Gravewalkers: Dying Time

By Richard T. Schrader

The story begins three hundred years after an unfortunate archeological discovery has unleashed a rage-virus plague outbreak that transformed the population of the Earth into infectious ghouls. These zombie-minded 'infected' hunt and kill natural humans on sight. In this future, the last remnants of mankind survive in orbital space aboard their ultra-secure technological habitats. Even with their superior science and hard won experience, mysterious accidents and inexplicable disasters continue to thwart humanity’s attempts to restore a permanent foothold on their now hopelessly conquered and quarantined murder plague planet.

The main characters are Captain Critias of the Marshal Service’s Virgil Ludus and his combat android Carmen; they adventure on the front lines of this conflict alongside an ever-growing population of supporting characters. While on duty, Critias discovers a closely-guarded secret, that among the feral-brained filthy ghouls there are intelligent asymptomatic carriers known in legends as Watchers. These cunning immortals have been the source of many unsolved calamities as they defended their Earth from human invasion. They do whatever is necessary to ensure that men never retake their conquered planet. Hidden in the impenetrable reforested wilds of Earth’s ruins are thousands of these ancient immortal ghouls that still retain their former human intelligence. They jealously defend their world against humans that have become unwelcome interlopers.

Mankind only narrowly dodged extinction during the outbreak because of the genius leadership of the now legendary King Louie, the man that first united the last tribal holdouts of uninfected humans during the first few years after the outbreak began.

Critias and Carmen, monster-fighting super cops from the future, encounter a prodigy physicist that opens a quantum teleportation portal into their King Louie past. They travel back nearly 300 years to experience the Dying Time era, about forty months after first infection. Critias and Carmen join the great King Louie and his fantastic world of heroic characters. In the past, they will find the answer that ends the ghouls in the future and allows mankind to finally reclaim the sacred lost Earth. Along the way, both discover the real wealth within humanity that makes it worth saving, Critias from the perspective of the system regimented man, and Carmen from the vain ambitions of science becoming a rival to god.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard T. Schrader
• Release date: Dec 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310773563

Richard T. Schrader

Suicide Squad 2 and Peacemaker are adaptions of characters from Gravewalkers.The helmets from before are stolen from here. If you liked the show you will love this.Audiobook versions with subtitles are available on Youtube. I will eventually have all 12.For those of you who felt something for my characters, especially my beloved and misunderstood autistic sidekick, that means a lot to me. I wish I could have gotten out of this permanent shadowban through some way other than plagiarism.It's ok that you were only curious. This is a video world now.@RichardTSchrad1 Twitter

Book preview

Gravewalkers

Book One

Dying Time

Richard T. Schrader

Copyright © 2013 Richard T. Schrader

Copyright © 2022 Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

Contents

Chaobai Robot

Trial and Error

Gladius and Toga

One Homecoming Too Many

Dying Time

Fat of the Land

Foragers’ Castle

Great Expectations

Sins of the Fathers

The Hawk, Scorpion, and Frog

Soulless in the Tyrant

Leap of Faith

Behind the Unreasoning Mask

Where Eagles Call Home

Ascension

Chapter 1: Chaobai Robot

A general planetary-wide distress call illuminated the gunship’s heads-up-display at the pilot’s cockpit position. Its accompanying beeping proved to be audible anywhere in the cabin-equipped aircraft.

Whoever had sent such an emergency request for help would happily accept it from whomever responded quickly enough; that meaning noncombat supply and transport vehicles were equally welcome, and not just the heavily-armed assault and rescue birds like Critias’ Marshal Service gunship, the Achilles.

A moment later, the HUD computer triangulated the transmission’s source location, which confirmed the GPS transponder data that came encoded in the distress message.

It was a bad one.

The distressed party had marooned themselves on the immediate outskirts of a dense urban ruin, one of many former mega cities that still dotted what remained of industrialized Asia.

All the old names from when humans owned the world had effectively faded from active use, common knowledge, or genuine concern, forgotten to anyone but itinerant explorers or history scholars.

