Ghoulies Abroad by Julie Steimle (bts book recommendations txt) 📖

Over the River and Through the Woods

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twelve

 

 

“So… what happened to the monk?” Andy asked, stacking his non-perishables from his pack and separating them from the wet things.  

Semour cringed, shaking his head. “He just vanished.”

“Do you think he really was an ally? Or was he planning all along to drown us in that river?” Eddie cynically muttered, wringing out his wet things from his backpack. Some were in waterproof bags, but not all.

“I don’t think he was planning it,” Daniel murmured, lashing up a makeshift clothes horse from branches he gathered from the surrounding forest. “I think they were trying to get rid of him.”

“And not trying to drown us?” Eddie snapped, twisting out a pair of socks.

Nodding, Daniel shuddered. “Oh no. They were trying that too.” He then lifted his eyes to Chen who was walking around shirtless while trying to dry his clothes near the fire on some tree branches. “But they underestimated Chen.”

They all looked to him. With all eyes staring at him, Chen immediately felt self-conscious.

“What tried to drown us?” Andy asked Chen. “They had no bodies. I couldn’t get them off.”

“Shui gui,” Chen said.

“Spirits of the drowned,” Daniel confirmed, remembering his list. “They usually try to drown others where they were drowned.”

“And they could not drown you because you were so big?” Eddie asked Chen.

Chen shook his head. “They could not drown me because water dragons can breathe under water.”

Rick and Andy nodded. They shook out their shoes. Andy had wrapped one of those silver survival space blankets around his shoulders for warmth. All of them wished they had put their clothing in more waterproof bags.

“The Monkey King stole a staff and his armor from a sea dragon in the story,” Andy said, shivering.

“But what happened to our monk?” Semour asked, keeping warm near the fire under a similar blanket. “I mean… he was just gone.”

“He didn’t go out ahead of any of us,” Chen said, teeth chattering. “I watched to make sure everybody got out. When I looked back to him, he was not there.”

“He wasn’t exactly a real person though,” Daniel said, shaking out his last shirt. “More like a spell.”

They stared at him.

“Didn’t you feel it? The difference between a magical person and a spell is—”

“Intensity, duration, and rhythm,” Semour said, nodding. He shook out his backpack and hung it on a near branch.

Each in the Seven nodded.

Rick frowned. “You mean you could tell he wasn’t real from the start?”

Andy shook his head. “No. He was solid. But real supernatural beings have a power behind them. You can feel their souls in a way.”

“Oh.” Rick then looked about themselves, absentmindedly sprouting fur in reaction to the cold. He looked a bit more like one of those movie werewolves, which made his friends smother chuckles. “Well… what do we do now? We’ve lost our guide. All our cell phones are useless. My computer needs to dehydrate, and I have no clue what we are supposed to be doing in Yancheng. I have no business there. But I know the monk specified this place as a necessary stop.”

“Every necessary stop seems to have an overwhelming problem,” Andy murmured, looking enviously on Rick’s sprouting fur. “The feud between the tiger and wolf villages in the first place. Those Japanese ghosts in Xinghua. Yancheng has got to have something extremely bad that those demons want to keep us from.”

“It is kind of strange…” Semour muttered while tinkering with his own computer system, which he had opened up. There was no WiFi in the forest after all. He looked to Daniel. “You said those birds were Greek. Explain please.”

“Stymphalian birds.” Daniel gazed gravely on them. He pulled out his red crystal and began to use his summoned fire to dry out his clothing, focusing most especially on his shoes. “These are mythic Greek monsters, famously killed by Heracles—though he didn’t kill all of them. Jason and the Argonauts also fought them. They have beaks of bronze, sharp metallic feathers, and poisonous guano.”

They all paled.

“Will they be back?” Chen uttered breathlessly.

Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know. Just thank heaven for bullet proof glass, ‘cause they didn’t get us.”

“How do you defeat them?” Chen stared, eyes widening, imagining another attack without the shelter of a car.

“In the legend of Heracles, he shot them all down with poison arrows.”

“What are they doing in China?” Eddie asked as if their presence was a personal insult.

“That I don’t know,” Daniel said. “But they can be shot and killed. And apparently cork armor is more effective against them than steel or copper.”

“Cork.” Semour stared critically at him. His suit of armor back home was silver plated. The core of the metal was much more sturdy.

“Their beaks get stuck in it,” Daniel explained. He then walked over to where Chen’s clothes were drying and grasped his own red crystal. He sent out a hot flame which quickly dried out his clothes. “We need to hurry.”

All of them nodded, though Chen stared at Daniel with wide eyes, as that fire had been like a blowtorch.  

As soon as their clothes were dry, each of them helped clean out the van, taking what they needed then abandoning the vehicle. As much as they were sure Tom probably could fix it, there was nothing they could do with the van anyway, as it was not on a road and there was no clear path through the forest to a road. They had to go on foot.

“I suppose this is why you all carry backpacks,” Rick muttered as they tossed away their suitcases and distributed Rick’s and Chen’s things between them. What they could not fit in, they stashed into impromptu packs made out of a sweatshirt, a belt, and some pants for Chen and Rick to carry. Then all of them marched into the thick of the woods.

