Ghouls (63 page)

“Hurry!” Sanders yelled.

Thanks for the advice.
Kurt flipped backward out of the ladder and onto the first-level catwalk. Sanders kept sighted on the mouth of the
orepass
, then emptied his clip in three-round bursts. The bolt spat out a line of brass like little goldfish into the pit.

Kurt was hauling himself up the rungs of a ladder parallel to Sanders’s. It was wobbling, snapping against its mounts, more like climbing rope than anything.

“Where’s the other ghala!”

Sanders slapped in another clip, yanked back the charging handle, and palmed the forward-assist. “I haven’t seen it! I don’t know where it is!”

Kurt was halfway to the top. Where was the second ghala? Sanders spied the first ghala coming out of the lower pass again. He aimed, leveling his beams—

Kurt saw it too late. The second ghala was already on the
causewalk
, leaning down just inches from Sanders. In a blur, it snatched Sanders off the ladder and dragged him up. His M16 fell end over end into the main shaft; Kurt never heard it hit bottom.

Kurt’s ladder was rocking worse; more of its bolts had ground out. He climbed up till his head was even with the
causewalk
; he was about twenty-five yards from where Sanders lay pinned. Kurt struggled to acquire a decent firing position—he leaned out of the ladder, braced against the ring rail. He shouldered his rifle and laid its beams ahead.

Sanders was being mauled. The ghala was crouched on top of him, vising Sanders down. Sanders instinctively lashed out, throwing thumb-bolts and web-chops under the thing’s neck, striking for pressure points, thrusting up knife-hands in attempts to unseat its ribs. But the ghala leaned closer, mocking, as if impervious to pain. Perhaps it felt no pain at all. It barely flinched at Sanders’s death blows.

Kurt’s ladder was still swaying; he couldn’t draw a good bead. He knew he had only one round left in the integral clip—there’d be no time to reload. He planted his foot against the
shaftwall
, trying to still the ladder as he continued to sight down.

Sanders squirmed beneath the
ghala’s
weight. Its head jerked to the left. It stared directly into Kurt’s double flashlight beams.

“Shoot!” Sanders yelled. “Goddamn it, shoot!”

Kurt froze behind his sights; his trigger finger felt like a curl of stone. He was paralyzed as the
ghala’s
primeval face leered back at him. Huge, orbicular eyes glittered a baleful shine. It was grinning, he realized. The ghala was actually grinning at him.

Not yet,
he thought.
Not…yet.

It turned back, slithering closer. Its lips slid up, showing yellow-black gums and silvery teeth that seemed to tense, lengthen, and quiver, shining with drool. Lowering then, its jaw came unhinged, its black mouth spreading wide to admit Sanders’s face.

The ladder stilled. As Sanders began to scream, Kurt squeezed off his last shot.

The concussion made the entire cavern vibrate. The bullet took the
ghala’s
head off at the jawline.

Kurt hauled himself onto the cause. He furiously butt-slammed the top rungs with his rifle until the ladder cracked off and crashed to the bottom of the pit.

Sanders pushed the body of the dead thing off him. Black blood and a dark yellow fluid oozed out of what little remained of its head.

“You really like to keep a guy in suspense, don’t you?” Sanders complained.

Kurt focused his lights down. “Oh, shit.”

“Come on!”

By now the first ghala had made it to the next level catwalk. Kurt and Sanders kicked and hammered and butt-stroked the next ladder until it fell. Below, the ghala raced to a third ladder, which promptly crashed over the side before the thing could even get its foot on a rung. The catwalk itself then gave way from the
shaftwall
and fell, leaving the ghala to hang one-handed from a black winze cable. Eventually, the cable snapped and the ghala plummeted very quickly to the bottom of the shaft.

“Happy landings, motherfucker!” Sanders shouted into the pit.

Above them, the ridge was beginning to buckle. Several stulls fell over and hit the
floorwall
with mammoth thuds.

“I think this place is trying to tell us something,” Kurt made the suggestion.

They fled down the manway. Behind them, the cavern began to shift out.

The two of them practically flew out of the manway. Kurt dropped his empty rifle and fell to hands and knees. The moonlight bathed his face; a clean, cool breeze stirred through the trees like a breath of life. They were out, and they had survived.

Sanders pointed to the fishing line tied off on the outside piton. “You want the honors?”

“Brother, they’re all yours.”

Sanders jerked the fishing line. Exactly four seconds later, triple explosions erupted heavily from within the earth, followed by a deep, rising rumble. Kurt and Sanders jogged to the tree-line as the mouth of the manway blew out a titan blast of dust and sound, and it was then that the entire ridge collapsed in on itself.

««—»»

They stood side by side in Willard’s shattered basement, facing the sinister pen which contained the two remaining ghala.

“What do we do with them?” Kurt asked.

Sanders picked up the spoon, ring, and
fuze
assembly of the grenade he’d set off here earlier. Since it was only a concussion grenade, the body had ruptured, not fragmented. He stooped to pick up the blown metal case, then put all the pieces in his pocket. Of the few rounds he’d fired down here, he left the spent cartridges on the floor; he’d touched them only with gloves. “We’ll take care of those two,” he said. “No problem.”

