Chef: "Precious little meat left on these bones, eh lads?"
Marley: "Snow got 'im."
Chef: "Never seen beautiful snowflakes leave a body's rags all bitten."
Marley: "Torn up in the woods, most like."
Dogbeater: "Will you two lower our voice?!"
Chef: "What gives, love?"
Dogbeater: "It's bad form, shouting midst the headstones."
Chef: "Why?"
Dogbeater: "Let the dead’s eyes stay shut."
Marley: "If they was gonna wake, they'd surely wake when our spade cracked that lid. I do say, this is a FINE coat we're wearing now, lads. Real wool! Maybe the next will have a nice pair of shoes on 'im…"
Chef: "Or maybe our legs will trip on another precious vagrant? Maybe one that's a little more fresh."
Dogbeater: "Quiet!"
Marley: "I told you, if the shovel didn't wake…"
Dogbeater: "It ain't the regular cadavers which concerns me, brother ghoul. It's the ones under the stones at the hilltop."
Marley: "The leaden tombs?"
Dogbeater: "We wander too near for my liking."
Marley: "Superstitious filth. How'd you conjure that in our brains?"
Dogbeater: "Let’s just keep to the lichyard edge, brother ghoul. Plenty of graves-"
Chef: "Quiet, my loves! Methinks our voice doth draw some mutts…"
Yipping came the high voices of small hounds on the wind. The ghoul - the eater of flesh, male or female - bared his matte yellow teeth. He stood from where he had crouched over rags and bones half buried in snow. The ghoul squinted about. His eyes (also yellow, but with a poisonous gleam) darted one way, then another. The ghoul could not place the direction of the yipping - the sound seemed to come from all across the cemetery.
In one voice, Dogbeater's, the ghoul said, "A whole pack of mutts, it sounds like."
From a sheath at his side the ghoul pulled a long-handled hewer. The edge was dull and rusty. The ghoul sucked his teeth. In another voice, louder and higher pitched, the voice of Chef, the same ghoul said, "I bet they're what got to this chap. They gnawed him, I wager."
Dogbeater's voice swore. "Bloody vermin."
"Maybe they're precious scavengers - vulture mutts. Heh, heh. Maybe they're precious fleshy themselves."
A third voice, Marley's phlegmatic one, growled from the flesh eater's throat. "Can't risk that, Chef. You know they've prob'ly got the doom in 'em."
Dogbeater, now in control, kicked the frosted rags and bones at their feet, and swung the rusty hewer in the air. "Bloody, tainted vermin! Kill the lot!"
A new chorus of yips gamboled around the wind-worn headstones of the lichyard. The dogs sounded louder. The ghoul crunched two steps through the snow to glance around one tall and square grave marker. Then he turned the other way, squinting at a wall of dead briars. The yipping, along with shuffling and snarling, seemed to close from all sides.
The ghoul pointed up at a hill ringed by a cast iron fence. Marley's voice growled, "Too many. Let's take shelter."
The ghoul took two steps down the row of graves towards the hill. Then he stopped short. Dogbeater shook their head viciously. He said, "No! We're not going near those leaden markers."
The ghoul rolled his poisonous yellow eyes.
Snow crunched suddenly behind the ghoul. He spun. One mutt - a malnourished terrier with matted brown fur - came yelping at the ghoul. Spittle flew from its frosted thin lips. Dogbeater took instinctive control. He swung the hewer, hard. The rusted blade chunked against the yapping dog's head just above its right eyebrow. The eye popped out from the socket. The tongue lapped out from between the rimy lips, and blood oozed from the dog's cracked temple as it veered with the blow. Its body skidded in the frozen grass and snow. It started flopping about in death throes, but Dogbeater lunged over it. He slammed the rusted hewer again and again. It cracked on the dying dog's skull. It shattered the dying dog's ribs. It severed the dead dog's foreleg.
