Zombie Pulp (48 page)

“Gas,” Kirk said. “Masks, everyone.”

For the next twenty minutes one gas shell after another hit, the streets not only thick with fog and blowing dust, but vaporous clouds of phosgene and mustard gas. It all combined together into a heavy, consuming soup that brought visibility down to ten or twelve feet at best.

Creel had been at the Second Battle of Ypres when the gas shells were dropping all around them and men were dying in numbers. One enterprising medical officer in the trench told the men to urinate into their handkerchiefs and press them to their mouths, that the ammonia in their urine would neutralize the chlorine gas. Creel had tried like hell to pee, but nothing came out, his penis seeming to pull into itself like a snail seeking the safety of its shell. Another soldier pissed in his hankie for him and never was he so glad to press another man’s urine to his lips.

But that was chlorine.

And he already knew from the smell that they were dealing with phosgene and mustard agents. The only thing that could be done was to keep the masks on and keep out of any concentrated clouds, for the mustard could burn right through cloth and continue burning into your flesh.

When Jameson made for the door, breathing hard beneath his mask, Sergeant Kirk pulled him back. “Let it dissipate,” he said, his voice hollow and distant behind his trench mask.

They waited as the gas settled, four men in hot masks, staring around through bug-eyed ports, all riven with fear for gas was the one thing that terrified everyone.

“Somebody outside,” Jameson said. “I saw them.”

Creel began to feel that fear building in him. It was too soon for the Hun to arrive; they would wait until the gas had done its work before they came storming in. No, whoever it was, it certainly was not the Germans.

They all pressed in near the window, the shutters gone, the glass long broken out of it. And, yes, out in the billowing, blowing fog and gas they could see forms moving, dozens of them. They were staying within the periphery of mist, not showing themselves, just massing in numbers.

Creel heard a pounding.

Everyone went still, tense.

“The kitchen,” Kirk said in a weak voice. “Somebody’s knocking at the kitchen door…listen…”

The knocking came again: slow, relentless, almost mechanical in its complete lack of rhythm.

Creel, steeling himself, pulled the Webley pistol from his pocket, muttering, “I suppose…I suppose someone should see.” Nobody volunteered to go with him and he was neither surprised at that nor disheartened. He moved away from them, keeping in a low crouch and he was not sure why. He went down the short corridor, feeling the insistent thud of his heartbeat at his temples. Sweat ran down his face inside the mask. Gently, easily, he pushed open the door and went in there, expecting the very worst and knowing he would not be disappointed. The door was heavy, wooden and latched.

The pounding went on.

The door trembled in its frame.

Through the broken window he saw them standing out there, ranks and ranks of them crowding in like flies: children. Probably the same ones that were haunting No-Man’s Land. They pressed up to the missing window pane, dead things with faces that were almost phosphorescent in their whiteness, puckered and seamed like they’d been underwater a long time, wormholes drilled into them. Their eyes were red-rimmed, a glaring translucent silver. They were all smiling, schoolboys and schoolgirls, but those grins said nothing of happiness. They were crooked, tortured grimaces. They reached leathery hands towards the window, nails splintered and packed with black grave dirt.

“
Let us in,”
they said together, a whispering choir.

The door rattled as they pounded on it with more and more grave-cold fists and Creel stumbled away, a dreamlike sort of terror flooding through him like he was hallucinating, his mind unraveling one skein at a time.

Finally, he let out a choking gasp and fled for the others and that’s when he heard the strangled screams. The dead children had flooded in and neither Sergeant Kirk nor his two riflemen got off a single shot. The children were like locusts, swarming, infesting, coming through the door and crawling through the window, more and more all the time, just as thick as graveworms in carrion.

Creel fell back, stunned.

