by Pat Kelleher
Nellie had no answer and relented. This was one area where she was relieved to forego responsibility. The weight of the revolver in her hand began to feel like a poisoned chalice, but she gripped it firmly nevertheless.
Ahead, somewhere through the undergrowth, there was a sound like a groan. Jack held his hand up and the rest of the party crouched down. He signalled the crew to spread out in a skirmish line, then stood and, looking right and left, waved them on with his revolver.
LIEUTENANT EVERSON LAY dazed against the bole of a tree, a large lump forming on his forehead, waiting for the world to stop spinning and his body to stop hurting.
The last thing he expected to see was Nellie Abbott walking out of the undergrowth with a look of shock on her face.
“Lieutenant Everson! What happened? How did you get here?”
He looked up and saw the coverall-clad tankers beside her. “The crew of the Ivanhoe, I presume,” he groaned. “Don’t you salute a senior officer?”
Jack shrugged. “Generally not, sir. Mr Mathers said it usually gets ’em shot.”
“And where is Lieutenant Mathers?”
“Gone west, sir.”
While not a shock, it was unwelcome news. There were precious few surviving officers as it was without losing another.
“Then who’s in command here?” he asked. The men looked sheepish.
“I guess that would be me,” said Nellie, stepping forward in her coveralls.
Now it was Everson’s turned to look shocked. “You?” he said. He looked to the awkward tank crew. “You’re taking orders from a woman now?”
Nellie’s eyebrow arched.
Reggie intervened. “Begging your pardon, sir. We were in a bit of a state for a while, the fumes from the tank engine and all that. Some sort of neuralgia. We weren’t quite ourselves. Miss Abbott saw us right. Showed us how we’d let Alfie down. We owed it to him, to find him, sir. We only did what was right. Orders or no orders, right is right. We were on his trail when we came across you.”
“We saw you come down. How on earth did you end up in that thing, Lieutenant?” asked Nellie.
Everson’s tone hardened. “We arrived at the crater. You weren’t there,” he said. “We were captured by Zohtakarrii and escaped in a captured observation balloon.”
“So there are no Huns?” said Wally, disappointed.
“No,” said Everson. “Well, one. I expect Tulliver’s on his tail this minute.”
Now fully aware of his surroundings, he looked around. “Where are the rest, Atkins and the others? They were in the kite balloon. Are they all right?”
Jack waved his arm. “Spread out, find them.”
THE TANK CREW came back in ones and twos, with bruised and battered Tommies and scattered haversacks, gasbags, battle bowlers and rifles. Corporal Riley and Tonkins had found themselves stuck in adjacent trees, having slid down a succession of broad flat leaves as though they were slides. Their electric lance kitbags were found nearby, their fall broken by the undergrowth.
Gazette had twisted his ankle and ended up entangled in a thicket, as if he’d been left hanging out on the old barbed wire.
They came across Pot Shot groaning in shrubbery.
“Bloody hell, I haven’t taken a beating like that since the police set about us during the transport strike!” he moaned as they hauled him out.
Gutsy had got away relatively unscathed, having had the benefit of the unfortunate Mercy as a soft landing as they came hobbling in together.
“Well, if it isn’t Wendy and the Lost Boys,” Gutsy said in clipped, bitter tones when he saw the tank crew.
Nellie threw him the kind of haughty look she usually reserved for her brothers. Gutsy, who had contended with Mrs Blood’s occasional wrath for over a decade, baulked nevertheless.
All were maps of contusions, scratches, bruises and livid welts from whip-thin branches, and all had run their gamut of swear words until there was nothing left but a weary acceptance of the discomfort and pain.
They found Padre Rand kneeling over Jenkins, the signals gear hung from various branches around them. The livid, raw acid burns on Jenkins’ face were the least of his worries now. He screwed up his eyes in pain as he snatched short ragged breaths. Padre Rand barely had time to read him the Last Rites before Jenkins’ breathing became softer and then, with one last gasp, stopped altogether.
ATKINS CAME ROUND, his head hurting, every limb throbbing and aching. He eased himself into a sitting position against a tree trunk, resting uncomfortably against the jumble of gear in his knapsack.
