Zombie Pulp (41 page)

There had been a fast, fleet-footed runner named Collins. Nice kid, naïve as hell, always giggling and sure of himself, untouchable as all the young Tommies thought they were untouchable, completely possessed by the idea of playing soldier, content with his speed which was impressive. After the battle he returned from the rear in time to see the killing fields. Ten minutes of it and his young skin was mottled, his eyes nearly rolled up white, the entire left side of his face hitched up like he’d just suffered a stroke. He started screaming and nobody could get him to stop.

Later, they got the kid calmed down and Creel looked in on him. His eyes were black starshot. “Ghosts,” he said, “oh dear Christ, all them…ghosts…out there…”

Yes, ghosts. And the older Creel got and the more of it he saw, the more certain he was that they were there, sliding around him, shadowing him…pitying him, hating him, jealous of the life he had that he wasted in the graveyards of combat.

Sometimes he wondered if that’s why he kept taking pictures of the dead—some fanatic, vague hope that he’d catch one of
them
on film. Some hollow-eyed ghost slipping away from the corpse that had housed it.

And why not?
he thought as he waited in the stinking mud of the forward trench.
Why the hell not? Who has a better right to see ghosts? Who has spent more time with them than me?

In the pale moonlight, he could see out beyond No-Man’s Land, into a stripped forest that lay far beyond. The same one they’d passed through on their way to the listening post. Not dozens of trees, but maybe hundreds or even thousands, all of them de-limbed, de-barked, and soot-blackened from shellfire. They stood up straight or leaned over or collapsed into one another in great pillar-like deadfalls. Creel had been through them, had stood amongst them one bright day when the Germans had been pushed back and there had not been a single green shoot or leaf or so much as a solitary songbird. A dead place. The trees were like a thousand-thousand battle-worn skeletons climbing up out of that blasted inky-black soil that was rank and burnt smelling, so thick in your nose and throat it was like breathing ash. Ten minutes into it he’d began to suffocate, the good air sucked away and replaced with that gritty, powdery crematory ash that blew and blew and filled his lungs with sand.

Yes, death everywhere and would it be that insane to believe that here in the netherworld of the battlefield where life was extinguished so casually and ghosts roamed so freely that maybe death had turned back upon itself? That the dead were eating spilled life, filling themselves with it, so they might walk again?

Dead children that walk and feed on corpses? Are you willing to accept that?

The rain started coming down again, pooling, sluicing, filling the trenches with yellow-gray slime as the sky above scudded with black clouds that split open. In the dying moonlight, the rain was like falling crystals, billions of falling crystals: shiny, reflective. It drenched him, ran down his face and lips, dripping off his steel helmet. But it did not smell fresh, it only stirred up the rot and muck and filthy drainage bringing a rotten wet-dog smell to Flanders that sickened him to his core.

The rain subsided and there was silence for a time.

Listen.

Listen.

He was hearing it now, hearing it perfectly well: gnawing sounds. The sounds of teeth sinking into meat and scraping over bone. Too loud to be rats. He did not believe it was dogs. Things out there feeding, filling themselves, glutting obscene appetites.

“Just cover your ears,” Burke whispered to him. “Maybe it’ll go away.”

The rain returned, coming down in sheets and Creel stared through it, certain for not the first time that just beyond the sandbags there were things moving out there, small twisted elfin forms taking advantage of the rain to feed on the dead.

11

Tomb Orchids

The dead waited.

In mud holes and bomb craters and shell pits, in skeleton forests and decimated villages and ruined cellars and filth-bubbling trenches, they waited. Moist with decomposition and sprouting tangles of green moss and rungs of polished white bone, they waited. In flooded ditches and muddy trench walls, in cheap plank coffins and beneath mildew-specked tarps, they waited and would wait. Steaming with rank corpse gas, netted in morbid sheaths of fungi, and exhaling the vile stench of the charnel and tombyard, they were patient.

