“ I’ll see you soon,” she said, and the sky melted.
Cross’ body shattered like glass. He was ripped back into the waking world.
TWENTY-ONE
Cross woke on his back, looking up at the sky. Ooze pressed against his sinking body, and greasy water filled his eyes like polluted tears. He lay half submerged in a grave of mud. Everything was brown and black. Night lay beyond the ambient mist, as thick as grease.
He rose, unsteady. He was soaked to the bone. Silver light danced in the distance, a muted aurora. Mud was caked against his face. It was difficult to even stand up in the sludge.
Cross looked around, and found he was alone. The camel had gone, or it had been taken, but if that had been the case he reasoned he’d have been taken, too. Likely the stalwart creature had finally wandered off on its own, bored of a companion who was always unconscious.
He listened for the whispers, waited for the silken touch of his spirit, but, as he feared, she was gone. Again.
Cross wanted to just lie down and be done with it. Angry tears welled up in his eyes. He crouched down heel to haunch, and put his eyes and ears in his hands.
When he opened his eyes again, sometime later, it had grown dark. He was in the middle of nowhere, awash in a sea of inky night, standing in darkness so thick that he could taste it. There was just he and the silence, trapped together in a black prison without walls.
It was almost pitch black by the time Cross started walking. His boots splashed in the mud and marsh, and the cold air froze his clothes to his skin. He still wore his armored coat and had his weapons and alchemy on his person, but he had no food and, more distressing, no source of light. His eyes might as well have been in his pocket for all the good they did him. He could’ve been at the edge of the cliff or about to walk into a wall, and he wouldn’t have even known it.
He walked, bolstered by the thought of seeing Snow again, almost believing it would happen.
Time passed. He couldn’t say how much. Nothing changed. The world remained black and moist and quiet.
Cross stopped, even if he wasn’t sure why. Something felt wrong. He had no spirit to tell him what, and he certainly hadn’t actually seen or heard anything. But he felt something, a sense of a presence in the dark…or maybe an absence.
He took some small comfort in the weapons he still carried: Graves’ Remington 870 sawed-off shotgun, his own HK45 and Graves’ SIG Sauer, a hex grenade, and Stone’s kukri machete. But even with all of those armaments, he felt largely defenseless without his spirit.
Something moved out in the dark. Cross heard whatever it was this time, and he smelled something charnel, like grave soil and excrement.
He readied the HK and tried to step quietly. His feet splashed and slurped in the mud in spite of how slowly he moved. Cross cursed under his breath and stopped, waiting. Clicking sounds echoed around him, fading in and out of the shadows. He heard little voices and growls as they closed in.
To hell with this. Cross moved forward in a half run. The mud grabbed at his feet. The noises grew louder, circled him, and surrounded him.
Cross fired into the dark. He heard a wet explosion, and the sound of whatever it was scattered. He carefully continued forward with his weapon held before him.
He stepped on the body before he saw it. It was small and grey and covered in mud. Its eyes were glazed open and it bore a hole from Cross’ bullet in its chest. The creature was the size of a human child, and it might have been mistaken for one if not for its oddly square head, its thick and sharp teeth, and its glistening black claws.
Ghouls, Cross thought, and he started to panic. Ghouls were pack hunters. And those packs were big.
Gnashing sounds converged on him. Leering grey faces loomed at Cross from out of the darkness. Black teeth flashed darker than the surrounding night. Cross shouted as razor-sharp claws slashed his face, his chest, and his arms. He felt fingers in his hair. Blood splashed onto his cheek.
Cross lashed out and whipped bodies aside. He smashed melon-sized skulls with his pistol, and pried away hands and teeth. The ghouls came at him from all sides in a tide of hungry mouths. Cross found an open maw, shoved the pistol inside and fired. Chunks of bone and flesh splattered everywhere.
He pushed and kicked and kept firing. They held his legs, his torso and his arms, even as they beat and tore at him. They grabbed his coat and tried to pin his limbs and drag him to the ground, where they’d easily be able to finish him off. He was drowning in a tide of angry little bodies.
Cross managed to pull the machete free from the sheath on his back, and somehow he shoved and kicked his way to his feet. He chopped through child-sized bodies with ease, cut off limbs and cleaved skulls in two. His ears filled with hideous screams.
They’re not children, his mind shouted. Not anymore.
His muscles were on fire. He felt like he was covered in nothing but wounds. Cross chopped and hacked in every direction. He swam in a field of meat. Claws raked his body, tore at his stomach and legs. Finally, after a savage blow that sent a wide stream of blood across his chest, Cross found an opening in the wall of ghouls. He pushed his way free and fled.
He ran through the dark without direction. He couldn’t tell if he ran away from the danger or toward it. The darkness was near absolute, deepened by the steel-hard mist. Black mud made every step uncertain. The chattering and gnashing of tiny teeth was right on him, closing around him like a cage.
Something took hold of his legs. Cross painfully tripped and landed face first into the mud. The machete flew from his hands.
Small and spindly hands tipped with wickedly sharp talons reached up from beneath the ground. They tore at him, grasped at him, and pulled him down. Needles of pain tore at his body. Cross breathed wet earth. He would drown in the mud.
The ghouls in pursuit were nearly on top of him. Cross lashed out and pried the hands off of him long enough to reach into the pocket of his armored coat. An earth-bound claw slashed at his ear and took off a chunk of skin, and pain flared down the side of his face.
The crowd of ghouls in pursuit had closed to within a few yards. They were ready to pounce. Cross threw the grenade, turned and lay prone in the mud while he shielded his head and neck.
The explosion rocked the ground. Cross saw white fire through his clenched fingers. The flash briefly illuminated the surrounding area, and he saw a muddy plain populated by dark pits and covered with over two dozen more ghouls. They screamed as the blast took them. Chunks of body and drifts of gore crashed to earth.
Cross waited for some time after the explosion. No more ghouls attacked him — he’d either killed them all or forced them back into hiding. His chest heaved, and every breath was like swallowing chunks of ice.
He recovered his discarded weapons from the ground. The SIG was broken. Cross sheathed the machete, reloaded the HK and the shotgun, and gathered himself. There was still no sign of the camel. Likely the ghouls had gotten their claws on it.
Dawn spread like a milky stain. The sky bled from black to grey, and the fog lifted enough for Cross to realize he was in a mass graveyard. Unmarked mounds were in every direction, and the holes he’d seen before were in fact half-dug graves. A few shovels and picks lay discarded in piles.
These were no ordinary graves, but ghoul graves. Living children had been cast into specially prepared necromantic soil and buried alive, and over the course of their slow and terrifying deaths they’d been gradually transformed into undead.
I’m close, he thought. I’m almost to Koth.
A whimpering from behind him drew Cross’ attention. Some of the ghouls had survived the worst of the grenade blast by using their fellows as shields, but that hadn't saved their limbs from being destroyed. These ghouls mewled pathetically, their limbs smothered like ground meat. They stared up at Cross, as if begging for mercy. He
