The Wraiths of War

by Mark Morris

  I could hear movement. Lots of movement. And not just the busy rustling of maggots feasting on the dead man’s flesh, or the scampering of nearby rats. No, I could hear other sounds too – most notably, from right in front of me, a prolonged, somehow stealthy succession of glutinous plops that might have been made by a body shifting in a bed of thick mud. But perhaps even more disturbing were the sounds coming from all around me. Out there, in the blackness of No Man’s Land, something, or what sounded like a lot of somethings, were stirring.

  Having regained my balance, I lit another match. Immediately I saw that the body of the German soldier was indeed twitching and jerking. He looked as though his dead limbs were being animated by an electrical charge, as though his body had become a series of involuntary reflexes.

  It was a horrible sight.

  Then, with a wet ripping sound, he pulled his shattered head from the mud and turned to look at me.

  I say ‘look’, but perhaps it might be more accurate to say that he seemed to use his head like a kind of radar, and had turned his face in my direction in an attempt to home in on me. His eyes had shrunk to little more than raisins in black sockets, and his skull, to which mud and clumps of hair clung, resembled a deflated football, the right side of which had caved in and crumpled. His mouth hung open, and as he sat up in a series of jerking, uncoordinated movements, a drool of maggots and black gunge spilled from it, and also from the hole in his splintered skull.

  He was lifting an arm, his hand clawing towards the muddy wall beside him as if to haul himself upright, when my match burned out once more. If I hadn’t witnessed many worse horrors since the heart had come into my possession, I might well have been hauling myself out of the shell hole by now, running in mindless terror across the churned-up death trap of No Man’s Land, an easy target for German snipers. I’m not saying I wasn’t shit-scared, because I was – but I wasn’t gripped by blind panic. Instead my thoughts were racing, trying to make sense of what the hell was going on.

  Was this the Dark Man’s doing? Was he somewhere nearby? Could he be in possession of the heart, and had used its power to reanimate the dead, in order to prevent or delay me from pursuing him and retrieving it? Or was the heart itself, lying out in No Man’s Land, somehow responsible? Perhaps it was animating the dead for some reason of its own? Or maybe it had been damaged and its power was leaking out like radiation from a faulty nuclear reactor?

  I lit another match. The dead German was clambering shakily to his feet, like a frail old man rising from a bath. Maggots trickled from his body, spattering on the ground like solidified water droplets. As he rose to his full height, I did too, but only for a moment – only briefly enough to peer over the rim of the shell crater and take a quick recce at what was going on beyond the confines of my little home from home.

  As I’d suspected, the dead were rising up around me. Out there in No Man’s Land, silhouetted against the burnt umber of the night sky, I could see at least a dozen ragged black shapes, some still recognisable as men, pulling themselves from the mud, creaking to life like animated scarecrows, shuffling or lurching or squirming their way across the rutted mud of the battlefield.

  It was an awful sight, but looking quickly to my left and right, I saw, with a thrill of horror, something that made it even worse: every single one of the reanimated dead was heading in my direction!

  I’d seen my share of zombie movies; I knew the lore. Zombies ate people, didn’t they? They feasted on human flesh. So was that why they were heading for me? Because they could smell me? Because I was the closest available meal?

  I barely had time to contemplate this before the guns started firing.

  The shots came from the German side, a blistering barrage of machine-gun fire, which lit up the night sky with white flashes of jerky light. I dipped my head quickly beneath the rim of the shell hole, but the bullets weren’t aimed at me. This time the Germans had taller, more obvious targets to go at. Scooting backwards until I was as far away as I could get from the reanimated corpse that was sharing the space with me, I pressed myself against the curved ‘wall’ of the crater and lit another match.

  The dead German was swaying backwards and forwards as if acclimatising to the fragile body into which he (or whatever animated him) had woken. His overcoat had slid off his bony shoulders and was now lying in a crumpled heap behind him. I looked at his ravaged face and wondered if there was anything still left of him in there. Could he still see me, although he had no eyes? And if so, did he still recognise me as the enemy? As he took a lurching step in my direction, I transferred the still-burning match from my right hand to my left and drew my revolver. If he was a zombie, and if zombie lore held sway here, then I ought to be able to stop him with a bullet to the brain.

  Even as I raised the gun, though, I realised how ridiculous that was. Zombies weren’t real. And the method recommended to dispatch them wasn’t a medical fact; it had been invented by a screenwriter or a movie director or someone who wrote comic books. What good would it do to put a bullet in the dead German’s head? His brain had already turned to black mush that was leaking out of his crushed skull. A more sensible option, surely, would be to disable him as much as I could. He wouldn’t be able to walk if his legs were shattered, would he? Wouldn’t be able to crawl towards me if his arms had been smashed to bits.

  Shifting my aim from his head to his thigh, I pulled the trigger. The bullet spun him round with such force that when he splatted into the mud on his back he was facing away from me. His arms paddled for a moment, then he started to push himself back to his feet. I shot him again, this time in the elbow, which shattered in a spray of stinking black goo.