The rain fell and the mud pooled and the slime oozed beneath a misting gray sky the color of gelatin. The swarming graveyard rats worried at the dead, fed on them, brought their degenerate pink-skinned brood to term in their bellies. The flies covered them in buzzing black shrouds two inches thick and the maggots erupted from mouths and eye sockets, orifices and the lips of green-furred wounds in boiling, squirming masses, ever-fattening themselves on carrion and decay until they burst with wing.

For the dead of Flanders there was silence and the death-watch ticking of eternity…but then something began to happen. Maybe it was in the black soil, the yellow-brown sluicing muck, the water, or the falling rain…maybe it was set loose when a certain barnlike edifice occupied by Dr. Herbert West and his grave-wares was shelled by German artillery. But it was there. It was active. It had potential. It was the catalyst that canceled out death and filled rotting husks with a grisly semblance of animation, a gruesome half-life. Day by day as it grew more concentrated, a toxic effluvium of resurrection, eyes winked open like marbles in tombstone gray faces and mouths yawned wide like clamshells and essential salts, so long dormant, were revitalized into motion. From the muddy, flowing, bubbling bog of No-Man’s Land, faces like rotting weed and cemetery pulp peered into the night, ice-white fingers clawed in the slime as a great furnace of creation began to boil in the primordial ooze and warm amniotic mud of Flanders which was not so different from the primeval seas of earth where life first began.

By night, there was the sound of things pushing up from the swampy landscape, fingers breaking through the crust of graveyard mold, and ruined faces sliding from the mud. Each night, more and more. And beneath the wan, sickly moon of Flanders, in the gray rain and yellow fog and rustling shadow, there was a sound of feeding, gnawing and tearing, the noise of teeth on bone and lips sucking juice.

Each night it grew louder.

And louder.

12

Burial Rites

The commanders of the London Irish Rifles had no true idea of how many men they lost in the abortive raid on the German lines at Lens that September day. The Battle of Loos raged for three days and early estimations were that some 20,000 members of the BEF had died and another 50,000 were wounded. That information was to be kept from the troops, but of course it reached them as everything did.

In charge after charge, the LIR had captured German trench systems only to be pushed back by heavy shelling and intensive machine-gun fire that raked the barren hills of
Cite St. Auguste.

Creel and Burke were there, having taken their leave of the 12
^th
Middlesex for a time. Each morning was the same: the men were fed an extra large ration of rum and then it was up onto the firestep with rifles and fighting kit, the sergeants crying out,
“FIX BAYONETS, BOYS!”
and then over the top, fighting a costly battle through No-Man’s Land, stumbling over the bodies of the fallen, over twisted-up unburied corpses, leapfrogging bomb craters, slopping through the mud, hiding in shell holes, rising up to charge yet again across open fields and fighting through massive barbwire entanglements as they were raked by German sniper fire, volleys of shells and deadly accurate machine-gun strafing.

The BEF, lacking shells for true artillery support, used chlorine gas for the first time and the masked Tommies found themselves fighting through a rugged, scarred land that was obscured by rolling pockets of gas. One of the sergeants kicked a football ahead of him so his boys would charge in the right direction.

When it was finally over with and the smoke cleared, the offensive had been a disaster. For days, stretcher bearers and Field Ambulance companies moved the wounded rear to the battalion aid post and Ambulance HQ, the worst being shunted off to the Casualty Clearing Station. Both Creel and Burke worked hour after sleepless hour moving the wounded.

In the aftermath, Creel witnessed something he would never forget.

When the officers were in the dugouts, the men had a symbolic funeral for their fallen comrades: they arranged some thirty skulls in formation on the open ground beyond the support trench and paid homage to them. Who the skulls belonged to he did not dare ask, but such things were easy to come by in that war. The wind was blowing and little dust-devils were swirling about, coating those skulls with a fresh coat of age.

