Zombie Pulp (44 page)

“There’s got to be more,” Creel said, somewhat exasperated.

“That’s it, mate.”

“Dammit. He’s involved in this somehow and I’m going to find out how.”

Burke sighed. “You’re going to get your arse thrown out of the war. And if you don’t care about that, think about me. I’ll have to go back to the fighting and I’m not liking the idea.”

Creel brooded for hours after that. He was too close. Right on the periphery of something that might be much bigger than even the war itself and he was not going to give up now. Though his relationship with Captain Croton was a little strained, maybe he could arrange a visit with the 1
^st
Canadian, embed himself over there for a time because that’s where he needed to be. That was the epicenter or damned near to it.

Burke was always warning him about going slow because he was already trying the patience of command, but he wasn’t about to go slow. There was a time to hide and wait, a time to listen, and a time to spring and go for the throat and that particular time was now.

As he sat in the forward trench, lost in thought, watching the slugs inching out of the trench walls, listening to the frogs croaking out in flooded bomb craters, he tried vainly to find his cynicism, his detachment, his objectivity—these were the meat and blood of any journalist—but they were gone. They no longer existed. He was one great creeping mass of anxiety from his head to his feet.

Go ahead, boyo, track down this Dr. Hamilton. Let him open his dark chest of wonders and let you peer inside. Write it all down. Write the story that can never be published. But it’s more than journalism now, it’s more than war reporting…it’s personal and you know it. Whatever’s at the root of this madness, it’s got your number.

And that number is about to be punched.

Sergeant Kirk came sloshing through the standing brown water and Creel nearly jumped out of his skin.

“
Keep your head down,” he said. “The Hun is about to come calling. I can feel it in my bones.”

And Creel could too.

He could feel the tension building through the trenches like every man there was wired together, part of some machine of cycling dread. In the dugouts, on the firestep clutching rifles with almost religious devotion, huddled over meager dinners of cheese and Bully Beef, leaning up against sandbagged ramparts—all the faces were the same: bleached white, lips pulled into stern gray lines, eyes huge and almost neurotic in their intensity. The Tommies prayed, squeezed rosary beads in their fists, holding tight to good luck charms and fetishes, everything from rabbits’ feet to a badly worn photograph of a wife or a cherished child, and—in some cases—the dingy brass button off the tunic of a mate who’d gone home or a favored spent shell casing that had saved a life or some nameless wooden effigy carved out of boredom and hope, smoothed into an unrecognizable shape by oily grasping fingers.

Creel was not immune to it.

He found himself gripping his field notebook, tensing fingers pressing into familiar grooves in the leather cover. He watched men going through the pre-battle rituals of survival—touching objects, holding their rifles a certain way, squatting in a particular stance, many of them humming beneath their breath or whistling a lost tune from childhood. These were all protections against evil, dismemberment, and death. Charms that would get them through one more battle and one more day and the stark horror of fatalism was apparent on the faces of any that had broken, however minutely or innocently, the sanctified steps of ritualization.

Night crept over the sandbags in black twisting worms of funeral crepe. Breathing was low, heartbeats high. Sweat broke on faces. Limbs trembled so badly they had to be held in place.

Sergeant Burke was next to him. “Hold tight, mate,” he said. “We’ll soldier through.”

Good old Burke. Tough as nails. Made of the real stuff, as they said. Unlike himself whom he viewed more and more as some death-obsessed carrion crow picking away at the remains of lives, Burke was the real thing: a soldier, a hero, someone you could look up to, would be glad to call friend, the sort you’d be glad to give your daughter’s hand to in marriage knowing that, in the end, he always did the right thing, the honorable thing. As he thought this, he felt Burke’s hand take hold of his own and clasp it tightly in friendship. It was something the men did when the shelling got heavy—holding onto one another, fusing themselves together. But Creel had never been part of it. He was always alone…now Burke made him part of the chain and he felt a tear in his eye.

As darkness dimmed the sky and shadows crawled thickly, the German flares burst overhead, green and yellow, turning the trench system into some weird strobing shadowshow of stiff-legged figures as they drifted earthward, sputtering, on their little parachutes, revealing the jagged wounds in the earth and the insects that scuttled in them.

Then it began.

Shells came in with screaming blue-white velocities, dropping like autumn leaves and detonating the scarred countryside in vast, ear-shattering eruptions of pulverized earth and spraying black mud. Blazing shrapnel lit anything afire that was remotely flammable. Wood and fallen trees were blackened into charcoal sticks, water boiled to steam, sandbags glowed into blossoms of fire.

Creel saw lightning flash, heard thunder and felt earthquake. Smoke and fire and screaming and burning flesh. In the distance, the heavy guns popped like champagne corks, and every man in the trenches was listening intently, giving each and every round a personality all its own. Not just mindless projectiles, but death-dealing fingers of fate that were preordained to take certain lives and spare others.
Pop, pop, pop,
went the field guns and the men would think, worry, contemplate the unknown, the great mystery:
There…that one…that one sounds like the one for me, I know that sound, I heard it before, maybe that’s what I heard when I died last time.
The sky rained shells and some detonated in the distance and some quite close, but all shrieking with their expulsions of shrapnel seeking flesh to macerate.

Crouched against the trench wall while men shouted and sobbed around him, Creel listened to the shells come as he always listened to them come, gripping Burke’s hand ever tighter: whistling and screaming, buzzing like swarms of locusts…and others, fired from the heavy guns…came roaring like freight trains passing overhead. But the result was always the same—an eruption, flying shrapnel, a shockwave that would knock you flat and give you a concussion if you were close enough.

