Glass broke somewhere behind him, and the sound of Charlie’s Tommy gun reached his ears as Burke hit the ground. He landed on his shoulder and let his momentum carry him forward into a short roll, coming up on one knee with his weapon pointed ahead of him. Gunfire was flying in both directions, and all it took was one look to understand why.
The tarp on the back of the lorry had been thrown off, allowing half a dozen German soldiers, all of them human as far as Burke could tell, to clamber out, take cover behind the vehicle, and begin firing at the house. Burke’s men were firing back at them, the sharp crack of their rifles punctuated by the roar of the Tommy gun in Charlie’s hands. Burke added his own firepower to the mix, felt the machine gun jerk in his hands, and watched with satisfaction as the enemy soldier he’d been targeting fell off the truck with blood pouring from a wound in the center of his chest.
As several of the enemy soldiers shifted their attention toward his position, Burke decided it might be prudent to find some cover. There was no way he’d make it back to the house; there was too much distance to cover and he’d be exposed all the way to the front steps, even with the help of covering fire from his men.
If you can’t go backward . . .
Surging to his feet, he kept a steady volume of fire directed at the truck as he rushed forward. Every step seemed to take forever and his feet felt like cement blocks as he fought his way across the half-dozen yards that separated him from the protection of the stone wall at the front of the yard. Bullets filled the air around him, whipping past like a swarm of angry bees, and he felt one clip the side of his ammo belt just as he threw himself down behind the fence.
Somewhere in those last few seconds the drum on his Tommy gun ran dry, so he hit the switch to drop the empty one on the ground, grabbed another one off his belt, and moved to slap it into place.
Movement caught his eye and he looked up to find a German soldier leering at him over the top of the wall, the barrel of his Mauser pointed right in Burke’s face.
Time slowed.
Burke’s left hand smacked into the bottom of the drum magazine, knocking it into place, even as he began to bring the barrel up toward his foe. His mind was screaming Too late! Too late! Too late! even as he tried to bring his weapon to bear, praying the other man had a misfire or some other failure . . . anything to let him live.
Someone was apparently listening to him.
A small red hole appeared in the center of the man’s forehead and he toppled backward out of sight.
There wasn’t time to thank whoever had taken the shot. Another enemy soldier suddenly ran through the gate, searching for a target, but he turned left instead of right and Burke was able to cut him down with a burst from his Tommy gun.
Even as that man fell, another took his place, firing point-blank at Burke as he did the same, and then there were two dead Germans in front of him and God knew how many more in the truck.
Letting go of his Tommy gun for a second, Burke snatched one of the two grenades he carried off his belt. He hooked the index finger of his mechanical hand through the ring hanging off the grenade and pulled out the arming pin. He counted to three and then lobbed the grenade over the stone wall in the direction of the truck. As soon as he let go, he shoved himself against the stone wall, trying to make himself as small a target as possible for when the shrapnel began to fly.
There was a shattering roar and a sudden blast of heat as the grenade found its target and exploded. Pieces of wood and metal and human flesh began to rain out of the sky, including an arm that struck Burke on the shoulder and nearly made him scream. Burke held his position, and when a German soldier rushed through the gate, his body on fire, Burke calmly put a bullet in him.
A few gunshots followed, and then silence fell over the battleground.
For a moment Burke stayed where he was, Tommy gun in hand and ready to fire. When he felt enough time had passed, he slowly stood up and looked around.
The lorry was a blazing ruin. Flames several feet high consumed it and what was left of the men who’d been trapped inside when the grenade had gone off. The bodies of several other German soldiers lay in the area around the truck, all of them dead.
Burke heard the door to the house open behind him and he turned to see Sergeant Moore and Private Jones standing there, guns at the ready, their heads turning to either side as they searched for targets.
“We’re clear,” he told them.
Burke stepped over to the Frenchman and was surprised to discover that he was still alive. He was about to call for the doctor when he noticed the blood bubbling up from two wounds in the middle of the man’s chest, and Burke knew there wasn’t anything they could do for him. He was literally drowning in his own blood and probably wouldn’t last more than a few more minutes. The best they could do was to make him comfortable until he passed.
To that end Burke took the man’s hand and held it, letting him know he wasn’t alone. The Frenchman gripped his hand with surprising strength and pulled him closer as he tried to tell him something.
Burke didn’t understand.
The Frenchman tried again.
“Pardonnez-moi,” he said, as he coughed up a thick mass of blood.
Forgive me.
Burke glanced away, trying to order his thoughts, to find it in his heart to honestly forgive the man, and at that moment the Frenchman’s grip suddenly when slack. When Burke looked back, the man was dead.
The man’s attempt to beg for forgiveness didn’t sit right with Burke until he ripped open the man’s shirt and found the red welts that showed where they had burned him with a hot poker.
After that, it wasn’t too hard to figure out what must have happened. The Boche must have stumbled on the partisan safe house, discovered that Pierre was waiting for someone, and had then tortured him to get information. Maybe they’d seized his family, threatened them as well. In any case, Pierre had cracked, and once he’d done so they’d used him as bait in an attempt to lure the Americans out into the open.
