Oasis of the Damned Read online

  “I keep hoping so, but I’ve killed so many I lost count.” Satisfied with the fire, Owens returned his sword to his belt. “They just keep coming.”

  Richter was already overheated, dripping, and slick with perspiration from head to toe, and like Owens, she’d begun to smell. “We have to get out of here,” she said softly. “You know that, don’t you? If we stay here, we’ll die. Like the others, Owens, we’ll die.”

  He stared at her dully. Finally, he pulled a canteen from around his neck and tossed it to her. “While the fire burns, we’ll get fresh water and something to eat. It’ll take a few hours more for the remains to burn to ash. When they do, we’ll scatter them, then sleep while we can.”

  “Sleep?” she said through a burst of nervous laughter. “I’ll never sleep again.”

  “Have to be awake long before dark so we can be prepared for tonight.”

  She took a pull from the canteen, then poured some water in her hand and splashed it along the back of her neck. “Why do you fight them every night?” She handed the canteen back to him. “Why not just lock down and ride it out, conserve supplies and only fight when you have to?”

  “Because no matter how big their numbers may be, the more we kill, the fewer there are.” He watched the fire. “And after what they did to the others…and what they might still do to us…they need killing. Some things do. You live long enough, you’ll understand that.”

  “I think I’ve seen enough to know—”

  “You’ve seen nothing,” he snapped. “You got no idea the kinds of things they can do, the things they’ll show you, they—they get in your head and you can’t get them out because they know what matters to us, they know what we love and what we hate. They know what scares us, what breaks us down and makes us vulnerable.”

  Richter squared her stance. Exhausted as she was, she’d had enough of his cryptic nonsense. “I asked before. I’ll ask again. What the hell are these things?”

  “You asked, I told you.”

  “You said they were ghouls.”

  “That’s right, straight out of Hell.”

  “I don’t believe in Hell.”

  “Hell doesn’t care.”

  She stepped closer. “I want answers, you understand me? If you don’t have them—fine—then stop acting like you do and I’m just not ready to hear them. But if you do know more, then you need to tell me and you need to do it now.”

  “Like I said, they’re ghouls.”

  “These aren’t ghosts. They’re flesh-and-blood creatures.”

  Owens blinked sweat from his eyes. “Never said they were ghosts, I said—”

  “Ghouls, right! Sorry—my bad—what was I thinking? These are animals, they’re literal, actual—for Christ’s sake—you’re burning their bodies as we speak!”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Richter clenched her hands into fists. “Say that to me one more time.”

  “Take it easy.”

  “You take it easy. If I don’t understand, then explain it to me so I will.”

  “I don’t want to fight with you, all right?”

  “Then tell me what you know. Please. You’re not out here alone anymore.”

  Owens scratched his beard, gazed out at the dunes, then offered a subtle nod. “All right,” he said softly, “all right.”

  * * *

  Straddling the sandbags, Richter picked at the old military C-ration Owens had given her, something that had once been or was supposed to be hash or stew—she couldn’t tell which—along with a chocolate bar that resembled a small brick. It had virtually no taste, and had the consistency of cardboard, but she scooped the stew with her fingers and ate it greedily. “You sure this stuff is still edible?” she asked, gagging down another mouthful.

  “I’ve been eating them for a while,” Owens told her. Sitting in the sand nearby, he was wiping his swords clean with an old rag. “Taste like shit, but we’re lucky to have them. Get hungry enough, you could eat a lot worse.”

  She motioned to the swords. They were long, with broad, double-edged blades and simply designed, though their somewhat ornate cross-guards gave them something of a medieval look. “Where’d those come from? They’re not military issue like the rest of the supplies and things around here.”

  “They’re Takobas,” he said, wiping the blades with an almost loving precision. “Tuareq swords.”

  Richter knew little about the Tuareq, only that they were Berbers, the principal inhabitants of the desert, a nomadic people who continually traversed the Sahara and had done so for thousands of years.

  “They stay clear of this place,” he explained, “but there were some here at one point. These are all that are left.”

  Richter looked out at the fire. It continued to burn and break down the remains to ash. She wondered if one day some other lost soul might find something of hers in this hellhole, the only remnant of yet another ghost lost to a blinding sun, shifting sands and dark nights of demonic madness.

  “When I say ghouls,” Owens said a moment later, still focused on the blades, “I don’t mean the English version. I’m talking about the Arabic word it came from. G-H-U-L-S. It means demon. These things stick to remote areas. They primarily haunt deserts, mostly ruins or old battlefield sites. According to the legends, they’re also partial to abandoned oases. We’re sitting on all four.”

  And those things are a hell of a lot more than legends, she thought.

  “Like you saw, when they attack, they do it in groups,” he continued. “They come in waves. Not all that smart from what I can tell, but they make up for that in other ways. They’re fast, real quick and agile when they want to be. More than any human I’ve ever seen. They can see in the dark, and they’ve got exceptional hearing and sense of smell. But it gets worse.”

  Richter sighed. “Of course it does.”

  “Sometimes, they take different forms.”

  “Are you telling me they’re shape-shifters?”

