Zombie Pulp (37 page)

Burial Detail

By six that night, Creel and Burke were back at the trenches and then it was off with the burial detail which Burke was still grumbling about. Sergeant Haines formed up his burial party and they went over the top into No-Man’s Land. They carried gas masks because gas was still clinging to hollows and low spots. German burial parties came within a few yards of them but were ignored as they ignored the Tommies.

The mud was thick and slopping when they stepped off the duckboards, sinkholes sucking men right up to their waists at times and it was a real struggle pulling them back out. The corpses were everywhere, some jutting from the mud and some floating atop it, all of them yellow with gas, blistered, limbs contorted, death-white fingers clutching at their throats, bubbling tangles of yellow vomit hanging from their mouths along with regurgitated chunks of their lungs.

It was ghastly work.

Since sniper fire was not a worry, the men carried shaded lanterns with them and more than once they stopped as scurrying trains of rats came up from flooded burrows and bomb craters, immense things that paid them no mind, squeaking and chewing on the dead, dipping their snouts into freshly gored throats and tunneling into the bellies of corpses.

Twice the burial party paused when the wan circle of light revealed hundreds of leering red eyes watching them.

If I only had my damn camera and some light to shoot with,
Creel thought.

The rain fell in a clammy mist and pockets of groundfog twisted around their legs as they pulled their boots out of the muck and carefully took yet another step, the noxious stench of the unburied dead fuming about them. They saw lots of bodies or fragments of the same that had been there a long time, most of them nothing but well-gnawed skeletons. They found the skull of a German in the barbwire, its helmet still in place…someone had put a cigar butt in its teeth. Battle-ravaged cadavers rose from the sucking yellow mud like leaning white tombstones, rats moving in black verminous armies around them. One of the Tommies stepped into a pool of mud and sank into the soft white mush of a dozen bloated Hun corpses. He nearly went out of his mind before they yanked him free.

The night was tenebrous, the air dank and cloying. Now and again, they could hear the Germans cry out as they made some grisly discovery.

“
Bloody hell,” Burke muttered when he stepped on a body and three or four oily rats escaped the abdomen with meat in their jaws.

Creel found a corpse that was moving and Haines, using his bayonet, discovered why soon enough: there was a rat nest inside it. Worked into a mad frenzy, he slashed the adults into ribbons and stomped the blind squirming pups to paste.

Haines told them to don their gas masks when they started to see dozens and dozens of rats creeping about on their bellies like great fleshy slugs. They’d all been poisoned by the gas and were dying in numbers. A couple of the Tommies started kicking them like footballs, giggling as they went sailing away into the brown slop.

About thirty minutes into it, they found three corpses tangled together at the edge of a run of duckboard. They were men from the 12
^th
and Haines and the others recognized them, despite the fact that they were covered in yellow slime.

“
Look here,” Haines said. “Rats again.”

The bellies of all three had been hollowed out quite thoroughly, even the flesh of their throats were missing. Haines and the others stood around in their bug-eyed masks, swearing and kicking at anything handy while Burke had a closer look. He waved away clouds of flies that were thick as a blanket.

“
See?” he said to Creel, out of earshot of the others, pointing to great gashes and punctures in the bones of exposed ribs by lantern light. “Ain’t no rat ever born had teeth like that. Too big.”

“
Dogs?”

But Burke just shook his head and would not say.

“
Footprints over here…small ones,” one of the Tommies said.

They went over to the duckboard and there was a crowding of muddy footprints on it which was not so surprising except for two things: they were the prints of bare feet and very, very small.

“
Children,” Burke said. “Children’s prints.”

“
Out here?” Haines said, stripping off his mask and mopping his sweaty, mottled face. There was something quite akin to stark horror in his eyes. “No kids…not out here…”

But the evidence was unmistakable: children had been out in No-Man’s Land stalking about barefoot. It seemed inconceivable, but to each man standing there, there was no denying what they were seeing. Sometimes mud could expand in size with the dampness, make prints larger than they were but certainly not smaller.

Nobody said anything for some time and Creel thought that moment would be burned into his brain forever: the Tommies standing around, ankle-deep in the Flanders mud, rain running down those grim gas masks, mist coiling about them, corpses rotting in the muck.

And as he framed that moment in his mind with something quite near to hysteria, a voice in the back of his head said:
The prints of children. Children are out scavenging No-Man’s Land by night. Barefoot children. And these bodies have been eaten by something that is not rats or a wild dog, Burke says. You don’t dare make the connection because it would be insane to do so….yet, yet you know something is terribly, dreadfully wrong with this scenario. You can feel it in your guts, in your bones, in the shadowy recesses of your soul.

“
Heard a story once about—” one of the Tommies started to say and Haines jumped on him, took hold of him and shook him wildly.
“You’ll shut up with that talk! Do you hear me? You’ll shut up with it!”

After that, solemn as only undertakers can be, they finished up their work quickly, each man suddenly very aware of the long shadows stretching around them and what might be hiding in them. They wasted no time in getting back to the trenches.

For there was something damnably unnatural haunting No-Man’s Land and they all knew it.

7

Tall Tales

The Tommies, when they gathered in the dugouts to warm their fingers about the glowing little coal brazier at night, their bellies warmed from the daily rum ration, would start telling crazy tales by the light of the moon. And maybe sometimes that was because they had a story to tell and sometimes because they just needed to hear their own voices.

Creel understood that part of it just fine.