The shells kept coming and coming as if the Hun were intent on destroying the trenches themselves, erasing the battlescars of man’s preoccupation with killing his own kind. They came in volleys that went on for thirty minutes or more then there was a shattered silence for maybe ten or fifteen and they started flying again.

When the trench wall blew apart, covering him in mud and dirt and sandbags, Creel crawled up through it like a mole seeking sunlight. All around him in the flickering glow of the German flares he could see that the trench system had been wiped out, reassembled. There was nothing but an irregular series of smoldering shell-holes all around him flanked by mountains of earth, sticks, rubble, and corpses. Men were crying out for stretcher bearers, but not many because most were either gone or buried alive.

He was still gripping Burke’s hand…but Burke was no longer attached to it. He cried out and tossed the hand aside, almost hating himself for doing so.

The darkness was broken only by flaming wreckage or an occasional flare drifting overhead, the air thick with rolling plumes of smoke and a dust storm of dirt and grit and pulverized fragments that slowly rained earthward. There were cinders and soot everywhere. The entire landscape—what he could see of it—had been taken apart and rearranged and there was no way to tell where the rear was or where the Hun lines were or where to escape to.

Stunned, face black with ash and mud, Creel found he could not stand and when he did, he went right down to his knees. So he crawled over the earth, calling out for survivors in a dry, ragged voice that was barely above a whisper. A shadow stepped out of the gloom and he knew it was a German soldier, a big fellow in a shining steel helmet, rifle in hands, an enormous bayonet raised to strike. Then there was a single hollow report and the Hun fell to the earth and did not move. Another shape came out of the gloom and Creel called out to him, but was ignored. Whoever it was took the German’s helmet and rifle and disappeared into the shadows.

Trophy hunter,
he thought,
a goddamn trophy hunter of all things.

He got to his knees, crawling again. The BEF artillery was answering in kind now, lobbing shells at the German positions. There was sporadic gunfire all around him, the sound of grenades going off, the occasional dull thump of a trench mortar. The Germans, he realized, had let loose with one barrage after the other and now raiding parties were moving into the sector. He saw the silhouettes of several men climbing atop a razorbacked hill that had not existed before the barrage.

He climbed to his feet again, still wobbly, but better. He stood there for a time, clearing his head, stumbling along a thread of earth that zigzagged haphazardly amongst a series of bomb craters. Then he tripped and fell into a shell-hole, emerging finally from muck and water. He heard a volley of machine-gun fire, felt rats crawling over him. His grasping fingers searched along the muddy wall and found he was in luck: a ladder. The crater must have been part of a trench before the barrage.

He crawled out, over the muddy pitted ground, scaling humped things that he soon realized were bodies. Then another flare passed overhead and he saw that he was in a field of corpses, hundreds of them spread in every direction. Not all were dead. Some were writhing on the ground calling for medics and stretcher bearers. He saw men without limbs. Men who were living trunks being worried by rats.

He kept moving, sickened, beaten, beyond hope.

“Hey, mate, over here,” said a voice.

Creel crawled towards the form. He cradled the broken body in his arms and realized the man was dead, shattered by concussion. His head in Creel’s hands, though intact, was almost liquid within, the skull nearly disintegrated. Everything inside moved with a slow gelatinous roll.

Crawling again.

Over corpses. Fragments of the same. Through muddy holes and pools of standing water, rats skittering around him, driven into panic by the bombardment. He came across a Tommy who was sitting upright, his back wedged up against a furrow of blackened earth. “Hallo, Captain,” he said. “Bit of bitters tonight, ain’t she?” His left leg was missing, his right arm nothing but a burnt fleshless mass. In his left hand he was holding his stomach and intestines. He kept talking as though Creel were not even there.

“Barmy bit of luck,” he said as Creel moved off.

How long he crept through the nightscape he did not know, only that after what seemed hours, the war still murmuring around him from time to time, he began to see men coming through the moonlight. What appeared to be hundreds of them, gashed and broken, streaming blood from wounds. Their eyes were bulging. They were tearing at their throats.
Gassed. All of them gassed.
Yellow foam was gushing between their lips and he watched as they all began to fall, piling up atop one other, vomiting yellow slime from their mouths. Even in the pale moonlight, he could see that their faces were black as they gasped out their last breaths.

For not the first time, his writer’s mind contemplated the possibility that he was in hell. For he’d been in lots of battles but never anything like this. Never anything that so completely took apart the earth and put it back together again like a puzzle missing half its pieces.

When he hadn’t heard anything for a time, he crawled into a muddy furrow and let himself smoke, let his nerves calm, his heart find its rhythm. He was probably crawling in circles. Better to wait. Listen. Make sense of things. An orderly retreat when the time came.

Sure, that was sensible military thinking.

He laid there for some time, the roaring of the guns in the distance now, the war having moved on to more fertile pickings.

Quiet.

Yes, it was suddenly unnaturally quiet. There was not a sound in any direction just that hushed weird stillness like a great switch had been thrown.

Creel had experienced it before, on many battlefields and in many wars.

Usually during the blackest hours of night, it would descend over the trenches and for a few shocking, gut-crawling moments you would wonder if you had died. If a shell had come screaming down on your position and blasted you to ropy fragments. They said you never heard the shell that got you and there was probably a truth buried in that one, but sometimes the silence was much worse than the shelling.

Out in No-Man’s Land, beyond the perimeter and wire entanglements, just…nothing. No rats scavenging, no wild dog packs howling. No men moving. No rain falling. It was eerie, hushed, waiting. Like something hiding in the darkness making ready to spring and tear out your throat. And though it was soundless, that silence had a quality to it all its own. A bigness, a volume, a weight that you could feel crushing the wind from you second by second as it settled down like a stone slab over an open grave.