  He nodded. “Sometimes they come as hyenas.”

  She shook her head. “How can any of this be possible?”

  “I’ve only seen it once, but trust me, that was enough.”

  Having eaten all she could stand, Richter tossed the stew aside and turned her attention to the chocolate bar. It was rock hard. She tried to bite it but nearly chipped a tooth. No wonder these things never melt, she thought, firing the bar into the sand, they’re made of granite.

  “Sometimes,” Owens went on, emotion gripping his voice, “they come looking like the last person they killed and…ate. But it’s not them, not—not really. Looks like them, even sounds like them sometimes but it—it’s not them.” Finished cleaning the swords, he slid them both back into the belt on the ground next to him. “Those claws on their hands and feet will tear you to shreds, and their jaws are powerful enough to bite clean through any bone in your body. A group of them can take a man apart and devour him in a couple minutes. They even take the bones. What’s worse, even if you get away, their bite is poisonous. If they bite you, you’ve only got a day or two before it kills you. Does it slow and painful. Fever hits, then paralysis. You waste down to nothing. If you don’t burn the body to ash once it dies, the next night it turns, becomes one of them.”

  “How do you know all this?” she asked.

  “Marciano. He knew all about them. His father was Italian, but his mother’s Algerian. He grew up here, learned about the legends from his mother and her family when he was a kid. Like the rest of us, he thought they were just old stories, until he saw them with his own eyes.” Owens got to his feet but paced about like a caged animal. “They killed him one night not twenty feet from here. They took him down and they…ate him. And there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.”

  To that point Richter had not felt particularly close to Owens, but his pain was nearly palpable in the thick desert air. She wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder, to give it a reassuring squeeze and tell him it was all right. But she didn
’t. It wasn’t all right. “Christ, Owens,” she managed softly, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve seen him twice since then.” He looked at her, his eyes brimming with barely contained terror. “Or something that looks like him. O’Brien too, they…they try to talk to me, they…” He drew a deep breath, his entire body trembling as he did so, and then he let it out and fell against the sandbags as if he might collapse otherwise.

  Richter realized then just how close to the brink Owens truly was. Alone here for weeks, and having seen his fellow survivors butchered by monsters his mind insisted could only exist in horror movies had nearly destroyed him not only physically and mentally, but emotionally as well. He was crippled and hanging on by the thinnest thread, watching helplessly as it slowly unraveled day by day, night by night. It was as if Owens knew his time was almost up, and soon she’d be alone out here just as he’d been. And there was nothing either of them could do about it. Richter wanted to say something, to do something that might help or somehow calm them both, but there were no words, no actions that could come anywhere near changing the reality in which they found themselves. She’d seen fate at work many times in the past, and there was no escape from it, no way to avoid it. Visions of her little brother Malcolm blinked across her mind’s eye, visions of the last time she’d seen him, not long before he died, a beautiful, wide-eyed and innocent child playing around the house or out in the fields, in the garden…

  She slid down off the sandbags. The food was sitting in her stomach like rocks. “Tell me something, Owens,” she said. “Where are you from? Originally, I mean.”

  The question seemed to bring him back and focus him somewhat. His eyes cleared and he used the rag he’d cleaned the blades with to wipe sweat from his neck, throat and upper chest. “Pennsylvania.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Told you, I worked at a refinery in Béchar. Contract was up, we were—”

  “But why?” she pressed. “Why this part of the world?”

  He watched her a while without answering. “I’m not a roughneck that bounces around from rig to rig like a mercenary,” he finally said. “I’m an engineer.”

  “Don’t they have engineers in Pennsylvania anymore?”

  “I got my reasons for being here, all right? Same as you, I imagine. If it makes you feel any better, if I had it to do again, I’d never step foot anywhere near this part of the globe.” He scratched at his beard. “All things considered, way you handled yourself out there I’d say you’re likely former military. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, I was army, flew Blackhawk medevacs.”

  “So you saw action then.”

  “Two tours in Iraq,” she answered. “But I don’t really like talking about it.”

  Owens nodded, as if her response had confirmed something.

  “You too?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I did my time.” His weathered face showed nothing but pain. “Learned how to kill, even got pretty good at it. People…those things…what difference does it make? Enemy’s the enemy, right? We never see them as human anyway, whatever the hell that is.” His bloodshot eyes found her. “Where you from?”

  “Iowa. Little town no one’s ever heard of.”

  “Don’t they have pilots in Iowa anymore?”

  “Guess I had that coming.”

  “Guess you did.”

  “I was just trying to find some common ground between us, that’s all.”

  “Is this the part where we get to know each other better?”

  “Apparently not.”

  They remained quiet a while.

  Richter grabbed the nearest rifle and slung it over her shoulder. Daylight or not, she wasn’t going to be caught unarmed again. “I was only trying to talk with you.” She gazed out at the dunes where her copter had gone down. Flashes of the enormous sandstorm, the aircraft plummeting and her harrowing jump and parachute drop came to her in a rush, gone as quickly as they’d arrived. She couldn’t see the wreckage, and the pillars of black smoking rising into the sky had long since stopped, but for reasons she could not quite comprehend, she felt drawn to the crash site, as if a part of her wanted nothing more than to return to that twisted wreckage, lie down alongside it, close her eyes and let the sand take her. “You’re not the only one struggling to hold things together out here,” she said. “Try to remember that.”