  Down he went again, and this time his body rocked from side to side, as he tried to use his good leg and remaining arm to rise. It was a ghastly thing to watch, but it was pitiful too. He reminded me of a stranded sea bird, its wings coated with oil, trying desperately to take to the air and unable to work out why it couldn’t.

  With the dead soldier all but out of action, I moved forward in a semi-crouch to finish him off. Above me the German guns were still blazing, and now I was pretty sure they’d been joined by shooting from our side too. Which presumably meant, unless Frank was blasting away by himself and the other guys were sleeping through it, my absence had been discovered. But again I pushed that thought to the back of my mind. At that moment a potential court martial for desertion was the least of my worries.

  The German soldier was still rocking from side to side, still stoically trying to rise. He gave no indication of being aware of my presence as I stood over him. He didn’t claw at me, or turn his head to try to bite my ankle. He just kept rocking backwards and forwards, his face little more than a yawning black skull, no pain or anger or animosity in it.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ I muttered, and I shot him in the centre of his face. It burst like a papier-mâché mask full of sludge, some of which spattered over my boots and up my trouser legs.

  In The Walking Dead, whatever malign force animated the zombies was instantly extinguished when the creatures’ brains were destroyed. But, as I had suspected, the rules that applied to zombies in movies and TV shows didn’t apply here. Although my German friend no longer had much of a head above his lower jaw, it didn’t stop him from trying to rise to his feet, or even slow him down all that much. He continued to scrabble in the mud, and got as far as levering himself up on one elbow before the failure of his shattered leg to hold him caused him to flop to the ground again. Even when I put further bullets into his ‘good’ leg and ‘good’ arm, grimacing as I pulled the trigger, his body continued to spasm and jerk, and would carry on doing so, I suspected, until it was completely destroyed.

  Trying to ignore the twitching corpse at my feet, I wondered what to do next. It was hard to think with the din going on above me, and as yet showing no signs of abating. Lighting another match, I checked the rim of the crater, shuffling in a slow circle to ensure that nothing undead was about to imminently drop o
r roll or lurch down the slope in my direction. It was horrible to think that bodies, or bits of bodies, were more than likely dragging themselves towards me at this moment.

  As I pivoted, my feet sliding in mud, I wondered whether I had ever been in a more wretched situation, and vowed to myself that if I ever got out of this, and became one of the older versions of me, I would make bloody sure that I came back to this moment to save my younger self.

  Then I suddenly thought: Why wait? I mean, why the fuck should I when I had the means to make it happen? I might not have the heart, but I had something that could potentially influence future events. But would it work? Was my logic watertight? There was only one way to find out.

  My hands shaking not only with cold now, but with excitement, I cast aside my latest match and unbuttoned the left breast pocket of my uniform jacket. I took out the notebook I always carried with me, the one in which I kept a record of where and when I needed to be at certain points along my timeline, and what I needed to do to keep events consistent with my experience. Strictly speaking, we weren’t allowed to keep diaries or notebooks in the army, for fear they would fall into enemy hands and give away vital information, but this was one rule that was flouted by a large number of men. Committing thoughts and experiences to paper, rather than keeping them bottled up, was an outlet which prevented many of them – many of us – from going insane with the grief, horror and anxiety we were forced to live with on a daily basis.

  Along with my notebook was a stub of pencil, which I sharpened with my jack knife whenever I needed to. In truth, I hadn’t made many entries in the book during the course of the War, as so far it had simply been a case of ploughing through the days, one after the other, with no deviations into the past or future, and no interference from my future self (selves?).

  Holding the book up to my face so I could see the white glimmer of its pages in the dark, I opened it and riffled through it until I came to what seemed to be a blank page. Then, with the stub of pencil, and working mostly blind, I wrote down the date, the approximate time, and the words ‘Shell Crater’.

  No sooner had I finished than a laconic voice, close enough and loud enough to be heard above the gunfire, said, ‘You rang m’lord?’

  It was my voice, although gruffer, more weathered, and it was coming from behind me. I turned to see an older version of myself – even older than the last version of me I’d seen in the hospital in 2097, his (my) hair and beard whiter and thinner than it had been back then, his face even more deeply lined. He was perhaps a bit skinnier too, and more stooped, though admittedly the heavy-duty cagoule that swamped him, and the green rubber waders that came up to his thighs made it difficult to tell.

  I was trying to get over the weird existential shock of seeing myself looking so old when the future me cocked an eyebrow, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking (which he obviously did), and barked, ‘As you can see, I came prepared.’ He flicked the beam of the torch he was holding up into my face, making me flinch and cover my eyes.

  ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘did you have to do that?’

  He neither apologised nor answered my question. Instead he countered with a question of his own. ‘Bloody hell, did I really look that bad when I was your age?’

  Only then did he lower the torch so that its beam was no longer blinding me. As I tried to blink the green after-image from my eyes, he said briskly, ‘Let’s get this over with then,. When you get to my age you’ll realise how anxious you are not to be reminded of all this.’

  He jerked his head up to indicate the flashes of gunfire above us, and as he did I noticed he was deliberately avoiding shining his torch in the direction of the German soldier’s still-twitching corpse, or even glancing that way.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘How much can you help me?’

