Unnatural Issue (41 page)

What happened to them afterward, when they were evacuated to recovery hospitals? She couldn’t say. She did her best for them, and that was all anyone could do. At least they were going to places where the sheets were changed daily, where rats didn’t scamper among the beds at night, where they weren’t in danger of being killed by shells or bombs in their beds.

There was one small problem, of course. If anyone ever found out that she was
not
a real nurse, nor French, she would probably get shipped summarily back to England. And now that she had found Charles, that was the last place she wanted to go. So far, Peter had held his peace, but if something happened and she was in danger—he might just reveal it all.

I just have to make sure that nothing does,
she told herself, then amended the thought.
Or, at least, nothing that he finds out about.

As she neared the hospital, which had been set up in a donated farm building of the sort that Uncle Paul owned (or
had
owned), she saw ambulances discharging their cargo and speeding away, Uncle Paul’s among them. She broke into a run.

“What happened?” she asked the orderly at the door, breathlessly, as she paused long enough to shed her cloak and hang it on the hanger.

By now she was conversant enough in French that she could pass as a provincial native from the north. It was funny, there were as many dialects of French as there were of English, and those from the Ardennes found it as hard to understand the Parisians as a London Cockney did broad Yorkshire.

“Cursed boche got their artillery fixed on a company coming off the lines for relief,” the man spat. “There must have been a spy or a spotter behind the lines, or maybe a nighttime balloonist. We’re only now getting them in, as no one dared get to them before dawn.”

Susanne nodded, ran to the scrubroom and doused herself in Lister Solution. It was going to be a long day, and she would need to be at her best for every man still alive.

 

When she stumbled out of the ward, it was dark, and she ran right into an officer just coming in the door. “Scuse moi, mam’s—” said a familiar voice,
“Susanne?
What are you doing here?”

Charles caught her elbows and held her upright as she swayed with fatigue. She looked up at him and smiled wryly. “Just doing my part,” she said. “I can’t exactly go back to England, after all.”

He looked at her sternly. “No, but you can go somewhere else. New Zealand. Australia. Canada. Even America!”

She bristled a little. “So it is perfectly all right for you to risk your life, and not all right for me to be safely behind the lines doing what I can?”

“But it’s not safe behind the lines!” Charles objected. “Hospitals have been shelled!”

“And I could be run over by a cart, or a flock of sheep, or a—a—kangaroo!” she retorted. “Meanwhile, you
know
I am an Earth Master, and you must know how many I have helped and
will
help!” Then she stopped, set her jaw, and let her broad Yorkshire come through. “And tha’ knows that short of bodily restraining me and puttin’ me on a boat in chains, tha’art not going to keep me from doing what I wish, so tha’ might as well give over.”

He stared at her. And then, ruefully, began to chuckle. “Cursed stubborn woman, you are true Yorkshire stock. But I’ll persuade you, see if I don’t!”

She sniffed. “Tha’ can try.”

“What if I knew where you can get a hot bath?” he countered. “A real bath.”

She stared at him in disbelief.

“A mile down that road—” he pointed “—is a lunatic asylum. It has a men’s side and a women’s side. Part of their treatment is hydrotherapy, and they have opened the bathing facilities to us. You can have a real hot bath there, provided you don’t mind the company of people who wear dead bats on their heads.”

Her skin itched at the mere thought of a hot bath. Her landlady was a lovely old dear, but the only tub was an ancient thing you had to fill from water heated on the stove, and was hardly big enough to sit upright in, with your knees to your chest.

“This is
not
going to make me go to New Zealand,” she told him.

“And if I were to take you to dinner?” He smiled.

“It still won’t,” she temporized. “But I will listen to your arguments.”

“Taking her to dinner,” of course, meant either bringing her to the Officer’s Mess or getting what could be scrounged up at the local bistro. She wondered which he would choose and was pleasantly surprised when it was the bistro. There were no actual regulations forbidding officers from consorting with nursing sisters, but she had no wish to attract any more attention than she had from the English military. She wasn’t a religious sister, she wasn’t a trained nurse, and she wasn’t French, even though she was serving with the French nurses. And she certainly didn’t have official or parental permission to be here.

She really didn’t notice what dinner was. Horse, probably; when it came to anything that you might cook and eat, the French were inclined to put a sauce on. And it didn’t matter. It could have been boot soles for all she cared. She had Charles all to herself, for the first time ever, and she set out to make a good impression on him.

It must have worked. He invited her to dinner the next day as well.

The six days—only six—of being in reserve passed far too quickly. The men in reserve got a chance to eat decently, sleep in beds, clean up, get rid of lice, have minor injuries and problems like trench foot cleared up. They got light drill daily, but mostly, they were supposed to rest and recover. Charles would be the first to admit that a great deal of his pleasure during those six days was in the dinners he had with Susanne. Finally he could talk to someone else about magic, about the bone-shaking distress he felt in the land because of the horrors of this war, the fear that the Elementals of this part of the world were being destroyed or driven off. You could say things to a woman you couldn’t admit to a man. She was a good old thing, was Susanne; she listened patiently and carefully, and if she couldn’t reassure him, at least she didn’t shower him with platitudes.

They even managed to round up Almsley and his man Garrick for two of these dinners, making for a lively discussion over the table. Peter tried briefly to persuade the girl that it was in her best interest to emigrate, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

He felt as though he was living like a human being again for the first time in months. Six days was not enough. His men clearly felt the same, and to be honest, they didn’t
look
recovered when their six days were up.

