Ghouls

“Damn, I can’t believe I could be that dumb.>, b

“Neither can I!”

“I didn’t think of it till just now. It’s true; they only spawn during the winter. But winter in Riyadh is about the same temperature as Maryland now.”

“That’s just great, that’s just fucking great.”

Sanders pointed to the mouth of the pass. “Is this the only way out of the stope?”

“No,” Kurt said. “Each stope generally has two orepasses. The other pass for this stope is on the other side of the hang.”

“Good. That means we can split up.”

“Split up! What the hell for?”

“One of us has to make it back outside to set off the grenades. Splitting up will increase those odds.”

“Shit,” Kurt said.

“You take the other orepass, I’ll take this one. The guy who makes it out of here first waits five minutes, then pulls the cord.”

Kurt’s mouth fell open.

“It’s the only way to do it,” Sanders said. “If we stay together the ghala only have one target to go after, but if we separate, that gives them two targets to worry about.”

Kurt stared at Sanders. He knew he was right, but he felt doomed just the same.

Sanders turned on the two flashlights taped to his rifle. “Good luck,” he said.

“I think we’re both going to need a lot more than that.”

“Don’t be too sure. I’ll see you outside.”

Sanders disappeared into the black of the pass. Kurt scrambled to the other side of the hang, wincing as he passed the undercut full of larva-stuffed corpses. With the double flashlights on his rifle, he combed the hangwall for the second ore-pass out. Just as he was growing frantic that there was no second pass, he spotted the heavy headrig in the twin flashlight beams. His exit to the catwalks.

Kurt sprinted into the second orepass—

—and then stopped cold.

What he saw taking place before him was far more than his mind could behold in that split-second glance. He saw two things. He saw the mangled body of Officer Mark Higgins stretched out on the floorwall. And crouched above it was one of the ghala.

The thing was swollen huge, pregnant with larvae. From its own abdomen stretched a ribbed tubelike ovipositor, the other end of which disappeared into Higgins’s dead mouth. The ovipositor was extending, working its way deeper down Higgins’s throat. Kurt could see the shapes of larvae moving down the heinous umbilical, as the ghala began quickly transferring its spawn from its own belly into Higgins’s eviscerated corpse.

Kurt broke from the freeze. Outraged, the ghala looked up. Kurt raised his rifle, took aim, and fired one shot. The report cracked an echo like a cannon.

The ghala flinched. The bullet missed.

Kurt back-stepped, nervously clearing the chamber for the next round. Raw-boned in the light, the ghala rose, a living monstrosity. Its coarse muscles and ropelike veins contracted beneath gray, enslimed skin. The sickly glistening ovipositor began to retract.

Kurt was caught in its spheroid, black sight. He cracked off two more rounds.

The ghala flinched left in a blur. The bullets missed.

The rifle wasn’t working. The ghala remained crouched, cocked back on stout, sinuous legs. Kurt was finished, and the ghala seemed to know this. It wasn’t afraid—it was mocking him, playing with him as a cat does a mouse.

Then its back arched, separating the huge knots of its spine. The taloned, three-fingered hand reached out. The ghala lunged forward.

Kurt thought his heart had suddenly shrunk to the size of a walnut. But he didn’t waver. He squeezed off one more shot.

The bullet caught the ghala in the shoulder, knocking it flat over Higgins’s corpse. Pain drew the sharp hollows of its face to black slits; it released a bellow nearly as loud as the rifle shots.

From above came a heavy, regular bumping sound. The concussion of the rifle slugs had caused a tremor in the ridge. Behind him two stope pillars crumbled. Something was about to go.

Lurching, the ghala rose back up. As it sprung forward, the orepass collapsed.

Kurt closed his eyes. He leaned against the longwall, dropping the rifle to cover his head with his arms. The bumping increased; he could hear the rock planes of the stope shifting all around him. Pulverized stone ground out of the ceiling; more pillars crumbled. Then the entire rear hang shifted out, its wall of dense rock drawing even, diagonal cracks. The wall broke and slid forward in a wave of chunks of ore.

Kurt was kissing the longwall, waiting to be crushed by the slide. Behind him came a clapping, cacophonous roar.

Good-bye, Vicky, he was able to think. I love you, I love you, I—

The bumping stopped. The stope held.

Aloud, Kurt muttered incomprehensible words. The dust began to settle, sticking to his sweat, which now popped through his pores like bugs. He picked up his rifle and shone its lights into the orepass.

Rock had swallowed the ghala whole, save for one long-boned hand which hung out of the mass of collapsed ore.

“How’s the fit, you ugly fuck,” Kurt said.

Then the hand moved. Rocks began to pop out of the mass. The ghala was shouldering its way out.

Kurt ran backtracking across the stope. If the first orepass had also collapsed, this would be his grave. He dashed through the headrig, expecting to run full-faced into a mountain of ore. But it never happened. The first pass had held.

He hung a mad turn on the catwalk, almost bellying over the safety rail. He raced for the nearest ladder, but turned when he heard clamoring high above him.

“What the hell happened?”

Kurt aimed his lights up. It was Sanders; he was at the top of a ring ladder, very close to the causewalk.

Kurt jumped on the ladder and began jerking himself up the rungs. “One of ’em was in there! I took some shots at it, then half the goddamned stope caved in!”

“Is it dead?”

“No!” Kurt blared. “It’s right behind me!”

Sanders was hanging off his ladder at an angle. He aimed his rifle, pointing the twin lights down at Kurt. At first Kurt thought Sanders meant to shoot him, but then the ghala emerged from the orepass. Sanders squeezed off a third of a clip on full-auto, laying grazing fire forward of the pass. The stream of laser-red tracers whizzed just feet from Kurt’s head and tacked a line across the face of the shaft. The ghala ducked back into the pass.

“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