Selected Short Stories Featuring Ghost Dust

by Nicolas Wilson

falls with the blade still stuck in the bone. Jack kneels and grabs the knife, wipes it across his pant leg and sheaths it, but before he stands back up he notices a key around the guard's neck and takes it.

  Sure enough, it opens up the metal door, and suddenly I remember what it smelled like at my uncle's farm, where they slaughtered pigs; it smells like shit, entrails, and death. There's no concrete on the floor, just an earthen pit, and I'm reminded of a news story I saw about a dog-fighting ring. I can hear breathing that doesn't sound like it should be coming from anything God created, and I raise my M16 just a little.

  Jack pushes my barrel back towards the ground; “Hold fire” he whispers. The air is full of dust and dirt, and there's only a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and suddenly I can see the outline he's seeing, the vaguest hint of something nearly human, kneeling in the dirt.

  As the dust settles, we can see it's a man. His left eye's gone, along with the eyelid and flesh around and in the socket. His jaw's been broken and rebroken, allowed to heal up wrong and broken some more. He's got three or four teeth left in his head, and at least one seems like it's been put in backwards, and the jaw's so mangled that the tooth keeps stabbing a hole into the skin around his mouth where he should have lips.

  He's naked, but I can't see a single strip of flesh that hasn't been burned or scarred somehow; his genitals are gone, but there must be some kind of open wound there because it's still dripping. His left arm's been severed just below the elbow, then sewed into his back; it must be a newer procedure, because every few seconds he forgets and yanks on it, then screams in pain and frustration at the result. His right leg is gone from just above the knee- that's why he's kneeling.

  He's got part of a finger left, just below the first knuckle, on his right hand. I think it's his ring finger, but there are so damned many scars and protrusions where broken bones healed up bad that it's impossible to tell without getting closer- and I know if I get any closer I'm going to seriously lose it. He snarls and yelps at us like a sick, frightened, confused old dog; he isn't human anymore, hasn't been human for a long fucking time- he's even past feral to a point where, without some kind of care he'd up and die. Then he loses interest in us at all, dives at the ground into a mound of human feces, rotting meat and spoiled vegetables and begins to gorge himself.

  Jack takes a step forward, and the movement makes him sit up and take notice. “Robert? Sergeant?” The creature stares blankly at him. Jack lets out a sigh that comes out as “Fuck.” There's no coming back from that- I don't know if any human being has ever been so thoroughly broken as that. Jack takes out his 1911, and for an instant I think in the eyes he sees just enough of of Robert recognize him, understands, and gives his blessing before Jack shoots him in the head. For what it's worth, he has a smile on his face as he dies.

  The silence in the room is worse than the unease had been. I want to do something, pat him in the shoulder, or- I don't even know. But not doing anything seems inhuman, though I suspect it's more for me than him.

  Jack kneels down by Robert, starts in on him with the knife. I feel like I'm going to vomit, because I can't for the life of me imagine what the hell's going on. Then he stands up, stretches out his hand to me, and I'm reminded of hunting with my dad, and he cut out a deer's eye and tried to talk me into eating it to gain its strength and I barely choke back vomit. Jack opens his fingers, and I see Robert's remaining teeth. “I need to know,” he says.

  I only glanced at the dental records for a few seconds, but I don't have much doubt, and even if I did, the teeth match, at least on a cursory glance. I shake my head to affirm it.

  And then Jack turns and fires a shot from his 1911, and in a dark corner of the room a man cries out, falls into the dirt. Jack walks quickly over to him, and pulls him into the light. He's older, fatter, maybe meaner, but it's Lo. He knows Jack, knows what comes next, and is trying for all the world to be defiant. His jaw sets in a snarl, and he's about to say something snarky, one last parting shot to try and unman Jack or Robert or both of them; Jack grabs his jaw in one hand and Lo's skull in the other and pulls them apart. Lo's eyes widen and he starts to whimper until there's a loud, wet crack as his jaw breaks on its way out of the socket. He screams in pain, tears already coming out of his eyes.

  Jack turns to me. “Leave. You don't want to see this. If you feel the need to stick around, you can watch the door for me.” Wild horses pulling in the opposite direction couldn't keep me here, but before I get two feet away he says, “Wait- duct tape.” I hand him the roll and he tears away a strip. “He doesn't get to scream. The men you took, didn't get to be heard- Bob didn't get to die with a free word on his tongue- so neither do you.” He puts the strip of tape over Lo's distended mouth, and he's thankfully muffled as I close the metal door behind me.

