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Zombie Pulp

Page 30

by Curran, Tim


  “Just cover your ears,” Burke whispered to him. “Maybe it’ll go away.”

  The rain returned, coming down in sheets and Creel stared through it, certain for not the first time that just beyond the sandbags there were things moving out there, small twisted elfin forms taking advantage of the rain to feed on the dead.

  11

  Tomb Orchids

  The dead waited.

  In mud holes and bomb craters and shell pits, in skeleton forests and decimated villages and ruined cellars and filth-bubbling trenches, they waited. Moist with decomposition and sprouting tangles of green moss and rungs of polished white bone, they waited. In flooded ditches and muddy trench walls, in cheap plank coffins and beneath mildew-specked tarps, they waited and would wait. Steaming with rank corpse gas, netted in morbid sheaths of fungi, and exhaling the vile stench of the charnel and tombyard, they were patient.

  The rain fell and the mud pooled and the slime oozed beneath a misting gray sky the color of gelatin. The swarming graveyard rats worried at the dead, fed on them, brought their degenerate pink-skinned brood to term in their bellies. The flies covered them in buzzing black shrouds two inches thick and the maggots erupted from mouths and eye sockets, orifices and the lips of green-furred wounds in boiling, squirming masses, ever-fattening themselves on carrion and decay until they burst with wing.

  For the dead of Flanders there was silence and the death-watch ticking of eternity…but then something began to happen. Maybe it was in the black soil, the yellow-brown sluicing muck, the water, or the falling rain…maybe it was set loose when a certain barnlike edifice occupied by Dr. Herbert West and his grave-wares was shelled by German artillery. But it was there. It was active. It had potential. It was the catalyst that canceled out death and filled rotting husks with a grisly semblance of animation, a gruesome half-life. Day by day as it grew more concentrated, a toxic effluvium of resurrection, eyes winked open like marbles in tombstone gray faces and mouths yawned wide like clamshells and essential salts, so long dormant, were revitalized into motion. From the muddy, flowing, bubbling bog of No-Man’s Land, faces like rotting weed and cemetery pulp peered into the night, ice-white fingers clawed in the slime as a great furnace of creation began to boil in the primordial ooze and warm amniotic mud of Flanders which was not so different from the primeval seas of earth where life first began.

  By night, there was the sound of things pushing up from the swampy landscape, fingers breaking through the crust of graveyard mold, and ruined faces sliding from the mud. Each night, more and more. And beneath the wan, sickly moon of Flanders, in the gray rain and yellow fog and rustling shadow, there was a sound of feeding, gnawing and tearing, the noise of teeth on bone and lips sucking juice.

  Each night it grew louder.

  And louder.

  12

  Burial Rites

  The commanders of the London Irish Rifles had no true idea of how many men they lost in the abortive raid on the German lines at Lens that September day. The Battle of Loos raged for three days and early estimations were that some 20,000 members of the BEF had died and another 50,000 were wounded. That information was to be kept from the troops, but of course it reached them as everything did.

  In charge after charge, the LIR had captured German trench systems only to be pushed back by heavy shelling and intensive machine-gun fire that raked the barren hills of Cite St. Auguste.

  Creel and Burke were there, having taken their leave of the 12th Middlesex for a time. Each morning was the same: the men were fed an extra large ration of rum and then it was up onto the firestep with rifles and fighting kit, the sergeants crying out, “FIX BAYONETS, BOYS!” and then over the top, fighting a costly battle through No-Man’s Land, stumbling over the bodies of the fallen, over twisted-up unburied corpses, leapfrogging bomb craters, slopping through the mud, hiding in shell holes, rising up to charge yet again across open fields and fighting through massive barbwire entanglements as they were raked by German sniper fire, volleys of shells and deadly accurate machine-gun strafing.