What was done was done. Nothing to do about it now.
“Your orders, sir?” Sergeant Moore asked, from where he was patiently standing off to one side. Burke hadn’t even heard him approach.
He shook his head to clear it of the extraneous thoughts and focused on the task at hand. The truck fire was still burning, and great, greasy plumes of black smoke were wandering skyward. If the locals weren’t wondering what was going on, they certainly would be soon. It was time to leave.
“Let’s grab what we can from the bodies—maps, ammunition, even local currency if they have any—and then get out of here. I want to be back on the trail in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, sir!”
As Sergeant Moore hurried back toward the house, Burke took another look at the devastation around him.
Guess our days of running without discovery are over.
Chapter Thirty-two
STALAG 113
When Freeman came to, he found himself being pushed down the hall in a wheelchair.
Or, at least, that’s what he thought was happening.
He couldn’t be sure if his senses were completely accurate; his vision was blurry and kept fading in and out, so all he was getting were quick snapshots of whatever was happening nearby. He could hear people speaking around him, but their voices sounded like they were talking underwater, all liquid tones and incoherent sounds.
He caught sight of a doorway coming up and tried to reach out, intent on stopping any forward movement until he regained some control over his faculties, but his arm refused to obey the commands his mind was giving it. That convinced him that maybe he’d been injured in a firefight, that the POW camp and the pit and the rotworms they’d put in the wound on his leg had all just been hallucinations, a result of the injury he had sustained. Fear shot through him like a three-alarm fire in a paper factory! The idea that he’d been injured made him think that he couldn’t get his arm to move because his arm wasn’t there anymore, blown
off in a mortar attack or severed during a plane crash, and he was about to start screaming for a doctor when the wheelchair went over a small bump on the floor and his head tilted down, showing him his arms and hands resting comfortably in his lap. He focused his attention on them, willing them to move, but they just lay there, like lumps of discarded meat, and no matter how hard he willed them to move, he couldn’t get them to budge.
Apparently things were much worse than he thought, for he hadn’t lost his limbs at all, he’d lost the ability to move them. He must have been paralyzed, maybe even brain damaged!
Oh Lord, he thought, please Lord, don’t do this to me, don’t, don’t, don’t do this . . .
A hand reached down and patted him on the shoulder as his wheelchair was turned into a room.
“You need to relax, Major,” said a familiar voice, though at the moment he couldn’t figure out to whom it belonged. “The rotworms secrete a rather active psychotropic compound that affects people in different ways, so you might be feeling weird at the moment. I can assure you that you are not paralyzed; just relax, all right?”
Must have spoken aloud, Freeman thought to himself and then wondered if he’d done it again.
He didn’t have the chance to find out. A siren began to sound, wailing in and out, an eerie cacophony that drowned out everything else for several long minutes. When Freeman could hear again, he realized someone else had entered the room with them and was having a conversation with his caretaker.
“ . . . have escaped!” the newcomer said, rather urgently. “They’ve broken through the first fence line and are swarming over the prisoner barracks as we speak!”
“Why are you telling me? Inform Obertleutnant Brandt. His troops are the ones assigned to deal with outbreaks.”
“I already have, sir,” came the reply, and this time even Freeman, doped up as he was, recognized the fear in the man’s voice. “Oberleutnant Brandt took a team into the compound when the trouble first began. No one has seen him since.”
In the silence that followed Freeman finally remembered who the voice belonged to. It was the doctor who had him removed from the pit and ordered him cleaned up and his wounded leg attended to, Dr. Taschner.
But what were they talking about? And why did they sound so afraid?
“Can you drive?” Taschner asked.
“Yes, Docktor!”
“Good. Get a staff car from the motor pool and bring it around to the rear of the building. You are to take this man to Dr. Eisenberg at the Verdun complex. Is that clear?”
“Right away, sir!”
Freeman must have gone off in his head for a few minutes, for when he came back to himself two soldiers were lifting him out of the wheelchair and into the back of a black staff car with the Imperial Hohenzollern eagle painted on the front doors.
Around them was chaos.
Gunfire and screams split the air, and squads of men in the blue-gray uniforms of the German army ran past, headed for some confrontation deeper in the camp. The guard who was helping him into the vehicle had a couple of long, ragged tears in his uniform tunic, as if he’d tangled with a wild animal, and he kept casting nervous looks over his shoulder as if to make sure that nothing was sneaking up behind him.
When they had Freeman settled into the rear seat and buckled into place, one soldier climbed in beside him while the other took his place behind the wheel.
As the driver pulled away from the infirmary, Freeman glanced out the window and what he saw shocked the fog from his senses.
A man wearing the light gray coverall that designated him as a prisoner of war was running toward them, seemingly intent on catching the car before it could leave the camp. Something about him looked familiar, and by the time the runner had closed half the distance, Freeman understood why. It was Demonet, the French captain the guards had hauled away the day before.
He looked stronger than Freeman remembered him being, as if he’d been eating four-course meals for the last few months in captivity rather than the meager sustenance that their captors provided, and any trace of the limp he’d moved with yesterday was gone. As he drew closer Freeman could see black lines running beneath his skin, like routes on a map, but his head was too full of rotworm secretions to understand just why he should be alarmed by that fact.
