Chapter 5 - Exploding Flesh (1/2)

Chapter 5 Exploding Flesh

About 20 meters away from us, the two ghouls suddenly opened their murky eyes wide and turned violent all of a sudden. They then began running toward our corner of the corridor with big strides.

This is bad, we’ve been spotted!

Fanny immediately raised her weapon and fired. The ghoul in front was hit and stumbled, a black fluid spurting out of its chest. Another bullet flew across its face, taking off a huge chunk of rotting flesh along with it, exposing its mutated, razor sharp teeth. It did not fall, however. The bullet had only slowed it down slightly, and it leaped toward Fanny in a frenzy again.

Because of my temporary loss of hearing, I could not hear the huge roar of my revolver and could only feel its terrible recoil. The round from my gun hit the second ghoul on its upper arm, the huge impact instantly breaking its arm, and its foul blood immediately spurted out. It did not fall as well, and the sudden loss of its right arm did not even slow its speed down in the least.

I believed Fanny’s wounded right arm was affecting her aim- why else would she have missed a few times at such close range?

The bolt of Fanny’s gun suddenly extended, signaling that there were no more bullets left in it. Just as she was reaching for an additional magazine in her technical belt, the ghoul had already charged in front of her. The revolver hit the ghoul that was about to pounce on Fanny, and huge chunks of blood and flesh burst out from the exit wound in its neck. Its head was about to fly off from the impact, but it was still connected to the ghoul’s neck by sliver of flesh and ended up hanging off its back after being tugged back down. It was as dead as it could be. Before I could fire off a third round, the other ghoul had threw Fanny on the ground and opened its mouth, wanting to bite off her flesh with its sharp teeth. Fanny was quick-witted, however, and stuffed her empty gun into its mouth, temporarily stopping it from biting her.

The ghoul squirmed violently on top of her, and there was no way I could take good aim. As such, I drew out the combat knife from its sheath on my thigh, pressed its head backward and stabbed my knife into its eye. As it passed cleanly through the ghoul’s head, plenty of its brain matter came spilling out from the back, and it stopped moving after twitching violently for a couple of times. Fanny’s neck was covered with the ghoul’s filthy blood.

Many wanderers were adepts in knife fighting. After all, there was little chance of them getting to use a firearm, mostly due to the prohibitive cost of ammunition. Most of it was left to their unscrupulous fellow humans and mutants who knew how to use firearms. The most common form of danger to these wanderers came from smaller sized mutated creatures in the wild, and ordinary firearms had little effect on these rapid creatures- they were better off using knives.

Fanny pushed the ghoul’s corpse away and climbed up, wiping her neck with a look of disgust.

“Your marksmanship is nothing to shout about,” she said, not thankful that I had just saved her life. That said, since I could hear her, it meant that I had regained my sense of hearing, even if the first words I heard after being able to hear again were so unsavory.

“If it weren’t for my wounds, you wouldn’t even have a chance,” she continued, a look of superiority on her face. She did not care how I felt and fished out her handgun from the ghoul’s mouth, before reloading with a magazine from the ammunition pouch hanging on her waist, as if I were not there.

This woman is really full of herself. Perhaps, in her eyes, it was a disgrace to be rescued by a vagrant she despised, and I started to take a real interest in her identity. She was prideful to the core, wore clean clothes, could handle a firearm, and was extremely knowledgeable about machinery- she must be somebody important. In the wasteland, people could kill each other for a bottle of clean water, but this was somewhat comical when she was in the picture. That’s right, we would not even be fit to drink the water left over from her shower. It’s not comical, but rather, pitiful.

“Take the lead, I’ll guide you along,” Fanny said. I shrugged my shoulders, completely unable to tackle her. We left the corridor where we met the two ghouls and went past many other passageways and rooms. Even though we remained alert along the way, we did not encounter any more ghouls. However, this strange, quiet ambience only lasted until we walked into a meeting room. It was then that I heard the insane roar of a man coming from behind the walls of the room.

“This noise… is that your companion?” I turned around to ask Fanny.

“Damn it, he’s been surrounded!” Fanny sounded anxious upon hearing his shouts, and she pulled the door of the room open, wanting to dash inside without any hesitation. However, when she opened it, a few ghouls that were standing behind the door turned to look toward the source of sound. The man with a gun was lying on the ground behind them, and a few other ghouls were ripping the flesh off his body. Evidently, he had already died.