Ghouls'n Guns

by Jared Mandani

He walked over to the prime. She was blinded momentarily, her nice, white robes were singed and her powers flashed and crackled around her, out of control, dazed as she was. She tried to stand, and managed to, but she was unsteady. The wound to her gut was taking its toll and she was disoriented.

  Without pausing, Davidoff ripped off a large length of tape, placed it on the grenade and walked straight up to the prime. He punched her as she swayed on the spot, knocking her to her knees. A streak of lightning shot out, hurting him, taking 30 HP, but he paid it no attention. Using the tape, he strapped the grenade to the prime’s chest and punched her once more, dazing her.

  “Get up!” he shouted to Zeke and Mara. They were rousing themselves, though they looked giddy and unsure of themselves. “Run for the exit!” he shouted. They did so, and he pulled the pin. Then, half-lifting the prime, he threw her down in the middle of the room onto the pile of plastic explosives. He grabbed up Zeke’s transmitter and sprinted away, catching up with Zeke and Mara as they dashed into the stairwell.

  “Get to the lift, we’ve only got a few seconds,” he said, but his words were drowned out when they were halfway up the stairs.

  The grenade went off, no doubt ripping the prime limb from limb. The whole place shook and plaster began once more to fall from the ceiling. Then, as he had hoped, at least a few of the explosives went off. They were on fire and, no doubt, being lashed with the last of the prime’s lightning. A great, muffled thud rocked the whole building, making the walls shake and sway; it was followed a second later by the sound of the explosion tearing through the cavernous basement, knocking down some of the pillars, hopefully, and tearing through the ceiling.

  The whole place suddenly felt very unstable.

  “Forget the lift,” he said. “Just find a window and get out!”

  ***

  At the top of the staircase, they witnessed the devastation that they had wrought. Zeke stared amazed as the walls began to slide over. A great hole was forming in the middle of the observatory, which they spied at the end of a corridor. There were seven bodies or so—it was hard to tell, as they were so mangled—strewn over the approach to the staircase, all in pieces. More intact corpses met them later on, four in total, all with single shot wounds to the head.

  It was all Mara’s work, no doubt. She had shot the first few and then, finding them all running towards the basement, had lobbed a grenade in. Without her, they would have been swamped. She had literally just saved their lives.

  “There!” she said, pointing. A row of windows out to the grassy mountainside stood smashed in. They ran over to them and vaulted outside, dropping eight feet or so on the other side and landing painfully. However, none of them paid the pain or the further injuries any attention: they were all more than half-dead anyway, and the adrenaline kept them from lingering.

  Chapter Fourteen

  They sprinted away, heading towards what looked like a disused customer carpark from when the place took visitors—before the breaches opened and any of this madness happened. There was a chain link around the carpark, rent apart in many places, and Zeke pulled at the edges of one of the openings. He pulled it wide enough for them all to get through as a keening wail went up behind them. The final warlocks, stuck in the upper stories of the castle, were bellowing their fury.

  No doubt they would begin to work their magics soon enough. Davidoff had no idea what they were capable of. For all he knew, they would be able to get themselves out of the building, save it from collapse and then head the three of them off.

  “Hurry!” he shouted, and they all made their way inside.

  There were overturned, broken cars dotted over the whole lot. A few more looked promising, however. There was an abandoned sports car nearby, one wheel missing and signs of smoke damage across its body. There was also a hummer on the other side of the carpark, but its engine was exposed and looked like it, too, had sustained some heavy fire damage.

  “Take a look at this,” Zeke said, pointing to a few abandoned bikes. Three looked like dirt bikes, only bigger, whilst another was a quadbike—useful in these bumpy, mountainous terrains. “Come on,” he grunted, limping over to them as Davidoff and Mara followed.

  They were all exhausted. They all moved slowly, their breathing labored and their joints beginning to ache. “Can you get them to run?” Mara asked Zeke as Davidoff scanned everywhere for enemies.

