No Man's World: Omnibus

by Pat Kelleher

  He pulled out of the dive and followed the great rift face along the edge of the sunken plain until he saw the gorge that pointed the way back, its mysterious metal wall flaring in the sunlight.

  As they neared the valley that the marooned Tommies now called home, Tulliver felt his mood sink with every foot of altitude he lost.

  LIEUTENANT EVERSON, ACTING CO of the 13th Battalion of the Pennine Fusiliers, heard the droning approach of aeroplane.

  “Back in one piece. Thank God for that!” he muttered, before returning his attention to the ongoing repair work. The circular rings of defensive fire, support and reserve trenches that now protected the precious circle of Somme soil had been pulverised in recent weeks; not by a German barrage, but by an animal stampede precipitated by a storm front of Kreothe, giant aerial creatures that drifted in herds on the wind. The decomposing corpse of one of the jellyfish-like creatures lay up the valley, not half a mile beyond the trenches, like some tentacled, demonic leviathan washed up from the depths. The men had already become accustomed to its stench, having lived in a charnel field of rotting corpses on the Somme.

  Hobson, a barrel-chested platoon sergeant whose most prominent feature was an immaculately groomed handlebar moustache, followed behind him, catching anything the lieutenant missed, snatching words with other ranks about undone buttons and the other hundred and one petty breaches of Regulations that blighted the life of a private, even here.

  Everson felt the weight of his responsibility keenly. He had gone to Oxford with the intention of escaping the weight of his father’s expectations. With the outbreak of war, in the summer of 1914, he joined the patriotic throng of other young men in front of Broughtonthwaite Town Hall and signed on as one of Kitchener’s volunteers. When his father found out, he was furious. Over his son’s objections, he used his considerable influence to buy him a commission, as a Platoon Commander, in the local regiment. In seeking to avoid responsibility, Everson had found himself saddled with it. He hated his father for that.

  The longer they remained here, the harder it was to maintain the men’s morale. He felt the respect they held him in being eroded week by week. They wanted leadership, and all he could offer was survival. It wasn’t enough. A slow drip of deserters sloped off to take their chances in the alien wilderness, whittling their numbers and further undermining the men’s confidence in him.

  Now, though, they had a solid lead on Lieutenant Jeffries. There was a deeply held belief among some of the ranks that Jeffries was responsible for their transportation to this hellish place, one Everson tentatively shared. Jeffries was a self-styled diabolist and rival of Aleister Crowley. He was also a con man and a wanted murderer. It was Jeffries’ boast that they were here on this planet as the direct result of some obscene ritual he had conducted, powered by the staggering scale of human sacrifice on the Somme. Before he vanished, leaving them at war with the Chatts, Jeffries declared that only he knew how to get them back.

  For over three months, they had searched for him and now, at last, they had a lead—the Croatoan Crater. Not only that, they also had the Chatt prisoner, Chandar, and a collection of ancient sacred scent texts unearthed at the Nazarrii edifice. They could give him leverage with the Khungarrii, the local colony, on whose territory they had materialised and under whose attacks they had suffered in recent months.

  With these, Everson felt he could finally act, rather than react. He could galvanise the men, give them a purpose other than survival. He only hoped it wouldn’t be too late. First, though, he must arrange a salvage party to recover the tank if at all possible.

  Following the jinking traverses of the radial communications trench, they turned left and clockwise into the support trench ring. Soldiers saluted as they passed. Some looked him in the eye with defiance. Others averted their gaze. Everson smiled briefly and nodded to all in acknowledgement.

  He noticed an awkward figure, his right leg missing below the knee, hobbling on crutches round the traverse ahead of them. It was a hard figure to mistake.

  “Nicholls?” The man had been in his own platoon. Half Pint, the rest called him, on account of his constant grousing. He’d lost his right leg below the knee in a battle with the Khungarrii. Anywhere else but here it would have been a Blighty wound, poor sod. Since then, Nicholls had served as his batman, at least until his new peg leg had tried to kill him. Now he was just a Category Man, unfit for active service.

  “Sir?” Nicholls attempted to turn but got one of his crutches stuck in the duckboards that ran along the bottom of the trench. “Damn thing!”

  “Sergeant, give him a hand.”