Critias had nothing specific to call the place, just the detailed topographical map of some verified coordinates.

His android Carmen leaned her violet-haired head out from the doorway of his ship’s small sleeping cabin. That’s the distress call alarm, she informed him about the beeping as if he would need her assistance to know.

She of course actually did realize that he knew, but it was a conversation starter for getting him to take her on the mission in a capacity that involved her leaving the confines of the gunship.

Her hair color was not by choice or fashion. The league of bioengineers who created all the androids had a policy that required their creations to grow hair in obviously inhuman colors. That genetic mandate ensured that no one would ever mistake them for being real humans, which they otherwise so ideally simulated.

Carmen’s hair color was not as overtly degrading as them having tattooed the word slave across her forehead, but the idea behind it was entirely the same.

When Critias didn’t immediately respond, Carmen hurried to the cockpit to confront him directly. Her prancing gate displayed an unsettling exuberance for getting into combat action. Carmen was more eager than ever to confront her first ghoul infestation. It was an opportunity for blood and gore that Critias had thus far denied her.

Critias had trained for the dangerous work of ghoul fighting for most of his life. Thumping infected freaks was not the only curriculum at the Virgil Ludus marshal’s school, colloquially known as ‘The Orphanage’, where he had grown up.

While only an average academic student at best, Critias had excelled at the combat oriented lessons. Beyond the schooling, Critias also had his recent promotion to captain as proof that he had years of practical experience when it came to stomping around down in the wild meat yonder.

Carmen was still brand new and while no doubt overflowing with virtual skill sets and infinite talents, she was as yet untested in actual combat. Critias was more than content to take her initiation slowly.

Joyful enthusiasm for mayhem was a bad quality in any marshal, and so Critias assumed it was no sign of excellence in any combat android either, even one like her.

She was the newest Epsilon series of hunter-killer class synthetics. She came out of the stew tank with a 260 IQ, a nigh invulnerable titanium skeleton, and the program-based battle knowledge worthy of any dozen marshal heroes, or so the lab jockeys had claimed.

Carmen wore a shuttle hangar technician’s blue flight-suit. With the soft shoes and a ball cap, she appeared to be a respectable young lady stuck playing tomboy after joining the service to become a flight mechanic’s ensign.

Critias had selected her costume with that affect in mind. He didn’t like it when people glanced at her thinking she was merely some misappropriated pillowing android he had stolen from a low-gravity orgy bar. Improperly dressed, that was exactly how morally corrupting her curves could be, so he saw no reason that anyone else should be privy to his personal opulences.

It’s a city, Critias told her sounding both calm and slightly annoyed with her.

He found Carmen to be perpetually irritating and suspected that she went out of her way to cause it, like with the distress alarm beeping.

The only time she wasn’t frustrating him was when he product tested her in the bedroom. That part of their working relationship was never annoying, and plenty vigorous enough to suggest that she would be capable in combat if she ever managed to instill enough confidence in him to let her try.

Beijing, Carmen informed him using the location’s name from the old world that had passed away nearly three centuries prior.

I like that name much better than just calling it a city, don’t you?

She asked rhetorically to show that she didn’t like that overly simplistic description, as though perhaps Critias was some sort of dullard that lacked the eloquence to put it into proper verbiage. After all, they were on their way down to what had once been a true wonder of the world, a super metropolis among the largest of old mankind’s habitats.

Carmen continued, City is sort of a curt euphemism for naming what is truly a gargantuan man-eating tumor that would be indistinguishable from Hell, if only Hell were comprised of meat instead of stone and rusting iron. City is a sad way to describe a continuous citified strand of metrorrhagia bayou that chases you around with biohazardous teeth.

She had included Hell a couple times hoping to please him. It was Critias’ favorite curse word after all.

Critias took the bait since he now officially felt annoyed with her anyway, What the Hell is a metrorrhagia, dare I ask?

That would be abnormal bleeding from a uterus, Carmen clarified. A most visceral image if you ask me, which he obviously had to his accurately anticipated regret.

