Read Online Beyond the Barriers (Novella): Ghouls by Timothy W. Long - Free Book Online Page A

broken bones. It was a pile of gore left to rot.
    Half an hour later, we came to the spot the recon team had reported.
    I moved around the area, inspecting the ground and surroundings. Something big had come to a rest here. There was a lot of blood and, as we pushed aside leaves and branches, I came across a hand. It had been severed and some of the flesh had been chewed off. I shuddered and covered it again. Not much of a burial. I hated to think about who it had been attached to. Were they still alive?
    The mass had left a beaten path that led further into the woods before we hit an old road. The street had no signs and it was barely a two-lane. At one spot, it was clear someone would have had to pull over to let another car pass. We followed blood splatters for half a mile before we came across a house back from the woods.
    There was a fence and a gate that was closed. The home was dilapidated but it was clear someone had recently done work on the location. Windows had fresh boards over them and the front door was completely blocked off with a huge piece of plywood that was nailed over the entryway. I nosed around and found a spot to eyeball the house from cover.
    It was clear that whoever was living there was smart. A dip in the roof and a kicked over step stool near it told me that the occupants got into the home by crawling up onto the roof. Probably a side window. But there were also slits cut into the boarded up top floor windows which would provide perfect firing angles to anyone trying to assault the location.
    We moved out, cautiously, me with a creeping feeling that someone had a gun trained on us the entire time.
    A few minutes later, we stumbled out of the woods and into an industrial area. Warehouses and abandoned buildings lay close to the Willamette river. There was a train and a depot. Boxcars had been opened and emptied. A line of low buildings kissed the edge of the river. We could spend all day investigating this area and maybe come up with a lot of supplies. More than likely it had already been picked completely clean. Six plus months into the end of the world meant that almost everything that could be snatched and eaten had been. There was a chance we’d come across a stash of canned food at some point. There had to be some out there. Think about all of the warehouse stores. All of the storage locations that fed those stores. Think about the companies who created the canned goods. They were probably sitting on tons of supplies.
    Right now we didn’t have time for that.
    Instead of investigating any further we moved back towards the woods.
    A quarter of an hour later, we picked up the trail again. That’s when we found the first body.
    “What a mess,” Scott said.
    The man’s age was hard to make out because most of his face had been torn off. Little bits of stringy hair still stuck to the side of his head but there wasn’t much more of his scalp. Bone shone through the gore and his eyeballs were gone. The rest of his body had been stripped of clothing and most of its skin. His intestines and organs had been pulled out of his midsection and lay in piles around his corpse. Flies buzzed around the mass, and I had no doubts that maggots would soon appear.
    “That guy died in agony,” Thomas said as he crouched next to me.
    I covered my nose with my hand but it did little to alleviate the stench. Blood, guts, and shit, not to mention rot, created a concoction that made me want to forget about ever eating again.
    “Think he’s from the house back there?” Scott said.
    “I think he was dinner,” I said.
    We moved out a few minutes later and picked up the trail. It was easy—just follow the blood and body parts.
    An hour later we ran into a shit show. A clump of undead had found something alive and made short work of it. I had taken the lead and had gotten a little bit lazy. I stumbled out of the trees and smack dab into a drooling rotter who hadn’t had a bath in months. I first instinct was to