Ghouls (42 page)

This was ridiculous. A goddamned pool hall. Why had Nancy Willard insisted they meet in this forsaken hole in the ground? Anonymity, of course, a place where they wouldn’t likely be seen by someone they knew. But
why?
Why the secrecy? Perhaps she was going to make a play for him.
Yeah, sure,
he thought.
Next joke.
It all went back to the phone call.
I’d like to talk to you about something,
she’d said.
You may be quite interested.

A
breary
figure at the bar turned and waved.

Glen
Rodz
.

What the…
but Kurt didn’t waste time finishing the thought. He pulled up the stool next to Glen.

“What the
hell
are you doing
here?”
Glen asked.

Kurt wasn’t sure how to respond. Had Nancy Willard intended for Glen to be here, too? Or was it just coincidence? “The Anvil’s beginning to give me Freudian nightmares; every time I look at a bottle of beer, I’m forced to think of tits. Thought I’d try a new place for a change. And to think I’ve been missing out on this all these years.”

“Yeah. Class joint.”

They both turned at a strange sound. Behind them, two bikers appeared to be urinating into empty beer cans.

“And a discerning clientele,” Kurt added. “I’m surprised they let me in without my tie.” Then he noticed the circlet of empty bottles arranged before Glen. “You always get a load on before work?”

“Willard gave me the night off,” Glen revealed. “With pay. Couldn’t tell you why, though. With all the shit that’s been going on, you’d think he’d want me working round the clock.”

Glen didn’t have to say much to let on that he was in the bag, or at least getting there. His eyes were dark and very bloodshot, and he looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

“You gonna tell me what’s bothering you?” Kurt said.

Glen frowned. He began slowly, so as not to let his words smear. “There’s this girl I know,” he said. “This girl I’ve been seeing for a while. And—”

The barkeep set two beers down, and at the same time a brief commotion rose from what must’ve been the back room. Men were shouting, then came a loud thud, a quick clang of metal, and a sound like pots hitting the floor. Glen and Kurt seemed to be the only ones who’d noticed.

“Sounds like they got a gorilla back there,” Glen said.

Kurt began to think he might be dreaming again. This place was getting weirder by the minute. “You were saying something about a girl?”

Glen paused, staring into the bottom of his beer. “It’s, uh…it’s not the sort of thing I’d want getting around.”

“Jesus Christ, Glen. We’ve been friends for twenty goddamned years. You ought to trust me enough by now to know I’m not going to run off and tell your business to the CIA.”

Glen smiled. The contrast with his eyes was not pleasant. “I know, sorry. I’m just a little off the ball right now. Too much drinking, too much thinking.”

“So tell me about the girl.”

Glen was staring ahead into the mirror on the bar wall. He didn’t seem pleased by what he saw. “I love her,” he said.

“You love her, that’s good. So why are you sitting here depressed as shit and drinking yourself into the outer limits?”

“Fuck. It’s…awkward. She’s a little older than me, and a lot smarter, but that’s never seemed to make any difference. All that matters is that I know her real well. And, and—”

“Oh, I get it,” Kurt said. “She dumped you. Well, let me tell you something. No girl’s worth hitting the skids for, I don’t care who she is.”

Glen smiled again,
brittlely
. “I’m not on the skids yet,” he said. “And, no, she didn’t dump me. I know she will soon—I’d bet money on it—but that’s not the point. Shit, I’ve been dumped before, plenty of times. Things are gray for a little while, a little low, but you always pull out of it eventually, you always ride it out. Sometimes I think men were put on earth just to be shit on by women. It goes with the territory. Women, goddamn women, they’re all devils on the inside, but you love them just the same.

“Your enthusiasm is illuminating,” Kurt said. But that was unfair. The beer was obviously swaying Glen way off the post. “If she didn’t dump you,” Kurt said, “then what’s wrong?”

“I’m in a bind. I don’t know what to do.”

“About what, exactly?”

“What I need to know,” Glen said, “is how do you tell a girl you love that she needs to see a psychiatrist?”

Now Kurt was totally thrown. “That’s tough, I gotta admit. But what makes you think she needs that kind of help?”

“I love this girl, I
know
her inside and out. I can’t tell you who she is—you’ll just have to take my word for it. She’s probably the most rational person I’ve ever met, and she’s very, very smart… And this morning she told me the nuttiest thing I ever heard in my life.”

“Well, what? What did she tell you?”

Suddenly Glen looked as though he were staring a thousand yards into the distance. “Something crazy,” he said. “Something impossible. And the worst part of it is I’m beginning to believe it myself.”