  “It’s all right. I’ve got it, sir,” said Nicholls from between gritted teeth as he gave the crutch a vicious tug. It came free. He let out a strangled cry and lurched backward against the revetment. The crutch clattered to the ground.

  Everson stooped, picked it up and handed it back to him. Nicholls took it, reluctantly, avoiding his gaze.

  Everson’s brow furrowed with concern. “Everything all right, Nicholls?”

  “Fine, sir,” said the Fusilier. “Never better. Everything’s tickety-boo.”

  Hobson leaned forward and pinned the man to the revetment with a gimlet eye, a note of threat in his voice. “Any complaints?”

  Nicholls shook his head. “No, none at all, Sarn’t.”

  “Very glad to hear it. Hop along now.”

  HALF PINT ROUNDED the traverse and shot a furtive glance over his shoulder, to check if he was being followed, but he’d left Lieutenant Everson and Hobson behind.

  He stood at the top of a set of the dugout steps and called hoarsely down into the gloom. “It’s me, Half Pint. Someone give us a bloody hand, then!”

  There were footsteps and a Tommy, his tunic undone, emerged into the light at the top of the steps. “About bloody time too,” he said. “Where’ve you been? Bains is waiting.”

  Ungraciously, Half Pint allowed himself to be manoeuvred down into the gloomy dugout lit by a single hurricane lamp, where he was dropped unceremoniously onto an empty bunk. Sat and stood around him were a collection of discontented Fusiliers, brought here like himself by word of mouth. He wasn’t surprised to see Hepton here, either. Officially a War Office kinematographer, he always had a nose for trouble, or a “story,” as he preferred to put it. His rankless officer’s uniform covered by an Army Warm, he smiled affably and nodded at Half Pint as he entered. Half Pint ignored him.

  “It’s not easy getting round on one leg,” he said, kicking out his stump to illustrate the point. “You should try it sometime.”

  “If I thought it was a Blighty one, then perhaps I would,” said Wilson. “But it ain’t any more, is it? And that’s the bleedin’ point, i’n’t it?”

  Across the way, Rutherford groaned. “Oh, don’t start, Wilson.”

  “Look, I signed up for the duration,” Wilson retorted. “I did me duty. I volunteered to defend my country. But look around you. Is this la belle France? No, it bloody isn’t. As far as I’m concerned, my war is over. And so’s yours, and yours,” he said, jerking his chin round the dugout at the gathered Fusiliers.

  “You don’t know that. The lieutenant will get us back somehow,” protested Carter, but there was little conviction in his voice.

  “Look, if your officer bloke don’t know the way home,” said Rutherford, addressing Half Pint, “then I do think he should tell us. If there isn’t one, if this is it, then fine. Let us make a new start, I say. Out there.” He gestured vaguely at the dugout roof.

  “Well, you would say that,” said Hepton with a leer. “A little birdie tells me that you’ve got yourself a piece of Urman skirt.”

  “Her name’s Duuma,” Rutherford insisted. “And her enclave has got this place sussed. I’d rather be out there with them than stuck in these trenches, or back in a crumbling terrace, any day. Not that I could go back anyway, not after what I’ve seen. I wouldn’t fit in there no more.”

  Wilson snorted with derision. “So what do yo
u think, Bains?” he asked the silent figure in the corner.

  The shadows hid Bains’ features, his face only visible in the red glow of his burning gasper whenever he took a drag. Blue smoke drifted up to the roof, snaking its way through the hanging knapsacks. Sitting on an upturned ammo box, he leaned out of the shadows, his elbows resting on his knees. He was an unremarkable man with large ears and untamed eyebrows. His cheeks were speckled with flecks of dried blood, nicks from a blunt razor. He had a chevron-shaped patch on his sleeve, slightly cleaner than the khaki serge around it, where once had been a lance corporal’s stripe. It was faint, but it was there if you knew where to look, and everybody in the dugout did. He took a final drag on his cigarette before dropping it on the dugout floor and grinding it into the dirt.

  “We’ve been here nigh on five months now,” he growled. “I think Everson has had his chance. He doesn’t know anymore than the rest of us, I reckon. Like it or not, we’re here for good, I’d say, and I’ve had a bellyful of doing what the Army tells me. All I want is a fair chance to make summat for myself, and I’m prepared to take it if I have to.”

