Ghouls

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Back upstairs.

The house was unnaturally quiet, as an afterstorm calm.

“Damn it, don’t move,” Vicky said.

“That hurts like shit!” Kurt articulated.

“Stop being such a puss. Do you want to get an infection?”

“She’s right,” Sanders added. “God knows what kind of germs that scalpel had on it.”

Kurt frowned at him cuttingly. “I’m touched by your concern…fucking maniac. You’ve got to be nuts to set off a grenade in a room that small. We’re lucky we’re not all chock full of shrapnel.”

“Pipe down and relax,” Sanders said. “It was only a concussion grenade; they can’t kill you unless you sit on them. All they’re good for is a big boom. Besides, what else could I do? If I hadn’t thrown that grenade, Willard would’ve blown your head right off your shoulders.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. That’s two I owe you.”

“Would you shut up and quit moving around!” Vicky said. She took away the alcohol swab, and Sanders began to tape up the last pressure bandage from his field, individual first-aid kit. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, though that didn’t make Kurt’s arm hurt any less.

“These cuts are no joke,” Sanders told him. “It’s a miracle he didn’t hit any major nerves or arteries.”

“At least the bleeding’s stopped.” Vicky’s face darkened to a cast of pure worry. “You sure you feel all right?”

“I feel fine,” Kurt said. At least as fìne as your average pincushion. He held up his bandaged arm and hand. Jesus, I’m the fuckin’ mummy. “You guys do pretty good work, I’ll say that much.”

“This is strictly jury-rig,” Sanders said. “You’ll want to get to a hospital ASAP.”

“The hospital can wait. I’ve got a bit of a problem to take care of first.”

Nobody said anything at that.

Kurt wanted a cigarette but willed himself not to ask Vicky for one. Have some backbone, you coward, he thought. The pile of money from Willard’s floor safe was still on the desk; Kurt was amazed that he couldn’t have cared less about it. He looked Sanders down. “So I guess you’re just going to disappear now, huh?”

“Not just yet. I’d feel bad letting you take on the ghala by yourself. No offense, but you’d lose your ass.”

“No offense taken. I’ve grown quite attached to my ass over the years,” Kurt said, but he wondered about the odds. “You have some kind of plan?”

Sanders had broken down the Ml6 on the coffee table, and was removing cleaning gear from its Fiberglas stock. “A simple LRRP bushwhack ought to work. Willard said that only two ghala escaped. If we time it right—”

“Wait a minute,” Vicky bullied in. “Did you guys leave your marbles at home tonight? This is obviously too much to handle yourselves. We’ve seen what these things can do. Let the county police take care of it.”

“Only as a last resort,” Kurt said.

“Bullshit!”

“Vicky, I can’t call Lieutenant Choate and tell him he’s got a couple of ghala to smoke out. If we do it ourselves—”

“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.”

Kurt’s skepticism was growing like a stain. “Willard implied that these things aren’t just dumb animals, that they got intelligence.”

“That’s true.”

“Then what if they spot us somehow? Or what if they know we’re there before they go back into the mine?”

“That’s why we set up the defensive positions. If the ghala smell us out beforehand, we can pick them off with the rifles before they can get to us. Piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” Kurt said. “I can hardly wait.”

««—»»

It was a bright night, crisply starred, sparsely clouded. The ridge lay frozen in moonlight. The moon crept behind a reef of clouds. Kurt felt tiny between the ridge and the opposing forest; he could feel the presence of the woods, and its pressing closeness. Thin brittle vines like wicker spread nets between the trees. The cricket sounds were louder now, exuding chaotically, pulsing out. A barn owl peered at them from a high tree, a white warning face in the dark. It all closed in on him now, the forest and the insect trills, the bleaching moon and the dark, and what they were about to do. Baked, cracked earth of what was once an outer trolley line crumbled beneath Kurt’s feet; his head felt empty.

I’m walking to my death, he thought.