  He shouldered past her and jumped the sandbags. “Come on,” he muttered, heading for the fire, “we’ve got to scatter those ashes and get ready for night.”

  Night…

  Memories of those horrible screams echoed through Richter’s mind, bringing with them visions even more terrifying. She looked to the sky. The sun had already shifted since earlier in the day, turning the dunes a slightly different shade. Daylight was burning, slowly dying. Within a few hours, darkness would return.

  And with it, the madness.

  6

  Beneath the burning sun, standing atop a dune not far from the outpost, they scattered the ashes on the wind. Richter watched them dissipate and rain across distant sands like gray snow. It still didn’t seem real to her, but the ash was evidence, a reminder that in this awful and ancient place, nightmares were real, alive in a land of the dead.

  They stood there a while, sweating and tired, drained.

  “We need to bring some water up from the well,” Owens finally said, staring down at the sand near his feet as if he’d dropped something. “Make sure we have enough to get us ready for tonight and through until tomorrow.”

  If there is a tomorrow, Richter thought.

  With the horrible visions of the creatures continuing to haunt her, Richter nodded, but she was already drifting away, morphing those hideous faces into something else. She’d been practicing for several minutes, and had nearly tricked herself into believing if she listened hard and long enough, she could hear beautiful music, the sounds of angelic voices singing and chanting like the choir at the church she’d grown up attending. Those memories reminded her she hadn’t set foot in a church in a very long time, not since the service for Malcolm’s funeral, and had no plans to ever return to one.

  “We need to get ready while the sun’s still high,” Owens sighed, “lots to do.”

  “The gasoline, the food, the bullets—it’s all dwindling down—once it’s gone, then what? If no one’s ever coming for us, we can’t stay here much longer. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You want to take your chances out there?” he asked, motioning to the desert with a sweep of his hand. “Because there is no chance out there.”

  “And there is here?”

  “We’re still alive, aren’t we?”

  “For now.”

  “Now is all there is.” Stone-faced, Owens stumbled down the dune and back in the direction of the outpost.

  Without response, Richter followed.

  * * *

  Odd, I think, to dream of the rain just then. But I love the rain, the memories of it in particular, because the rain reminds me of home. Or what had once been my home. That home is gone, it exists only in memories now, and even then, it hardly seems real. It feels more like…this…like a dream, or a story from someone else’s life. An illusion—that’s all it is—a parlor trick played on me by the loneliest corners of my exhausted mind.

  I focus on the rain, the lovely rain, the way it hits the roof with such force, then gushes down through the gutters, out the downspout and into the yard. There is something majestic about it, the way it moves and sounds, so defiant and strong, and yet so beautiful.

  Strange…to find myself at home when I’m so very far from it...to dream of all this water and rain while I’m surrounded by thousands of miles of sand…to dream of the lush, bright green lawn and the flowers along the front garden, while that sand shifts, grows, moves much like the rain…overtaking everything in its path as it expands and devours…claiming all that dare lie in its way.

  And then, Malcolm…little Malcolm…all blond locks, big blue eye
s and a smile that could warm the coldest heart…so young and innocent, crouching there near the garden, not so very far from the front door, where just inside the house our mother fusses with dinner.

  This is a dream. Why then am I so aware of reality outside the dream while still trapped within it? Odd, I think. Perhaps I have a fever, and that, coupled with the blow to my head, has left my brain desperately struggling to make sense of those images and sounds and feelings that course through my mind, flickering like so many frames of film hastily run through an aged and dying projector.

  No matter, I’m home. And my little brother Malcolm is there too. Younger than he’d actually be by now, but as I most fondly remembered him. His hair has just begun to turn from blond to a lighter brown, and he still looks at the world with such wonder and awe.

  “You’re back,” he says, his delicate voice barely audible above the rain.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a hero?”

  I realize then that I’m wearing my military uniform. “No,” I answer.

  “What was it like?” he asks.

  I want to be happy, to smile and laugh, to scoop him up in my arms and tell him how badly I’ve missed him and how much I love him. But I stand my ground, unable to move, unable to answer. The rain falls like daggers.

  Malcolm leans closer to the flowers; sniffs them. “Was it like Hell?”

  “Yes,” I whisper, the rain blurring my vision…or are those tears? I want to ask him what he knows of Hell, he’s just a child, but I know better, because we both realize he knows Hell all too well.

  He stands and faces me, this little boy, my younger brother in his short pants and freshly pressed and buttoned shirt. “Was it like this?” Blood drips from the corners of his mouth. It runs over his chin, staining it with swaths of crimson that look like war paint. He smiles through the horror.

  “Stop it,” I say. “Please, Malcolm, I don’t want to remember you like this.”

  The rain washes the blood away, but it keeps coming, and then slowly begins to transform into something else…sand…falling from his mouth in a steady stream. “That wasn’t Hell,” he tells me. “You’re in Hell now.”