She was right of course; that disgusting description was dead on when referring to the biological horror show that the Earth had become. It was impossible to be too disgusting when putting it all into words.

That Carmen insisted on constantly using vocabulary he couldn’t understand and often had never even heard before was all part of what made her so damn irritating.

She asked, Are you going to let me go outside to see it?

No, he promptly replied like he hadn’t taken even a moment to think about it. You don’t understand ghouls well enough yet that I can trust you. For now, you just need to watch me and learn a few things.

For a moment, Critias actually wondered if Carmen was going to fail to annoy him for once, and then she dashed that illusion by opening her mouth and letting her never-ending internal dialog fly free.

I know all about ghouls, she assured him with genuine confidence.

They are proverbially resilient creatures, entirely vicious, notoriously carnivorous, and wholly lacking in any forms of meekness that beings with the destiny to inherit the Earth were reputedly going to possess. Ghouls never age, never die, and at the very worst they just end up inert piles of undead meat that remain infectious forever.

Carmen was entirely right of course. The ghouls of their time had persevered the passing centuries, survived human lifetimes sleeplessly honing their predatory skills and killer instincts. The passage of time had only made them ever more cunning and dangerous.

Even in their first days of Outbreak they had proved to have the ferocity and wherewithal to wipe out terrestrial humanity, and that was when mankind was at their most numerous and equipped with every resource to prevent it.

Those were the days before mankind unwillingly transformed into billions of insentient contagiously-diseased humanoids. Those hideous mindless monsters still held undisputed sway over every earthly landmass, which was the world of the present day.

Despite his own regular internal monologues and frequently verbalized empty threats about leaving Carmen back at home, Critias never did. He found that having her around was a comfort in some way that only the egghead psychologists would fully understand.

Those bioengineers in their white lab coats had tested, quizzed, and studied Critias in intimate detail before they finally composed all their observations into a final form.

Just one look at Carmen’s exquisite configuration proved that the makers had Michelangelo’s eyes and Mozart’s ears when it came to collating four-letter neorganic ontogeny sculptures into living, speaking personifications of human perfection. In Carmen’s case, she was a form gleaned from Critias’ own subconscious mind.

‘Ontogeny,’ Critias thought as he silently shook his head over the word, a bioengineer’s word that he picked up from Carmen lecturing him. In some way it disgusted him that she really was infecting his vocabulary with her insufferable superhuman intelligence.

As to not leaving Carmen at home, that home was the luxuriously massive Orbital Platform Nine where seventeen thousand inhabitants knew and loved their Homer.

That technological habitat along with the various other orbital space stations was the only perfectly infection-free places left for what remained of humanity. Not even the atomically sterilized islands or the oceanic big-hulk horticulture carriers gave that same orbital seal of preferred cleanliness.

Job necessity or not, having an android was surely the pinnacle height of privilege and comfort that any man could hope to possess anywhere in civilization, for nothing was more splendid than owning a combat-ready tailor-made indentured concubine for a personal servant.

He had named her Carmen only three months prior. The name just came to him when she had called him master as her first delighted word upon opening her freshly activated mechanical eyes. She saw Critias gazing back down on her in utterly delighted stupefaction.

The bioengineers had encoded Carmen to be a field operations K-series model based on their newest and most capable Epsilon-R series of scientist engineering technical androids. Like them, she was a combination of bioengineered neorganic tissues and surgically implanted high-endurance technological hardware.

Carmen wasn’t as godlike in her intelligence as were her light-duty Epsilon-R predecessors who worked as laboratory assistants, and yet like them she was still super genius enough to have a rebelliously grandiloquent manner unbefitting of a proper servant or for a hot-zone combat marshal for that matter.

Her implanted hardware included an interlink modem that allowed her instantaneous communications with not only the grand network, and the gunship, but with most any piece of modern technology from weapons and surveillance devices to powered doors and kitchen blenders.

As to the matter of the distress call, Carmen brought up a bunch of relevant information to display on the cockpit’s main data HUD.

She explained the nature of the emergency, It is a civilian transport. They experienced catastrophic drive failure and had to make an emergency landing.