He was amazed to find himself still alive. His first thought now was of Flora, just as his last thought had been. He was still alive. He could still get back to her. But to do that, he would have to move.
He saw his rifle some yards away, and levered himself to his feet. The action set off a ferocious pounding in his head. Spots danced before his eyes as he steadied himself. He heard voices calling. He tried to call out, but his mouth was parched and he couldn’t find his water bottle, so he started towards the sounds.
Ahead, white petals drifted down from a tree bough, spinning round in eddies and carpeting the ground beneath the tree. Limping towards it, he realised they weren’t petals, but pieces of card. He could see photographs on some. A slipknot of fear tightened round his stomach. He dropped to his knees and brushed his hand through the fallen photogravures, turning them over. They were photographs of girls, every one, some smiling, some demure, full figure, portrait, occasional French nudes and music hall singers. He knew them all.
Several more fluttered down from above.
Not wanting to, but needing to know, he looked up. He dearly wished he hadn’t.
Fifteen feet above, a body lay face down, splayed awkwardly across a couple of boughs with an arm outstretched, as if reaching for the fallen cards. Pallid whipcord creepers had wrapped themselves around the neck, biting deeply into the skin. The eyes were wide and bloodshot; the fleshy parts of the face were dark purple and bloated with settling blood, distorting the once pleasant features into a grotesque caricature as it stared down through the foliage at him.
Atkins’ voice was quiet but heavy with sorrow, regret and guilt, all bound up in a single word. “Porgy.”
Try as he might, he couldn’t reach his mate’s body. Unwilling to abandon him, he set about collecting up the fallen photographs, Porgy’s ‘deck of cards.’ As he did, Atkins felt the tears come, stinging the welts on his face as they tracked down his cheeks. Being alone, he let them fall.
He wasn’t sure how long the voices had been calling. He cuffed his eyes dry and shook off his despondency enough to call out hoarsely, “Here!”
The rest of the section and the tank crew arrived in short order. It took five of them to cut Porgy’s body free and lower him gently to the ground, as Atkins watched, numbed.
Nellie sought to comfort him, putting a hand on his arm.
“Only—”
Atkins shrugged it off, rounding on her.
“Where the fuck were you?” he spat at her. Shocked at his own vehemence and anger, he watched Nellie open her mouth to say something, but he wasn’t listening. He didn’t want to listen. He knew it wasn’t her fault. But he couldn’t stop himself. As if Porgy’s pointless, stupid death had given him permission, all the pain and self-doubt he had kept bottled up over William, over Flora, welled up in a way he hadn’t felt since Ketch died. Atkins’ brutal words had opened a sluice gate, and the rage and pain poured out in a torrent. “I told you to stay where you were. If you’d stayed at the top of the crater, like I said, like I ordered you to, we wouldn’t be in this bloody mess and Porgy wouldn’t be dead! But oh, no, Miss bloody high-and-mighty knew better. This is all your fucking fault!”
The tank crew gathered protectively behind Nellie, and Jack stepped up to Atkins.
“Are you looking for trouble, chum?”
“Jack, Only. Stop it,” said Nellie as the men glowered at each other. “I have four brothers. I can fight my own bat
tles, Jack. I don’t need you to do it for me.”
Atkins balled his hands into fists. He didn’t care. He deserved it. He would take anything the burly tanker dished out; after all, he thought to himself bitterly, wasn’t he the penitent Fusilier?
“Come on, then,” he said.
The longed-for blow never landed. Everson stepped between them.
“That’s enough,” he said. “I’ve already had one mutiny. I won’t have another. Is that clear?”
Jack lowered his fists and allowed Nellie to escort him back to the others, berating him as they went and giving his arm a solid punch.
Atkins continued to glare at the gunner’s broad back.
“Is that clear?” repeated Everson.
“Sir,” said Atkins, grudgingly, his hands relaxing.
EVERSON BREATHED A sigh of relief and gestured Gutsy over. “Blood, take Lance Corporal Atkins over there, calm him down.
