The first part of chapter 2, called “The Ghoul” so far.
Wordcount so far: 13,8K.
I’ve been writing on and off on this chapter so I’m sorry if it’s a bit unbalanced. The story is branching off in a totally weird direction. It has zombies now! Who would have thought? Yeah, I know. It scares me too. *grins* I still have no idea where this thing is going, only the faintest idea of the next scened. But where it’ll end up… I have no clue. It’s strange, to write without planning. But most of all, it’s slow.
Dead in the Water
Chapter 2: The Ghoul
I:
It all seemed some crazy nightmare to Nadine. She still had her wallet and her mp3 player in the back pocket of her baggy jeans, because she was supposed to go shopping today… and here she found herself under the amber sky of a stinking dead world that was not her own with a sobbing guy next to her. She’d taken drugs once and experienced the most terrifying dreams, but those were nothing compared to what was happening to her right now. Jordan’s heartbroken sobs were too real and too close to home; it reminded her so vividly what it was like to lose everything. Never mind the stench.
Nadine reached out to the young man who brought him here and hugged him tightly to offer some superfluous comfort. It would not make him feel better, it would not help the situation, but at least it told him that he was not alone. “I’m so very sorry,” she murmured while his tears were wetting her neck and her t-shirt.
“It’s all gone,” Jordan wept. He was completely oblivious to her words but probably responded to the sound of her voice. “It can’t be, it can’t be, it’s not fair, I promised, I /promised/…”
She just held him and felt her heart bleed for him until hot tears were trickling down her face as well. She did not know whether she was crying for him, for the images of the world he had conjured for her, or because she knew so well how it was to lose something you lived for, but she shed a few tears with him.
All the while, the oppressive scent of the world was ravaging her nose. It was sweet, like rotting roses. It made her light-headed and tickled her gag-reflex; it was horrible to just stay here for too long. “Jordan,” she said eventually. “Jordan, we need to get out of here, we need to do something.” She hated herself for cutting into his grief like this, but she remembered that distraction had helped her to get out of her pit of despair last year. They’d made her do things to make sure she did not drown in her grief, and it had helped. At first she had resented them for bothering her but in the end she had seen that they were right.
“You don’t understand Nadine,” he started, wiping his face with the back of his hand as she let go of him.
She shook her head. “I do, I know what it’s like to have your whole world crash down upon you. But you can stay here and grieve, or we could go into the city and see what is left, and see if we can find survivors.”
“Save yourself the trouble,” a voice behind them rasped.
Nadine whirled around, but Jordan was faster: he was already standing, his glittery sword softly reflecting in the amber hue of the sky and completely ready for battle, utter grief or no. She could feel him more than she saw him, for her eyes were drawn to the newcomer.
Instantly, she had to fight nausea.
It was not quite human, what was standing on the hilltop, facing them. He was sitting on some sort of vehicle that was emitting a low hum that they must have missed previously; and the creature itself… it had all the characteristics of a human being. It should have been a human being. A dead one, that was.
Nadine had seen many horror movies on nights out with friends, and this creature looked like one of those zombies. Even in the sickly amber light its skin looked so pale it was almost translucent. Its eyes were empty, its face slack and devoid of any emotion. Still, there was a precision, a control to the way the creature moved and regarded them. There was more than a little intelligence there… but that was not the worst.
The worst thing was that there was light around it. The light was a misty and sickly amber, like the clouded skies… and it swirled around him… and in and out of him like a living thing; entering its ears, its nose, its mouth. It was breathing the amber light, emitted it and sucked it right back again. In and out, swirling around, and in and out… over and over again. Like a living entity.
The light looks more alive than that guy is…. Nadine’s stomach churned with the wrongness of this being. “Who are you?” she asked. She had to swallow back the bile in the back of her throat.
“What are you?” Jordan added. His hands were clenching around the hilt of his sword.
Something that should have been a smile was spreading over the creature’s face. “I am your escort,” he said in that dry, raspy voice. “Would you please come with me?” It must have been human once; a rather attractive young man with dark eyes and curly black hair. Now… it was a travesty of a human being. All of Nadine’s instincts were telling her to run away very quickly. That thing was so wrong and unnatural! It looked like the light was feeding upon it, like some sort of parasite. It repulsed her.
“I don’t think so.”
Nadine shot a grateful glance on the young man next to her. At least he felt it too. “Where were you planning to take us anyway?”
The thing waved in the general direction of the city. “To the Processor,” he said in that awful voice. Christ, did he lose half of his vocal cords in whatever happened when he turned zombie?
Nadine rubbed over her arms against the gooseflesh that was creeping up while she tried to imagine what the hell the zombie-thing was talking about. “That doesn’t sound very appealing,” she murmured. “So, what happens there?”