  ‘As much as I remember me helping you when I was you.’

  ‘And how much is that?’

  You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if you ever met yourself, the two of you would get on like a house on fire? But the truth was, I found him pretty irritating. In some ways I even found it hard to believe this old geezer was me, not because I had any real doubts, but simply because there was such a distance between us that he seemed like an entirely different person to my present self. It was as if he was a grumpy uncle, or maybe an older brother who I’d lost contact with years ago, and with whom I now had nothing in common. He looked at me askance.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Then all at once his voice became quieter, less confrontational – so much so that I had to lean in to hear him. ‘But when you reach where I am, kid, when you see this from my point of view, believe me, you’ll feel exactly the same way I do.’

  Throughout our exchange he’d been holding the torch up, pointing it vaguely at the muddy wall beside us, but now his arm drooped as if the thing had suddenly become too heavy for him, the beam shrinking to a tight, bright circle on the ground between the toes of our boots. I noticed the circle was vibrating, and when I looked at him I was surprised to see not only that his hand was shaking, but that his bottom lip was too.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, suddenly feeling as awkward and embarrassed as if he were a stranger.

  He sniffed and nodded, but even in the dim light I could see his eyes were gleaming with wetness.

  Oh God, he was crying. Had I made him cry? Had I made myself cry?

  I hovered, not sure what to say, not sure whether to reach out and give him a hug.

  But knowing exactly what I was thinking, he raised a hand, and blurted a choking sob of a laugh.

  ‘Fuck me, I’m making a right scene, aren’t I? I promised myself, having seen it once, that I wouldn’t do this, that I’d be stronger when it came to my turn. No doubt you’re now thinking the same as I did. Yet when it comes to it, you’ll probably blub like a baby too.’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, though only to make him feel better. I put the notebook back in my pocket, then placed a filthy hand on his shoulder. ‘Sorry,’ I said hesitantly. ‘For bringing you back, I mean. I never thought how bad it would be for you. The things we do to ourselves, eh?’

  He nodded ruefully and wiped his eyes with a wrinkled, trembling hand. Even though I knew it was me I was looking at, it was heart-wrenching to see how badly affected he was by returning here. How vulnerable he suddenly seemed.

  ‘I can’t stay long,’ he said, and he cleared his throat in an attempt to strengthen his voice, stop it from cracking. ‘It’s not that I’m not allowed to, it’s just… I can’t.’

  ‘I understand.’ I spread my hands, knowing he wouldn’t take offence if I got down to business – knowing, in fact, that he’d welcome it. ‘So what can you give me? Can you take me to the heart?’

  He shook his head, though simultaneously grimaced in apology. He knew from first-hand experience how desperate I was, and how disappointed his reply would make me feel.

  ‘Sorry. I can help you solve your immediate problem, but that’s all.’

  ‘Because it’s all you remember from when you were me?’

  ‘That, and the fact that if I stay much longer the strain of it’ll give me a bloody heart attack. And I’m damned if I’m going to die in this shit hole at my age. What an irony that would be, eh?’

  ‘You won’t have a heart attack,’ I said, and I tapped my own chest. ‘We’ve got nanites, remember. At least, I assume you’ve still got them?’

  ‘I have. And they’re good, but they’re not miracle workers.’ Then unexpectedly he grinned. ‘Mind you, you don’t know the half of it. From what I remember, when I was you, you think I’m about eighty, don’t you?’

  I was about to reply, but before I could, something loomed up behind his right shoulder – a black figure, silhouetted against the dying glow of a Very light, standing on the rim of the pit.

  Not sure whether it was an enemy soldier or a zombie, I yelled a warning and reached out to grab him, my instinct being to… I don’t know, drag him to the ground, or at least out o
f harm’s way.

  Before I could grab him, though, his arm came up and deflected my hand. I was surprised by the swiftness of his reflexes, but then realised that what was happening now was just an action replay for him, and that he’d known what I was about to do.

  In a voice that was still shaky, but strong enough to be heard above the now intermittent gunfire, he said, ‘It’s all right, kid. No need to panic.’

  The black figure behind him took a lurching step forward, and then, with a complete lack of coordination, tipped forward into the pit. I winced as it face-planted into the mud at the bottom. My wince became a cry of horror as, with a wet crack that could be heard in a moment of silence between one burst of gunfire and the next, I saw the falling body flip up and over despite the fact that its head remained in the same position, face down in the mud. Only when the figure finally came to rest, the head on its broken neck now stretched so impossibly backwards that it was trapped between the ground and the figure’s shoulder blades, did I see that it was little more than a near-skeletal frame draped in the tattered rags of a mud-caked uniform. The figure’s emaciated limbs were moving slowly and jerkily, like the legs of a beetle on its back. Then, motivated by some primal instinct to regain both mobility and momentum, it began to rock from side to side, presumably with the intention of first flipping over on to its front, then clambering to its feet.

  My older self still had his back to the figure. Looking at the blankly determined expression on his face, I saw this was a deliberate choice, that by refusing to obey his natural instinct to turn around he was showing he had no desire to re-live this particular moment, to see for the second time what was admittedly a sickening sight.