“I guess we could shoot them in the pen and bury them someplace.”

“No,” Sanders said, and led Kurt up the stairs to the study. “Willard was right over all, just insane in his methods. Those two things in that cage are an unknown species of life that medical science has never seen. They’ve got to be researched, taken apart, studied. We could learn something from them, something that might do us some good.”

“But I thought the whole idea was to not alert the authorities.”

“That is the idea. Civilian authorities would turn this into a joke. But the
proper
authorities will know how to handle this just right. No fuckups, no smears, no headlines in
The Enquirer.”

The money from Willard’s safe still lay stacked on the desk. Kurt looked at it bleary-eyed. He wanted a cigarette bad, he felt that he deserved one after all that had happened that night. He looked down and saw a pack of Willard’s
Luckies
on the floor.

Sanders was counting the money.

Kurt lit one of Willard’s cigarettes. He took a long, smooth drag, then violently coughed the cigarette out of his mouth onto the floor.

“We split fifty-fifty,” Sanders said. “Fair enough?”

Kurt was still coughing. “I’m a fucking police officer, for God’s sake. I don’t take ill-gotten gains.”

“How is it ill-gotten? It’s Willard’s and Willard is dead. He’s got no surviving heirs, no relatives, no kids.” He put his share of the cash in his green string bag. “You want to leave your half sitting here for the Army to pocket?”

“Army?” Kurt said.

But Sanders was already on the phone. He switched on Willard’s desk intercom so that Kurt could listen in, too. After undo hassle with more than one night operator, Sanders’s call finally got punched through. Two rings, then:

“ASA Headquarters, Specialist
Clabo
speaking, sir! This line is not secure.”

“This is Warrant Officer Smith,” Sanders said, “from the 54th Battalion.”

“Yes, sir! May I help you, sir!”

“Log and copy the following information.”

“Ready, sir!”

“I’m reporting a perimeter-positive non-CBR-related hazard. Make sure you get those words down right, Specialist. It’s very important.”

“Yes, sir! I got it, sir!”

“This is a Status Black emergency. Do you know what that is, Specialist?”

There was a long pause. “Yes, sir!”

“Then write it down.”

“Done, sir! Grid coordinates, sir?”

“No grids available, Specialist. Log and copy the following location.” Sanders gave him Willard’s address, county, state, and zip code.

“Logged and copied, sir!”

“Report everything I’ve told you ASAP to the field officer of the day and the S-3. And I repeat. This is a
Status Black
emergency.”

“Yes, sir! Please hold, sir!”

Sanders hung up. He wiped the phone off with a napkin. “That’s called getting the Army out of bed.”

“But who was it?” Kurt asked.

“Fort
Devens
, Massachusetts, the headquarters for the Army Security Agency. A Status Black emergency is the code term used to indicate confirmed civilian fatalities from an unknown hazard. They won’t waste any time responding to a call like that, and once they get a look at what’s in the basement…”

“Now I get it,” Kurt said.

“My car’s parked in the woods half a mile off. Let’s get out of here. In about twenty minutes, an Army Field Emergency Investigation Platoon will be coming through that door more pissed off than a pack of mad Dobermans.”

Kurt rose to leave but stopped midway out of his seat. The stack of money was looking him right in the eye. It wasn’t his; he couldn’t take it.

“Take it,” Sanders said.

“But it’s…it’s unethical.”

“Take it or leave it. We gotta go.”

Kurt clenched his teeth.

He grabbed the banded bills with both hands and left the house.

— | — | —

EPILOGUE

By noon the area around Willard’s mansion was a fanfare of uniforms. The gravel road that led to the house had been blocked off by a manned sentry post. Stoic-faced and armed with M16A2 assault rifles, ASA MP’s guarded all points of access to the house and maintained 50- and 25-meter guard perimeters. Drab green trucks lined the road up, five-tons and deuce and a
halfs
. Army technicians made a constant parade in and out of the house. Sitting awesomely in the front yard were two helicopters, a Bell 206
Jetranger
from Fort
Devens
, and a Sikorsky Black Hawk from Washington. A very queer-looking vehicle (that Sanders had called a “gamma goat”) had been backed up to the front porch. It had big wheels and a flat cargo bed in back. Kurt could guess what it would soon be transporting.

Shortly after Kurt and Sanders had left the house, a team of Army field investigators had arrived from Fort Meade, Maryland. After an initial report, a Field Hazard Alert Squad had been trucked to Belleau Wood from the Edgewood Arsenal near Aberdeen. Then came a DECON platoon and two Control and Assessment Units, flown in all the way from Fort
McClellen
, Alabama. A lot of brass had arrived by dawn, colonels and majors, and even a brigadier general from the Washington Military District. The last thing to arrive was a truckload of men from 12th Army Forensics. Kurt wondered what their reactions had been when they’d first seen the ghala in the basement.