He saw seven or eight of the little monsters take Howard down while another—a little girl in graying cerements—stripped off his gas mask, clutching his terrified face in her white little hands. Then she opened her mouth, yawning it wide and black like a manhole, and from the channel of her throat came a hissing yellow gas that enveloped Howard’s face. He screamed, high and long, until his lungs began to come apart and his thrashing face began to blister and burst with spreading lesions and pitted ulcers. His face quite literally melted like tallow, running and streaming. They got Jameson the same way, breathing out their toxic breath of blister agents, phosgene, and deadly mustard gas.

As Creel heard the door in the kitchen come off its hinges and the undead children took notice of him, he broke for the stairs, taking one last look and seeing them dragging Kirk away by the legs. His mask was gone, his face hanging in blistered flaps.
“Help me,”
he wheezed.
“Dear God, help me…”

But Creel couldn’t help him; he was beyond help.

He raced up the stairs, breathing hard in his mask. Again, the two doorways before him in the dimness. He knew what one led to, but he was going for the other. As he paused before the room with the weird fruiting corpse in it, listening for the sounds of hell following, he heard something that sent fingers of panic threading through him.

In the room, behind that door…
movement.

Not a subtle movement as before…no, this was a big sound, a
huge
sound that made him lose his balance, fumble against the wall so he did not go flat out. He felt a very real need to scream, but his tongue felt like it was slippery in his mouth, oily and sliding.

In the room, those sounds…

Like knotted roots being yanked up from stony soil.

Handfuls of them pulled from the earth.

That’s what he was hearing along with sort of a moist shifting noise, a sort of slithering, and a dry hollow moaning. Then…footsteps, dull and dragging, something brushing the walls in there like vines rustling in the wind…a stench of vegetable decay and woodrot…

The door began to whisper open.

He saw a white pulpous hand reaching out of the darkness.

Then he was through the other door, throwing it shut behind him. As the children flooded up the stairs and that nameless germinating thing scratched at the door, he threw the shutters open and climbed out, trying to ease himself down the wall like a monkey and succeeding in dropping about twelve feet to a cobbled alley.

He saw two of the children right away coming out of the mist at him, hands held out to make contact. Their shrouds were but filthy shifts stained with grave-soil and grave-drainage, faces like those of grinning white clown-puppets, eyes the color of moonlight on water. They were filled with poison gases as if they had sucked them up like sponges….gas steamed out of them in wisps and slow-turning tendrils, rising from mouths, innumerable holes and crevices in their faces and flesh.

Creel did not hesitate for one moment.

He ran right through them knocking them aside, back into the fog where they seemed to dissolve and become part of it, two columns of corpse-gas.

He had no true idea where he was in the village and everything was crowded, compressed, debris laying in hills and mounds, huge craters filled with black water opening at his feet. Alone. He was alone now and he knew he was alone and the idea of that was something he did not dare contemplate. Not yet. Not here. He groped through the mist, edging along the bullet-pocked brick façades of buildings, staring up at blank windows looking down upon him, crawling over blasted, crumbling walls of stone, limping down narrow streets that were gray and misting.

And then—

For one moment, one that put him down on his knees, he saw something in the mist that could not see him. Just for a moment. It came out of the fog and was enshrouded by it just as quickly. A woman. A woman in a white bridal gown. She was feeling her way along a wall with outstretched fingers, looking for something and perhaps some
one.

Creel just waited there silently until she passed.

He knew she hadn’t heard him. In order to hear you needed ears and in order to have ears you needed a head and this woman had been missing that vital accoutrement. Just a wandering trunk.

Madness most certainly insinuating itself by this point, Creel came stumbling down a low hill, liking the sound of his muddy boots on the cobbles, the sound of rain dripping, the way the fog was a great hungry ghost trying to eat him—

And he screamed.

Screamed because it was there, waiting for him: the thing from the cavalry post. It still wore its tomb-filthy shroud, a great and graying winding sheet that covered its head in a loose hood and its outstretched arms in yards of worm-eaten graveyard cloth. Plumes of fog rose up around it, making it look like it was smoldering.

