the moist, steaming earth had regurgitated a meal of men. Scratch and Kelly sorted around a bit, finding shell casings and old Lewis gun drums, scaring carrion crows from the remains of Hun soldiers.
“ Look at this,” Scratch said, holding up a German helmet with a bullet hole channeled neatly through it. “He took it in the head, poor bastard.”
“ Aye, but it was quick, weren’t it?” Kelly said, gnawing on some canned Bully Beef.
“ You eating again?” Burke said.
“ I’m hungry.”
“ Swear you got the worms or something.”
“ Pipe down,” Haines told them, reading his compass.
Creel sat there smoking, clicking off a few shots of the wreckage around him with his Brownie. He did not need to be there at all and he knew it. He could have had a soft, cushy job back home in Kansas City. He rated an editor’s job, but here he was in this misting netherworld of rats and crows, carrion and mud. He didn’t belong here…then again, he hadn’t belonged in the Balkan Wars or the Mexican Revolution, the Second Boer War or the Boxer Rebellion, but he’d been there and now he was here.
War and the litter it produced, always drew him.
Sighing, he watched Kelly and Scratch.
Just kids. That’s all they were. Maybe the atrocities of the trenches had bleached the innocence from their eyes and replaced it with a perfect hollow glaze of indifference, but they were still kids. He watched them scavenging, playing in the mud while Burke just shook his head. They found the fully articulated skeleton of a Hun officer gripping a tree trunk for dear life. They could not pry him loose…he had grown into the tree with ropy tendrils of decay like the fibers of woodrot threading through a deserted house.
Haines gave the word and they moved on, splashing through the muck, rain running from the brims of their steel helmets. It grew very quiet. Nothing moved. Nothing scurried. Water dripped from the trees, but little else. The mist blew around them in churning clouds. Creel wiped a mixture of cold sweat and colder rain from his face, very much aware of the beat of his heart. His greatcoat and mud-slicked boots seemed like concrete. He thought if he stopped completely he would simply sink away. He was seeing things moving around them, but he knew it was imagination…ghosting, long-armed forms at the periphery of his vision.
“ Down,” Burke suddenly said.
They crouched in the mud, not seeing anything or hearing anything…then three ghostly forms emerged from the fog: a German reconnaissance patrol, faces blackened, bayonets fixed. They moved with an eerie silence over the boggy ground, not muttering a word. They faded into the mist and Creel could not be certain that they hadn’t actually been ghosts.
Ten minutes later, fighting through mud pools and crawling over the exposed roots systems of blasted trees, they sighted the trench system and ruined dugout Sergeant Stone and his men had been using. Creel could see a nearly-obliterated sandbag rampart enclosing a series of trenches flooded with a slimy yellow muck which bobbed with rat corpses. There was a crumbling brick wall that looked like the remains of a house or hut that had taken direct hits from heavy artillery. A single dead tree rose up above it, hooded crows gathered on its remaining branches.
They moved closer, spread out now so that a single volley of machine-gun fire could not cut them all down in a single sweep.
A crow squawked.
Rain fell.
And for each man, dread moved in their bellies.
Creel put a cigarette in his mouth and it was sodden with the rain almost immediately.
“ Go easy here, gov,” Burke told him, a guiding hand on his shoulder. “My back’s up. We’re being watched. Sure we are.”
Creel looked around but could see nothing. Yet, he could almost feel eyes, watching eyes, staring out at them from the gathering fog.
Rats scratched over the sandbags, dozens of them sitting atop the broken wall as if waiting for something. Creel nearly stepped on a bloated white corpse and then jumped back when he saw not two but three rats come out of the torso in a steady march. They hissed at him and went on their way.
“ Kelly, I want you off to the left flank,” Haines said. “Scratch…the right. Secure the area. Creel, with me.”
Burke went along. Haines did not include him by name because he did not like him. Burke had the VC and Haines was livid with jealousy.
Creeping over the sandbags, they moved up on the dugout.
A hot stench of decay wafted out at them. Inside, it was shadowy and dim, black swarms of flies rising in clusters, crawling over their faces and hands. There was three feet of water inside, rubble and refuse, and Sergeant Stone. He was leaning up against the wall like he was about to catch a smoke…only he was slit open from belly to throat and perfectly hollow within. Not a scrap of viscera or meat could be seen.
“ Rats?” Creel said, amazed by that point that anything could sicken him.
But Haines shook his head, breathing hard. “He wasn’t bitten open, you fool… he was slit. He was opened by a trench knife, maybe, then gutted, cleaned out like a bloody fish.”
Again, Burke examined the body and flashed Creel a look. “Like the others,” he said.
“ What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Haines demanded.
“ It means, you great bloody gob, that Stone was chewed on by something that wasn’t a rat nor a dog,” he said, glaring into the man’s eyes. “These teeth marks…they’re from something else. Something, I’m thinking, that walks about on two feet like we do.”
“ Idiot,” Haines said, crawling up and out of the dugout.
“ Scared stiff, ain’t he?” Burke said, pointing a thumb at the sergeant’s hasty retreat. “Don’t blame him, I don’t. Not at all.”
Creel found himself staring at Stone’s face which was a grinning grave rictus, lips pulled back from discolored teeth. There were maggots in his eye sockets. In the tomblike silence of the dugout you could actually hear the industrious suckering sounds of them feeding.
“ Enough,” Burke said.
They moved back over the crumbling wall, the bricks tumbling away beneath them. Scratch was waiting there with his rifle, surveying the flooded trenches and the swimming rats crossing them. There was a Hun corpse at his feet.
“ Look at this,” he said. He pressed his foot down on the corpse’s chest and the blackened tongue slid out from between the lips. He lifted his boot and the tongue retreated. He kept doing it, giggling, human remains having lost all shock value for him.
And the war will end, Creel thought, taking a snapshot of the body, and he’ll have to go back home, his mind a black sore of corruption.
“ Kelly!” Haines called out, just above a whisper but firm. “Kelly!”
They looked around and he was nowhere to be seen. They moved off to his last position but there was nothing. Swearing under his breath, Haines led them off, circling around the post in an ever-widening search pattern.
Kelly was gone.
“ We better be off,” Burke said. “Whatever got him is still out there. I can…I can smell it.”
And the absolutely crazy thing was so could Creel. What was that odor? Sharp, pungent, like a stench beyond death.
“ Oh, Christ,” Scratch said. “He was there…I saw him…”
Creel studied Haines. This was a judgment call now and he could almost hear the gears whirring in his head. Did they retreat back to the trenches and leave Kelly or did they stay and risk their own lives in what might be a vain search? Maybe the reconnaissance patrol took him out quietly. Maybe he sank in the mud. Maybe he wandered off. The grim possibilities were endless.
Scratch’s face was white as cream, flecked by specks of mud. His squinting eyes like knife scars, his mouth trembling. Haines peered about like a hunting hawk. Burke was listening. The rain came down in gray sheets, chill and clammy.