  The BEF, lacking shells for true artillery support, used chlorine gas for the first time and the masked Tommies found themselves fighting through a rugged, scarred land that was obscured by rolling pockets of gas. One of the sergeants kicked a football ahead of him so his boys would charge in the right direction.

  When it was finally over with and the smoke cleared, the offensive had been a disaster. For days, stretcher bearers and Field Ambulance companies moved the wounded rear to the battalion aid post and Ambulance HQ, the worst being shunted off to the Casualty Clearing Station. Both Creel and Burke worked hour after sleepless hour moving the wounded.

  In the aftermath, Creel witnessed something he would never forget.

  When the officers were in the dugouts, the men had a symbolic funeral for their fallen comrades: they arranged some thirty skulls in formation on the open ground beyond the support trench and paid homage to them. Who the skulls belonged to he did not dare ask, but such things were easy to come by in that war. The wind was blowing and little dust-devils were swirling about, coating those skulls with a fresh coat of age.

  The soldiers, all with the same blank eyes, walked past, saluting. One guy they called Slivers—because he’d been a carpenter in Knightsbridge—openly broke down, went to his knees, and began to sob.

  No one went to him.

  The Tommies stood around in their mud-caked boots and filthy greatcoats, Enfield rifles slung at their shoulders. They were dirty, desperate, their eyes huge and hollow, faces like living skulls. They had lost the ability for pity.

  Burke finally went over to Slivers and helped him to his feet and Slivers clung to him like he was something he had lost long ago and found again. “Got Dick, didn’t they? He was my mate. He was right in front of me and the pissing Hun got him. Right in the fucking head, they did.” He showed Burke a series of dirty smears on his uniform blouse. “That’s Dick’s brains. They sprayed on me. They was in me eyes and all over me face. This is what Dick thunk with. Poor old Dick. He was such a good mate. What am I supposed to do now, eh? What am I supposed to do without me mate?”

  But nobody really knew. They were all shattered, fatigued, worn thin as wires and they didn’t have the strength to do much but stumble back into the trenches and consort with their private hell.

  “It was a mess,” one of the sergeants told Creel later. “See, what kind of action is it when you’ve got no bloody artillery what to support you with? No bleeding shells for them bleeding guns?”

  “Not good,” Creel said.

  “No, sir, not good.” The sergeant looked up and down the trenches, that long stare in his eyes like he was looking for something he could never hope to find. “It was a real mess out there. Shells coming down and men dying, fighting for every inch of ground. Patrols bumping into patrols, companies getting tangled up with other companies and that gas coming down and which way was which and who was who…saw our own boys get gassed by our own shells. Plunk, plunk, plunk, they went and no warning. Our artillery, what there was of it, didn’t cut through the Hun barbwire like it was supposed to and I was watching men, mates of mine, getting their boots tangled in it while the Hun cut them down. Ain’t that the life?”

  Creel gave him a cigarette, an American one, and he liked that. Started laughing at how American tobacco could make it to the front but no Americans.

  “Country’s divided,” Creel told him. “Some want to fight, some don’t. Lots of Americans joining the Canadians to get a taste.”

  “Nothing against your countrymen, mate. If I was them, I’d stay home. Enjoy life, ain’t nothing but death here. We ain’t winning and neither is the Hun.”

  As night drew on, Creel was in the dugout with a group of enlisted men and the stories started circulating as he knew they would and he knew he was going to hear things that he wanted…and dreaded…to hear. Lot of it, of course, was scattered recollections about the raids on German lines, just bits and pieces that shook
themselves loose from the men’s minds as they sat and contemplated. As Creel listened, he watched men stripping their shirts off, their backs scratched raw and red from flea and lice infestations. Some of them stripped naked and ran the flame of a candle along the seams of their underclothes and you could plainly hear the lice eggs crackling. It was the only sure way to get rid of them or keep them at bay.

