skirmishes.
“Chadbourg,” Creel said. “That means we’re well away from our own lines.”
“Aye,” Kirk said. “A bit west…probably quite near the Canadians, I’m thinking.” He looked around, trying to get his bearings. “We’ll have a rest here, I think.”
Howard started shaking his head. “But those things-”
“Are not something we need worry about. Crazed, all of them. Broke free from an asylum, I shouldn’t doubt.”
That was so thin you could see through it, but it made Creel smile when he didn’t think he had any smiles left. You had to hand it to Kirk; he just refused to give in. The living dead were crawling out of their graves and he was concerned with finding a place to lay up a bit before the march back to friendly forces. Creel almost burst out laughing at the very idea of it. Well, the undead haven’t lunched on us quite yet, have they? Let’s have ourselves a nice brew-up. There’s a good fellow. He contained his laughter and mainly because it would have been hysterical and sounded more like a scream than anything else.
They moved up the main thoroughfare, the mist enclosing them from all sides, the ruins rising up around them in ghostly, vague shapes, shadows clustering in doorways, rats scurrying in dead-end alleys, ravens sitting atop the creaking signs of pubs and cafes that had fallen into themselves.
According to Kirk, Chadbourg had been abandoned over a year before when the troops starting moving in from either side. Yet, to walk through those streets, meandering amongst heaped rubble and broken stone and staved-in walls, there was a sense of decay that was thick, heavy, almost palpable with age. Shutters hung from empty windows by threads, collapsed doorways looked in on moist rancid darkness, stairways terminated in midair and crept below street level into flooded blackness. It stank the way a cemetery at Ypres had smelled, Creel remembered, after a vicious shelling by the Hun that churned up the ground, exhuming graves and rotting boxes, tossing skeletons into trees and atop roofs; a pestiferous, moldering stink of subterranean slime and leechfields.
Most of the houses and buildings were nothing but heaped debris, hills and ramparts of it, some so high you could not see over them and others filling streets so they were impassable.
When they did find a habitable structure, the roof was usually gone, nothing but splintered timbers overhead crisscrossed against the grim leaden sky.
Finally, they found a brick house with a half-timbered second story that was intact save the outside wall was scathed by machine-gun fire and the windows were broken out. It was cramped and damp-smelling inside, but there was some dust-laden furniture and even a grandfather clock with a bird’s nest built into the face. Looking at it, Creel had to wonder how many times some aproned peasant woman, her back sore from churning butter, her hands white with flour, had looked at that clock face and waited for her men to come in from the fields, clumping boots dusted with wheat chaff.
Another world. Another existence. This place will never know that peace and solid contentment again, he thought. It will never know tired backs settling into feather beds and old women sweeping children into dreamland with twice-told tales and kettles of soup steaming atop blackened stove gratings on Sunday afternoons.
No. It will only know the cawing of crows, the scurrying of rats, the sound of leaves gathering and wind whipping through creviced walls, the spidersilk silence of gathering dust.
Filled with anguish and a bitter fatalism, he went to the window and looked out into the mist-choked streets. The breeze had picked up a bit and the fog blew along with rolling clouds of dust and fine debris.
“Nothing anywhere,” Howard said after he returned from checking the rooms. “Not a scrap of food. Not a bleeding thing.”
Creel found a lantern on a hook, half-filled with oil. “We’ll have some light if we need it,” he said.
Jameson started up the creaking stairs to the upper floor and stopped, grimy hand on the rail.
There was a sound from up there.
Like something dragged over a floor. Something heavy.
Standing there in his dirty greatcoat, dented steel helmet, and mud-caked trench boots, he looked like some little boy playing Army with his father’s old uniform. His face was dirty, though unlined and impossibly smooth like it had been pressed. His eyes were huge and white and he looked like he belonged anywhere but where he was.
Just a sound, that’s all it was, but it stopped everyone like they were standing in quick-set concrete.
The only thing alive about Creel at that moment was the cigarette in his lips: it was trembling. He felt a sharp stab of fear in his belly that kept cutting deeper, making a darkness that was toxic and oily spread through his vitals. It was not the fear of war. Of bullets and bombs and bayonets bisecting his stomach, nothing man-made. This was ancient. A formless, crawling terror that moved through him.
Jameson’s voice, when it came, was dry as a crackling corn husk: “There’s…there’s something up there, Sarge.”
Brilliant deduction, kid.
Kirk looked over to Creel and for the first time Creel saw that it was alive inside the man: fear and indecision. It was infesting him to the point that he was nearly unrecognizable. No more stiff upper lip or confident eyes or hard set to his mouth…no, his face was greasy with sweat and smudged with dirt like a chimney sweep. Eyes red- rimmed and bulging from their sockets, lips pressed tight to stop his teeth from chattering. Something had just given in him and he was now a dirty, hunched-over, chinless, scraggly trench rat, a middle-aged man who had no business in this war.
“We better go have a look, hadn’t we?” Creel said.
Jameson and Howard nodded. Kirk did not move so Creel went over to him, patted him on the back and slid the Webley revolver from the sergeant’s holster.
Poor guy had frozen right up.
He led them on a wild run through the living dead and did not bat an eye, and now…a simple noise from a shuttered room above was enough to suck the blood right out of him. It got like that sometimes in combat, Creel knew. You charged a trench and gored three enemy soldiers with your bayonet, you shot down another, skipped about on a merry lark avoiding machine-gun fire, bullets zipping around you, just so you could get close enough to toss a belt of Mill’s bombs into a trench mortar emplacement. You did your duty and you didn’t think twice about it. You made it through, got back with your mates…then you saw a bullet hole in your helmet that miraculously missed your skull and you fold up, start sobbing and can’t seem to stop.
There’s a breaking point to all.
His was last night when that living dead hag called his name and earlier today in the dugout when that… whatever that was…called his name again. Something broke loose inside and he was no good. Now he could feel the blood in his veins again and the wind in his lungs and he brushed past Jameson with a catty wink, looked back at Howard and the still immobile Sergeant Kirk. He did not feel betrayed by Kirk’s momentary weakness. In fact, he felt stronger and his respect for the sergeant increased.
“Come on, son,” he told Jameson, lighting the lantern, knowing this was what Burke would have done. “We’ll soon sort this shit out.”
Up the stairs then, feeling his strength abandoning him as nerves set in, as shadows pooled and lengthened, as things were heard scratching in the walls and others were sensed in the ganglia at his spine. A short, low corridor above. Two doorways. He knew even then which it would be. His fist sweating on the revolver, he kicked the nearest door open and a rolling wave of hot putrescence blew out at him and nearly put him to his knees.
“Gah,” Jameson said. “That stink.”
It was revolting and moist and cloying. It nearly made Creel stumble back down the stairs because he certainly did not want to look upon anything that smelled like that. Sucking in a shallow breath through his teeth, he stepped forward, holding the lantern high, night-black shadows swimming around him like eels.
What he saw made him step back because he was not really sure what it was he was looking at…just a swollen white mass spreading over the floor, a fermenting, yeasty excrescence.
It was a corpse.
Someone had died up here and instead of their remains crumbling away, they had grown in the damp shuttered darkness like a fleshy mushroom. He could see the basic outline of a skeleton-a grinning skull, a basket of rib staves, a pipe cleaner arm, a knee drawn up-all of it covered in a soft white pulp that had risen like bread dough turning the corpse into a great fruiting body that had ripened like a juicy peach, sprouting and budding and blossoming. Tendrils of that white decay had spread over the floor and grown right into the planks and up the walls