Being a synthetic android and also the property of the Marshal Service, Carmen had deep access to data flow and classified security matters in general. Her behavior inhibitors made it impossible for her to ever be disloyal to her human masters or divulge secrets to unqualified ears, so the makers saw no good reason to deny her access to most anything.

If nothing else, lies and disinformation were toxic to artificial minds. The androids processed information so fast and in such unpredictably innovative ways that any censorship or restrictions were more likely to cause them harm than provide any benefits.

Critias saw from the data she displayed that the ship belonged to the Rex Leonis Barony. One way of saying it would be that Rex Leonis was a family or clan, but they were far more than that. They had their own island domain from where they had operated for over two hundred years.

Their island not only had the premier human biology medical university, but also a wide range of manufacturing facilities that included everything from reclamation processing refineries and a marine protein canning facility to a linear vectoring rotary inertia engine laboratory.

Their total wealth was incalculable and their influence was great enough to make them a defacto branch of government. Their family members held job positions of most every sort extending well beyond the confines of their heavily fortified island.

The place was so beautiful that it was even a popular tourist resort for vacationing orbital citizens.

Baron Leo was as influential and respected as any Governor, Critias’ own boss and head of the Marshal Service the Grand Marshal Wayne, or the Reclamation General. All of those people confabbed with Baron Leo regularly on matters of important business.

He asked Carmen, What the Hell are they doing in such a godforsaken place anyway? Is there anything going on there that I should know about?

She expanded a data panel to bring it to dominance on the display before explaining, Governor Akashi has sponsored an operation to test a new ghoul eradication robot and they selected Beijing as the test site.

Carmen made pages of data reports scroll by in a speedy blur that only she could have read, if she had needed to read it rather than just absorbing it all instantaneously over the interlink.

She interpreted the reports for him, Governor Akashi’s experimental robot attracted, crushed, and then packaged feral ghouls for approximately seven hours and then had a critical systems failure of an unknown nature. The distressed ship is a research and survey vessel that Governor Akashi employed to perform a ranged aerial investigation. It appears that their ship also had a mysterious mechanical failure.

Carmen made a slight frown as she pondered the automated diagnostic report that came from the downed ship. According to the data I have available, their teslaflux engine developed unsustainable cavitations in its harmonic field. The imbalance threatened to disintegrate the ship with catastrophic vibrations. Their pilot had no choice but to land immediately.

Critias was no teslaflux engineer. He had to ask, What causes that?

I don’t really know what caused it, Carmen confessed, but this diagnostic reading suggests that a mass of neodymium came into contact with their field drive’s casing and that immediately impeded its normal function.

I find it highly improbable that debris of that nature would be able to reach their ship at survey altitude. The data I have is most perplexing. I believe that only a closer examination of the engine itself would be able to answer your question.

Critias offered a sarcastic comment, We all know how frequently the high-tech breaks down around here.

His sarcasm went over Carmen’s head such that she took him seriously and then went to her norm of correcting his ignorance with what she mistakenly perceived as her superior intelligence.

Actually, she replied. It is quite rare for anything to happen in such a way that we would call it a mystery. Having it happen twice in the same day, in the same location, is even more improbable.

He suspected that the problems were anything but accidental, but Critias kept that conspiratorial opinion to himself for the moment; instead, he said, Hopefully a mysterious accident won’t bring us down too. There has to be an easier way to find out that this really is enemy action.

Oh, Carmen voiced her sudden comprehension. "Goldfinger, Chicago Rules, once with the extermination robot was happenstance; twice with the survey ship was coincidence, but a third time with the Achilles would be proof of enemy action."

She needed a moment to search an epic amount of information in an effort to develop a clear answer as to just who such an enemy might be. In the end, Carmen settled on the most mundane possibility, You think there is a traitor among you. Would it be an enemy of Governor Akashi or of Baron Leo?

Both, Critias offered cryptically, and everyone else for that matter. I don’t mean a traitor from within. There is something else out there, something much worse, and it doesn’t like it when we trespass on Earth.