  “Funny bit, it was,” a corporal was saying. “One night, the mist hanging heavy, we lost C Company’s machine gunner and his two mates, see? We go up to the fortification, the gun pit, there’s the Lewis gun, all the ammo boxes pretty as you please…but no men. All five of ‘em are gone. How do you figure that? German sappers took ‘em, they wouldn’t leave the gun and ammunition, would they?”

  “No bodies?” Creel said.

  “Nothing, mate. Must’ve carted off the bodies even though it makes no bloody sense to take corpses and not weapons, now do it?” He shook his head. “Nothing there except them funny prints in the ground.”

  Creel felt something cold take hold of him. “Funny?”

  “Sure. Bare prints, they was. You know, like somebody were walking about without boots on.”

  This would have been the point, Creel knew, that if the corporal’s story was just a lark the men would have begun ridiculing it. But they didn’t. They just sat about in the semi-darkness, smoking silently, their eyes shining in the murk.

  “Were they…small prints?”

  The corporal shook his head. “The prints of men not children. And the funny thing is they was full of worms, squirming worms.”

  Creel swallowed. “Worms, you say?”

  “Sure. Maggots. Lots of maggots.”

  Creel did not interrupt as the stories made their rounds and each one—from maggoty footprints to skulking things like children that scavenged the dead to Hun that took .303 caliber sniper rounds and kept walking—only confirmed what he feared; that something absolutely incredible and horrifying was happening out there.

  Later, he went out into the trenches and it was a quiet night save for the falling rain that went on for several hours before drying up. What it left in its wake was a sickening odor that was beyond dirt and mud, blood and filth and dank uniforms…it was the vile stench of rot, of tanned hides and dark sewers, sumps and mass graves and backed-up cisterns. He had all he could do not to vomit and was that because of the stink of war or was it because inside his own head he was smelling something infinitely worse, infinitely more pestilent, and infinitely more dangerous to his sanity?

  He got away from the Tommies, leaning against the trench wall, mud up to his knees, smoking cigarette after cigarette, listening to the rats crawling around him, and wondering, dear God, just wondering. Something was going on out in the body dumps and sunken graves and green-stinking fields of carrion. How did he track it to its source and if and when he did, what the hell could he really do about it?

  Colonel, now I know you don’t like me because I’m a journalist but just listen for a minute, will you? The dead are rising out in No-Man’s Land and something has to be done about it.

  Creel almost started laughing at that one.

  No, it wouldn’t go over well.

  The Tommies were suspecting things, hinting and intimating at the worst possible occurrences. Down in their hearts they knew something was wrong beyond the usual calamities of war. Maybe they would not put a name to it, but they knew. Some of them, anyway. But the officers? No, never, ever in a million years would they accept it. They didn’t teach the old boys anything about the living dead at Sandhurst, it just wasn’t cricket.

  Creel stumbled through the mud, snaking through the trench system, eyes glazed, skin damp from the rain, heart beating with a low and distant rhythm, wilting beneath the pall of stark memory, sliding down deeper into himself, seeking a cool, smooth darkness that was his and his alone.

  13

  Battle Fatigue

  Sometimes he would come awake at night gasping for air like a stranded fish and once the sweating and gasping were over with, he’d wonder what had been suffocating him, but he’d know: the war. After awhile in the trenches it was like all the sweet, pure breath was sucked from your lungs and you were subsisting on corpse-gas, marsh mist, and the smoke of burnt ordinance.

  Awake and knowing sleep was beyond him, he’d make his way up to the fire trench and listen to the Tommies whispering, telling each other how they were certain they would die and they’d never see home again. He’d listen to their voices until they became a lulling soft murmur like ancient clocks ticking away into eternity and soon enough, those voices were rain and running water, clods of earth gently striking coffin lids which was the sound of time. As dawn neared, there were low voices, the rattle of equipment, the snap of a rain-soaked poncho, the slushy sounds of mud. Now and again, something like laughter or sobbing, and then deep silence winding away into emptiness. The wind would sing a final mournful song amongst the battlements and clay-spattered earthworks. Rats would scurry out beyond the sandbags. A lone dog would howl.

