Ghouls (62 page)

“I know,” Kurt said.

They continued through the
orepass
. Soon Kurt didn’t even bother to look at what he was walking on. He followed the face of stull-less, trickling black rock. The
longwalls
drew on, still sharply gnashed by the dredger, which had bored this pass decades ago. A tenuous buzzing droned from up ahead.

“What’s that?”

“How the fuck should I know,” Sanders said.

“Could it be the ghala?”

Sanders was exasperated, and sick. “I fucking told you. The ghala aren’t here. They don’t stay in their lair at night. If the ghala were here, they’d have torn us to pieces by the time we were two steps into the manway. They only guard the den in the winter, when they spawn.”

“Then what’s that sound?”

At last they came to the wooden
headrig
which marked the end of the pass. Through this would be the main chamber of the
stope
, what miners called “the hang.”

Kurt stepped through the rig. The hang was huge, supported not by stulls but pillars of rock which looked much thinner than the OSHA regulations demanded. It was a miracle that this
stope
had not fallen years ago.

Now the buzzing was loud and irritating as static.

With their lights, they combed the sides of the hang for the buzzing’s source, turning a vast circle. The walls were etched cleanly by
cutmarks
from miners’
hammerbars
. The floor lay barren, save for scatterings of
twiglike
bones. But what was the sound?

Far left of the hang, they found it. Mounds of things.

“What the hell is this?” Kurt said.

As they approached, Kurt stumbled on something. He cast his light down. At the base of a pillar lay several heads. Kurt’s light remained on one. Long, matted hair and clumps of beard, lipless, eyeless, but intact enough for recognition. It was Lenny Stokes’s head.

Sanders nudged him on. The buzzing and the stench seemed to coat them like glue. Their lights fell on the mounds, which had been stuffed into an undercut in the hang. The mounds were black and seemed to shimmer with movement.

“Good Christ.”

“Oh, no,” Sanders said. “Oh fucking no.”

The mounds were bodies, or pieces of bodies, covered by blankets of cavern flies. Kurt prodded the mass with an iron rod. The flies lifted in a swarm of swirling, buzzing black.

Some of the bodies had been dismembered, others remained whole. At least a dozen bodies had been packed into the undercut, but they all seemed heinously bloated, as if the torsos had been first hollowed out and then filled with something.

Sanders stared speechless, his eyes riveted to the swollen, putrescent mass. The bodies seemed melted together.

“There—there’s something in them,” Kurt gasped. “They’re stuffed with…something.” With the rod he forked some of the bodies out of the undercut, stirring a miasmic stench and slops of maggots.
Enslimed
bodies flopped out as if deboned. Shapes seemed to move beneath the bloated bellies. At first Kurt thought that the ghala must be storing the bodies as a food supply for winter, but then the iron rod punctured one of the distended bellies, which immediately burst, as if under pressure. The hole the rod had made split wide, pouring forth a lumpy, liquid mass of—

“Eggs,” Sanders aid. “Larvae. The ghala are spawning.”

They were a translucent scarlet, each about the size of an avocado. Kurt popped one with the rod, and it effused a vile, thick fluid. When they’d spilled onto the
floorwall
, they began to move slightly, twitching, and there were so many. Dozens of larvae must have been ensiled into each corpse.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Sanders groaned.

“You said the ghala only spawn in winter!” Kurt yelled.

“Well, I guess I was fucking wrong!” Sanders yelled back.

Kurt grabbed Sanders by the collar. “Does this mean that the ghala are in the mine? Right now?”

“Yes.” Sanders’s voice was very hoarse. “Yes,” he said again.

They turned and ran. They stumbled over bones and line rods and chunks of ore. Kurt meant to run full speed out of the
stope
, but Sanders had to nearly tackle him at the
headrig
. “Shithead. You want to run right into them?”

Kurt was livid with anger. “Goddamn you, you said they only spawn in winter, you said they wouldn’t be in the mine.”

“You’re the asshole who wanted to come down here!”

Kurt supposed that a fistfight at this time would not be very practical. Sanders shook his head and said, “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.