Otterthwaite, get Hopkiss’ identity disc and divide his ammunition and food. Then we need to organise a burial party.”
Everson noticed the tank crew in a brief huddle. They pushed Jack from the scrum towards him. The gunner looked awkward and embarrassed.
“We don’t think it’s a good idea to bury them, sir. We should burn them.”
“Burn them?”
“It’s just that the Sub—Lieutenant Mathers, sir—”
“I thought you said he was dead?”
“He was, sir.”
“Was?”
“Some sort of fungus reanimated his body, sir.”
Everson pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. Was nothing ever straightforward in this place?
“And where is Mathers now?” he asked wearily.
“Sucked into an underground river, sir.”
“Well then, problem solved. Private, we haven’t the time to cut down wood and build a pyre to burn them. We bury them and move on.” Jack shuffled, unsure.
“That’s an order, Private.”
“I DON’T LIKE any of this, Corp,” said Tonkins, as he stood by the fresh shallow grave with his entrenching tool. “I wish I was back in the dugout, making repairs.”
“Well, lad,” said Riley, stood by another, ready to dispense his customary wisdom. He really wished he had a pipe to draw on. These things always sounded better when punctuated by puffs of shag and wreathed in a fog of fragrant smoke, but needs must. “It’s like my old father always said: ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst and take what comes.’ After all, I put in for extra staff in my unit and Battalion sent me you. And look how that’s turned out!” he said, slapping Tonkins heartily on the back.
Tonkins smiled broadly, nodded with relief, paused as a penny dropped and then frowned. By then, Corporal Riley was already halfway across the glade.
AFTER THE PADRE led a brief funeral service for Hopkiss and Jenkins, Everson called Atkins and Riley together, along with Nellie who, although he didn’t like it, seemed to speak for the crew of the Ivanhoe.
Hopkiss’ death had hit the Black Hand Gang hard, Atkins most of all. Everson needed something to keep them occupied other than mere survival.
As he waited for them to arrive, he fished in his tunic pocket and retrieved the scrap of bloodstained khaki serge cloth, and the Pennine Fusiliers button that had once belonged to Jeffries. He played it through his fingers, rubbing a thumb idly over the raised Fusilier badge cast on it as he pondered. With his petrol-fruit-heightened senses, Mathers had been able to divine Jeffries by some sort of psychometry. He had said Jeffries’ trail led into the crater. And here they were. If so, what did that make this, some kind of talisman, some sort of fetish? Did that mean it had some kind of eldritch connection with Jeffries? He shuddered and found himself stuffing the button away in his pocket again, as if to be rid of it, or at least put it out of sight.
“We need to decide our next move,” he said as the others turned up. “It’s clear we have several objectives. One, to find Private Perkins. Two, to see if we can pick up Jeffries’ trail.”
Nellie spoke up. “Napoo believes Alfie has been taken by Urmen.” Hesitantly, Atkins chipped in, “If we’re looking for Urmen, sir, there was the tower we saw, towards the centre of the crater. That looked man-made. It should be easy enough to find.”
Everson nodded, relieved that Atkins was engaged. “It’s a start,” he said.
Corporal Riley nodded in agreement. “Don’t like leaving a man behind, if I can help it,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, they moved off, heading for the centre of the crater and the tower.
TULLIVER SAW THE remnants of the blazing kite balloon crash slowly into the treetops, then lost sight of it as the bus continued to turn into its climbing spiral. There was nothing he could do for them. He silently wished them luck, pulled back on the stick’s spade handle, hauled the nose up and raced after the Hun.
The Strutter was no real match for the Albatros as it was, but now Werner had the advantage of height and extra speed. And he used it. The Albatros was now diving steeply on them from above. He would wait until he was almost on top of them before he opened fire. Tulliver had only moments to act.
He slide-slipped and plunged through an indolent cumulus as the mountainous cloud drifted by. The bright blue of the sky faded, and he found himself enveloped by a diffuse grey space. He kept his rudder as level as he could, or thought he had. He felt the negative plate at his feet slide across the cockpit. He was drifting, banking. Straighten up.
