Exclusive: Read an Excerpt from John C. Foster’s ‘Dead Men,’ Plus A Never Before Seen Sketch of The Ghoul!

The beautiful sketch included is by the talented Luke Spooner
CHAPTER FIVE

1.

Tendrils of smoke rose from the Ghoul’s jacket as he crawled through the dark forest. A wracking cough hit him and he stopped on all fours as spasms squeezed his torso, and his lungs struggled to force out the last of the smoke.

Hell was fire.

He remembered coughing another time, as the green gas filled the death chamber. His body convulsed as the ghost of that pain gripped his chest and guttural sounds filled the woods. His head drooped like a dog’s and foam dripped onto the dead leaves.

Even in Hell he was abandoned. Apostate. Loathed.

Slowly he stood, a mass of gangly limbs, arms and legs too long for his torso. His head was bald and oddly shaped, and his eyebrows were singed off, making him appear even stranger. His burial suit was soot covered, the jacket split up the back, pants ripped at the knees.

His name was John Smith, but they used to call him something else.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and absently smeared the slime across the lapel of his jacket. Images flashed through his mind, but they were elusive and he could not make sense of them. Only the last image, of two men leaving him to burn.

He staggered through the trees, leaving the fire behind him. A low, animal cunning drove him away from the light, knowing that others would come.

As he moved away from the blaze, he could see less and less. His ears played odd tricks on him, blending his own asthmatic wheeze with the rustle of tree branches in the wind and the crackle of dry leaves underfoot.

2.

Donny Lee tapped the brakes and downshifted the Harley when his headlight beam caught the moving shape by the road. For a split second he thought it might be a deer and he wondered if this might be his lucky night, but the shape moved and he realized that he was seeing a man crawling on all fours, as if he had just tumbled downhill into the road.

“Shit,” he said, making it two syllables. He cut to the shoulder and slid to a stop, the pipes burbling and popping with heat as he shut the bike down.

“Hey, you okay?”

Donny Lee kicked down the stand, then swung his leg off the bike. He fished in his saddlebags and came up with a heavy, police-style flashlight.

Stepping into the road, he panned the bright beam around, advancing behind the light. The only sounds were the clack of his boot heels on the tar and the gentle ticking of the motorcycle’s engine as it cooled.

Donny Lee stopped and aimed the beam into the ditch beyond the shoulder.

“Hey, is anybody there?”

Nothing. The trees sighed in the wind and he heard a skittering sound as leafless branches rubbed together.

“Sonofabitch,” he muttered, and a cold chill ran down his spine. Donny Lee had grown up in the mountains and loved the solitude of a night ride, but right then, he very much would have preferred the bustle and lights of a big city. Little Rock, maybe, or even Nashville. Anything seemed better than this lonely stretch of road.

“Look, if you’re hurt, make a noise or something,” he said, louder this time.

Donny Lee dragged his flashlight beam along the tree line where he thought the person must have come from and something moved . . . but it was just the play of shadow from his light. An ugly smell came his way, like shit mixed with something worse. The tiny hairs on the back of his neck lifted.

“Okay, well, fuck you!” he shouted at the darkness, and spun around to his bike—

Donny Lee caught a glimpse of a wildly flapping shadow rushing at him before a pale hand grabbed him by the throat and squeezed. He swung the flashlight but his wrist smacked into another hand with a crack like wood striking wood. Impossibly long fingers caught his wrist like a vise while the hand on his throat squeezed.

Donny Lee, who had been in almost as many barroom brawls as he claimed, brought his knee up sharply and felt it connect. For a wild moment he thrashed and bucked and thought he might pull free, then the hand on his throat jerked him up onto his toes and he saw the pale man’s mouth gape wide and jump forward at his face. Unbelievable pain exploded in his nose as the other man’s teeth clamped on it and Donny Lee shrieked. The hand on his throat pushed him away as the teeth on his nose pulled back, straining, until his nose gave with a tearing sound of flesh and cartilage. The red fountain spewing from the middle of his face transcribed an arc in the air as Donny Lee slammed back onto the road.

He made panicked, bubbling sounds as he tried to breathe through his crushed throat. The pain in the center of his face was a roar, drowning out his ability to think. He scrabbled backward, spewing blood.

There were no thoughts of his Harley, so close, or of his barroom fights, or of jacking a deer on the side of the road. He was reduced to one thought: escape.

A long shadow stretched across him as something blocked the light. Donny Lee felt his bladder release and a warm liquid filled his jeans as he looked up to see the tall man walking towards him.

He tried to say, “No,” but all that emerged was a moist, mewling sound as long fingers with dirt-encrusted nails reached down for him.

The last thing Donny Lee saw was a toothy white grin gleaming from between bloodstained lips.

3.

The Ghoul stood up from the corpse, his face and neck coated with blood. The dead man’s throat was a red ruin where the Ghoul had laboriously torn it open with his sadly inadequate teeth. He had lapped up what blood he could, but the heart had ceased pumping and the blood had ceased flowing.

Still, he felt refreshed and he tilted his head back, grinning in pleasure. His mind was muddy, but getting something to eat helped. He wiped a sleeve across his bloody mouth, but froze halfway through the act.

The Ghoul felt odd. He had spent half of his life deeply medicated, and those familiar sensations didn’t alarm him. But there was something else, a slippery slope leading down into a yawning blackness.

He sat down on the road and began singing quietly, though anyone listening would be hard-pressed to identify it as such. Certainly not Donny Lee, with his limited repertoire of country western jukebox ballads, a repertoire severely curtailed on account of being dead.

A bolt of pain gripped the Ghoul’s head and his belly felt like it was squirming with snakes. He clapped both hands to the sides of his head.

“I’m not John Smith.”

But he was having trouble thinking . . .

He extended one long finger and traced his name in Donny Lee’s generous offering of blood.

He remembered the Priest and the route and the woman. He remembered the fire and the men who had left him to burn. He knew where they were going.

He stood up, knees popping, and clopped across the dark road to mount the waiting motorcycle. Thumbing the ignition to life (Donny Lee had kindly left the key in it), the Ghoul grinned as he pulled out into the road. Roaring off into the darkness, the split back of his burial jacket flared in the wind like wings.