They passed the collapsed manways and finally stood before the only open entry. Kurt stared into the bore of blackness, the same depths in which Higgins had died just hours before. Vines, gnarled and thick as barbed wire, twisted about the portal’s outer support stulls. Fissures in the ridge itself sprouted tufts of grayish, unhealthy vegetation.

Sanders removed from his pocket a flat spool of thirty-pound test trilene fishing line. He knotted one end around a piton in the outer stull, then inserted a pencil through the spool’s center.

“Where’d you get that?” Kurt asked.

“Willard’s.”

“What’s it for?”

“You’ll see. Here.”

They carried several flashlights each. Sanders had brought an additional four from Willard’s, two of which he now gave to Kurt. Then they each securely masking-taped two flashlights to the handguards of their rifles.

“Ready?” Sanders asked.

“You’re sure the ghala aren’t here now?”

“One hundred percent sure. They only stay in their lair after dark when it’s their mating season, and that’s winter.”

Kurt loaded his five-round clip. “Okay. Let’s go.”

They slung their rifles, turned on handheld lights. Entering the manway was like stepping into a Freudian nightmare. A queer, warm draft siphoned overhead, bringing fetid odors of rotten wood, niter, and decay. The dripping sound could be heard even this far out. Sanders let the spool of line unravel as he followed the uprooted trolley rails deeper into the mine. Kurt struggled to keep up, thinking of Theseus and the Minotaur.

“What’s that stink?” Sanders asked.

Kurt shined his light on the crusted deposits. “Sulphur, zinc, saltpeter. It bleeds through the rock. And it gets worse, too.”

“Should’ve brought a fuckin’ gas mask.”

Sanders walked slowly, to inspect each stull. Some of them remained in good condition, but most were rotten or swollen by decades of seepage. Further on, he stopped, noticing the sign on the last overhead prop: MAIN SHAFT AHEAD.

“This is the end of the manway,” Kurt told him. “The stope pit’s about thirty yards in front of us, down that ramp.”

Sanders pried at the final manway stull with his fingers. The wood came apart in pulpy, termite-infested splinters. “What’s more likely to be weaker, the manway or the ceiling over the main shaft?”

“Hard to say. The greater weight’s over the pit, but then there’s a lot more reinforcement.” Kurt aimed his light ahead, revealing the inner cavern’s labyrinth of stulls. “How many grenades do you have?”

“Three, all fuzed M25’s, like the one I dropped at the house.”

“I say we set them off here, at the juncture. The concussion should bring down the ceiling and the manway as well.”

Kurt held the light as Sanders set to work and opened the string bag full of things he’d brought from Willard’s. He removed a box of one-inch flathead nails and the three grenades. Then he took the first grenade in his hand, gripped the safety spoon, and pulled out the retaining pin. He threw the pin aside.

Kurt gulped.

“It won’t go off unless I release the spoon,” Sanders said, and into the pinhole above the grenade’s pyrotechnic train, he inserted one of the nails. “Safe now.” He handed the grenade to Kurt, and repeated the procedure with the other two grenades.

Next, Sanders removed three eight-inch shepherd nails and a hammer.

“Don’t hammer too hard,” Kurt said. “Loud noises and old mines don’t mix.”

Sanders chuckled.

Each of these grenades had an additional hole in the striker housing, known as a “tack hole.” (The Army had implemented tack holes for a variety of fuze assemblies during the late Vietnam era, to make booby-trap techniques safer.) Using the tack-holes, Sanders began to nail each grenade to the overhead prop. Kurt glanced up furtively as Sanders drove the nails. The pounding shook loose dust and chips of stone from the manway’s ceiling. The inner cavern bounced back echoes of each blow.

Lastly, Sanders tied a yard-long piece of line to the smaller flathead nails in the safety-retainer pinholes, then tied the other end of each piece to the original piece of line which ran to the outside of the mine.

“Done,” Sanders said.

“Why bother removing the pins? Wouldn’t it have been less complicated just to tie the lines to the rings themselves?”