  Monroe piped up. “But blokes have been doing that; desertin’, I mean. And patrols have come back saying they’ve found their bodies barely miles from here.”

  “All right,” said Bains. “But how’s that any different from getting blown up by a Minnie, eh?” He looked round the gloomy dugout of malcontents and grousers. “Or ripped apart by shrapnel, or dying of a gut wound in a shell hole? We’re sitting ducks if we stay here.”

  “But this place is all that we have left of Earth,” said Cox.

  “And you’re really going to miss all that, are you?” said Bains. “People say the world will change after the War, if it ever ends, but I doubt it. Them as has money will still have it and them as hasn’t still won’t. I’m going to be no worse off here. But at least I can be me own master. And so can you. Starting right here, right now.”

  “Why, Bains, you’re beginning to sound like a Bolshevik,” said Hepton with an oily grin.

  “So what do we do?” asked Cox.

  “It’s already being done. Word has gone out. Some of our brethren will be on sentry duty. They’ll let us pass. All I ask is that if you don’t join us, stand aside and let us take our demands to Everson. We just want a say in how things is run from now on, and we’ll man the barricades to get it if we have to.”

  Half Pint heard Bains’ speech with despair. Grousing was one thing, but this was another kettle of fish altogether. It had started out innocently enough—they had genuine grievances, after all—but now it seemed to be gathering a momentum all its own. Bains spoke with passion, though it wasn’t altruism that was forcing his hand. He was letting his ambitions get the better of him. He hadn’t lost his stripe for nothing. Bains wanted power and over the past few days he had been giving the same speech to many small discontented gatherings like this. Half Pint, his glass by nature being half empty, expected the whole thing to blow up in their faces.

  “And what on earth makes you think Everson’s going to listen?” needled Hepton.

  Bains grinned. “He won’t have a choice.”

  AT THE APPOINTED time, gangs of men, many with their faces covered, took advantage of the chaos caused by the mutineers, and rampaged through the trenches, and across the open ground between, in a spirit of mischief, revelling in the irresponsible respite from daily military routine.

  Other men had darker motives.

  Padre Rand, the army chaplain, knew the men felt lost, far from home as they were, and far from the sight of God. He knew because that was how he felt himself. However, he had his faith, or at least had rediscovered it out here. And with the largesse of the shepherd he knew he must use it to protect his flock from straying.

  So it was that he found himself stood on a firestep, pleading with a mob of unruly men who sought to pass by. He raised his arms in the air, appealing for calm, but his uniform wasn’t helping. Although they held no army rank, chaplains wore an officer’s uniform with a dog collar and black bib.

  “Let us past, Padre,” a voice from the masked crowd called out. “We just want to talk to Lieutenant Everson.”

  The padre, middle-aged and sandy-haired, looked down at them more in sorrow than in anger. “Then why cover your faces and go armed with clubs?” he asked, attempting to look them in the eyes. “Go back to your dugouts. This isn’t the way.”

  A large bruiser of a soldier pushed his way brusquely to the front and stood before him. “Don’t be a martyr, Padre. This isn’t your fight. Step down.”

  The padre smiled sadly and shook his head. “I’m very much afraid, my son, that it is. You’re going down the wrong path. I am, for better or worse, stood at the fork in the road. You would do well to listen to me.”

  “Then you can’t say I didn’t warn you.” The man pulled back his arm, drawing a gasp from the surrounding mob crowding the fire bay.

  A man surged forward, ripping the kerchief away from his face as he did so, to restrain his arm. “Wilson, have you gone mad? You’ll lose your name.”

  Wilson turned and snarled. “Take your hands off me, Rutherford.”

  The padre watched, startled, as the two men struggled. The soldiers around them tried to move back, away from the grappling pair, but in the cramped confines of the fire bay it wasn’t possible. An arm flailed out and caught the padre on the jaw; he lost his footing and slipped, cracking his head against a revetment post.

  An accusing cry went up from Wilson.“Rutherford, what have you done?”

  Rutherford stood, looking shocked.

  As the padre went down, the mob fled in panic, and Rutherford with them.

