Ghouls

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

John Sanders looked in the mirror for the first time in a year. Deep gouges channeled most of the left side of his face; the effect made him think of tooled wax. It was as though this part of his face had been sluiced away by a spade bit, and his identity as well. The largest scar ran wormlike from the corner of his lip to the back of his jaw. He could still make out the tiny ladders of stitches which formed crescents under his eye; it was makeshift repairwork, but at least he could still blink normally. That’s all that mattered. He supposed he just as easily could have lost the eye.

By most people’s standards, his face was hideous, though John Sanders did not ordinarily regard anyone’s standards but his own. This was not reactive rationalization (he had felt this way even when the bandages had come off), and now, staring at the damage seven years later, he clearly recognized how lucky he’d been. It was luck that he hadn’t bled to death in minutes, and to this day he found it miraculous that he’d even made it off the ridge alive. O’Brien and Kinnet hadn’t been so lucky. He’d watched them die. He remembered.

Sanders didn’t care about his face; he didn’t need a face to live. He needed a brain, eyes, arms and legs, and he had all of those things. His face was unimportant. So what if people stared at him? He didn’t need people. So what if the sight of his face caused women to shudder. He didn’t need women. He didn’t need anybody.

Soon after his Med Evac from Riyadh, oro-facial surgeons at Walter Reed Army Medical Center had scheduled a dozen corrective operations, but had stopped after the first. They’d told him then that his was not a case of routine plastic surgery—to embark on a succession of operations this serious might prove more experiment than improvement as an end result. Tissue damage had been extensive. Some of the facial muscle groups had been routed from their seats; while other tracts had been not just severed, but removed, ripped away completely.

It had been Sanders’s decision then to decline on the option of corrective surgery.

Suddenly the mirror held him; it took him back. Fragments of the dim past assailed him, like scenes and images lost in faded films. Tactility. Sound. Hectic motion. A million sensations fogged by time and tricyclic drugs.

He could still feel the elastic snap, when it had hooked its alien hand onto his face and tugged.

Could still hear the slunking pop as he’d thrust his knife into its coarse, sinuous abdomen.

The night-piercing shriek of its pain.

The vision of his own life before his eyes.

And the fat, dull explosion of white phosphorus.

Thinking back now it all seemed too bizarre, such that he could barely believe it himself—but he knew it had happened. He knew. The doctors had offered countless linear explanations, matched with bland faces and treacherous eyes. Their list of speculation rolled on like the mutterings of a language from another world. Ideas of reference asserted through reversed monomania. Neuroleptic toxicity, undifferentiated hallucinotic schizophrenia. Myxedema, right cerebral dysfunction. Involutional depression and paranoid features. Unsystematized delusional insanity.

These were Sanders’s rewards for the truth, a psychological profile that would make Charles Manson seem straight. And the doctors had laughed at him, too. Silently. The way all psychiatrists laughed.

Further reward had been expeditious medical discharge, free air fare home care of an Air Force C-141 MED EVAC flight, and seven years of restricted psychiatric environment.

That’s about enough, he commanded himself. He turned from the mirror and faced the room he’d rented. Room 6. $37.50 per day. Reduced rates for five days or more. The deal of the century, for sure.

Room 6 was a compressed pit. It came complete with a sagging bed, a fiberboard desk, two shaded lamps, and a bathroom the size of a broom closet. All the comforts of home. The floor was bare wood, and the white-painted walls had begun to tint yellow from age, neglect, and cigarette smoke. Behind him stood a squat dresser enameled a hundred times over. Dust clung to the baseboards, and formed clotted balls which lurked beneath the bed. In the wastebasket he noticed several bloody napkins, a pair of torn panties, and no less than four prophylactics, used, he had to presume. Pressed into the wall just over the bed were two smudged handprints.

His duffelbag hung empty in the closet; he’d already unpacked his things, and had arranged them in the dresser. He’d been fortunate that the Uniformed Code of Military Justice did not restrict private ownership of bullet-proof vests, though such items could never be worn on duty unless they were general issue. This was not general issue. The Bristol grade-25 protective vest lay in the drawer like a black, perverse girdle. It was British-made, with front, back, and pelvic panels composed of Kevlar and a fiber-reinforced plastics composite that would stop up to a 9mm submachine gun round at 75 feet. He’d won it in a card game in Germany. The half-dozen dents in the ballistic material were barely evident, and he thought again of how lucky he’d been.

From the drawer he removed his set of ancient HPC lock picks. His MOS qualifications for armorer and lock technician had protected these from customs. He opened the black, zippered case, which was approximately the size of a prayer book, and surveyed the assortment of black, spring-steel implements. These tools might prove vital in the next few days. He would have to brush up on his technique, though; it had been a while since he’d last practiced.

Last was his stash belt, his portable bank. It sat in the drawer like a dead snake. Within its zippered lining he stored his current funds, a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks. Florida was still his legal place of residence, even though he hadn’t actually been there in years. During his hospitalization, then, his VA disability checks had been sent to a bank in Sarasota, via direct deposit. The thousand in the belt, plus his ready cash, was the remainder of his TDRL pay from the Army, which he’d kept in an account at the patients’ funds office until his release.

Officially, only sixty-six pounds of on-carry freight per man were allowed on any MAC flight, though an additional ten pounds were allowed to slip by if properly tied to the duffel in a standard G.I. string bag. It was from this that customs had confiscated the only things from Sanders’s air baggage: deodorant, shaving cream (aerosol cans were not permitted in any military air freight compartment), a lizard-skin wallet, and his set of Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knives. All lost without consequence.

Bored, Sanders opened the door and stood wide within its frame, looking out. The night air rushed him and seemed heavy with dank, sweet scents. From all around came the anapestic calls of crickets. Darkness had settled fully now, a murky deceptive dark which he’d noticed frequently since coming back to the World. The moon was smeared by clouds to just a faint blur overhead; he could hardly tell the sky from the woodline on the other side of the highway. The sign at the end of the parking lot burned GEIN’S MOTEL in hot blue neon. He peered at the sign strangely, as if someone might be hiding behind it.

The danger was easy to see. At least he hadn’t lost all his operational foresight. He would need a good weapon before he began, and that might require a favor. There were many favors owed, though, and Sanders thought of May 1968, Delaware Offensive, Quang Tri Province, and a good, good friend named Jack Wilson. It was time to cash that favor in. He remembered well the whoosh-tick-bam of Soviet-made wire-guided rockets as they impacted Detroit steelplate.

Inexplicably, the word ghala came to mind, and with it a chill bolted up Sanders’s back to his brain. He yielded to the dark thoughts and wondered just what he might be getting himself into for the sake of curiosity and an uncollected debt.

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