Edward Lee - Ghouls

GHOULS

by Edward Lee

GHOULS

1988 by Edward Lee

For this edition, Id like to acknowledge the following for their invaluable input which led to this book being published and for essentially beginning my career as a novelist: Amy Stout, Wendy McCurdy, Pesha Finkelstein, Adele Leone (RIP) and Roberta Grossman (RIP). I am unendingly grateful to you all.

E.L.

Dedication:

For (my) Betsey

-hypnagogically

and

f o r e v e r.

| |

PROLOGUE

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 1978

The colonel measured time with cigarettes.

He smoked one every fifteen minutes, so by the accumulation of butts on the step panel, an hour and a half had passed.

An hour and a half?

His mouth opened slowly and he blinked, touched by the faceless reality. It seemed hed been sitting here in the Jeep for days, waiting for them to come back. Dementatus proximus, he thought. Only an hour and a half. He felt caught on the grapnel of a convulsive, tilting nightmare, where time ticked backward and the world revolved in reverse.

He tried not to think about the screams.

By his watch it was 0314 hrs. Had the battery run out? He was sure hed replaced it recently; Sanders had made him replace it, had made them all. Still, something warped the colonels perceptions of time and proximity. The night and so much waiting had wrung his senses to distortion, leaving nothing real. The moon pulled at his brain. He looked down at the submachine gun across his legs and wondered what the old Army levermen mustve felt while tying thirteen perfect knots into the hanging noose. The gun lay in his lap like something stillborn; he scarcely touched it. M3A1, Sanders had earlier explained to him. Simple, sensible, few moving parts. Its the least expensive weapon in the Army inventory, and the most reliable. To the colonel, though, it seemed flimsy, cheap; its finish looked and felt like dull gray wax. And it never jams, Sanders had added. Dent it, bury it, piss in it, pour sand in the chamber, but it never jams. The colonel hoped he didnt get the chance to test the validity of that particular claim.

He wondered if Sanders and his men were dead.

There had been sounds of battle, not twenty minutes before. The slow, pathetic sputterings of their greaseguns, anguished shouts in the distance, and then the grenades (six of them, the colonel had counted) exploding through the dead night air amid a trail of fracturing echoes. Had everything gone as planned? He was to consider the grenades a signal, a certain cue to be ready to move. If you hear the grenades, Sanders had said, then youll know weve made it out of there. But if you dont hear them, dont wait for us. We wont be coming out.

The grenades were a good sign, an indication of success; but only minutes later there had been more sounds, more heated gunfire. And then the screams.

Screams of pain, of terrorhuman screams, but in unison with screams that were significantly less than human.

The colonel knew then that something had gone wrong.

He thought about starting up the Jeep and driving out of there while he still had time. Maybe the plan had failed. Maybe he was sitting there waiting for dead men to return. Or worse, maybe

A gunshot rang out. (A pistol, he thought. Sanders took a pistol, too.) It was something, anyway, a shred of promise. The shot meant that at least one of Sanderss team was still alive.

The colonel decided to wait ten minutes more.

He lit another cigarette and nearly smiled, remembering how Sanders had warned him not to smoke. Some nonsense about light discipline. Always wear a watch with a cover. Never wear a watch that ticks. Bury all garbage and empty Cs. Anything that shines, paint it black. Paint your face black. Paint your hands black. When you pull your dick out to piss, paint it. Then cover the piss. And never, ever smoke at night.

Was Sanders really just a fanatic, an Army nut? The colonel thought about that. Hed seen Sanderss credits, though: embassy armorer with a classified MOS suffix, training schools he couldnt even talk about, combat service stripes to the elbow. Once, hed shown the colonel what he amusedly referred to as his junk. Take a look at my junk, Sanders had offered. DoD training certificates, boxes of them. Qualification braids, aiguillettes, a years worth of Soldier of the Month awards. Expert badges for weapons no one had heard of. Commendations from generals, division and group commanders, and even a letter of recognition for outscoring the rest of NATO at some Redeye range in Germany. The name signed at the bottom was Bernard W. Rogers.

Next, hed shown the colonel a shoebox full of medals from Vietnam. Sanders had always displayed a neutral embarrassment toward that particular war, and the contents of the shoebox. A lot of fruit salad and chicken shit this is. They shouldnt give medals for wars we dont win. All this shit you hear about delayed stress and torture and how bad Vietnam was. Tell that to the guys who went to Korea and Stalingrad. Tell that to the guys who had to fight the Waffen SS on D-Day. Makes me want to throw up. Better to melt all this shit down for bullets. Hed tossed the boxes back into his locker. Junk. Purple Heart. DSC. Silver Star.

No, Sanders was the best he could find. But was that good enough for this? The colonel wondered.

Just wait. Its no use worrying about it now.

Through the steel-frame windshield, he viewed a stretch of the nights zenith. The desolation of this place always left him slightly on edge; hed never seen nights so clear and infinite. The moon was egg-shaped, a pallid, misshapen face in the sky, backed by a depthless void of stars. To his right, the Tuwwaiq Ridges broke the line of the horizon like the rim of an endless crater. These were the hills, Arabian hills, crestlike hillocks thrust forth from the earths crust, barren, dead. Yet the Saudis called them hills. They didnt know what hills were. This sacred Islamic world of theirs was little more than a wasteland, plain after plain of scorched volcanic rock and a sea of sand. February now, midwinter, and the temperature was about sixty. The average summer day brought heat that sometimes reached 125 degrees.

He tilted his head out of the Jeeps canopy, squinting into the night, straining for the sight of a cloud, if just a wisp, but there was nothing. He hadnt seen a decent cloud formation in three years. Here, the yearly average of precipitation was about four inches. Some areas of the Great Empty Quarter, the Rub Al Khali, had rainfall every three to five years. It struck him then that this place was not of his world at all, as remote as another planet, and he thought that if it werent for the oil pools, the Saudis could take their heat-baked living hell of a home and shrivel in it. Yes, the earth could crack open right here and suck everything down

The clap of more pistol shots gave him a start like a bolt of current. Someone was coming. The shots had been closer this time, much closer. He pitched his cigarette out, touched his weapon.

He listened.

A scuffling to his right. Panting. Boots scraping over the jagged stone ruts of the ridge. He jerked at the crack of still another pistol shot, and automatically he turned over the Jeeps engine. Leaning out, he raised a pair of IR monoculars to his eyes, focused, then combed the strange green field across the slopes through which Sanders and his men would make their escape.

Top of the ridge, a tiny, desperate figure appeared, at first just an insect-shape in the IRs circle. It was a man scuttling down the incline.

Then came a scream, bestial, hell-bent. A howl of rage.

The figure coming down the ridge was Sanders, his automatic pistol in one hand, a green metal ammo box in the other. He was scrambling, then leaping into the Jeep a blurred instant later, yelling, Go! Go! Move! and as the colonel ineptly jammed the Jeep into gear, Sanders snapped another clip into his pistol, hung out off the roll bar, and began firing more shots behind them. The colonel sped down the crude road, slammed back and forth in his seat; he prayed they didnt lose a wheel or break an axle over this trench of a road. Brass flew as Sanders pumped off his remaining shots. The colonel locked his eyes ahead; he was grateful not to have to see what Sanders was shooting at.