The Mammoth Book of Terror (56 page)

He looked back from where Liggett had fled.

Dreaming.

Strange shapes lumbered from the smoke, slopping through the mud but unhindered by it. Indeed, these things seemed to flow with the filth, not struggle against it. They looked like the
stretcher-bearers he had seen earlier, but as they approached he saw that there was no likeness there. None at all.

Dreaming . . . please God, let me be dreaming.

The demons had yellow eyes.

He shuddered, a tortured sigh escaping his cracked lips. The battle continued around him, but now the fighting was more scattered. In the midst of the tumult, he could hear the steady
tac-tac-tac
of the German machine guns, spreading death precisely and methodically. William reflected on how the emotions of the man behind the weapon never hindered its evil effects. The
machine gun was new to this world, yet it could have been created and directed by some ancient, scheming spirit of destruction.

Grabbing a rifle from the clutches of a corpse, he peered cautiously over the edge of the crater. The dream lingered with him, the glint from the creatures’ yellow eyes as they lumbered
toward him like misshapen men . . .

He was in the middle of no-man’s land.

And something was charging his position.

Screaming, William pulled the trigger and was greeted with an empty click.

The thing drew closer, its harsh and ragged breath echoing in the darkness. Ducking back down William flailed in the water, searching wildly for another weapon. His hand closed on something
round and he brought it up to the surface – he had to, he could not help himself – and an eyeball stared back at him from his glistening palm.

He screamed again.

The shriek was answered from above.

The thing towered over the shell hole, darkness enshrouding its body like a blanket. William scuttled backward like a crab as a guttural laugh mocked him. The thing cocked its head, surveying
him calmly.

It’s a man . . . it’s a man . . . it’s got to be a man . . . !

A
flare popped half a mile away, throwing a sheen of sickly light over the scene.

Its body was pale and bloated, the skin mottled like melted cheese or wax. The creature bent at the knees and leapt, landing in the hole but not sinking into the mud. It snarled at him. Its
fetid breath fogged the air between them.

It was not a German. It was not a man. Men didn’t have yellow eyes.

Or tusks.

Scampering up the slope, William fled across the field with the howls of the creature nipping at his heels. He risked a glance to see if it was gaining. Blessed relief washed over him when he
noticed that the thing hadn’t left the hole.

He heard the ripping sounds, and the chewing. It was feeding.

He turned and ran into the night. The air exploded and burned around him as he dashed across the field and back into the labyrinthine trenches. Leaping over a sandbagged parapet, he saw hunched
forms moving in the darkness below. He jumped another trench, missing his mark and clawing wildly at barbed wire as he slid down.

A cluster of German and French troops struggled against one another, not in battle, but in flight. Even as he watched the mud erupted before them, spewing earth and water skyward. William turned
and ran before he could see what had caused it.

The earth was giving up its secrets.

The trench crossed another, then another, and soon he was lost in the intersections. The Argonne battlefield was a cacophony of hellish sound now, gunfire and explosions punctuated by cries of
agony and other, less human exhortations.

Above him, out in front of the barbed wire, a man was being torn apart. The attacker ripped the victim’s arm from its socket. Brandishing the bloody trophy like a club, he began to beat
the other man mercilessly. He sank into the mud, raised his remaining arm in a feeble attempt to ward off the blows.

The victor
squealed
in delight.

William continued moving, never willing to stop, always fearing that to halt would be to give in . . . give in to whatever had taken possession of this battlefield.

He reached an empty portion of the trenches and slowed for a moment, gasping for breath. The sounds continued from all around him. The air was heavy with the stench they had first encountered in
the village.

Around a dogleg in the trench, footsteps approached.

William looked to his left and saw a thick, yellowish-green cloud veiling the night sky. He wondered if the forest and trenches were on fire. Perhaps that would be good. Maybe flame would purge
this place of all its ills, both manmade and . . . other.

The footsteps grew closer, falling faster.

Dizzy, William struggled to remain standing. His throat burned as pain lanced into his chest. His eyes watered. Breathing became difficult . . . and then impossible. He spat blood; crimson
frothed on his agonized lips.

Something raced at him along the trench.

“William!” It growled his name, voice horribly distorted, inhuman.

Then he saw that the thing was Morris, a wound on his scalp bleeding freely and matched by a gash in his side.

“William!” his friend screamed again through his mask, and then he was there, catching him as he fell.

“Morris . . .” he coughed. “Hurts.”

“Gas. They’ve gassed the trenches. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving.”

“The Sergeant . . . Winston . . . Liggett . . . they’re dead,” William spat.

“We’re all dead, William,” Morris answered as he dragged him through the mud, away from the cloud.

Through the haze, William saw that his friend’s hair had turned white.

And then he knew no more.

The voice startled him. He looked up and saw beauty.

It was the girl from the baker’s, her head surrounded by an aura from the bright sun. Light gleamed from her golden tresses as she sat next to him. He remembered her name now. Clarice. She
was . . . had been . . . his girlfriend. How could he have forgotten?

Slowly, as if surfacing from a dream, it was all starting to come back. He knew why he was crying. He’d had this conversation before.

“My father is butchering Onyx today,” he said quietly as she took his hand. “I know he’s only a silly cow, but . . .”

“You’ve grown fond of him,” Clarice finished.

“Well, yes,” William agreed. “I’ve looked after him since he was a calf. I can understand why father must do it, but it all seems so bloody unfair. Onyx has lived his
life, day after day, never knowing why he really existed: for food. What kind of fate is that?”

“That is simply the way of things, my love,” she answered softly. “There’s too much of the poet in you. He’s just a cow. We raise cattle to eat. That’s why
they exist.”

