all garbage and empty C’s. Anything that shines, paint it black. Paint your face black. Paint your hands black. When you pull your dick out to piss, paint it. Then cover the piss. And never, ever smoke at night.

Was Sanders really just a fanatic, an Army nut? The colonel thought about that. He’d seen Sanders’s credits, though: embassy armorer with a classified MOS suffix, training schools he couldn’t even talk about, combat service stripes to the elbow. Once, he’d shown the colonel what he amusedly referred to as his “junk.” “Take a look at my junk,” Sanders had offered. DoD training certificates, boxes of them. Qualification braids, aiguillettes, a year’s worth of Soldier of the Month awards. Expert badges for weapons no one had heard of. Commendations from generals, division and group commanders, and even a letter of recognition for outscoring the rest of NATO at some Redeye range in Germany. The name signed at the bottom was Bernard W. Rogers.

Next, he’d shown the colonel a shoebox full of medals from Vietnam. Sanders had always displayed a neutral embarrassment toward that particular war, and the contents of the shoebox. “A lot of fruit salad and chicken shit this is. They shouldn’t give medals for wars we don’t win. All this shit you hear about delayed stress and torture and how bad Vietnam was. Tell that to the guys who went to Korea and Stalingrad. Tell that to the guys who had to fight the Waffen SS on D-Day. Makes me want to throw up. Better to melt all this shit down for bullets.” He’d tossed the boxes back into his locker. “Junk.” Purple Heart. DSC. Silver Star.

No, Sanders was the best he could find. But was that good enough for this? The colonel wondered.

Just wait. It’s no use worrying about it now.

Through the steel-frame windshield, he viewed a stretch of the night’s zenith. The desolation of this place always left him slightly on edge; he’d never seen nights so clear and infinite. The moon was egg-shaped, a pallid, misshapen face in the sky, backed by a depthless void of stars. To his right, the Tuwwaiq Ridges broke the line of the horizon like the rim of an endless crater. These were the hills, Arabian hills, crestlike hillocks thrust forth from the earth’s crust, barren, dead. Yet the Saudis called them hills. They didn’t know what hills were. This sacred Islamic world of theirs was little more than a wasteland, plain after plain of scorched volcanic rock and a sea of sand. February now, midwinter, and the temperature was about sixty. The average summer day brought heat that sometimes reached 125 degrees.

He tilted his head out of the Jeep’s canopy, squinting into the night, straining for the sight of a cloud, if just a wisp, but there was nothing. He hadn’t seen a decent cloud formation in three years. Here, the yearly average of precipitation was about four inches. Some areas of the Great Empty Quarter, the Rub’ Al Khali, had rainfall every three to five years. It struck him then that this place was not of his world at all, as remote as another planet, and he thought that if it weren’t for the oil pools, the Saudis could take their heat-baked living hell of a home and shrivel in it. Yes, the earth could crack open right here and suck everything down…

The clap of more pistol shots gave him a start like a bolt of current. Someone was coming. The shots had been closer this time, much closer. He pitched his cigarette out, touched his weapon.

He listened.

A scuffling to his right. Panting. Boots scraping over the jagged stone ruts of the ridge. He jerked at the crack of still another pistol shot, and automatically he turned over the Jeep’s engine. Leaning out, he raised a pair of IR monoculars to his eyes, focused, then combed the strange green field across the slopes through which Sanders and his men would make their escape.

Top of the ridge, a tiny, desperate figure appeared, at first just an insect-shape in the IR’s circle. It was a man scuttling down the incline.