The yipping in the distance, meanwhile, had reached an insane, louder pitch. Breaking the cemetery silence in the grey day, the voices of the dogs were not distinct from each other, but instead made a communal, primitive din. It was like an echo from man's ancient past; many, many seasons of the cylinder ago; a sound descended from the dogs' ancestors, from wolves who called to the stars beyond the glass that girts the sky, wolves that hungered. A time when the ancestors of the ghoul had huddled in caves by a bright yellow flame, and watched with wide eyes the black night.
No matter that these were yipping mutts and not old wolves, for they could still bite, could still kill and eat. No matter that the ghoul had a hewer instead of a stone club, for the once-sharp weapon was rusted and dull. No matter that the sky was not dark with night, for it lay grey enough under the snow clouds. No matter these differences - the mutts made the ghoul shiver.
The ghoul could tell the direction of the pack now. The headstones and grave markers ran for miles and miles in this part of The Restless Waste, but the lumpish hills over which they ran constrained the ghoul's sight to a small burial tract. The poisonous yellow eyes caught the movement of the pack within this tract. The dogs were close.
They came from a 'forest' - a little copse among the corpses, skeleton trees straddling a hill, with gnarled roots uprooting the untended graves over which they cast their creaky shadows. The pack swarmed from these shadows. Three-odd dozen black shapes flitted swiftly down the snowy white hill, like rats scurrying down a set of marble temple stairs. The black shapes jittered between the headstones. One shape would smack another, rebound, stagger behind a headstone, and emerge from the other side, like the specter emerging from its final rest. All the dogs cavorted in this way, all of them skittering drunkenly down the slope. All of them charging toward the ghoul. All of them baying. All of them hungry.
The ghoul hissed, swung the hewer once into the emaciated terrier corpse with a wet crunch, tugged at his own sleeve. Chef whined, "Too many! Shelter, my loves."
The ghoul turned toward the fenced hill, away from the direction of the pack. Again he stopped after two steps. His shoulders rolled, his left eye bulged, his right twitched. Dogbeater said, "No! I won't-"
They heard the rattle of dog nails on a headstone. The pack was close. Marley cut in, "Chef's right. Too many. I'd rather lay with a corpse than get mangled."
The ghoul still did not move. The pack drew closer. Dogbeater said, "We were a dog crusader! Killing mutts is our supper, lads."
"Not so many," Marley countered. The ghoul's face twisted to argue, but Marley went on, "We needn't lay with the elves, Beatey. I spy a mausoleum in this endless lichfield. Let’s hole up in it, wait for the hounds to pass."
The mutt pack had reached the base of the overgrown hill. The ghoul, turning, now spied the flash of bared teeth among several of the hairy, scrawny, scrabbling shadows. The ghoul hesitated no longer. his feet kicked up plumes of cold snow as he ran betwixt the graves. The dogs had his scent and his sight now. The two leading dogs took up a carnal barking that was soon picked up by the rest of the pack. The dogs were faster. The headstones dropped by the ghoul in twos and threes, but the pack raced past four and five at a second. The stones seemed to watch silently, the blurred and wind-worn names of the ancient markers marking now the clamor and passage of the raggedly-dressed ghoul pursued by the howling dogs.
The ghoul scrambled through the graves - too slowly. The frosting, stinking breath of the dogs seemed to permeate the air. He felt the barking of the leader at his heels. He felt the nip of teeth against a pantleg. With a sudden fury Dogbeater turned their body around and swung the hewer with abandon. The short spear missed the snapping grey muzzle of the sheepdog which had bit him. The dog retreated a step, but the rest were near.
The ghoul dived a hand into the front pocket of his ragged black coat. Chef screamed, "Not our supper!" but it was too late. Marley took a linen-wrapped chunk of suspicious meat and hurled it to the side. The pack saw the motion, and a second later caught the rancid, rotting smell of the flesh. They bayed as one and veered toward the meat.