When we dig in too deep or stay for too long, it seems to always come along and blow our house down. I think the robot really pissed them off and then this survey ship going down was more of the same. We need to grab whoever is left down there and then get the Hell out of Dodge.

The city is Beijing, Carmen corrected his name for the place, but I understand what you mean.

She had other ideas than leaving in a hurry, I need to inspect the engine of the downed ship, maybe the robot too. I would be able to tell you the cause and then you would know more about this enemy you think is down there. If you can identify the culprit, we could go on a mission to kill or capture this entity.

He shook his head no, A snatch carrier can fly in and then lift their equipment out for repairs. The engineers will have all the time they need to figure out what went wrong. You will stay on the ship and follow my instructions. It will only take a moment to get the survivors aboard.

She felt disappointed that once again he would deny her the entertainment of meeting and battling ghouls. Carmen understood that complaining wouldn’t help, so she didn’t bother.

Because the bioengineers had synthetically manufactured nearly all of Carmen’s mind and memories, it was difficult for her to personalize it in a way that humans naturally did. In her mind were records and images of the old world before the ghouls had destroyed it.

The golden age of man was a sight to see with cities that stretched to the horizons, all glimmering with millions of electric lights and the illuminated signals on their swarms of ground vehicles that rolled about in lines as would army ants. The signage was all so brilliantly colored.

Carmen had a special love for its grandiose pomposity and relished the idea of getting to see it in person. To say the least, Carmen felt sorely disappointed with the drab reality.

The land was green. There was some brown here and there like where the rocks of the mountainous areas showed through, but it was mostly green. There were shades of green and brown. The Chaobai River was more blue than green, but even that was far from the vibrant colors of the former civilization that she had hoped to see.

In the nearly three centuries since the fall of man, fully grown trees had filled in the landscape.

Carmen could make out the remains of tall buildings that formed a sort of gap-toothed wall along the western shore of the river, but even they were dull shades of brown, grey, and green. While it was certain that underneath the blanket of vegetation was the vast remains of an epic city, even from the sky they could see little of it.

In total, the experience felt worse than a disappointment. It struck her as being more akin to her mourning at a funeral. She felt a sense of loss and longing that nothing could ever fulfill, or so she believed.

One thing they could see was the six-lane elevated roadway that led to an intact bridge that crossed the river. Soil had accumulated onto the concrete deck, enough that it had grass and smaller plants growing all over it. Nothing tall as a tree could ever sink deep enough roots into the pavement to prevent the windy season from blowing it over. The end result was no less boring than everything else, but at least the lack of trees made the snaking highway readily visible.

They used the bridge for testing their robot, Carmen said as to why the HUD gave the place as their destination. Satellite reconnaissance places the heavier ghoul population deeper in the city.

The ghouls find better shelter there in the winter, Critias explained the reason. The cold can’t kill them, but it makes them miserable and hungrier, so they avoid it when they can. Now that we are in the warm season, their ghoul smashing robot would get a steady traffic crossing the bridge as they migrate around looking for things to eat.

With telescopic cameras, Critias zoomed in on the robot to see what they could. It was a tracked vehicle of sorts with a rotating torso on top. An assortment of arms from large paddles to smaller tentacles allowed the device to scoop up any ghouls that came near enough.

The automated harvester would deposit the bodies into a chute where internal mechanisms squashed the ghoul, boiled off the water content of its body, and then compacted the dehydrated meat into large cubes. The robot finally sealed each cube inside a plastic film that kept the biohazardous tissue safely packaged.

Presumably, some other robotic machine would have come along later to dispose of the packaged meat cubes. There was a line of finished cubes along the bridge that proved that the robot had operated as planned, at least for a while. It wasn’t moving anymore and no active communication signals came from it.

Critias guessed that the inspection team had gotten as far as he had, learned as little as he had, and then their teslaflux drive engines had crapped out, which forced them to land. Rather than ditch in the river, which would have been problematic on many levels, their pilot had elected to set down on the elevated roadway as far east as he was able.