The soldiers, all with the same blank eyes, walked past, saluting. One guy they called Slivers—because he’d been a carpenter in Knightsbridge—openly broke down, went to his knees, and began to sob.

No one went to him.

The Tommies stood around in their mud-caked boots and filthy greatcoats, Enfield rifles slung at their shoulders. They were dirty, desperate, their eyes huge and hollow, faces like living skulls. They had lost the ability for pity.

Burke finally went over to Slivers and helped him to his feet and Slivers clung to him like he was something he had lost long ago and found again. “Got Dick, didn’t they? He was my mate. He was right in front of me and the pissing Hun got him. Right in the fucking head, they did.” He showed Burke a series of dirty smears on his uniform blouse. “That’s Dick’s brains. They sprayed on me. They was in me eyes and all over me face. This is what Dick thunk with. Poor old Dick. He was such a good mate. What am I supposed to do now, eh? What am I supposed to do without me mate?”

But nobody really knew. They were all shattered, fatigued, worn thin as wires and they didn’t have the strength to do much but stumble back into the trenches and consort with their private hell.

“
It was a mess,” one of the sergeants told Creel later. “See, what kind of action is it when you’ve got no bloody artillery what to support you with? No bleeding shells for them bleeding guns?”

“
Not good,” Creel said.

“
No, sir, not good.” The sergeant looked up and down the trenches, that long stare in his eyes like he was looking for something he could never hope to find. “It was a real mess out there. Shells coming down and men dying, fighting for every inch of ground. Patrols bumping into patrols, companies getting tangled up with other companies and that gas coming down and which way was which and who was who…saw our own boys get gassed by our own shells.
Plunk, plunk, plunk,
they went and no warning. Our artillery, what there was of it, didn’t cut through the Hun barbwire like it was supposed to and I was watching men, mates of mine, getting their boots tangled in it while the Hun cut them down. Ain’t that the life?”

Creel gave him a cigarette, an American one, and he liked that. Started laughing at how American tobacco could make it to the front but no Americans.

“
Country’s divided,” Creel told him. “Some want to fight, some don’t. Lots of Americans joining the Canadians to get a taste.”

“
Nothing against your countrymen, mate. If I was them, I’d stay home. Enjoy life, ain’t nothing but death here. We ain’t winning and neither is the Hun.”

As night drew on, Creel was in the dugout with a group of enlisted men and the stories started circulating as he knew they would and he knew he was going to hear things that he wanted…and dreaded…to hear. Lot of it, of course, was scattered recollections about the raids on German lines, just bits and pieces that shook themselves loose from the men’s minds as they sat and contemplated. As Creel listened, he watched men stripping their shirts off, their backs scratched raw and red from flea and lice infestations. Some of them stripped naked and ran the flame of a candle along the seams of their underclothes and you could plainly hear the lice eggs crackling. It was the only sure way to get rid of them or keep them at bay.

“
Funny bit, it was,” a corporal was saying. “One night, the mist hanging heavy, we lost C Company’s machine gunner and his two mates, see? We go up to the fortification, the gun pit, there’s the Lewis gun, all the ammo boxes pretty as you please…but no men. All five of ‘em are gone. How do you figure that? German sappers took ‘em, they wouldn’t leave the gun and ammunition, would they?”

“
No bodies?” Creel said.

“
Nothing, mate. Must’ve carted off the bodies even though it makes no bloody sense to take corpses and not weapons, now do it?” He shook his head. “Nothing there except them funny prints in the ground.”

Creel felt something cold take hold of him. “Funny?”

“
Sure. Bare prints, they was. You know, like somebody were walking about without boots on.”

This would have been the point, Creel knew, that if the corporal’s story was just a lark the men would have begun ridiculing it. But they didn’t. They just sat about in the semi-darkness, smoking silently, their eyes shining in the murk.

“
Were they…small prints?”

The corporal shook his head. “The prints of men not children. And the funny thing is they was full of worms, squirming worms.”