So it was with decidedly gloomy feelings that he and his troopers made their way back to the Front—to a different series of trenches this time. Besides having to work really hard to convince himself that his country needed him out there, he was laboring under a sense of failure for another self-imposed task. He hadn’t been able to talk Susanne around to evacuating to the colonies, and now it would be at least two weeks before he could see her again. She was so damned stubborn; if only she would see reason!

Once they got into the relief trenches, it became a matter of going silently and with no lights. The relief trenches were within reach of the guns, and any light would give the spotters something to sight in on. This was a night of no moon, which was good for keeping undercover, and it was good because the boche artillery had to fire blind; but it was bad because he couldn’t see anything, and he was rearmost man.

Perhaps that was how he got separated from his own troop. Because he went around a corner—and suddenly, he was alone.

As in,
completely alone
. There was no warning, it was as if he had suddenly been transported to a place that had been abandoned. The sense he always had, of knowing where his men were—well, he couldn’t sense them. He strained his ears, but he could hear nothing but the ever-present rumble of artillery and, nearby, the soughing of the wind. No footfalls, no murmurs of voices, nothing.

Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. His stomach felt queasy, and if he’d had hackles to raise, they’d have been up.

And just as a chill crept down his spine, he felt with a shock of recognition that he wasn’t alone anymore.

He sensed it first: a draught of icy cold wind, colder than the winter wind he was used to, and carrying the scent of corruption with it. Then he heard it—a faint, but menacing moaning.

Then a starshell burst overhead, and he
saw
it. Saw, as the shell dropped lower and lower, the limbs clawing their way up out of the muck on either side of the trench. Saw the half-rotten corpses dragging themselves to their feet. Watched in horror as they turned their eyeless heads toward him.

With a yell, half fear, half panic, he opened up on them with his service revolver.

It had no effect, of course. They were already dead. Worse, he
knew
some of them; the decomposing features weren’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognize some faces, and some of them had been his own men. With horrible sucking sounds they pulled themselves out of the mud and to their feet. As they piled into the trench, hands grasping for him, the paralysis of terror suddenly wore off, and he turned and ran—

Only to stumble to a halt when a second starshell burst and showed him that he was blocked on both sides by an army of walking dead piled into the trench and spilling over the top.

He pressed himself against the wall of the trench.
Maybe they won’t find me. . . .

But within moments, he knew that was a false hope. They all turned their eyeless faces in his direction and started forward at a shambling walk.

He scrambled up the side of the trench, frantically clawing at the boards shoring up the dirt. He made it out just ahead of the horrible groping hands and stumbled away.

The damned things followed, piling up against the side he had just scaled and using the bodies of those who had gotten there first as a staircase.

Sheer, total terror engulfed him. He shook like a leaf in a high wind, and his mind spun in circles. He appeared to be the only truly living thing in this entire landscape of death.

The dead glowed with their own phosphorescence as they surged after him, moving much faster than they had any right to.

He screamed and ran.

But more of them were pulling themselves up out of the earth in front of him, and he dodged frantically out of their way. This wasn’t like the fight back at Branwell Hall; then, there had been four of them, they had the proper weapons, and Peter had fought these things before. Now he was utterly alone, without the right weapons, on alien ground—and the things that were after him wore the faces of his dead companions. He would never see Rose again. She might not even learn what had happened to him.

So he did the only thing he could. He ran, spurred on by fear that ran hot through his veins and galvanized him

Only to fall headlong into a shell crater.

He turned his fall into a tumble, managing not to break his neck or anything else, until he fetched up in the muddy bottom of the crater. He scrambled up the other side, or tried to, but the silent dead ringed the rim, cutting him off from escape.

He had no blessed salt, no blessed iron, no—anything. As he put his back to the wreck of a cart down in the bottom of the crater with him and fumbled his rifle with its fixed bayonet off his back, he could only send out a single, magical, despairing cry for help and pray that someone, anyone, was near enough to “hear” it.

He did not expect the answer that he got.

From the earth at his feet, a dozen or more little brownie-like creatures erupted. In their hands were tiny flint blades. He heard a shrill whinnying sound and the pounding of hooves, and a moment later, a shining white equine form plunged through the mob of walking dead, slashing from left to right with the single horn in the middle of its forehead.

A second white creature, this time a stag with a magnificent spread of antlers, appeared on the opposite side of the crater; it bugled a challenge and charged the dead with lowered horns.

Its challenge was answered by the little manikins at his feet and by a long, drawn out howl. Three white wolves appeared between the stag and the unicorn to attack, as the brownies charged from below with those wicked little blades.

Every time the unicorn’s horn touched one of the dead, it dropped to the ground, lifeless again. The stag merely broke them in pieces. The wolves did likewise, and the brownies set upon the broken and cut them to pieces.

For a moment his heart leaped. But another starshell showed him the truth: Charles’ rescuers were themselves wounded and weary—and sick. They were inextricably linked to the land, and the land was sickening, dying. The stag missed as often as he hit, and he stumbled a little when he tried to charge. The unicorn looked to be on his last legs; the light of its horn was dim, and its coat was harsh and dingy. The brownies only had their little flint knives, and the wolves were emaciated. They had come to his rescue, but they themselves were falling.