Ghouls of Gehenna - Chapter 1

When our lips parted and I looked into her eyes, my heart sank. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked. She looked away, out towards the training yard. 

“I… uh… sorry, Anna. I didn’t mean to worry you, it’s just that…”

“What?” 

“It’s just that I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. Am I supposed to be able to rest with everything going on out there?” 

“Are you talking about the war? Why? We’re home now, we’re safe. Besides…” I flexed my arm and smiled. "Nothing's getting past me." 

“I'm sorry, Anna. I don’t feel safe. I never do.” 

…

The sand was very nearly blinding as it whipped up and around. I stared through my goggles at the gnarled creature crouched in front of me. It dug into the guts of one of those pilgrims with the urgency of a starving ghoul, due to it being a starving ghoul. 

No, don’t let it happen to you too. They were a person once, just… 

“You’re not her, are you?” It ignored me and continued digging. I don’t know what else I expected. It didn’t know who ‘her’ was. Poor fucking guy, though. 

I just kept watching. 

Off in the distance I saw a shape moving through the storm. It was… a vehicle of some kind. A military vehicle. I kept my eyes on it as it approached me. There were no spikes on it, or sliced up corpses. That could only mean one thing. The monastery. 

“Hey there!” Yelled a man from the turret mount. It had no turret, but that didn’t stop him from hanging out up there, smoking a cigarette from a tiny hole in his scarf. “Woah. Hey! Ghoul spotted! Taking the shot!” 

Before I could say anything he headshotted the damn thing with a scoped rifle. Before you could say anything? What were you going to say, Anna? ‘Don’t kill it, it might be the love of my life’? Are you completely out of touch?

The man who stepped out of the driver’s side door walked over to the dead ghoul and kicked it with his boot. “Nice shot, Ray.” 

“Thanks, boss.” 

“And you…” he turned to me. “You aren’t with the local marauders. Who are you with?” 

I sized him up. He was bigger than average, but I couldn’t tell anything else with the covering wrapped around his mouth, nose, and head. “I’m with Anna.”

“I don’t know who that is.” 

“I’m out here by myself. That was a… joke.” 

“You’re Anna, then?”

“The one and only,” I replied. 

The back driver’s side door swung open and a woman with her face wrapped up, wearing pure black vestments, stepped out. 

“You aren’t that Anna, are you?” 

Did my celebrity status make it as far as the west, too? “The one and only. Why? You a fan?" 

“Soldier, this woman took out the godless Creed of Earth by herself,” she said. 

“It wasn’t by myself, I had help.” I paused. “And they weren’t godless, it was just a different guy than yours.” 

“Regardless, you’re famous in the midwest.” She tried to look me in the eye, but couldn’t see through the lenses of my goggles. “Come with us, back to the monastery. At least for now. You can rest up and eat something that isn’t dog food or dust rat.”

The guy from the turret yelled out to us. “Four o’clock! Spikes!”

I drew my handgun and calmly ducked behind the humvee. The other two followed suit. 

They weren’t fast enough. The spiky car turned into a slide and two of the marauders started firing from the windows. I watched our driver take a bullet to the head and crash face first into the dirt. The guy in the turret wasn’t as lucky. He took several rounds to the chest. And the nun…

She pulled a .45 from her robe and cocked the hammer. “Not such a civilized world anymore, is it?” She smiled. 

“So the nuns all carry around here?” I laughed. 

“Not all. Though it couldn’t hurt. The French had Joan of Arc, China had the Shaolin temple. The 'warrior monk' goes back thousands of years.” 

The marauders clearly didn’t see us. They approached the humvee to loot it and we ambushed them. Three of them lay dead in the sand, and the fourth, the driver, sped away. 

I checked the damage to the vehicle. Suffice to say we were shit out of luck. That thing wasn’t going anywhere by its own power. “Great…”

“Is there a problem?” 

“Humvee is shot. We’re walking from here on out. How far is Dustrocks?” 

She thought about it. “About a mile to the north.” 

“Let’s get going, then.” 

If we made it in one piece, I'd have my car back.