like climbing vines in a cobwebby, lacey filigree that even hung from the ceiling in threads and ribbons.
It was disgusting to look at and worse to contemplate for given time, Creel thought, the creeping charnel rot would have invaded every last stick and board in the house until it all came down in a glistening fungoid mass.
“Who you suppose it was?” Jameson said, holding his nose.
Creel shrugged, staring at the oily gray toadstools that filled the eye sockets and sprung jaws in great clusters. “A peasant maybe. An injured soldier that crawled up here to die…”
“But we heard something move.”
“Maybe it was that… mass weakening the timbers.”
The words had barely left his mouth when the entire pulpy fungal mass shivered like jelly. Then it did it again. And Creel plainly saw a viscid wave pass through the thing like a breaker heading ashore in a sea of gelatin.
“Something in there,” Jameson said.
Creel did not dare speak. For whatever it was, he was certain that it was somehow responding to their voices or the vibrations of the same. That wave shuddered to a rest in the lower regions of the corpse and from between the legs there was a wet, tearing sound as the membranes of soft rot were sheared.
Both Jameson and Creel saw it.
They saw that fleshy mound between the corpse’s legs rip open and two tiny hands emerge that were waxy and gleaming, oddly boneless in their rubbery contortions.
Jameson let out a wild scream and just started shooting, he put three rounds into the mass where the rest of thing must have been and it stopped moving…those hands seemed to curl and wither, withdrawing back into the body cavity.
A woman, Creel thought with a madness scratching in his brain. Died pregnant…only what was in her did not die, it gestated in moist putrid blackness, it came to term in her rotting womb, something inhuman, something unbelievable, and something somehow related to everything else that’s going on.
They came down the stairs, faces pasty and stomachs in throats, but they did not report on what they had seen and nobody asked for the war came to life again and they heard the distant thump-thump-thump of heavy guns sending out shells. They went shrieking over Chadbourg and a few hit nearby with resounding explosions that shook the earth. They were pretty close and Creel figured they landed out in the cemetery. Overhead, the shells were coming and going, the Canadians and the Hun exchanging pleasantries.
“We’re right in the middle,” Howard said.
The shells started landing inside the village, throwing rubble into the air, knocking down walls and opening immense craters in the narrow streets. A house across the way took a direct hit and was literally thrown up into the air, raining down as bricks and burning lathes and sticks and debris.
“We better get out of here,” Kirk said.
As they crouched near the doorway two and then three shells hit around them, the shock waves sending them to the floor, plaster falling around them, nails ejected from walls. Outside there were clouds of dust competing with the mist and then all grew quiet.
For a moment, then two.
Then more shells were coming but they landed in the village with an almost gentle pop, pop, pop. Not high- explosive ordinance, these were shells of a different variety and everyone knew what they were just by the sounds.
“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