After a particularly violent barrage in the Le Touquet sector by German 18-pounders, whizz-bangs, which blew sandbags into fragments, a young private from the 2
^nd
Lancashire Fusiliers with eyes like smoked glass kept touching his arms and legs and chest in the observation trench.

Standing there, knee-deep in the frozen mud, Creel said, “It’s okay, son. You’re still intact.”

“
Oi, it’s not that, sir,” said the private, touching his grime-streaked face. “It’s not that at all, you see. It’s just…well, I’m making sure I’m
solid
and what, not a ghost. One minute you’re solid as brick, the next naught but a ghost drifting about.”

In the trenches where death came so swiftly there was a real need to prove to yourself that you were truly alive, a thing of flesh and blood. When you spent week after miserable week living in what amounted to sandbagged ditches with freezing drizzle raining down on you, ears ringing from machine-gun fire, the pitted landscape a cratered run of barbwire and unburied corpses lit at night by flickering green flares…it all became very surreal. And the need to prove to yourself that you were not in some desolate hell or purgatory whiling away eternity became very strong.

Creel had felt it himself more than once.

Scribbling down the vagaries of life in the trenches, the madness was always there and he was mute witness to it. Very often, it vented itself in the form of stories. Particularly after a fierce action or raid, like bad blood that had to be lanced.

He’d heard about monstrous packs of rats that took down living men. About visions of Christ and the Virgin Mother in the trenches. The phantoms of dead men patrolling the perimeters. And from one particularly terrified sergeant of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, he’d heard about a creature half-bird and half-woman, a hag that fed on corpses (later he learned that was an old one, so old it had hair growing on it, a twice-told battlefield tale that predated the days of Cromwell).

But he was a realist.

Seventeen years as a combat correspondent will do that. It will leech the poetry from your soul and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. War, any war, is bad enough without a fertile imagination complicating things.

But after the burial party…and what that German sergeant had said…he began thinking differently.

It was the state of those corpses and the footprints that haunted him for days afterwards. Maybe it meant nothing at all…yet, his mind would not let go of it. Over and over again, it went through what he’d seen out there and he began to get that feeling in his gut he hadn’t had in years…the sense that he was onto something. And when that feeling grew strong, when he smelled the blood in the water, he knew he’d have to track it to its source, one way or another.

But he went slow.

He went easy.

When you were in his position, there by the good graces of the BEF—even if their reasons weren’t exactly altruistic—you could not make waves. He wasn’t like some of the British newsies, guys like John Buchan or Valentine Williams, Henry Nevinson or Hamilton Fife, established accredited war correspondents. They had been selected by the Brits to shovel out the propaganda and were doing a bang-up job at it, steering the British public away from the godawful truth of the war and finely tuning their misguided perception of a valiant struggle against the bloodthirsty savage Hun (with only light, acceptable losses, of course). If they knew the truth of what was being done with their sons and husbands, brothers and fathers in the meatgrinders of the trenches, there would be rioting in the streets.

Creel was offended by censored news.

Maybe his own stories were watered down, but he did manage to keep a somewhat despairing undercurrent to them. He would not be a tool of corrupt politicians regardless of what side of the Atlantic they spawned on.

But he knew he had to be careful.

He had to step light.

So he didn’t make much noise at first, he just listened.

And he kept hearing the same thing again and again: there was something out there. Something that wasn’t a man. Something that fed on the wounded and dying. He jotted it all down in his notebook, thinking it was the sort of thing that might spice up yet another dreary account of war.

Then three men of the 12
^th
disappeared from a listening post a stone’s throw from the German forward trenches. And this after not one but two wire-cutting parties failed to return.

“
It’s nothing but the Jerries,” Sergeant Haines said. “They snuck up on ‘em, took ‘em prisoner. Them Jerries is quite good at things like that.”

It was always possible. But Sergeant Stone, who’d led the three, was extremely capable.

“
So when are you going out?” Creel asked him.

“
Tomorrow,” Haines said. “We’ll have a bit of a look. Be a morning mist coming in.”

“
I want to go with.”

“
You?”

“
Yes.”

The sergeant sighed. “All right. But you carry rifle and kit like the rest. If you lag, you’re left behind.”

8

No-Man’s Land

Haines was right about the mist: it came with the dawn, white and fuming, a perfect enveloping wall that obscured everything, turned all the wreckage out in No-Man’s Land to gray indistinct shapes. As the sun rose higher and higher, it did not dissipate. It seemed to be steaming from the broken, mud-slicked ground itself. It fell over the trenches like a shroud and visibility was down to ten or twelve feet. Creel could hear the men and the clank of their equipment but not see them.

There was no time to admire the fog as the officers and sergeants called for the men to “stand to” and up on the fire step they went, bayonets fixed to guard against a dawn raid. It was the same every day. Afterwards came what the Tommies called the “morning hate” in which both sides exchanged machine-gun fire and some light shelling just to relieve the tension of waiting. It didn’t last long. The soldiers stood down, cleaned rifles and equipment, were inspected by the officers.

“
Hear you’re coming for a walk with us,” Corporal Kelly said to Creel as they breakfasted on hard bread, bacon, and biscuits.

“
Thought I might,” Creel told him.

“
Won’t be good out there, sir,” Kelly said, shielding his rations from a light falling rain. “If I was you, I’d change me mind. You don’t have to go but we do.”

There was no getting past the dread underlying his words, but was that the understandable fear of the enemy or was it something else? Creel didn’t ask. No sense getting any of the boys worked up and nervous like he was.

“
The bloody situations you get me in,” Burke said to him as he had a cigarette. “Think I’d be safer in combat.”