Straighten up. The fog thinned to a mist and, through that, the ground gradually resolved itself.
He’d lost sight of the Albatros. Tulliver pulled up, climbing parallel to the great shifting white slopes of the cloud, the Strutter’s shadow rippling over its bright surface.
The Albatros burst out of a cleft between two cloudy peaks above and he climbed after it, contour-chasing though the misty canyons of a morphing landscape, landing wheels scudding along their insubstantial surface, leaving whorls of mist in their wake.
He’s leading me on a wild goose chase, thought Tulliver, as the Albatros stayed tantalisingly out of reach above.
They left the cloud behind as they continued to climb in a spiral. His ears crackled as the pressure changed, and the air got colder with the altitude. The sharp bite of the wind whistling through the wires was clean and exhilarating, at least to begin with. At this height, and at speeds of eighty to ninety miles an hour, the cold started to numb his extremities. Chances were his machine gun would freeze up, too, not that he had much ammo left. Still, he climbed hard on the Hun’s heels.
Now, if he could just settle the bastard in his gunsight.
There was a brief burst of tracer bullets across his top plane. Werner roared overhead, and waggled his wings once—twice. When he came round again, he was pointing down insistently.
Tulliver banked and chanced a look. Eleven thousand feet below, crisscrossing the landscape, were vast intersecting lines, scoring the landscape. He had seen a few of them in reverse on the negative plate down by his feet, but they didn’t do the scale or the number justice. Helped by the petrol fruit fumes from the engine, they were even harder to miss. The lines, however, weren’t continuous. They were broken and faint in places, sometimes marked only by a slight change of colour or thickness of vegetation, sometimes vanishing under forests or hills and valleys, reappearing fractured, miles away, half-hidden but concomitant. They seemed to run for miles, disappearing off towards the horizon until they were lost in the haze of aerial perspective. On the ground, they would have been invisible, but Tulliver knew that the new aerial photography could reveal geological features that had long lain undiscovered. What they could be, he had no idea. Were they evidence of ancient earthworks or geological processes?
There did seem to be unpleasant associations with Jeffries’ perverse appropriation of artillery to plot a pentagram on the landscape. Was this a pattern, too? There looked to be a geometric aspect to it all. Was this, as the Zohtakarrii claimed, proof of their worl
d’s creation? Were these the strands of the world as woven by GarSuleth for his children?
From their reaction to the plates, they certainly thought so. But the sheer scale of it. It beggared belief.
As he and Werner circled each other, it was clear now that the Strip in the crater was part of it, too, an exposed part of a line. This was what he had glimpsed before. This was what Werner had tried to tell him about. There was more to this world than met the eye, the German had said. Tulliver had thought it mere hyperbole at the time. Werner hadn’t been trying to shoot him down at all. He’d lured him up here to show him, to let him see for himself, in order to corroborate it. He turned to Hepton. Hepton had to see it, too. He couldn’t fail to.
But the kinematographer was sat huddled in the observer’s cockpit, shivering, his hands cupped round his mouth, trying to blow on them to warm them. Tulliver pointed down, but Hepton wasn’t interested. Out of the corner of his eyes, Tulliver thought some of the lines shimmered. He couldn’t be sure. Frustrated, he lifted his fouled goggles and looked again.
No, there it was. With his fuel-sharpened acuity, he could see an ephemeral energy flowing along the lines like water, towards intersections, building in intensity until a vast spastic column of lightning blasted briefly up into the sky. Across the planet’s surface, lightning bolts jagged up into the atmosphere in an inverted lightning storm, with a noise like an artillery barrage.
The Strutter’s rigging wires began to hum and sparks started arcing from one to another.
That wasn’t good.
Then, with a roar like Wotan’s furnace, a tremendous column of brilliant white lightning punched up from the ground into the sky between the Strutter and the Albatros, in a searing blast of heat and noise. It filled Tulliver’s world, obliterating everything, leaving his ears ringing and his eyes blinded.
The concussive shockwave smashed into the fragile machines of wood and wire and fabric and sent them spinning out of control. They were going down.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Each Flash and Spouting Crash...”