It seemed to him that Demonet was moving extraordinarily fast as well, for he closed with their vehicle even as it was picking up speed, and Freeman’s anxiety grew accordingly the closer the other man got. A normal human being shouldn’t be able to do that, Freeman told himself, and he knew that it was more than just a visual illusion caused by the drug in his system.
Something was wrong.
Demonet was no longer Demonet.
Freeman tried to move, to alert the soldier beside him, but all he succeeded in doing was jerking his foot back and forth ineffectually beneath him.
As it turned out, he needn’t have worried; Demonet managed to get their attention all on his own when he leaped ten feet through the air and landed with a loud crash on the rear of the vehicle, sinking his claws—claws?—into the surface of the trunk.
The soldier in the rear seat spun around to see what had caused the ruckus and found himself face-to-face with the thing that had once been Claude Demonet.
The man yelped in fear and snatched at the pistol in the holster on his belt, all the while shouting something at the driver in German.
Apparently the shouts had been a command for the man to take evasive action for the driver began swerving the vehicle back and forth in an effort to dislodge their unwanted passenger. The shambler just sank his claws deeper into the metal and wouldn’t let go. When the driver was forced to straighten the car out for a moment to avoid running down a group of fellow soldiers, the shambler scurried up to the rear window and peered inside.
The creature’s mouth split open in a wide, froglike grin, and Freeman could see row upon row of razor-sharp teeth lining it.
The shambler drew back one fist and prepared to smash the rear window, but the soldier finally had his gun out and fired through the glass.
The bullet struck the shambler in the chest and knocked it right off the rear of the vehicle, rolling several times in the street before coming to a rest.
It wasn’t moving, but Freeman wasn’t convinced it was dead, either.
Then the driver shot through the gates of Stalag 113 onto the open road beyond.
Chapter Thirty-three
VERDUN
The ride was long and uneventful. At first Freeman tried to speak to his guard, wanting to talk about what had happened back at Stalag 113, but neither of them spoke the other’s language and gestures weren’t adequate when discussing the transformation of men into monsters and attacks by rampaging shamblers. Unable to communicate, Freeman settled back against his seat and quickly fell asleep, exhausted both mentally and physically from all he’d been through over the last several days. The relative safety and the rocking motion of the car lulled him into a deep sleep.
The guard nudged him awake as they approached the main gates to the facility at Verdun. The driver had a brief conversation with the guards, the barriers were lifted, and they drove through. This camp was much bigger than the previous one and there was a great deal more activity, causing Freeman to wonder just why he was being brought here.
The driver took them through camp, giving Freeman a good view of the local garrison and the shambler pens, and then he stopped in front of a row of small cottagelike buildings. An officer stood in front of one of them, accompanied by several soldiers, all dressed in the blue-gray of the German infantry. They were waiting patiently, it seemed, for his arrival.
When the car stopped, the guard beside Freeman ordered him to get out. Expecting to have difficulty with his leg, the Allied pilot was surprised to discover that it felt as good as new. The flesh beneath the bandages no longer felt hot and swollen, and it supported his weight without difficulty when he went to stand on it.
The officer,
a lieutenant from the insignia on his uniform, stepped forward, and Burke tried to suppress the instant reaction that overcame him at the sight of the man. It was clear that he was no longer human. His black veins stood out prominently against his gray skin, and his eyes had the yellow cast to them that was so common in the shamblers. But he walked and talked and moved like one of the living.
Freeman’s first guess was that he was looking at a revenant, one of those extremely rare shamblers that came back with their physical and mental faculties intact, much like Richthofen himself. But from what he’d heard, such creatures didn’t exhibit the physical characteristics of the shamblers, either, and Adler certainly did.
Perhaps he’s a new breed of shambler, Freeman thought. He’d already encountered one variation, in the houndlike creatures that had hunted him after the crash. Could this be another?
The officer said, “Welcome to Verdun, Major Freeman. I am Leutnant Adler. Rittmeister Richthofen regrets that he could not be here to meet you personally. If you would follow me, please.”
Richthofen! So the bastard had lived.
Freeman wasn’t surprised; after all, he himself had managed to walk away from the crash. Doing the same when you were already dead must have been that much easier. Still, it was disappointing to hear. He’d hoped he’d downed the German ace once and for all.
Adler didn’t appear to notice his scrutiny but turned and led him inside the building before them.
The little cottage turned out to be the visiting officer’s quarters, with a bed and a desk and a small sink for washing up. A clean set of clothes was laid out on the bed, and there was a plate of fresh fruit on the desktop.
As Freeman stepped inside, Adler said, “Rittmeister Richthofen will be with you as soon as he can. If you need anything in the meantime, ask the guards and they will contact me.”
It sounded good, but from the tone of his voice, Adler made it clear that he didn’t expect to be bothered for any reason. Nor did the way he pulled the door shut without a backward glance leave any room for misunderstanding.
By the Blood of Heroes Page 23