“Forget about what you see on TV; it takes about fifty pounds of elbow grease to jerk a pin out of a grenade. That’s why I replaced the pins with nails. The nails’ll come out easy, a quick tug is all we’ll need. This is how we used to booby trap spider holes in the war when we didn’t have any demo.”

“What do we do now?”

“We go back outside and dig in. When the ghala return in the morning and come back into the mine, we pull the other end of this fishing line, and that will be it.”

To Kurt, it almost sounded too easy.

While Sanders double-checked his rigging, Kurt wandered down the haulage ramp, toward the main shaft. He felt drawn to it somehow, challenged to take one last look into the pit. At the causewalk, he shined his light down into the black void. It looked bottomless now, a chasm without end. The dripping echoed up, a maddening almost metallic pap. He could feel heat rising. His light trailed the winze groove from the bottom of the shaft, then stopped at the row of stopes. The pit’s blackness made him reel.

He stared at the stopes for a long time.

“This the shaft?” Sanders had come up from behind. He took one look down and said, “My God.”

Kurt continued to stare.

“Come on,” Sanders said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I have to go down and see.”

“See what?”

“The stope,” Kurt said. “I have to see what’s inside the stope.”

“You got some sure-fire shit for brains. This place is rigged to blow.”

Kurt began shaking the rusted ring ladders which descended to the stope ledges. He needed to find one that would hold his weight. “I’m going down,” he restated. “You said yourself that the ghala won’t be back for a couple more hours. This will only take a minute.”

“These ladders are rusted clean through. You’ll break your neck, you moron.”

Kurt didn’t know what suddenly impelled him to want to do this. The mystery of the stopes beckoned him, prodding his blackest curiosity. He needed the final proof to what a day ago he would’ve dismissed as pure insanity.

“There’s nothing in that stope but bones,” Sanders called after him. “It’s skeleton city down there.”

Kurt wasn’t listening. At last he found a ring ladder that had remained secure.

“You’re really gonna do this?” Sanders said. “You’re really gonna be this stupid?”

“That’s right.” Kurt climbed onto the ladder and began to go down.

Sanders said, “Shit,” and followed him.

The ladder wobbled slightly but held. Kurt descended with great care, testing each rung. He made a point not to look down.

“This is crazy,” Sanders complained above him. “This rickety piece of shit’s gonna break apart. Then we get to do free-falls without chutes.”

Kurt angled out of the safety ladder and stepped out onto the first-level catwalk. From there he took another ladder down to the next level. He moved slowly along the cat, grasping pitons for support when he could. Sanders cursed faintly behind him.

Kurt stopped at the side of the orepass, the entry to the stope where Higgins had died. He felt dead himself for a moment, his heart still, his brain inert. Did he doubt the safety of the stope? Sanders was certain the ghala weren’t here now. It seemed that what he feared was what drew him. Death in there, Kurt thought. Skeletons. Emptied skulls. Waiting for me to see it all.

Sanders caught up to him.

Kurt took a deep breath and entered the stope.

A stench hit him like a blast from a cracked steam pipe. It was hot in here, the air viscid as syrup; he could barely breathe.

Sanders entered as if wading in muck. “This place stinks worse than a corpse pit. What the fuck are you trying to prove?”

Kurt didn’t answer. He roved his light back and forth over the longwalls. The stench rose; he tried breathing through a handkerchief, but that was a joke. As the stope began to veer, he found the first of what he was looking for.

Bones. Stripped ribs. Femurs split and sucked of marrow.

“See? I fuckin’ told you,” Sanders said, gagging.

Kurt’s light played at his feet. Sections of spine lay like big, malformed spools. Fillings glittered up from the teeth of a disconnected jaw.

He stepped forward, stupefied. Water dripped from a crack in the topwall; bones crunched underfoot. A gnawed hand lay to the left, a stripped foot to the right. At the base of the pass he saw what looked like the top of a grapefruit, but realized with numb revulsion that it was the top of a skull.

Sanders sounded like he was about to throw up. “We’ve seen enough.”

