Filled with disgust and fury, Tulliver worked rudder and stick, threading the machine between the tentacle roots, up towards the swollen cupola above, before letting loose a prolonged burst of machine gun fire, wishing he still had burning tracer bullets left.
The winged creatures turned their attention to the Sopwith as it banked away, swooping down as one, towards the machine, with raucous harridan shrieks.
Maddocks turned the rear machine gun on them as they flew past the tumorous mouth bag.
Tulliver felt a downdraft of warm, foul-smelling air that briefly buffeted the machine as they passed beneath the maws and their writhing tonguedrils.
He had to get away from the damn things before they tore the aeroplane apart. The winged creatures seemed to keep away from the great harvesting tentacles, flocking instead around the mouth things. Perhaps they weren’t immune to the juices with which those things dripped.
“Hang on,” he bellowed over his shoulder at Maddocks.
Putting the machine into a spin, he went corkscrewing down around a tentacle. Maddocks peered back, to see the scavengers dropping away and returning to easier prey, and once more resuming their mouth-tube squabbles.
Tulliver levelled out, seeing a patch of bright blue sky between the huge sacs above, and put the aeroplane into a steep climb, racing to rise above a monstrous Kreothe, whose size dwarfed the tiny fragile machine.
At it passed from the green twilit world of the Kreothe’s underside into the bright glare of the sun, the Strutter’s shadow crossed the taut skin of the giant air sac, like a bott fly among a herd of horses – and he was going to bite. Tulliver continued climbing to gain the height he’d need for the attack. Below him now, the tops of the Kreothe were spread out in a landscape of bulbous towering sacs.
Tulliver pushed the Sopwith into a steep dive towards the Kreothe he’d targeted. He loosed a quick burst from his forward facing machine gun. The stream of bullets raked the huge billowing field of skin stretched out below them. Parts of it seemed to deflate, crumpling slowly under the withering fire of the Lewis gun, but the whole did not collapse, suggesting chambers of buoyancy.
He pulled out of his dive and flew along the Kreothe. There was nothing else they could do. They weren’t going to bring one of those things down, so, instead, he pulled back on the stick and climbed, just for the sheer exhilaration of it.
The shoal of Kreothe shrank below them, the blue sky expanded to meet them and, briefly, Lieutenant Tulliver felt at home.
IN THE FIRE trench, Sergeant Hobson craned his neck and looked up at the huge translucent fleshy canopies as they passed overhead, went to the storage box and brought out a Very pistol.
“What are you going to do, Sarn’t?”
“What am I going to do, Draper? I’m going to give one of those things a very nasty surprise.”
He fired the flare pistol. The flare arced up into the sky, bursting brightly against the soft moist nodule attached to the under side of a Kreothe air sac.
An involuntary shudder ran through the tentacles that hung below it, and the nodule itself seemed to shrink and contract from the burning white light that seared through the skin.
The men watched from the trench, mesmerised.
“It’s shrivelling like your balls on a wiring party, Coxy!”
“Fuck off, Draper.”
The great air sac that carried the creature aloft began to burn and wither and, with its buoyancy lost, the Kreothe began to sink slowly, its now limp tentacles dragged along the ground like anchor chains, weighting it down. It descended slowly, like a holed titanic ocean liner, sinking down to its final resting place further up the valley, beyond the trenches.
The other Kreothe, if they knew or cared about the fate of their shoal member, did not react. They drifted by overhead, oblivious to the ruin they left behind, feeding off stragglers from the fleeing herds further up the valley.
THE KREOTHE HAVING drifted on, Edith, Sister Fenton and Padre Rand staggered into camp with the two soldiers, Jones and Miller, that they had managed to save. The pair were now practically comatose.
“Stretcher bearers! Stretcher bearers!” called the Padre.
Stretchers were rapidly found and the party ushered across what was left of the encampment, to the Aid Post down in the support trench.
“What have we here?” asked Captain Lippett, his concentration on a man’s gashed scalp before him as he threaded a needle through the skin.