“You’ll become one of them,” Jordan said. His voice sounded steely, determined. “And that is not something you’d want.”
And then the thing smiled all of a sudden. It was more of a jerking twitch around the mouth, but it was a smirk nonetheless. And it made Nadine want to break into a dead run even more fervently. “Just you,” the thing said, its dead stare focusing on Jordan. “You’d be Processed. You’ll be one of us.” The creepy smile flashed again as empty eyes turned to Nadine. “The female… she will just be raped, her power stolen, and killed. Not necessarily in that order.”
Nadine’s hands froze in their rubbing. Her heart skipped a beat. “What?”
“I completely refuse,” Jordan said.
“Refusal is pointless.”
“Not really. I’m the one with the sword,” Jordan reminded it.
The thing reached inside the vehicle and produced a weapon that looked disturbingly like a machine gun. “Refusal is pointless,” it repeated. “You could also be killed on the spot, raped, etcetera.”
Her heart was beating in her throat. “Um, Jordan…?”
There was an audible click as the safety on the zombie-thing’s gun was taken off.
“Working on it,” Jordan growled. His brow furrowed with concentration.
The machine gun was cocked, aimed in their direction…
…and the next moment the world darkened and they found themselves in the veils again. Around them, bullets were cutting through the air, missing their target as shimmers took their place.
They had parted the Veils of Reality at exactly the right time, with less than hundreds of a second to spare. One heartbeat later, and they would have been riddled with bullets. As it was, they were standing in glittery twilight once again.
Panting heavily and shuddering with a jolt of adrenaline, Nadine let go of Jordan. “What the FUCK was that?”
The sword dropped onto tangible darkness and a small butter-coloured light sprung up while around them, Jordan’s world faded into darkness. He sat down on the ground, his hands buried in his dark blond hair. “This is what the Riveira family protected us from for all those generations. Obviously, we lost our protection, and we lost our world.”
She sat down next to him and tried to regulate her breathing. She was still shuddering. “But what the fuck was that? It looked like a fucking zombie!”
“Not quite. I’ve heard of your zombies. This is… worse. These creatures don’t eat your brain. They are corrupted and robbed of their personality until there is nothing left. It’s like they are overwritten with a new purpose, and the mist nurtures them and feeds on them to keep them standing and functioning. They are our bogeymen. My sister used to scare me with them when I was a kid. We called them ghouls, but they aren’t of course.”
“Ghouls.”
“Yeah. I used to wet my pants just thinking of them. I would lay awake in bed, watching the dark corners of my rooms, unable to sleep. And my mother, she would say that ghouls aren’t real, that they don’t exist thanks to the Riveira family, and that I shouldn’t worry.” He laughed, unbelieving. “And now they walk, and I’ve seen one. And I talked to it.”
“Can it come after us?”
He jerked up, frowning at her. “NO. Ghouls can’t part the Veils. Don’t even start thinking those things, or you will create one for us to deal with. Please.”
That was at least something. But then another thought hit her, based on the threats that were handed out by the ghoul. “But if you would be zombified… ghoulified… or processed, like that thing said. Would you, or your ghoul-you, or whatever… would that thing be able to come here?”
“Quite possibly,” he said with some hesitation. “I don’t see why not. There is both talent and intelligence in ghouls, based on what they used to be as a human. Technically, it should be possible.”
Dread was creeping up her spine. “But if this… thing happened to the whole world. If everyone has been processed and the world is dead, and they are walking dead… you said there were more Travelers like you, right?”
Jordan’s eyes widened as he followed her line of thought. “Then this would be spreading already. Then the Veils wouldn’t limit this to my world, and other worlds would perish like mine.” He buried his face in his hands. “Oh Diane,” he murmured, “why didn’t you hold out a little bit longer?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck…” Nadine squeezed her eyes shut. She had to try and hamper her imagination running away with her, as images of her own ruined world were popping up in her mind. She shouldn’t go there, before she knew it she’d have molded the Veils into something they couldn’t get out of. “How long before it reaches my world?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know? It’ll get there eventually,” he spat. “I don’t know how long you’ve got, but what does it matter? It’s all over. Everything is gone, and the rest will go soon.” He sighed. “I suppose I should take you home, and you can enjoy the time you’ve left. Maybe your presence in your world will make sure that your world will be the last to fall.”
It was no use. Her mind was racing with possibilities, each one more grisly than the other. She thought of her friends, her shoddy apartment, the pub she liked to hang out. She thought of the sky over the city she’d lived her whole life, sickly amber – and ghouls. Ghouls everywhere, with the mist around them, feeding upon them. The thought nauseated her. “There is no way we could stop that, is there?”