The woods were dark, full strange noises, and the feeling that they were being watched. James had a compass ready, which they followed. Tom was tasked with dragging a suitcase full of heavy rice and all their electronics—that is until Chen had offered to carry it as a horse to ease his burden. The bag was slowing them all down.  

“Rick,” Andy said after a while of traveling this way, “Give Chen your pack. I think you need to go wolf for your own protection.”

Startled, Rick shrugged and undressed. He left his boxer shorts on, tucking everything else into the bag on Chen’s back. He patted Chen on the side and whispered, “Sorry about this.”

Neighing as if it didn’t bother him, Chen butted Rick back with his head to just hurry up.

Tom snorted, watching Rick sprout more fur and claws. “Nice shorts.”

“Shut it,” Rick muttered through wolf teeth when he dropped on his front paws.

But they went a lot quicker from there.

Tom was light on his feet. Chen could move faster in his horse form and so could Rick as a wolf. Faster and quieter. As for the Seven, they moved together like a top-secret scouting squad from an army.

They were near the skirts of the city by nightfall. All of them were cold. Chen had changed horse shape twice, getting hairier and hairier until he was one of those Siberian Yakutian horses.

“Is that it?” Daniel asked when he saw the city lights, his breath frosting out in little clouds with his cheeks almost a raw red.

“I hope so,” Andy muttered. “I’m exhausted and cold.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to find a place to sleep in there?” Semour asked, still not feeling dry enough to be warm.

“Maybe a youth hostel,” Rick-the-wolf murmured. “If we can look young enough.”

“I say we camp here,” James declared. He looked to the others. “We make a fire, set up tents. And I’ll take the first watch.”

Andy nodded, clearly tired of the trouble they had run across in the city.

“What?” Tom rubbed his hands, cupping them over his mouth. “No. No. I’m a city boy. I want a hotel.”

“You can get one.” Andy gestured to the city. “But I have a feeling that we are just going to attract trouble. We don’t exactly look city-ready right now.”

That ugly truth, all of them looking soppy and dirty as if they had crawled through muck and blood at the warfront, was not something Tom could deny. Muttering, Tom seemed to sulk for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll go fetch dinner.”

“Buy a backpack for the three of us, while you’re at it,” Rick-the-wolf said. “There might be a Decathlon store in Yancheng.”

Tom saluted him then rushed off, quickly going immaterial.

“How does he go places so fast…?” Eddie murmured, watching after him while Daniel and James unpacked and heaved things off Chen’s back, starting to set up camp.

Rick-the-wolf shrugged. “I dunno exactly. He’s lighter than nothing when he’s transparent, so for all I know he lets the wind blow him wherever.” He trotted over to Chen to fetch his clothes and a coat to cover him so he could to help out as a human.

Andy followed him. “Stay wolf. We need your nose.”

Turning a pointed ear, hearing all the sounds around him, Rick sighed and nodded. Fur-for-warmth would have to do.

James started a low, smokeless fire, while the others set up tents around it to block out the moaning wind. Rick smelled no demons, though the air with pungent with other scents. He detected burning nicotine, which came from the northeast where there was a home. And of course garlic, which made him sneeze. If there had been demons in the forest, they had all been killed on the river bank.

“What river had we crossed?” Daniel muttered, poring over their splotchy map water-damaged map.

“The Yangtze I think,” James whispered.

“The Yangtze is not between Xinghua and Yancheng,” Rick said, lifting his snout off his paws. “It was just a small river.”

“Small?” Daniel stared at him.

Rick shivered, barely nodding his head. “In comparison to the Yangtze, yes.”

Then he smelled something. Decay. It reminded Rick of the time when he had to hunt down zombies in Central Park for the NYPD. The odor was nasty, and coming closer. He hopped onto his paws. “Trouble is coming.”

Daniel and James shared a look. “I can feel it, but barely. What is it?”

Semour drew his sword. Eddie and Andy grabbed for their weapons. Chen, who had long changed into clothes and a warm coat, rose to his feet shuddering.

“Stinky,” Rick described, remaining wolf. “Rotting…”

“Like death?” Chen asked.

Rick nodded his wolf head. “Zombie smell, to be honest.”

“Zombie?” They stared at him.

“You know what zombie smells like?” Andy asked, appalled… mostly because it had remained a secret.

His hackles raising, Rick nodded. “I sniffed some out once when I was a kid back in New York. Long story.”

“Jianshi,” Chen said, his eyes raking over the darkness. “If I am right, these are not your run-of-the-mill zombies. They are vampires.”

Stiff-jointed, arms extended in rigor mortis, hopping through the trees rather than walking came these animated corpses with red eyes and bared teeth. Most of them were rotting, and they were coming straight for their camp.

One jumped at Andy who moved just in time and hacked into it with his sword. The thing lost its arm, but it kept coming. And the arm kept moving.

“How do we kill them?” James shouted, backing away while hacking at another with hardly an effect to stop it.

Swiping at one, dodging another, Daniel hopped to his bag, reaching in. He yanked out wooden stakes. “Wood from a peach tree!” He tossed one stake to Semour who was knocking back one jianshi with his silver