The ghoul had not stopped to watch. He ran on. The barking, yipping, mad cacophony of dogs dwindled a little as he put row after row of headstones between them. The ghoul leapt a short stone fence. He crouched, rubbed his pants and coat with snow, trying to mask his scent. He crept along the broken wall for a hundred arms. He reached the end of the wall, at which point lay a large mausoleum of bluish stone. The pediment at the top was faded. The ghoul could just make out some ancient battle between two naked men with hammers and a half-skeleton, half-metal man with a whip and shield.
The ghoul did not ponder the carving long. He crept up to the iron gate at the front of the sepulcher. The gate was locked, but the lock was rusted. The ghoul smashed it with a fist-sized stone he found in the snow nearby, crept inside, and jammed the stone against the gate to hold it shut.
Mausoleum stillness settled around the ghoul. The air felt like icewater in his throat. Four squat windows were embedded in the stone near the floor. The windows were broken, jagged glass lay unshining under dust on the floor. The windows and the grated door let in scanty light and snow, as did a hole in the decaying ceiling.
There were three long, pale sarcophagi in the space. Above each was a face of fading paint. Like the man with the whip on the exterior pediment, each face was not fleshy, but a mix of skull and metal.
The ghoul shivered. "Looks like elves in here too," said Dogbeater. "Let’s go back-"
Both the ghoul and the silence were interrupted by a furious barking and rattling from behind. The ghoul spun.
Two dogs - two mangy, flea-riddled, worm-infested, bloody-eyed mutts - bayed just beyond the gate. They pushed against the door. The wedged stone rattled. The ghoul jumped forward and slammed the door back into place, at the same time lashing through the bars with his hewer. "Back, you frothers," the ghoul screamed in Dogbeater's voice. "Back, before I skin you too!"
The two mutts retreated. One's snout drizzled snot and blood from the rusty hewer's lash. The ghoul, meanwhile, wedged the stone more firmly under the door. Marley said, "Need something to tie it with." The poisonous yellow eyes scanned the room, then settled on one of the sarcophagi. "Check the box. Might be cloth on 'em what's not too sere."
"Maybe they've still got precious marrow," added Chef.
"Don't be stupid. They're elves - golani. Their bones are-"
But again the ghoul was interrupted by further barking, this time from the windows. A muzzle stuck itself through the opening of jagged glass in one of the four. It tore its eye on the jagged glass still in the frame, yelped, and withdrew. But more barking came from the other windows, and another head plunged in, followed by a body as one the skinny dogs tried to scurry through.
The ghoul snarled and leapt from the door. Snowflakes fell gently on his black wool coat as he passed under the hole in the roof. The ghoul un-gently smacked the wriggling dog. The hewer cracked against its skull, and the emaciated mutt fell instantly limp, half-in half-out of the broken window.
"Quick, love," said Chef eagerly. "Drag that meat inside."
But there was no time. Another dog began crawling in at the window on the opposite wall. Dogbeater, in full control of their arms and legs, sprang at that on. Silence had abandoned the sepulcher by then. The yipping was closer than ever, dogs at every window now, dogs trying to crawl through, dogs rattling at the iron bars of the door. The wedged stone scraped on the floor. It held; for the moment. The ghoul yelled in all three voices at once. He rushed madly about the space, hacking with his hewer, trying to shut one of his ears against his shoulder, trying to drown out the barking with his screams.
Then, through his open ear, the ghoul heard a deeper call…
The yipping at the doors slackened. The mutts sulked back, whimpering, from the windows. The ghoul strained his ears. He heard a second, deep, resonant boom. The rest of the dogs seemed to pause. The ghoul could see their frothing maws waiting at the windows, the breath heaving clouds in and out of their ribbed lungs. But still, they held back. A third boom resounded. The ghoul swung his wild, poisonous eyes toward the barred door.
The three smaller mutts standing at the barrier - two smaller vicious shorthairs and a shaggy collie with a missing foreleg - slunk back.
From around the corner, the ghoul watched a black-haired beast emerge.