“If there is, I can’t think of any.”
There was gooseflesh on her arms. Even though there was no cold or warmth between the Veils, she was shivering. “And those ghouls will be everywhere. And the mist will… rape… and mutilate… everything. And in the end, no one, /nothing/ would be safe.” She looked up at her companion, the young man that had taken her from her own world – so determined, so much like a classic movie hero if she’d ever seen one – and now all she could see on Jordan’s handsome features was desperation. In the light between them, his hazel eyes were wide and bright with fear and grief.
In that one wordless look, she suddenly understood so much about Jordan Lucenna. She intuitively understood that Jordan was /always/ in control, that he always understood things, he resolved problems. He had come to build upon that certainty that how big the problem, he always was the one to get himself out of it, he always came out on top. If she guessed correctly, then Jordan had never really had anything go completely wrong in his life. Sure, he’d suffered setbacks… but he’d never had his whole world explode in his face before. He’d never sat in the shambles of his life and had to make the best out of the situation.
And his life had very literally exploded in his face – Jordan hadn’t been able to save the situation. He had failed and his whole world was gone. The thought was terrifying. Nadine didn’t feel very good about it, either. She was shuddering uncontrollably by that point, horrified of the few moments she’d spent in that dead world. It was a gruesome promise of what was about to come. And yet… it had not happened yet, for her. Her world was still messed-up and chaotic and polluted and undoubtedly tearing itself apart with wars and diseases… but at least her world was still alive. It was still bright.
So of course Jordan didn’t know where to crawl. He was not equipped to deal with this kind of thing. Then again, who /was/? What would she have done if the roles would be reversed? What if it had been her world, dead and raped by amber parasite-like mists? For her, it was just a gruesome possibility, a nightmare with some promise of coming true. For him… it was reality staring him in the face. Reality, and loss.
That meant that right now, she was the one who had to do things. There was no use sitting around in the space between Realities. She didn’t think it would be very good for them, either. They had to act, they had to do something. “Jordan,” she started, rubbing over the goosebumps on her arms, “what exactly would you have me do when I reached your world? Why did you get me?”
He had his hands buried in her hair and stared at the blackness under his feet, not saying anything.
“Jordan,” she insisted.
“You would have been a place-holder. Something that would ward of the darkness while we tried to mend Diane.”
“You said that she and her family… and me, that we’re talismans. How does that work?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It has to do with something intrinsic to the Beloved Family. Their presence alone warded of the … decay. Or whatever it is. And when they all died, there were outbreaks of the mist. We heard stories of ghouls, but they were quickly contained. We knew then that the stories were true; we needed then that Primeira needed the Riveira’s to keep it safe. But by then, Diane was already dying.”
“But what did she do to make you safe?”
“The stories called it Heartmagic.” He still didn’t look at her, but studied his feet in their black sneakers. “I never understood what it meant. I don’t think that anyone ever did. All we knew was that it kept us safe, and that it kept the decay at bay. What else did we need to know?” He shrugged. “Anyhow, it’s not as if it matters now. It’s too late…”
“Look man, you brought me there for a reason. To do something, to be something. Hell, I don’t know.” She crossed her arms in agitation. “There must be something we can still do. I mean, from what that zombie… ghoul… thing said, they wanted to kill me quickly.” And raped, the thing had said, but she’d rather not dwell on that. Being raped by an undead being was enough to make her want to hurl. “They needed to get rid of me. Somehow… they think that I pose a threat. Even without not knowing me, that thing knew I had to die, and not be… processed, like you.”
He looked up at her now, hazel eyes sparking with some interest. “You might be onto something.”
“Perhaps my presence is just an itch in the ass of whatever it is that killed your world,” she said, “but perhaps it’s more. Perhaps we could do something.” Going home would not help. In a flash, she could see her own future in the shimmery visions that were conjured by her imagination between the Realities. Going home, going about her daily life – her work, the pub, her friends, always with that gnawing feeling of guilt, always knowing that it was all ending, and it would be ending soon. And one morning, she would wake up and the world would be collapsing and there would be panic, there would be news reports on television about the apocalypse, and everyone would die and turn into some sort of zombie. It was inevitable. “I guess I’m dead already. And my world is going to die anyway… so as long as we have a fighting chance… shouldn’t we try to do something about it?”
Brilliance then lit up in his eyes, and Jordan jumped up from his slumped position to embrace her in a tight, joyful hug. “Oh, Nadine! You are true to your family, true to Diane!” He laughed, and his voice broke into something that resembled a sob. “I hear you speak and it’s like I hear Diane.” He buried his face into her hair and all she could do was hug him back awkwardly as he held her tight enough that she had to struggle for breath. “Thank you,” he whispered in her neck. “Thank you…”