  Beyond the trenches, the first shots rang out.

  The world faded and the padre found himself sinking into darkness. There, the nightmare vision he fought to keep at bay, the one he experienced in a heathen Khungarrii ritual, waited for him...

  TULLIVER TRUDGED ALONG the trenches to his dugout, lost in a moment of maudlin introspection. He still felt bitter. The RFC had fought for two years to be taken seriously by Brass who couldn’t see how to use them. And now Everson was making the same mistake.

  A group of rowdy Tommies filed along the kinked communication trench, singing and shouting, and jostled him from his thoughts. Some wore gas hoods, others covered their faces with scarves or kerchiefs. From all about came raucous shouts and yells. This was far from boisterous high spirits.

  One man, a balaclava and scarf round his face, seized Tulliver roughly by the arm.

  A mate, catching sight of his double-breasted RFC tunic, quickly dissuaded him. “Leave him, Spokey. He’s Flying Corps, not even a proper soldier.”

  The fellow let him go with a grunt and moved on.

  “What’s going on?” Tulliver called after the mob.

  “The proletariat are rising up!” said another jubilant Tommy, shoving past, rifle in hand. “Some of the boys are off to tell Everson what they think of him. We’ve got no argument against you, sir. You keep out of our way and we’ll keep out of yours.” He ran after his comrades.

  Tulliver understood their resentment, even shared it to a degree. The camp had been on edge since the Khungarrii siege and the animal stampede. But he hadn’t expected this.

  From up beyond the trench, there were angry shouts and barked orders, answered by jeers as disorderly soldiers rampaged recklessly across the camp, dismissive of the NCOs’ calls to order.

  “Damn!” Tulliver shook his head and drew his revolver.

  He raced along a comm trench, swerving round the traverses, in an attempt to get to the command post.

  The points of several bayonets brought him up short.

  He slipped to a stop on the wet duckboards, inches from the glinting steel as a small section of men, led by a lance corporal, glared at him.

  “Just what the hell’s going on here?” Tulliver demanded.

  “Mutiny, sir.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “H
old Your Hand Out...”

  TULLIVER POINTED HIS revolver at the lance corporal’s head.

  Lance Corporal ‘Only’ Atkins didn’t flinch, confident in the clatter of several rifles he heard behind him as they were raised and pointed at Tulliver.

  The RFC officer cleared his throat, but didn’t lower the pistol.“We’re not the mutineers, sir,” said Atkins. He glanced over his shoulder at the men behind him. “Lower your weapons, lads.”

  “You sure, Only?” asked the tall, lanky one.

  “Uh huh.”

  The men behind him lowered their Enfields, albeit reluctantly. Warily, Tulliver lowered his gun too, but kept them pinned with a sullen stare.

  “What’s your name, Corporal?”

  “Atkins, sir.”

  “Atkins? Everson’s Black Hand Gang Atkins?”

  “That’s one way of putting it, I guess,” he said with truculence.

  “Though we prefer 1 Section, 2 Platoon.”

  “Oh. Right you are,” Tulliver said cheerfully.

  Tulliver studied the soldiers in their worn, ill-fitting uniforms; the tall lanky one must be Pot Shot, no mistaking him. The one who never took his eyes off him, that must be Gazette, the sniper. The other with the roguish good looks must be Porgy. He’d heard the stories that had circulated around camp about them, and the ones about Atkins in particular. He knew Everson trusted him and his section implicitly, and decided to do the same.

  Tulliver raised an eyebrow. He held out a hand. “Tulliver, Royal Flying Corps.” Atkins took it warily, and Tulliver gripped his hand firmly. “So you’re Atkins, eh? Glad to meet you.”

  His eye caught the telegraph pole overhead, the cable now hanging limp in the mud.

  “Damn them. They’ve cut the telephone wires. Signals won’t be happy. You and your men come with me. We’ll have to report the situation in person.”

  EVERSON SAT WRITING up the Pennines’ recent fantastical experiences on this foreign world in the Battalion War Journal. They were totally at odds with the dry reports of troop movements, battles and trench raids of earlier pages. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t mad, and if all this wasn’t the product of a febrile shell-shocked imagination. He even thought that might be preferable.