“
Creel,”
it said in a voice of subterranean damps,
“Creeeeeeellll—”

Then he was running again, slipping through the mist, hiding, waiting, rising to run again, knowing that those children were out there in numbers and that even if he managed to avoid them, he could never, ever avoid the shrouded thing…it would find him wherever he went.

He stumbled into an open square.

A dozen men trained rifles on him.

“
Hold your fire,” someone said. “He looks…almost human.”

Creel dropped to his knees, shivering, holding himself, sobbing behind his gas mask.

He was taken inside a ruined building and soon, the gas dissipating sufficiently, all removed their masks. He found himself in the company of a reconnaissance patrol of the Canadian 1
^st
Light Infantry.

A tall, handsome medical officer with stark, haunted eyes said, “You can return with us to the lines. My name is—”

“Hamilton,” Creel said with something of sneer. “Doctor to the dead.”

21

The Corpse Factory

“You’ll excuse my deceit, I hope,” said Dr. Herbert West to me, “but after you told me what was happening, I somehow lacked the fortitude to confess to my crimes. I knew if I had admitted my foul deeds you would have no longer helped me and I so dearly needed your help…the reanimation of the dead is…is not a solitary pursuit. It is not something one does alone by candle light.

“You see, old friend, I became somewhat fixated with the idea of mass reanimation. I needed a group of cadavers that had all fallen at the same time, sharing the exact or near-exact moment of death. It would be a comparative study, you understand, wherein I would be able to establish a certain modus operandi as to why certain animals rise up at a certain time and others need more time for the reagent to regenerate metabolic processes. So…when I heard about those children gassed during the shelling of the orphanage at St. Bru…I could not help myself. They were buried instantly in a common grave and it was there I went, mere hours after their interment.

“I did not go alone. You will recall a certain Monsieur Cardoux that I had become somewhat reliant upon in my researches? Cardoux was the undertaker employed by the Army to bury not only our dead but the Hun who had fallen within our perimeter. He was not well liked, as you can recall, by either peasant or soldier. Both would turn away from him in the street when they saw him coming with his boxy old hearse towed by a single draft horse. The children of the villages…yes, they would spit at him, throwing stones and shouting, “Allemands! Allemands!” when they knew he had a berth filled with German corpses. He was an odd sort, certainly, well known for his criminal dealings and shady operations. I can see him even now—his dirty old coat, the red scarf at his throat, the moth-eaten black satin top hat he wore so proudly. His beady rodent’s eyes, leering grin of yellow teeth. Yet…he was of use to me and I had full authorization to use the Hun remains as I so pleased.

“Well, it was to the cemetery at St. Bru that Monsieur Cardoux and I went that very night, those unfortunate little waifs cold only a matter of hours. Cardoux had been paid well, but as I saw him there, skulking about the fresh graves with his shovel, a ghoulish figure to say the least, I knew the matter before us was more than a matter of monetary compensation.

“Cardoux, you see, had something of an unsavory, unnatural fixation with the dead. I had seen it in his buzzard eyes many times, the carnal twist to his swollen pink lips. Do I dare even mention the shocking, nauseous activities it was rumored he partook of? The unholy grave-wares it was rumored his small stone cottage in the wood was decorated with? The grisly grinning death masks upon the walls so meticulously preserved and presented? The blasphemous trophies of mummified children frozen in gruesome poses of play? The grave-loot and charnel trinkets that he displayed with sardonic obsession? The locks of hair braided into funereal ropes that dangled from the ceiling? The revolting shelves of infant’s skulls? The tanned heads and bone sculptures, the jeweled necklaces of teeth and the memento mori volumes bound in human skin? Yes, a thoroughly vile creature was our Monsieur Cardoux, graveworm, corpse-rat, a grinning, drooling deviant who—I later learned—shared his bed with that tiny, unspeakable golden-haired cadaver.