“The only two surviving neurasthenia patients, Mr Lippett. They all just walked out in the veldt and waited, waited... to be eaten by those... things,” Sister Fenton informed him.
“And these two weren’t, eh?”
“We dragged them into a chatt ditch.”
“Quick thinking, Sister.”
“It was the Padre’s idea.”
“Good show, Padre.”
“Just looking after my flock, doctor.”
Lippett looked up at Edith. “I thought that was your job, Nurse Bell. You know the men call you Little Bo Peep, do you?”
He obviously knew she didn’t. The remark rankled with Edith. She had got used to being belittled and bullied and she had borne it. She knew her position. But she didn’t have to like it. It was funny, but before she came to this world, she would have just taken it meekly and perhaps had a cry to herself later. Now, she felt incensed. She had tried to tell him there was something wrong with them, but he didn’t listen, he wasn’t interested, not in malingerers, not in cowards. She clenched her fists and felt the nails bite into her palms. She stepped forwards. Doctor or no doctor –
“Nurse!” It was Miller. He was looking in horror at Jones, who had begun fitting on his stretcher, his spine arching, his hips bucking.
“Right, get him into the aid post, we’ll have to try and relieve the pressure in those cysts,” said Lippett, all airs and graces vanishing in an instant. “Stanton, prepare the equipment, come on, man.”
As Lippett set about his operation, Sister Fenton gave Edith a look. “A word, Nurse.” She led Edith away from the Aid Post.
“Two!” said Edith through gritted teeth, doing her best to contain her anger. “Two out of twenty seven. We could have saved them if Mr Lippett had listened to me in the first place, if he had the slightest –”
“You can’t know that.”
“He didn’t even try.”
Sister Fenton fixed her with a hard stare, one that said she would brook no nonsense. “Nurse Bell. I will deal with this. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this isn’t a hospital. We don’t have the facilities of a hospital. We don’t even have the supplies of a Casualty Clearing Station or an Ambulance train. God knows, those would seem like luxuries here. The drugs, the surgical procedures, the medicines. We are all doing the best we can. This place brings illnesses, infections, things we’ve never seen before, and without the benefits that modern medicine has to offer. What more could we have done?”
“But Sister,” Edith protested.
“Nurse Bell!”
But Edith could no more keep quiet now than a whizz bang, or she felt she would explode. “I will not let a man like that dismiss –”
Sister Fenton interrupted. “You’re letting Driver Abbott’s suffrage go to your head. Mr Lippett is a qualified doctor. You’re a VAD. You’ve had, what, six months’ basic medical training? It wasn’t all that long ago you were just emptying bedpans and changing dressings. By all means, note and report your observations of your patients to me, and I will do what I can, but do not suppose to tell him what to do. Do I make myself clear?”
Edith could barely trust herself to speak. “Yes, Sister,” she managed to mutter.
SOMETIME LATER, DRAINED and blood stained, Captain Lippett came out of the tent and approached the nurses. He shook his head. “He’s dead, I’m afraid. Died on the table.”
Edith struggled to restrain her emotions and choked back a sob. Sister Fenton remained impassive.
“If it’s any comfort, the other one yo
u brought in, Miller, is still alive.” Lippett finished wiping his hands. “Though it appears you were right, Nurse Bell. They were more than just neurasthenic,” he added with a trace of resentment. “Come and see.” He ushered them into the tent. Edith entered, wary of what she might find. Jones’ body was still on the table, covered by a bloody sheet. “They were host to some sort of parasitic infection,” Lippett continued. “Fascinating things. I managed to remove some of them from the intestines.”
He showed them a steel surgical tray. A thing, smaller than Edith’s little finger, lay in a pool of blood. At first glance, its small delicate-looking grey body seemed ribbed, but on closer inspection, Edith realised it was corkscrewed. It looked gruesome enough as it was, but to imagine it inside? She suppressed a shudder. Her real horror, however, was reserved for the small head. The body tapered toward it. It was eyeless. Needle sharp hooks, as fine as fish bones, surrounded an oral sucker. As she tore her attention away from the thing she realised Lippett was still talking.