“I’m going to check the stope chamber. It can’t be far.”

Sanders stopped, leaning on his rifle. He spat, gagging, shaking his head. “You’re crazy to want to do this, man. This place is an open grave. You’re gonna dream about this for the rest of your life.”

“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.

“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 never heard it hit bottom.

Kurt’s ladder was rocking worse; more of its bolts had ground out. He climbed up till his head was even with the causewalk; he was about twenty-five yards from where Sanders lay pinned. Kurt struggled to acquire a decent firing position—he leaned out of the ladder, braced against the ring rail. He shouldered his rifle and laid its beams ahead.

Sanders was being mauled. The ghala was crouched on top of him, vising Sanders down. Sanders instinctively lashed out, throwing thumb-bolts and web-chops under the thing’s neck, striking for pressure points, thrusting up knife-hands in attempts to unseat its ribs. But the ghala leaned closer, mocking, as if impervious to pain. Perhaps it felt no pain at all. It barely flinched at Sanders’s death blows.

Kurt’s ladder was still swaying; he couldn’t draw a good bead. He knew he had only one round left in the integral clip—there’d be no time to reload. He planted his foot against the shaftwall, trying to still the ladder as he continued to sight down.

Sanders squirmed beneath the ghala’s weight. Its head jerked to the left. It stared directly into Kurt’s double flashlight beams.

“Shoot!” Sanders yelled. “Goddamn it, shoot!”

Kurt froze behind his sights; his trigger finger felt like a curl of stone. He was paralyzed as the ghala’s primeval face leered back at him. Huge, orbicular eyes glittered a baleful shine. It was grinning, he realized. The ghala was actually grinning at him.

Not yet, he thought. Not…yet.

It turned back, slithering closer. Its lips slid up, showing yellow-black gums and silvery teeth that seemed to tense, lengthen, and quiver, shining with drool. Lowering then, its jaw came unhinged, its black mouth spreading wide to admit Sanders’s face.

The ladder stilled. As Sanders began to scream, Kurt squeezed off his last shot.

The concussion made the entire cavern vibrate. The bullet took the ghala’s head off at the jawline.

Kurt hauled himself onto the cause. He furiously butt-slammed the top rungs with his rifle until the ladder cracked off and crashed to the bottom of the pit.

Sanders pushed the body of the dead thing off him. Black blood and a dark yellow fluid oozed out of what little remained of its head.

“You really like to keep a guy in suspense, don’t you?” Sanders complained.

Kurt focused his lights down. “Oh, shit.”

“Come on!”

By now the first ghala had made it to the next level catwalk. Kurt and Sanders kicked and hammered and butt-stroked the next ladder until it fell. Below, the ghala raced to a third ladder, which promptly crashed over the side before the thing could even get its foot on a rung. The catwalk itself then gave way from the shaftwall and fell, leaving the ghala to hang one-handed from a black winze cable. Eventually, the cable snapped and the ghala plummeted very quickly to the bottom of the shaft.

“Happy landings, motherfucker!” Sanders shouted into the pit.

Above them, the ridge was beginning to buckle. Several stulls fell over and hit the floorwall with mammoth thuds.

“I think this place is trying to tell us something,” Kurt made the suggestion.

They fled down the manway. Behind them, the cavern began to shift out.

The two of them practically flew out of the manway. Kurt dropped his empty rifle and fell to hands and knees. The moonlight bathed his face; a clean, cool breeze stirred through the trees like a breath of life. They were out, and they had survived.

Sanders pointed to the fishing line tied off on the outside piton. “You want the honors?”

“Brother, they’re all yours.”

Sanders jerked the fishing line. Exactly four seconds later, triple explosions erupted heavily from within the earth, followed by a deep, rising rumble. Kurt and Sanders jogged to the tree-line as the mouth of the manway blew out a titan blast of dust and sound, and it was then that the entire ridge collapsed in on itself.