  “Mm.” Zeke nodded, crouching down beside one and pulling a few tools from his belt. “This bike should be good, as should the quad,” he said. He set to work, muttering and swearing. “Yeah, give me two minutes. I’ll fix this one’s engine up a bit,” he told them, patting one of the dirt bikes. “The quadbike is good to go, but I’ll need to siphon off some fuel from the other bikes.”

  While he did that, Davidoff and Mara kept guard. Mara set her rifle up, configured for sniping, on the side of an overturned car. She scanned the sloping hill leading up to the observatory, squinting to see through the thick, black smoke roiling out from the basement. As she did so, Davidoff walked to the carpark’s edge, his Uzi in hand, though only at half ammo, to defend the other side should the need arise.

  A shot whipped the air, cracking with a tremendous snap of recoil. Davidoff jumped and glanced around as another shot rang out.

  Mara’s barrel was smoking and she looked tense, white-faced and sickly. Up the hill, a warlock was falling down. She was a young woman in smart clothes, clutching at her stomach as she bled out. Another warlock ran out, choking on the smoke. He was in an expensive waistcoat with dark trousers, with a collarless shirt and shining wristwatch. As he fled, he noticed his companion dying in the grass and a look of fury wrote itself over his face. He looked like he began to swell, and white light surrounded him. Stones and fallen debris began to lift up around him, compelled into the air by his telekinesis. However, before he could find his attackers, before he could fling anything their way, Mara fired once more, sighting a perfect shot from her rifle.

  The bullet caught the young man in the collarbone, shattering it and sending him reeling backwards. The nimbus around his body died down and the objects he had been lifting all fell back to the floor. He twitched a couple of times and then lay still, dead.

  “Come on!” Zeke shouted. There was a roar as Davidoff and Mara turned to look at him. The motorbike’s engine had sprung to life, as had the quadbike’s. They both stood purring next to Zeke as the big man smiled, proud of himself.

  Davidoff took the quadbike, telling Zeke to sit on the back. His friend was in a bad shape: he had lost too much HP at the warlocks’ hands. He was still bleeding a little—Davidoff would have to tend to him as soon as they found somewhere to hide on their way back to the compound—and he was wheezing badly. The lightning bolt had clearly done more damage than expected.

  Mara, who was in little better shape, took the motorbike. “Are you going to be fi—” Davidoff began as she threw her leg over the saddle, but his words faltered as she glared at him. There was such dark menace in her eyes that he did not dare question her. Indeed, she looked so determined that he thought her wounds would not slow her much at all.

  They revved their engines and sped off, away from the carpark, down to a winding road that took them halfway down the peek and around to the other side. They found a main road and a gate, leading out to it from the observatory. A couple of warlocks were on guard, which was why they could not come up this way. However, with the smoke billowing up from the observatory’s main building, the guards were shaken and hesitant. Mara had her rifle set to combat mode, full auto, and she sprayed the little booth they were stood beside. She sprayed the ground at their feet and she caught a few shots into their legs and lower stomachs.

  They fell to the floor, crying, and Mara put one down with a headshot as she cycled past. Davidoff ran over the other, bucking his quadbike and eliciting a sickening crunch as the warlock expired.

  Then came the moment of truth. As they cycled off, Davidoff hit the
button on Zeke’s remote detonator, hoping against hope that it would work. At the moment, they had tumbled about a quarter of the castle in. It was unusable now, and it was certainly unsafe, but he did not know if it would count as being ‘blown up’ to the mission parameters.

  He had no need to fear, however, his friend had done his work well. Zeke’s explosives turned out to be epic. A great thud went out behind them as he pushed down on the button and they sped away along a long ridge of rock face. They all stopped their bikes and turned to look, far enough away now for safety, and saw the walls and the remaining windows on the first floor being blown outwards. As the first floor came out, the top floors hovered as if in slow motion. Then, their support gone and time and gravity catching up with them, they too tumbled downwards. The great dome at the observatory’s top fell in, and then all was lost as dust and fire rose up.

