Ghouls

“You’ll get killed!”

“Probably not,” Sanders said.

“What’s this probably shit?” Kurt roused. “I thought you said you had a plan.”

“I do, so don’t sweat it. The only way we’re going to get killed is if you fuck up.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Just follow my lead and we’ll come out of this looking good.” Sanders assembled the cleaning rod and affixed a fluid-soaked pad to the eyelet. He ran the rod in and out of the barrel vigorously. “It’s not like we don’t have any points in our favor. The ghala are nocturnal; they feed at night.”

“Which means they’re out there in the woods right now?”

“Yeah, but it also means they won’t be coming back to their lair until a couple of hours before sunrise.” Sanders peeled back the cover from his watchface. “That gives us several hours to set up. When you lost your man in the mine, what time was it?”

“Almost dark.”

“Bad timing—if you’d gone in an hour later, then the ghala would already have been gone. But at this hour, we can be sure they’re not there. What kind of shape is this talc mine in?”

“Piss poor,” Kurt said. “The entire operation has been out of service for decades. It’s got six haulage lines leading to the excavation pit, but all of the lines are caved in except one.”

“So there’s only one way in or out?”

“Right.”

Sanders began to put the rifle back together. “Then we’ve got it made. All we have to do is wait for the ghala to return from their feeding, then we blow the mine. We’ll take some guns along, just in case, but we probably won’t even need them.”

“I’ll have to stop home first, for more bullets.”

“Forget about your service piece,” Sanders said. “It’ll be useless against the ghala. The fuckers are so fast they can dodge low-vel ammunition. This I know for fact. Me and two Marines took on a pack of ghala with .45’s and greaseguns.”

“What happened?”

“We got burned. We barely hit any of them—they just stepped out of the way. But—” He held up the M16. “They can’t dodge a fast rifle slug, at least according to Willard.”

“What if Willard was wrong?” Kurt asked. “What if rifle bullets don’t work, either?”

Sanders smiled. “Then our shit is weak.”

“Your brains are weak!” Vicky got up and yelled. Anger tinted her cheeks like rouge. “I will not allow you two imbeciles to go out there like a couple of cowboys and get yourselves killed! I’m calling Bard.”

“No, not Bard,” Kurt exclaimed.

“What’s a Bard?” Sanders said.

Kurt grabbed her at the door and turned her around to face him. “Vicky, if you call Bard, you’ll mess everything up. You’ve got to trust me, you’ve got to do what I say.”

“Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me. I don’t like you very much right now.”

“Sanders and I know what we’re up against; the county doesn’t. If you call Bard or the county, then a whole bunch of guys are going to get killed.”

She didn’t say anything then. She just looked at him. Her anger was drying up, replaced by something forlorn and very gray.

“I want you to take the cruiser back to Uncle Roy’s,” he specified. “Get Melissa and go to a motel, someplace out of town. I don’t want either of you anywhere near this place tonight.”

“Why can’t it wait?” she said. “Why can’t you do it tomorrow? It’s safer in the daytime.”

“You heard Sanders. In order to blow up the mine, we have to go into it to set the charge, and the safest time to do that is now, when the ghala are out feeding. It’s the only way, Vicky.” He gave her the house keys and his wallet. “There are a bunch of motels in Annapolis. Get Melissa and go to one. In the morning, go back to Uncle Roy’s. If I’m not there…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to tell her what that would mean.

“Whenever something good happens,” she said, “there’s always something bad to come right along behind it, always.” She looked straight into him, but with a void in her eyes, a vista of utter blankness. “I really thought we had something going.”

“We do,” he said.

“And if you get killed, what will we have then?”

He’d never seen her look so sad. He knew it all in his heart, and his heart felt black. Words formed and dissolved in his mind like efferent puffs of smoke.

His hands slid off her as she walked out the door.

“I love you,” he said.

She got into the cruiser and drove away. Kurt stared out past a night from another world, beckoned, paralyzed by the notion that this was the last he’d ever see of her.

««—»»

Moonlight made the woods fluoresce.

“Goddamn it,” Sanders whispered. He pulled Kurt back to the other side of the access road. “Don’t skylight yourself.”

“What?”

“Stick to the treeline. If the ghala are nearby, they’ll see you in the moonlight.”

Kurt didn’t like all the “ifs” that seemed to be popping up. He walked behind Sanders now, merged with the darkness of the trees. Sanders carried his M16 by a handle that looked suitable for a briefcase. Tied to his belt was his string bag in which he’d placed tools and nails from Willard’s house. He’d also taken a rifle from Willard’s gun rack—which Kurt carried now across his back—an antique German 98K that seemed to weigh a ton. Sanders claimed its 8mm slugs would more than suffice for the necessary muzzle velocity. “This thing packs a wallop,” he’d said. “So mind your shoulder if it turns out you have to use it.”

Great. Another if.

“Christ, I wish I had a cigarette,” Kurt said.

Sanders gritted his teeth. “Would you keep your goddamned voice down,” he whispered. “If the ghala hear you—”

Kurt frowned. He lowered his voice. “For a guy who supposedly knows what he’s doing, you don’t sound very sure of yourself. Maybe Vicky’s right. Maybe we should call this off, let the county—”

“The fuckin’ county would lose twenty men before they even knew what hit them. You want that on your conscience? Besides, one word to them about the ghala and they’d throw both our asses straight into the nearest funny farm.”

Kurt considered this.

“So are we together or not? You can’t be yellowing out on me at the last minute.”

“I’m not yellowing out,” Kurt said. “Jesus.”

“Okay, then.” Sanders double-checked the lips of his magazines for dents and burrs. The men he’d seen die thanks to misfeeds had left a pockmark on his subconscious. Then he checked the clip-beds for tension; the tracer rounds clicked down snug. “Now I don’t know from mines, but I assume this access you told me about is a tunnel of some kind.”

“Right,” Kurt said. “It’s called a manway.”

“So we go in and check it out, find the weakest spot in this manway, and that’s where we tack up the rig.”

“What good will that do? We can’t bring the mine down now; the ghala aren’t in it.”

“We’re not going to bring it down now. After we rig it up, we go back outside, set up defensive positions, and then we wait. In the morning, when the ghala go back into the mine, that’s when we blow the manway. There’s a good chance the whole works’ll come down, and even if just the manway caves in, the ghala will be trapped inside.”