“Is that the only reason?” William retorted. “Aren’t they intelligent creatures, living things? Maybe they have hopes and dreams? How would you feel if you lived your
life only to end up on someone’s supper table? It’s not fair, Clarice. Onyx is nothing more than fodder.”

“Maybe we all are, William,” she stated simply. “Come, would you like to see your home?”

“Yes!” William cried. “I’d like that very much. I can’tseem to remember it properly at all.”

They walked hand in hand through the pasture, the roof of the farmhouse looming just over the hill. They passed through a grazing herd of Holsteins.

“Mind the dung,” William warned her, stepping lightly.

Then he stopped, terror rooting him to the spot.

A monstrous bull gazed at him with Sterling’s face. “We’re all fodder, lad,” said the Crown Sergeant, slowly chewing his cud, a bulbous wound opening in his side.

“That’s right, William,” echoed Winston, his teats swollen with milk as he tore ravenously at a patch of grass. “It’s the way things work. We exist to provide
sustenance to the planet.”

“We’re germs,” Liggett mooed through a splitting throat.

“I don’t understand,” William gasped.

“Perhaps you are not meant to,” said a voice from behind him.

Clarice had vanished. William turned and saw Morris, buried up to his waist in the soft earth of the meadow.

“The earth still has secrets, William,” he said gravely, sinking deeper into the loam. “Buried forever and never meant to be seen. Not by us.”

“Come, William,” his father cried from over the hill. “Bring the cattle. It’s time for the slaughter.”

Liggett, Winston and Sergeant Sterling began to snort in agony. Then William was sinking into the earth as well, struggling desperately as he watched the tufts of Morris’s hair sink
below.

It’s a dream, I know it’s a dream because his hair turned white back at the front.

William opened his mouth to scream and the earth rushed in. Above him, the slaughter began anew.

He gagged, grasping the thing and pulling the cadaverous fingers from his mouth. Gasping for breath, he panicked when he found he couldn’t move. He turned his head to the right and
Morris’s glazed eyes stared back at him, unblinking and filled with blood. A warm and sticky fluid dripped onto his forehead. Something heavy lay on top of him.

Bodies, he realized. He was buried beneath bodies. Muck and water covered most of his form, leaving his shoulders and head above, but the night was hidden from view. The echoes of the artillery
blast still ricocheted through his mind, even though it could have been minutes or hours ago.

Something landed nearby with a heavy splash and a grunt, and then, for a few brief moments, there was silence. William held his breath and strained to hear or see, but his world had contracted
to this; a claustrophobic stench of fresh blood and turned earth, and a cloying darkness caused by the shadows of the dead. He whispered Clarice’s name . . .

And then something started ripping and tearing at the bodies around him.

It’s time for the slaughter
, he heard his father say again.

Something stopped him from crying out. At the time he thought he was being calm and cautious, but later – when he was walking across a shattered, silent landscape with only the dead and
unwanted as company – he realized that it was outright terror.

He was frozen stiff by fear.

Animal sounds of feeding, the snap of bones, wet sucks as bodies were hauled from the mud . . . whole or in pieces . . . gulping and retching. And in the background there was still gunfire,
still the occasional thud of an artillery shell finding a home somewhere, but it no longer had the sound of a fullblown battle. Now, it was more like a skirmish.

Soon, with the sounds seeming to grow nearer as the thing ate its way down to him, the gunfire ceased altogether.

But the fighting continued. William heard shouts and screams, feet splashing through water and mud, bodies hitting the ground. At one point, he heard the Lord’s Prayer chanted frantically
in German. A horrific squeal sent him into a shiver. He clenched his fists and bit down on his lip, tasting blood, desperate to remain still lest the gorging thing sensed him down here.

He realized that he could see it, now. The body above him shifted and jerked as mouthfuls were taken from it. Its head snapped back and crunched into William’s nose. His eyes watered, his
face caught fire, but he remained still. He should be playing dead, he knew, holding a breath, narrowing his eyes so that light could not glint from the moisture there . . . but he could not close
his eyes because he could see the thing, and the horror of it forbade him any solace.

Its mouth was the worst because it was surrounded by flecks of blood and clots of meat. The pale snouted nose leaked copiously over its fleshy lips and chin, diluting dead men’s blood and
sending it spraying into the air every time the thing moved its blockyjaws. A second before William finally managed to close his eyes, it sneezed.

Retreating into his own mind – trying to escape, to find beauty in his memories – William felt the warmth of alien fluid spatter across his face and run, slowly, down over his split
lips.

He imagined blood gushing from a slaughtered bull’s throat.

He tasted the vile mucus of the creature, the salty blood of the dead men, and the alkaline fear that was his own.

He struggled from the loose earth and the body parts that surrounded him, trying not to look too closely. His hands found some horrendous things as he tried to haul himself upright. They were
all cold.

An eerie silence hung over the battlefield. There were no whistles or whispers, no crackle of gunfire, no shouting or groaning or screaming from no-man’s land. There was not even a breeze
to rustle by his ears. Nothing. And as William dragged himself from the collapsed trench that had so nearly been his grave, he saw why.

Everyone was dead.

Never had he seen human destruction on this scale. The landscape around him was carpeted with corpses, piled two or three deep in places, all of them mutilated and tattered by whatever had
killed them. Both armies must have abandoned their trenches to fight in the open . . . but fight whom? Not each other, he knew that. He had heard tales about the Hun, seen caricatures of them
before he came to war, but the ones he had seen since then . . . the ones he had killed . . . had all looked exactly like him.