  Davidoff looked at their timer, but as he did so it froze. Then it disappeared entirely, blinking out of existence. The world shook, the pixelated lines returned, framing everything, and then some words appeared:

  OBJECTIVE COMPLETE: MISSION SUCCESS

  RETURN TO BASE: STATUS_URGENT

  They made fast enough progress, with Mara out a hundred feet or so ahead of them, guiding them back to the military compound in which Dr. Finkelstein and the others were waiting for them. Within a couple of hours, as the sun began to set to the west, they were about halfway there. Their bikes, whilst less secure than the jeep they had brought up here, were far faster over this terrain. Mara had managed to find them a couple of shortcuts that the jeep would not have been able to pass over, shaving a great deal of time off their route.

  Zeke kept one beefy arm around Davidoff’s waist the whole way. For the most part, he kept a decent grip, strong and sure. Davidoff could feel his friend alert on the seat behind him. However, a few times he felt Zeke go limp, sliding over to one side or another, and he had to shout to wake him up. “Come on, buddy, nearly there!” he kept having to say. Zeke, dazed and injured more than half-dead, realistically, kept jerking upright again, muttering about how he was OK.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he would grumble. “I’m fine. Honest, I’m fine.”

  But Davidoff was getting worried, both about Zeke and about Mara. Though she looked confident on her bike, cycling straight and true and managing a couple of steep hills that they had to zigzag down to make good time, he knew how much damage she had absorbed.

  It was too early yet for the woods to come too much alive. They saw a couple of shapes loping off in the distance, but nothing too much for the first couple of hours. However, as their third hour of traveling passed them by and the darkness began to grow across the east, a blood-red sunset breaking out across the western ranges of the mountain tops, they caught their first really troubling sight.

  They were cycling across the top of a high ridge, skipping the tracks below and taking a direct route. The mountain’s sides fell down steeply around them, forming into a high plain on one side and a deep, twisted gorge on the other. The gorge chewed through the terrain to their right hand side, flooded with the sunset’s blood-red glow.

  “Damn, buddy. Do you see what I see?” Zeke called out, his voice hoarse. He was pointing downwards, into the gorge.

  Davidoff peered down and his heart sank. There, a mile or so below them, he saw a couple of figures in groups. Some of them held electric torches whilst others were burning brands, and they were formed into three distinct clumps, each one a half mile or so apart.

  “Mara, hey, Mara,” Davidoff radioed, signaling her.

  “Yeah, what is it?” her voice came back to him. He saw her up ahead, shrugging the radio clipped to her vest up to her mouth.

  “Stop,” Davidoff said. “Pull over. Zeke’s spotted something.”

  Mara made a halt and waited for them to catch up. They all jumped off their bikes and crept over to the edge of the ridge’s cliff faces. A vicious wind whipped at them, carrying with it a rancid stench. Across, on the other side of the gorge, they sighted a few twinkling, sickly-looking lights. They had already met a couple of those rents in reality, those warping holes through which all this foul power emanated. Now they saw it down there, seeming to follow those groups.

  Davidoff took out his telescope, Mara her binoculars, as Zeke looked through his bolt rifle’s scope.

  Down below, there was indeed a mob heading through the gorge, pushing through the low foliage and splashing through a thin stream that cut its way down from the higher slopes to the north. There were four groups in total. The nearest was about a half-mile back behind them, whilst the closest two were almost directly below them. Each was made up of fifteen or so zombies and other mutants, drawn from the forests and surrounding towns. Ghouls capered amongst them, some running ahead as their leaders marched at the front of each gaggle of zombies.

  The group farthest away, about two miles ahead of them, cresting the edge of the gorge and about to descend to a wide, forested basin below, was larger by far. A good fifty creatures formed a loose group. Animals warped out of all sense of reality trotted along. Horses with scaled flesh and great, ridged spines poking out through their skin; wild mountain bears with glowing eyes, and great horns cresting their brows. Zombies staggered around them, walking quickly with jerky motions, animated by the ghouls around them. At the head of the group, riding a great elk with mutations covering its body, sat a large ghoul gripping an automatic rifle in one hand and a long, two-handed wood chopping axe in the other.