  A lot of time passes. I try to focus on the noises in the house, creaking stairs, settling foundation, not the sounds of bones broken, meat falling into the dirt. I realize I haven't slept since last night, that I'm fatigued, but I know I can't rest now- and worse, knowing that the paranoia at every whispered sound grows. I'm midway through an elaborate fantasy about my own tortured death by the hands of Lo's associates when Jack emerges. He takes the duffel from me without a word, and leads me upstairs.

  He hot wires one of Lo's cars, a yellow Jag, and I'm edgier than I've been since the last time somebody shot at us, convinced that this is too close to the end for something horrible not to happen to one or both of us. And then the car turns over, and he opens the passenger side for me and I get in and close the door. A Jag might not be bullet proof, but it's a cocoon, a safe place from which I'll emerge clean and new and unrelated to all the horror of the past few hours.

  And I realize as we wait at the first stop light off Lo's property that so will Jack. “It's over now, isn't it. You can go home.” He stares at me, with eyes that shove into my guts and carve out a cavern; he doesn't need to tell me it's been a long time since he's had a home to get to.

  He wrinkles his nose, like he'd stepped in something foul, then forces his face back into the same, dead mask he's been wearing since this started. “Lot of mad men in the world. Think they ought to meet me.” The light goes green, but he doesn't go anywhere, instead he fixes me with a look, and it's the first time his eyes have betrayed anything like humanity. “The wife- she was bad people. Don't let it weigh too much on you.”

  I sigh; my shoulders are heavy and I tell myself it's the heft of the M16 I'm not used to. “What's too much?”

  “I don't know,” he says, as he eases on the gas.

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  Raider

  I want to believe this is normal. Yesterday afternoon, I met with an oncology specialist. He examined the biopsy, and said that I tested positive for a BRCA1 mutation and confirmed the original diagnosis, breast cancer, and his suggestion was the same: modified radical mastectomy. He suggested we start chemo immediately, and instead I went to Egypt, to Deir el-Bahri, near Luxor. It is part of the Valley of the Kings, and specifically, the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut.

  One of her many claims to fame was an expedition to Punt, which brought back thirty frankincense trees, all of which she had planted at Dier el-Bahri. Hatshepsut is also infamous for her relation to the goddess Sekhmet. She’s usually portrayed as a bloodthirsty war goddess, but somehow she’s also in charge of the physicians. Anyway, Hatshepsut threw an extravagant annual party for Sekhmet that involved everyone drinking vast quantities of wine, which of course led to vast quantities of sex.

  Sekhmet’s relationship to medicine are a little hard to define, but a Nepalese aspect, Simhamukha, is actively involved in subduing the spirits involved with disease. I don’t believe in Egyptian or other New Age medicine- but I do believe there was something to the myth of Sekhmet. Or maybe it’s just that I approve of an ancient ritual based around bacchanalia; I’ve had my marshes traveled through a time or two. But after Hatshepsut’s reign, the “porch of drunkennes
s” she’d built for Sekhmet was moved to her tomb.

  Eventually, the porch was destroyed, likely by Amenhotep II when he was trying to erase the memory of people who might have a stronger claim to the Thutmose lineage, and her body was removed from her tomb. There have been various mummies and organs believed to be hers over the years, though there is at least one other royal Hatshepsut, from the 21st Dynasty, muddying the waters.

  It’s cold. Sometimes I forget that desert doesn’t mean hot all the time; deserts are hot in the day, and cold as Hell at night. Deir el-Bahri was once a major tourist draw, until the Luxor massacre, where almost sixty tourists were killed by Islamic terrorists. There’s still usually a steady stream of people during the day; that’s why I waited til night (well, that and the horrendous jetlag).

  As dirt grinds beneath my heel and ancient stone, I desperately want to believe this is normal, that I haven’t lost my mind, that I’m not just stuck in the denial phase of grief. That any reasonable woman in my position would also be skulking through an Egyptian crypt at night in search of some ancient panacea- because the alternative, that this disease has broken me, is too much to bear.

  It’s