The ship was intact and the landing gear was down. By all appearances, it had been a safe touchdown where no one got hurt, and the ship remained salvageable.

Since the harvester robot had already consumed the roadway ghoul population and packaged it for later incineration, the survey ship had landed in a relatively peaceful area. All the crew had to do was stay locked inside their vehicle until rescue arrived, which with Critias, it just had.

Critias got up from the pilot seat to go suit up in his armor. As he headed for the equipment locker, he ordered Carmen, Radio them that we have arrived and will be retrieving them momentarily. Stay on station to keep an eye on things, but don’t get close enough to put more attention on them than they already have.

As Carmen buckled herself into the pilot’s chair, she asked, Do you want me to search the area for that enemy you are worried about?

Yeah, sure, he agreed dismissively, not at all taking her seriously. Critias did believe that the inevitable trouble that terrestrial operations always encountered were the work of some sinister intelligence; he just didn’t think that Carmen could solve it with the ship’s telescopic cameras scanning the world’s endless forests.

He locked down the visor on his helmet as he returned to the cockpit fully prepared.

Critias’ officer class mechsuit was bullet resistant armor-fiber integrated into an android’s neorganic musculature, all melded onto a titanium exoskeleton armature.

In total, the suit provided him with a fantastic boost to his physical strength and agility. It stabilized his hand-eye dexterity, enhanced his perceptions with its myriad high-tech sensors, and screened out poisonous fumes or infectious agents for an inexhaustible supply of breathable air.

Locking himself inside his extremely valuable mechsuit was the next best personal security to being safely home in space. A mechsuit was indispensable when it came to preventing the infectious ghouls from wounding him and thus condemning him to joining them as a cursed crazed immortal.

Suits like his were not cheap or easy to manufacture. In many ways they were the equivalent of an android turned inside-out so a person could wear them. They were too extravagant for everyone to have one, so it was a hard won privilege for the elite few who were always in professions where the public expense wouldn’t go to waste.

Carmen reported, They have a crew of five and none of them are injured. We can pick them up when you are ready.

Before Critias could give the command for her to take them down for the retrieval, the gunship suddenly lurched sideways and began to freefall. It was all Critias could do just to grab onto something, lock down his magnetic spacer boots, and prevent himself from bouncing around the cockpit.

Since Carmen was already secure in the pilot’s chair and had affixed her seat harness according to protocol, she was able to immediately devote her full attention toward regaining control of the gunship.

Ever since she studied the diagnostic report that the survey ship’s engine had sent about its failure, Carmen had contemplated every possible scenario as to what might have happened and what she might do to prevent that same failure in the future.

Because of her thorough preparations, Carmen had been actively watching out for the same cavitational anomaly to take place in their own teslaflux propulsion system. Her prompt solution was to increase power to the engines rather than shut them down, which would have been the proper safety measure to prevent the imbalance from shaking the ship to shreds.

Carmen also remodulated the teslaflux field, not in terms of attraction or repulsion, but with an awareness of deflecting the magnetic grip of a dipolar mass that she believed had attached itself to the external casing of the engine.

Her quick thinking ejected the foreign magnet with the speed of a bullet, and thus freed of its influence, she immediately restored the Achilles to normal flight.

It wasn’t Carmen saving their asses that captured Critias’ attention. He watched with astonishment as the ghoul harvesting robot vanished along with the entire section of road deck it had been on. That moment was the time required for the soundwaves to reach them, an indescribable crunch as from an earthquake.

Dust clouds gushed up from the ground, at first around the sides of the elevated roadway, and then all of it as the robot’s section collapsed, taking the machine down along with it. The failure did not end there. The adjoining section to the east buckled and then it too plummeted to the forested ground below.

What the Hell is going on? Critias called out in disbelief. Everything was going to shit so fast that he couldn’t believe it.

There goes another one, Carmen warned as the next roadway section failed at its western end and then dropped.