  Without thinking about it, all three, Davidoff, Zeke and Mara, knew that he was leading them. This was his army. Or, at least, this was his part of a larger army. That thought did occur to Davidoff, making him shudder.

  “Where do you think they’re heading for?” Zeke asked, his voice sounding strangled.

  “These mountain paths only lead one place,” Mara said grimly. “They all go down to the forests surrounding the military compound.”

  “You think they’re planning to attack it?” Davidoff asked, and Mara nodded, almost imperceptibly in the dusky half-light.

  “Could be,” she said. “It seems likely, at least.”

  Davidoff swore. “We need to warn them,” he said. “We need to get out ahead of them.”

  They leapt back onto their bikes, revved their engines, lit their headlights and carried on, only an hour or so away from the compound’s forests and moving fast.

  ***

  Twenty minutes later, as they bumped down a long track that wound its way between a couple of minor peaks, about fifty feet above the forest and descending fast, Mara gestured down to one side. A steep drop revealed another ravine to the east. They stopped their bikes once more and went for a look.

  Zeke pulled a face. “Look how many there are…” he whispered, staring through his gun sights.

  Another few groups were below. It was dark enough by now that they could not make out any individual figures. However, both electric and flaming torches dotted the ravine, a good fifty or so of them, and each one showing at least a dozen or so zombies, ghouls and worse. At the ravine’s far end, back where the three had just come from, another swarm of torches was beginning to appear around a humped bend in the mountains’ footprints. There could have been a thousand or there could have been ten thousand in total. There was no way at all of knowing.

  “But either way,” Davidoff whispered. “We’ll need to reach the compound before them. They’ll need warning, and we are vulnerable out here.”

  ***

  They made the woods and found the route that Mara wanted. They had managed to leave the hordes behind them, falling away as the bikes sped along. The ghouls were leading their armies mostly on foot, so there was no way to keep up with them.

  However, the thought of being caught out here was never the point. It had never been the thing to truly scare Davidoff. It was the relentless tide that freaked him out. They would come slowly but they would not stop. Ever. The players and the AIs
in the compound would have a good few hours in which to prepare, but they would have to fight off an inevitable tide that could break against their walls a hundred times or more without losing pace.

  We will be drowned by them all, he thought to himself. He shook his head, trying to clear away such negative images, such horrible feelings, and he partially succeeded. However, just as they broke out of one patch of trees, a screech rang out above their heads.

  There was a wide open space before them, and then there was more forest bisected by the main road, which they could join as it curved through the lot. Once they were on it, it was plain sailing: they would make the compound’s outer fences in a few minutes of fast cycling. But as they emerged through the bushes and trees into the open glade, surrounded by knee-high grasses and clumps of boulders, that shriek rang again and again. Like some kind of giant carrion bird searching for its meal.

  Mara drove her dirt bike into the middle of the open space, intent on getting back to the compound, but Davidoff slowed, waiting by the edge near the treeline. That screech came again and again, and he radioed to Mara. “Double back, meet us here,” he whispered into it. “There is something up in the sky. You’re far too exposed.”

  He heard the whine of Mara’s engine change and he saw her headlights swing around to face him. She sped on, back uphill to where he and Zeke waited. Davidoff cut their engine and both jumped down, peering up into the sky. Something was definitely moving up there. There were a couple of times when he discerned a shadow moving, dark against the dark sky.

  Then, when she was only twenty meters away, Mara shouted out. She leapt from her bike, tucking and rolling over as she hit the ground hard. The bike itself sped along a few more meters before veering. It fell onto its side and lay in the grass, its motor humming away gently to itself.

  Something had swooped down out of the sky at Mara. Davidoff saw a little blood on her forehead as she stood up from her fall, her assault rifle raised and at the ready. Another shadow dove in close by, then another. One of them grabbed Mara’s dirt bike and tossed it eight feet away before disappearing once more, but two more beasts flew in close to Davidoff and Zeke, giving him a good enough look at them.