««—»»

They stood side by side in Willard’s shattered basement, facing the sinister pen which contained the two remaining ghala.

“What do we do with them?” Kurt asked.

Sanders picked up the spoon, ring, and fuze assembly of the grenade he’d set off here earlier. Since it was only a concussion grenade, the body had ruptured, not fragmented. He stooped to pick up the blown metal case, then put all the pieces in his pocket. Of the few rounds he’d fired down here, he left the spent cartridges on the floor; he’d touched them only with gloves. “We’ll take care of those two,” he said. “No problem.”

“I guess we could shoot them in the pen and bury them someplace.”

“No,” Sanders said, and led Kurt up the stairs to the study. “Willard was right over all, just insane in his methods. Those two things in that cage are an unknown species of life that medical science has never seen. They’ve got to be researched, taken apart, studied. We could learn something from them, something that might do us some good.”

“But I thought the whole idea was to not alert the authorities.”

“That is the idea. Civilian authorities would turn this into a joke. But the proper authorities will know how to handle this just right. No fuckups, no smears, no headlines in The Enquirer.”

The money from Willard’s safe still lay stacked on the desk. Kurt looked at it bleary-eyed. He wanted a cigarette bad, he felt that he deserved one after all that had happened that night. He looked down and saw a pack of Willard’s Luckies on the floor.

Sanders was counting the money.

Kurt lit one of Willard’s cigarettes. He took a long, smooth drag, then violently coughed the cigarette out of his mouth onto the floor.

“We split fifty-fifty,” Sanders said. “Fair enough?”

Kurt was still coughing. “I’m a fucking police officer, for God’s sake. I don’t take ill-gotten gains.”

“How is it ill-gotten? It’s Willard’s and Willard is dead. He’s got no surviving heirs, no relatives, no kids.” He put his share of the cash in his green string bag. “You want to leave your half sitting here for the Army to pocket?”

“Army?” Kurt said.

But Sanders was already on the phone. He switched on Willard’s desk intercom so that Kurt could listen in, too. After undo hassle with more than one night operator, Sanders’s call finally got punched through. Two rings, then:

“ASA Headquarters, Specialist Clabo speaking, sir! This line is not secure.”

“This is Warrant Officer Smith,” Sanders said, “from the 54th Battalion.”

“Yes, sir! May I help you, sir!”

“Log and copy the following information.”

“Ready, sir!”

“I’m reporting a perimeter-positive non-CBR-related hazard. Make sure you get those words down right, Specialist. It’s very important.”

“Yes, sir! I got it, sir!”

“This is a Status Black emergency. Do you know what that is, Specialist?”

There was a long pause. “Yes, sir!”

“Then write it down.”

“Done, sir! Grid coordinates, sir?”

“No grids available, Specialist. Log and copy the following location.” Sanders gave him Willard’s address, county, state, and zip code.

“Logged and copied, sir!”

“Report everything I’ve told you ASAP to the field officer of the day and the S-3. And I repeat. This is a Status Black emergency.”

“Yes, sir! Please hold, sir!”

Sanders hung up. He wiped the phone off with a napkin. “That’s called getting the Army out of bed.”

“But who was it?” Kurt asked.

“Fort Devens, Massachusetts, the headquarters for the Army Security Agency. A Status Black emergency is the code term used to indicate confirmed civilian fatalities from an unknown hazard. They won’t waste any time responding to a call like that, and once they get a look at what’s in the basement…”

“Now I get it,” Kurt said.

“My car’s parked in the woods half a mile off. Let’s get out of here. In about twenty minutes, an Army Field Emergency Investigation Platoon will be coming through that door more pissed off than a pack of mad Dobermans.”

Kurt rose to leave but stopped midway out of his seat. The stack of money was looking him right in the eye. It wasn’t his; he couldn’t take it.

“Take it,” Sanders said.

“But it’s…it’s unethical.”

“Take it or leave it. We gotta go.”

Kurt clenched his teeth.

He grabbed the banded bills with both hands and left the house.

— | — | —