“Fire!” The captain pointed his own standard issue at the closest creature and opened up. Then they were all firing, and the gangshi hopped closer, oblivious to the damage, homing in on their targets. Their drooping faces showed no pain, no awareness, no mercy, not even hunger.
West didn’t wait to see what happened, he knew what was coming and they had to get armed and back under cover before the compound cleared out. They ran ahead, chased by screams from the soldiers.
The motor pool was lit up, Jeeps revving, gears grinding. A captain was organizing a handful of people to evacuate the patients, but he was mostly drowned out by the engines.
“Holy cow!” a private cried, his voice cracking. “Look at ‘em all!”
West turned and looked, out into the dark behind the compound. There were a dozen, two dozen of them, glowing, hopping dead men coming from every direction, heading in every direction. He thought of crickets, or locusts. They moved erratically, a small hop, a bigger one – and then a sudden blur of motion and the thing was twenty feet away from its last position. It hurt West’s mind to see them move. East and west, they hopped over the hills or behind the trees, in and out of sight. A handful filtered through the deserted village, stumbling right through some of the little hooches, their arms straight in front of them. Some were moving south; more were headed for the MASH.
“Armory,” said Cakes, and pointed to a small crowd in front of a Quonset. A corporal and three privates were handing out arms, mostly M2 carbines and boxes of cartridges. They were blocking the door. The air shook again with that deep, physically unpleasant sound. West thought maybe it was the gangshi feeding.
West pushed to the front. “We need something bigger. What else have you got?”
The corporal’s voice shook. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? What’s your armament?”
“I drive an ambulance,” the young man said. “Look for yourself, we’re bugging out.”
He and a handful of the soldiers took off running towards the deserting Jeeps.
West and Cakes pushed into the unlocked room. Inside were two long, cramped aisles maintained for shit – empty racks next to over-packed ones, boxes stacked on boxes in no order. Outside there was screaming and shouting and more of that terrible vibration.
“Find us something,” West said, and Cakes started hefting and tossing.
West saw a rack of shotguns and went to investigate. A half-dozen 20-gauge Ithaca 37s, and seven cases of 28-gauge shells. Useless. Someone had stuck a captured Soviet burp gun behind a stack of dented helmets. He was hopeful for a split second – the PPSh-41 was shit at any distance but up close it could spray a lot of lead, fast – but the sole long box magazine was empty.
Does it matter, anyway? He hadn’t wanted to think about it, was planning to assess after he’d seen their firepower options, but that one that had killed the man in pink – it didn’t have a head. No head, and just as lively as a square-dance. Unless the kid could come up with some folk magic remedy, West wasn’t hopeful at their chances.
“I got us three working M1s and a shitload of Willie Petes,” Cakes said. “M15s, though, they don’t explode.”
White phosphorous signaling grenades. Maybe. Fire killed everything. He reached for the heavy, clinking bag of .45 rounds that Cakes had filled, shouldered it, and took two of the M1s. “Bring ‘em, whatever you can carry. Maybe these things will burn.”
Outside, someone had finally had the presence of mind to hit the air raid siren, and the rising, falling wail of it drowned out the world.
The gangshi burst in through the corner of post-op near the scrub room, directly in front of the two men who’d run inside, and then everyone was screaming. Broken wood and bent metal framed the glowing dead man, clothed in the peasant garb of a farmer. Its body had bloated in recent death; the creature looked swollen, puffy, the man’s face as round and shining as the moon. Dust rained down from the ceiling. One of the two men who’d run in – Lee knew he was with the motor pool but didn’t know his name – tried to get away and could not. The gangshi had already fixed its lifeless attention on him. The man shrieked in fear and then agony as the gangshi absorbed his chi. His body withered and dried and shrunk as his energy was stolen away and Lee could feel the shudder of shifting balance, imagined that the terrible vibration was the sound of distortion in the universe.
The ROKs cried out and somehow found legs, falling, running, crawling beneath cots. The farm boy on the floor kicked his feet, shrieking, and the gangshi turned its whole body towards the movement. Farm boy screamed. He’d pulled out the stitches in his side in his struggles. Fresh blood seeped through his bandages.
“No! No!” he yelled, as the gangshi hopped closer, and then the sounds he was making changed, from fear to terror to pain. The gangshi had connected with him. As the farm boy’s skinny body depleted, the bloated man shone more brightly, rich with chi.
If it is full… No one had suggested that the gangshi could get full, but surely they could not absorb more chi than a body could hold.
“Be still,” Lee said to the Americans. “Don’t make it see you.”
The dark haired man – the tall sergeant had called him Burtoni – immediately froze, his eyes cast down. The other one with jugeunkkae on his face, McKay, tried to hold still but he was so afraid. He shook and he could not look away from the gangshi, could not make himself calm. Lee didn’t want to die but thought that McKay was going to crack and bring the gangshi to them. Lee closed his eyes and thought of his family.
Pak Mun-Hee chose the moment to cry out to God, tongsung kido, to plead forgiveness for his sins. The ganshi’s feet shifted, and it hopped towards Pak. The ROK cried out and fell back, unable to get up from his cot. He knocked over a tray of syringes that Nurse Miss Jenny had been preparing and the polished metal tray clattered to the ground. Glass broke. Overhead light splashed across the tray and Lee was up and moving. One word was in his head. Mirror.
Lee scooped up the metal tray as the bloated gangshi connected to Pak Mun-Hee from an arm’s distance away, stilling his frantic movements, trapping him in the unnatural exchange. Lee thrust the tray up in front of the gangshi, breaking the connection, forcing the gangshi to confront his own reflection. The tray seemed to vibrate in his hands. Lee did not look at the creature or at Pak Mun-Hee. He squeezed his eyes shut.
For a moment nothing at all happened, and Lee felt sweat break out all over his body. And then a horrible, high-pitched keening erupted from the gangshi. Lee risked a glance. There was no change in the dead, bloated face but the keening cry went on and on, the sound of fury and hate and fear spilling from its lifeless throat. It was a terrible sound.
The gangshi shifted on its bare feet and hopped back outside, moving almost too quickly to see. It was there and then it was gone.