It seemed like good fortune when the eastern end split at the seam only to hold while the western end slammed down onto the rubble of the sections that had foundered before it. For the moment, it appeared that the systemic collapse had halted and the crippled survey ship remained safe as could be expected under the circumstances.

Get us down there now, Critias ordered her. I don’t know how long that section can hold.

With his limited understanding, Critias assumed that it had been the weight of the robot that had caused the decrepit road section to collapse and the survey ship was not a lightweight either.

The crew of the downed ship must have thought much the same thing. They no longer felt safe inside their aircraft, and they wouldn’t be if the roadway section they were on decided to fall underneath them.

It wasn’t as if the highway was brand new. It had suffered the significant change of the local seasons without maintenance for nearly three centuries. Most bridges and elevated roadways on Earth had already collapsed from natural causes being so old. That highway was not safe even under the best of conditions. Already wounded, it might fail at any moment.

Carmen demonstrated superb piloting skills as she swooped the Achilles down to rescue the crew who even then rushed out into the open. Some of them waved frantically skyward for the gunship to hurry or perhaps they thought their rescuers couldn’t see them through the billowing dust clouds.

I will lower the boarding stairs, Critias told her as he headed back from the cockpit. I want you to hover as close to the deck as you can without touching down. That section has enough weight on it already and we are much heavier than that survey bird.

Yes, master, Carmen confirmed her order, since an order it was, and her inhibitor hardware module forced her to comply with it to the best of her ability.

Dust from the collapse spread outward across the area, reducing visibility to only a few meters. Carmen could pilot by the topographical radar, but Critias had no special means to see since no wavelength of light could pass through that fog of pulverized cement.

As soon as Critias opened the hatch and lowered the boarding ramp, he heard the familiar howling of ghouls already in a killing frenzy. It didn’t make sense, but he was sure he heard thousands, which were far too many to be so close so quickly. A vanguard of their fast movers should have arrived well enough in advance to warn of an approaching tribe, only there were none.

The five survivors certainly heard the hideous shrieking of the damned and most of them were not seasoned combat veterans accustomed to such stress. Some of them turned back toward the survey ship while others came forward to where they thought the Achilles would land. In a moment they lost sight of each other in the dust and a greater panic set upon them.

I can’t see a damn thing out here, Critias radioed to Carmen. This is going to Hell in a handbasket!

I think I can help, Carmen radioed back and then a moment later the gunship throbbed with a slow but steady imbalance in the drive system that beat like a heart.

Whatever it was that Carmen did to the ship, it worked wonderfully. The pulse interruptions she caused in the field of the teslaflux engines was too brief to affect their flight stability, but it did repulse all the dust particles as they came within its sphere of influence. It made them shoot away due to particle-field interaction. With clever tuning she had modified the engines to act as a dielectrophoretic dust particle remover.

The dust parted for the Achilles gunship as though a Red Sea for Moses.

Carmen brought them down low enough that she touched the nose gear to the pavement while keeping the rest of the landing gear and all the weight of the ship airborne.

Critias knew better than to trust in the survivors to do anything intelligent. He jumped down to the deck with a teslaflux rifle in hand and then rushed toward their downed ship to collect them himself.

The dust flowing away made Critias think that even if Carmen was irritating, she was a very clever girl. That was when the dust rolled back far enough to reveal the slither wall, an actual crawling embankment of crippled and deformed ghouls.

While it was true that all ghouls started out as natural human beings, nearly three centuries of hard living had differentiated them into a variety of forms. The few who had survived the downfall of humanity had given the creatures just as broad a range of often amusing names based on their general appearance and degree of mobility.

All infected could regenerate injuries, but with limitations that included rampant deformity under some circumstances.

The flood of ghouls that approached at the moment were all of the crawler variety. When other infected had first killed them while they were still human, they sometimes devoured entire limbs. Fully functional ghouls could encounter some misfortune like the collapse of rubble in a decrepit building, and that would rob them of a limb.

Such grievous losses rarely grew back and even less frequently regenerated into anything functional. Amputations generally just healed over as permanent disabilities.

Crawlers were those ghouls that could no longer run or even walk for want of functional