“...it’s an intriguing pathology. Although most of them remained in the gut, I found a cluster of them curled round the brain stem, from where it seems they can affect the nervous system of the host,” he was saying.
“Making them do things against their will?” asked Edith, her face crumpled with disgust.
“It appears so. The hosts acting against their own best interest for the parasites’ benefit. It would certainly explain the patients’ uncharacteristic behaviour. From the reports, I believe a number of chatts were affected, too,” said Lippett, getting to grip with his subject. “I suspect that they might be the parasite’s natural hosts. As hive insects, they probably have weaker individual minds. As for the neurasthenics, perhaps their weakened mental state made them more susceptible to the parasites’ control. From what you’ve witnessed, I’d hazard a guess that the parasite’s life cycle required it to be eaten by those Kreothe creatures,”
“Like tapeworms?” enquired Sister Fenton.
“Quite,” said Lippett with enthusiasm. “Of course, this is only an initial theory. I shall continue to study the creatures – and we still have Miller.”
Edith opened her mouth to say something, but was silenced by a stern glance from Sister Fenton.
“For now, our first course of action is to trace the infection back to its source,” said Lippett, looking at the nurses expectantly.
“We’ve had no reports of strange behaviour from any of the other men,” said Sister Fenton. “It must have been something specific to the neurasthenics.”
Lippett nodded in agreement. “Perhaps something the men ate in the past week. It would have contained the eggs which the patients would have ingested. Once in the digestive tract, they hatched and grew into their juvenile forms. Some would have bored into the bloodstream and travelled round the body until they reached the brainstem.”
Edith’s face burned with shock. “Oh,” she said. She was going to say more, but Sister had only just berated her for presuming too much with Doctor Lippett.
Sister Fenton raised an eyebrow as Edith turned to look at her. “Yes, Nurse Bell?”
“The stew,” Edith explained.
“I beg your pardon?” said Lippett.
“The stew, Doctor. I didn’t know. Honestly.”
“It seems none of us did, nurse. Did anybody else eat any of it? Did you?”
Edith shook her head emphatically. “No, it was specifically for the patients. Although...”
“Yes, Nurse?”
Edith put her hand to her mouth. “Lieutenant Mathers. I remember Nellie saying he had some, a small amount I’m sure.”
“Mathers?” queried Lippett.
“The Tank Commander,” said Sister Fenton.
“Well, I’m sure he’s in little danger. I mean it’s not as if he’s one of Nurse Bell’s little lost sheep, is he?”
THE TWILIGHT OF the Kreothe passed and, in dribs and drabs, the soldiers climbed once more out from their dark holes into the alien sun.
Everson sighed. He stood looking at the flagpole, which was now leaning at a precarious angle, knocked by a careless Kreothe tentacle. The Union flag flapped and fluttered weakly, like an ailing dog, still wagging its tail at its master’s approach.
It put Everson in mind of the leaning Madonna and Child at Albert, in France. It had stood atop the basilica there until it had been bombed. The statue survived, but leaning at an angle. It was thought that if it fell, the war would end. If only things were that simple.
Several small nearby copses had been uprooted, but in the shelter of another, the three captured battlepillars survived unharmed. Maybe, thought Everson, because the Kreothe found them unpalatable. Still, the Kreothe’s loss might be their gain.
“Ever have one of those days, sir?” asked Hobson.
“Nothing but, Sergeant. Nothing bloody but.”
“So, what do we do now, sir?”
“Now, Hobson?” he said, looking around at the carnage and sighing heavily. “We start again.” And not for the first time, Everson’s mind turned to Atkins and his black hand gang and to that damned tank. Where were they?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“The Better ’Ole...”
“HELL!” GROWLED ATKINS in frustration. “We’ll have to go in after them.”
“But they’re not even our mob,” objected Porgy.
