Slumrat Rising

Truth retreated back into the light of the doorway for a moment, just to reset. The Ghūl hated bright lights, but wouldn’t wait long. They would start throwing crap around the door. Eventually, something would knock out the light. This would happen pretty quickly, as the light was the cheap little underpowered talisman flashlight that Prentiss fished out from under his counter. The bathroom mirrors, however, were not some fancy glass job. They were high polish steel with a spray-on clear layer of plastic to keep the polish. They were, in other words, cheap, crummy and durable. They reflected the light very adequately. Truth grinned. He was very used to working with cheap goods.

One quick adjustment of the mirrors later (and already having to slap thrown crap out of the air) Truth rushed back out into the hallway. He stood in a little rectangle of light, and cleared the area immediately around the door. The bathroom was at the far end of a longish hallway, so he was in luck there. He wedged a mirror up between the wall and a Ghūl corpse. The light, such as it was, lit up the hallway. Not well. There was only so much light a crummy little flashlight could put out. But enough to let him see.

The hall was littered with Ghūl. They sprawled against walls, crawled along the floor, some even jabbed their fingers into the ceiling and mimicked crawling along it. Their desiccated bodies made that much easier. Not that they weren't strong enough even for something six times their weight. Those stick thin fingers tore through wood with only a little effort. They all tried to avoid looking directly at the mirror but… it wasn’t that bright. And Truth was between the Ghūl and the light.

Truth looked around. He could make a beeline for the room with the escapable window. It would probably be sticky getting away, but not impossible. He lightly discarded the thought.

“I can’t fix my shitty parents.” Truth told the Ghūl. “I can’t stop the dealers and the pimps. I can’t fix fucking anything in the world. And then here you are.” Truth kissed two fingers and raised them to the sky. “Finally, a problem I can fix with violence. Thank you, Gods. You saw I needed this, and you really came through.”

The closest of the Ghūl decided it was done acting casual and hopped up on a wall. Sat on the wall like a damn frog, digging at the rotting mortar with its fingers and toes. Then it launched itself at Truth. Ragged nails and blackened teeth coming at his face fast. Truth was already waiting. A step forward and just to the side, enough to make the lunge miss. The pipe swung out to meet the incoming face. Their combined force smashing the head open like a pumpkin off a bridge.

Truth brought the pipe into line with the next Ghūl and stabbed it over the heart. If it was a human, the heart would stop from such a savage blow. He thought it might be effective. The even more savage kick the Ghūl aimed at his nuts suggested that it was not. Truth flinched back, feeling the wind from the filth crusted foot fan his undercarriage. The Ghūl only used to be human. Headshots only. Such fun.

The Ghūl tried to turn the missed rising kick into a descending ax kick with a little hop to get in range. Truth decided to play along, blocking the foot up high. Smashing the pipe down, crushing the high kicker's skull. Then shoving the corpse into the next Ghūl, who figured they would cut in on the action. A second Ghūl was coming from below. While the first was dealing with the corpse, he parred the second’s attempt to shred his calf. As it rose up to get a shot at his gut, Truth body checked it into the back of the same corpse it’s friend was dealing with. It turned out that they were not, in fact, friends, and claws flew everywhere. Truth would have let them go at it, but there were more coming down the hall. Fast.

Truth let himself flow with the madness of the scene. The dim light barely picked up the shapes before they came at him, silently shrieking their need to pull him apart. To make him pretty, with his guts hung like bunting. With his teeth pulled out and finger bones jammed in their place. They never minded being hit. Broken bones, shattered organs, these weren’t worth their attention. The only thing that stopped them was when their skulls burst like balloons of rotting jelly. When the bone fragments of their skull finally stopped bouncing, so did the Ghūl. If the Ghūl had even the faintest notions of evasion or defense, it would have been a one sided slaughter. It was still a one sided slaughter. And Truth was loving every second of it.

There was no more time to think. No more time to worry about the SAT’s or his parents, or the siblings. No time to think about why this felt so familiar. Why he knew how a crushed skull would feel before he first swung the pipe. He didn’t have to wonder why he remembered things that never happened. Truth lost himself in the joys of his powerful flesh. He moved in a gristly choreography with the Ghūl, blocking, countering, killing, moving on. Pressing down the hallway. Washing away all the pain and misery in the fountaining, rotten blood and meats of the Ghūl. All too soon, he ran out of Ghūl and hallway alike.