— | — | —

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

a grin like a cut tightens your face, have you forgotten your dead friends this easily? you place the briefcase across your knees, open it—

—and turn, glaring, caustic glimmers in your eyes, “what’s this shit, you motherfucker?
i
stick my neck out a mile for you back there, and now you’re gonna shaft me?”

the briefcase contains not money but old copies of the army times, some
arabic
newspapers, and several recent issues of
british
penthouse.

now the colonel is holding his M3 chest level, pointing the dull, eight-inch barrel at your heart. “
i’m
sorry, sergeant,” he says. “
i’m
very, very sorry, but for this to work, no one can know, absolutely no one. not even you.”

and before you can plead or even move, the colonel squeezes the trigger, and ten .45 hardball rounds slam into the middle of your chest and literally blow you out of the Jeep, the impact crushes the air from your lungs, as if you’ve just been struck in the chest by a railroad tie. you hear your ribs crack, and a drone like a tuning fork, distant at first but then suddenly so loud you feel your head might split, on your back now, legs jackknifed and arms aslant, you raise your head to see the Jeep pulling off into the cool, crystal night, next, you are a tiny figure plummeting through a dozen
stratas
of black at hellish speed, like a nightmare of being thrown off an airplane with no chute. you feel yourself fading, fading—drifting across the blind terrain of dust and smoke and nihility. you lose consciousness

time passes, but how much you cannot know, your only measure is the hard, silent black

it occurs to you, at some point, that you have died

but then sentience sifts back in
notchlike
stages, and you sit up and find yourself whole and alive, your chest is a flaring plot of pain; the blunt trauma of the bullets makes it hurt just to breathe, but you smile in spite of it, grateful to have deceived death so totally, the vest— you owe your life to the vest, if you hadn’t worn it, you’d be dead.

you pick yourself up and start to walk, grindingly at first, but then with increasing confidence, eventually your stride falls into a steady rhythm; the shock of being shot and living soon recedes, and your pain shrinks to almost nothing when you begin to realize the depth of your rage.

you can only think of the colonel now.

the colonel.

he’d intended to kill you all along, and the marines too, if they’d survived, somehow you find that harder to believe than the scheme itself, the ghala were real, a myth forged by centuries, but you don’t care, you don’t care about anything now, except the colonel.

you can’t wait to see his face.

the idea of murder doesn’t set well with you. though you’ve killed many men in war, you’ve never committed murder, but you won’t kill the colonel, no matter how much he deserves it. though you may well make him wish he was dead.

heading him off at the airport should be easy, but you must hurry, you walk faster, harder—soon you are trotting along the desolate road, your senses focus only on vengeance, and you are so swept by rancor that the prospect of being followed never crosses your mind, and why is that? how could you let one man make you forget all you’ve learned?

but you
are
being followed.

being stalked.

and when your stalker strikes, it is with such speed that you have no time to react.

a blur flutters behind you there is no sound suddenly you are jerked backward and pinned to the ground by a figure that is only vaguely human a cold slick hand presses your face as if to flatten your skull against the road between the fingers you glimpse the features of a monstrosity features made mercifully unclear by shock and darkness your pistol is in the Jeep you recall and you draw your knife but not before the thing’s other forklike hand is ripping at you with quickness beyond that of any man then the fingers sink popping into skin and begin to separate the flesh from your face like someone tearing strips of wallpaper you scream through a well of blood one eye seeing red and bury your knife hilt-deep into the thing’s furrowed abdomen.

its blood is black and pumps out in a rill of glistening ichor, but the man-animal’s hand holds fast to your face, still tearing, you thrust the knife again, deeper, twisting, then jerk the pin of your last grenade, the spoon flies, the thing’s jaws draw open impossibly wide—it howls its pain high into the night, and with the last trickling of your strength, you stuff the grenade canister into its maw.

you run faster than you’ve ever run. four to five seconds later the grenade goes off and engulfs the thing in a splattering burst of white phosphorus.

you stagger forward, delirious now from blood loss, you pull off your fatigue shirt and press it to your face in an effort to control the bleeding, your progress grinds to an off-balanced shuffle, you sense only faint, fragmentary things, the road beneath your feet, the sputtering heat behind you, and the necessity to keep moving, the vision in your good eye begins to melt, rimmed with black dots and spangles like shavings of steel, but through this you see twin spheres of intense white light which seem to be advancing toward you, swelling in size, a deafening roar-fills your head, and you must shield your eyes.

the twin spheres stop, they stare back at you, blazing; they hover like disembodied eyes, headlights? you stand before the glare and dumbly clutch the shirt to your face.

two sharp silhouettes emerge from the blaze, curious stick-men backed by light.

voices switch back and forth.

“check this shit out. is he one of ours?”

“looks like a
jarine
.”

“no, his belt is black, jarheads have tan belts, this guy’s army, from the support garrison.”

“look at him. he’s hurt.”

“probably fucked over by ‘
rabs
.”

“
’
rabs
?
this far out? this is no-man’s-land.”