Atkins looked at him. “Yes. Yes, they are. They’re British Army, like us. We’re all we have. We’re in a hole, Porgy. If we don’t stick together, if we don’t look out for each other, we’ll end up like those poor old sods we found back there, unknown, unmourned and forgotten, without even a decent grave. That’s not a fate I intend to suffer. I intend to survive and get back home, Gutsy. I made that promise on the Somme and I’m making that promise here and, by God, I’m going to keep it. If Lieutenant Everson says we need that tank, then we need the tank – and that means we need its bloody crew, too. God knows what kind of trouble they’ll get into in there, led by that madman...”
Gutsy nodded his head. “We’re with you, Only.” He turned round to the rest of the section. “You heard the Corporal, lads. Battle order.”
The rest of 1 Section took off their packs, leaving themselves only their webbing with ammo and grenade pouches, and gas mask bags at their chest. They checked their rifle magazines and cycled the bolts so there was one in the spout, ready.
“What about me?” asked Nellie, planting herself obstinately in front of Atkins. “They might get hurt, so I’m not staying here.”
Atkins had learned his lesson where Nellie Abbott was concerned. “No, I didn’t think you would,” he said, with a trace of a smile. He nodded towards the Section’s urman guide, who was cutting lengths of branches with his curved sword and wrapping them with some dried mossy substance to use as torches. “Stick with Napoo.”
Prof and Chalky had started to make their own torches, cutting at a little grove of saplings. Saplings with a black bark with silver-grey veins. Nellie frowned. They were familiar...
“No!” she yelled, lifting her skirt and running towards them as they hacked away at the slender trunks. “No, stop. That’s corpsewood. It’ll kill you!”
Hearing the name, Napoo whirled round and raced across the glade, knocking the cut wood from the Tommies’ hands. “She speaks true. It will drain you of your life to keep its own.”
The men backed away from the saplings as if they’d been bitten – which they very nearly had.
“Ruddy hell, Chalky,” joshed Mercy. “I can’t turn me back on you for five minutes without you getting into some trouble or other.”
Chalky shrugged sheepishly, and smiled gratefully at Nellie.
Prof shuddered. “Corpsewood?” He backed away in horror and stood in the clearing, looking round, like a spooked horse, not daring to move as if everything around might be the death of him.
“Hey, it’s all right, Prof,” said Nellie. “You’re safe now. You scared me, is all. I’d just seen it before, what it can
do.”
“I don’t think you’re helping,” said Gazette, looking up from checking his rifle one more time.
“You aren’t, neither,” retorted Nellie. “If I want your opinion, I’ll ask the Corporal.”
The rest of the section laughed and jeered. Nellie ignored them and turned her attention back to Prof. She knew that haunted look. She’d seen it in soldiers’ eyes before.
“Corpsewood,” Prof kept muttering to himself, shaking his head, “corpsewood.”
A GENTLE DRAUGHT blew from the cavernous opening as they approached the main entrance of the edifice. Roots and boughs were woven round and embedded in the wall of the doorway until they formed a jamb, roots thrusting buttress-like into the ground, but the great bark-like doors, that would have sealed the edifice, had long since dried and shrivelled as the door plant itself had died, leaving the cavernous entrance open. Other vegetation had taken advantage of the fact, clinging to the walls and invading the fallow spaces beyond. Great hanging carpets of plum-coloured shrubbery tumbled down from cracks in the edifice wall.
As they stood on the threshold, Atkins paired the men up; one man with their rifle and bayonet at the ready, accompanied by one holding a torch. Gazette walked with Pot Shot, Porgy with Chalky, Mercy with Prof. Gutsy, gun shouldered, held Little Bertha, his meat cleaver, in his hand, the flames of the torches reflecting off its polished surface. Napoo and Nellie Abbott brought up the rear. Atkins kept an eye on Chandar.
The chatt sank down on its legs and moved reluctantly. Atkins had half expected it to make a break for it and run. It could have fled, but something kept it with them; against its better judgement, as far as he could tell.
The Ironclad Prophecy Page 23