He pushed open the fire door. The strange music was louder in the stairwell. Looking up, he saw lots of Ghūl faces staring back down. There would be almost no light up there. Just what little trickled through the windows. Truth’s smile was warm and sincere. He gave his naked body a little shimmy to encourage the thickest bits of Ghūl flesh and his own filth to drip off. He scraped the worst off the pipe against the door frame.

“Ready or not, here I come!” Truth charged up the stairwell.

It was a glorious excess. The sheer joy of feeling newly powerful muscles move under his command. Every breath seemed to suck in an ocean of cosmic rays, spun into new energy by the aperture above his heart. The Nine Worm Path ensured that every speck of lactic acid that would build up and burden him was neutralized and removed by waves of rejuvenating cosmic energy. Energy he wasn’t expending at nearly the rate he thought he would be. But then, he wasn’t using any spells. All Truth asked his energy to do was let him play a little longer.

Truth raised his pipe. He didn’t know how long he had swung it for. It had gone pitch dark long ago. He just kept climbing the stairs and banging the metal railings, calling every Ghūl in the building to come fight him. In this narrow stairwell, that he could control. It was gloriously fun. And the Ghūl seemed to be in on the game. He just knew that the Ghūl in front of him was going to shoot his legs, knock him down and rip out his throat. And bless his little boney ankles, that’s exactly what the Ghūl tried to do. Truth’s pipe smashed straight down, splattering the skull and causing the corpse to pinwheel down to the landing below. At least it had a soft landing, cushioned on the other corpses.

Had he… been getting stronger? No, it really did feel like the Ghūl were cooperating with the slaughter. They just telegraphed everything so incredibly obviously that things felt easy. The music was pretty loud now. Whatever that strange church music was that had led him to the top floor of the building. The Ghūl had been busy, ripping out internal walls and leaving only the structural support beams.

“Now, how the fuck did you mindless freaks figure that out?” Truth laughed. But the Ghūl weren’t mindless, were they? They just didn’t care about things that humans did. Still though. He swaggered into the darkness, following the sound of the music.

The Ghūl had stopped playing around. Which unfortunately meant that they were not attacking any more. Truth frowned at the end of his fun. Then he frowned a little more deeply. There was a faint glow coming from the back wall. As he walked closer, it resolved into an orange haze around some large structure, perhaps fifteen feet high by ten feet across and some distance deep. It was irregularly shaped, and too hard to identify in the faint light. It also seemed to be the source of the music.

As he strode closer, he could pick out individual Ghūl. Most seemed to be squatting and looking up at the glowing whatever-it-was. Others were tending to bathtub sized leather hammocks. They seemed to be filled with something liquid, judging by the heavy way they swung back and forth. For some reason, they were ignoring him.

Truth stopped some twenty feet from the statue. It had to be a statue, statues were all the Ghūl made. Nobody really understood what they were statues of. Everybody knew what they were made of. In this case, the mutilated and defiled corpses were formed into a rough ball, with some protruding bits and others wrapped in strange ways. Stranger still was the fact that it was starting to look like something he could understand.

He stared. The Ghūl ignored him, poking away at their human skin slings of something or other. Truth had never heard about any slings, but then, it wasn’t covered on the SAT so he didn’t care. What the hell was that thing? He let his eyes go unfocused, trying to free associate. The Ghūl crouching around the statute, watching it unblinkingly, caught the corner of his eye. Then he looked back at the statue, and could feel it snap into focus.

It was a man. A God. Chained hand to ankle, then bound around the shoulders and the knees. Proportioned to heroic ratios, it was a grotesque tribute to an idealized masculine physique. God was not looking at his people. His head was tilted up, traces of dried tears on his cheeks. Blood dribbled from his ears. Somehow, in some impossible way, Truth knew that this was something the God did to himself. He wasn’t looking away out of disgust. It was boredom. He had been bored to tears and yakked at until he went deaf. He was done with this world, this entire universe. God was more interested in what he could imagine than what he made.

A wet slap noise jerked Truth from his reverie. Something had come out of a skin hammock. It was a Ghūl, and a sopping wet one at that. It reeked. Truth could smell it six feet away. He wanted to puke. It smelled like the cultivation tonic he used to break through.

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