It was a wolfhound, though with more 'wolf' than 'hound' about it to the ghoul's eye. It was thin still, but not quite as thin as the other half-starved dogs. Its hairy face was poxy, with bright pink scars, and one white eye. The other eye was black as the bottom of a well, yet with a purplish gleam to it like the gloaming.
This wolfdog's head hung low to the ground as it stalked around the corner. It kept its purple eye fixed upon the ghoul from the moment it rounded the corner, while its white eye stared uncannily down its long muzzle.
The beast strolled up to the iron bars. It sniffed the white stone of the floor. Its lips curled back, showing a huge set of fangs as yellow as the ghoul's, but shinier. Instead of a bark, it gave a sepulchral growl. The other three dogs by the door shied farther back. The barking at the low windows ceased. The other dogs around the mausoleum quivered in eager anticipation as black-haired wolfdog approached the bars.
"Don't," Marley's voice warned in a hiss between clenched teeth. The ghoul swung his hewer in the still air.
The great dog, still watching with its one eye, stalked surprisingly backward. The ghoul did not dare move - something seemed wrong. This mutt seemed smarter.
One-eye raised its head from the ground. It rose from its lower crouch to stand tall between two faded headstones. It tilted its head up and back. Its grey muzzle opened only a little for the front canines. Toward the grey sky, over the silent day, like a monster descended from some jagged mountain cleft, the wolfdog howled.
A choral shriek of all that was wild cracked the silence of the tombs. All as one the pack lunged. Glass crunched as the dogs wriggled through the jagged windows. The black wolfdog charged the iron door. He shot his snapping, pressured jaw between the bars and shook the cast iron with his mighty shoulders. The wedged stone ground against the floor.
The ghoul shrieked. He arced a wild swing at the wolfdog's stuck head. Missed. Stumbled back. A mutt snapped at the ghoul's ankle; the hewer blade cracked its skull and loosed the jaws. Panicking, the ghoul climbed atop a sarcophagus.
Three dogs were already inside, their thin fur crisscrossed by cuts from the broken windows. The skinny hounds ran up to the ghoul and began nipping his feet. He stomped, and spat, and swung the jagged short spear, but the pack was closing and gathering. More dogs circled around and streamed through the door. The wolfdog jerked its head free and came around the bars as well.
The ghoul's eyes, terror-wide, shone suddenly with a crafty gleam. He had noticed, somehow, little white flakes sticking to his black wool coat. The ghoul glanced up. The hole in the rotten ceiling was just above. He leapt and grabbed the collapsing edge of the wall. The old ceramic shingles fell and cracked away at his touch, but the ghoul managed both to keep his hold and to keep his hewer clutched in a thumb.
Beneath the ghoul the dogs brayed madly. The nearest ones jumped and snapped at the scraping feet. The ghoul tried to scrabble quickly up the wall, but one lanky pointer-dog jumped and snapped just in time to latch on to his rotten, 'secondhand' boot. The ghoul screamed curses. He slipped an inch lower. He tried to shift his elbow up so that he could use his hewer hand to slash at the dog, but the ghoul saw the wolfdog in the mix. The monster bullied its way through the rest of the pack, snapping at its comrades, eager for a taste of ghoul flesh. Instead of swinging his hewer, the ghoul only screamed and kicked madly. Another dog jumped and came down with a scrap of the ghoul's trousers. The wolfdog reached the sarcophagus. It squatted back on its hind legs and prepared to lunge.
Just in time the ghoul's boot came loose. The mutt fell away with the boot in its teeth. It shook the thin leather footwear viciously. The ghoul heaved himself up just as the black wolfdog lunged. Its teeth snapped like a bear trap over empty air where the ghoul's leg had been.
Hauling himself fully up onto the ledge formed by the broken roof over the brick wall, with the dogs braying below, the ghoul perched tentatively. He gave a ragged scream as he glanced back down, triumph and terror echoing across the lichyard.
This has been Nuclear Elves, a two-part story.
Ready for Part 2?
This is fascinating worldbuilding! The prose was so grotesque and visceral - I think this would be a perfect Halloween read!