  In the days following the Battle of Loos, Creel began to wonder—and not for the first time—about the state of his mind and more so, the state of all minds in that war. He was starting to think that there was some infectious, collective insanity making the rounds like a germ and he could not remember the last time he had spoken with anyone that was remotely ordinary.

  The Tommies bothered him.

  Their youth ground to ash, they contemplated their deaths like old men, hoping only that there would be something to bury. The relentless, dogged combat and deprivation and inhumanity and suffering of the trenches were deteriorating their minds into a stew of morbid dementia and pandemic melancholia. The good white meat of reason had been chewed away and what was left was something rancid that sought the earth and quiet entombment. So many of them had reached the stage where they were convinced that the only way to be a good soldier was to die in battle. And it was not some misguided heroism, but a sort of fatalism that each day survived only prolonged the pain and the sooner it was over with the sooner they would be out of the mud and filth of the trenches and even death was better than living like a rat in a hole.

  With their wide white eyes and muddy faces, they would look upon Creel like he was some sort of exotic species, a mad thing that belonged in a cage, and ask the inevitable: “What in the Christ are you doing here? You could be home.”

  Creel would tell them that he had no home and a silent apartment in Kansas City didn’t count because it depressed him. He hated being at the front and he hated being away from it. That was something they understood.

  “No wife or little ones, mate?”

  “None. One divorce. Can’t hold a family together jumping around the world looking for that story I can’t seem to find.”

  “How many wars for you now?”

  “Thirteen,” he’d tell them.

  They wouldn’t comment on that number as if acknowledging it would contaminate them with its poor luck. They’d just keep asking him why he was there and he’d tell them the truth: “I’m looking for something.”

  They’d ask what and he would not say.

  What really could he say?

  That he saw Flanders as a great poisonous flower and they were all trapped in its petals, waiting for it to close up, caught in the inevitable venomous darkness, waiting for the slow call of forever night? Even to him with the somewhat morose and macabre rhythms of his thoughts that sounded more than a little like some kind of psychological/metaphorical sinktrap, the result of an overtaxed mind and an overburdened imagination.

  But that was how he saw it.

  Death was here, in this place. Malignant, wasting, hungry death and it was a force far beyond anything as simple as the misfortunes of war. It was alive, elemental, discorporeal and sentient…and he could feel it and had felt it ever since he got to Flanders.

  Like it has been waiting for me, he often thought in the heavy shades of night. I’ve hounded it through battle
after battle and now it’s not running from me anymore, it’s not hiding, it’s just waiting in the darkness like an ivied graveyard angel, arms open to embrace me and draw me beyond the pale into a world of rustling shadows and nonexistence.

  And whenever his cynicism laughed at the very idea, he needed only take a tour of the countryside by day, chain-smoking and nail-biting, to see that it was not too far from the truth.

  This was Death’s place.

  He did not know what Flanders was before it was scarred by trenchworks and gutted by shellholes, its viscera yanked inside out and covered in mud and sunken in stagnant rainwater, a great bog floating with carrion and peppered by bones…but he was pretty sure it had been a pretty place. Probably green and growing, fertile, old world European where you could smell the sweet flowers and count the yellow haymows at the horizon, listen to the creak of horse-driven farm wagons meandering up rutted dirt roads. Like something out of a pastoral landscape by Pissarro or Cezanne.

  But now war had claimed it and forever changed its face from wonderland to wasteland. The countryside had been dotted with tiny farming villages—he knew that much because their ruins were everywhere—and he imagined they had been quaint little places once upon a time. But they would never be that way again. The hand of Death was absolute, it had cast a diabolical spell here, a sinister alchemy, an infection that rotted Flanders to its moldering bones. That could never be completely erased. When he looked around now and saw those villages like monuments standing in rubble, cold, blasted, and empty, surrounded by boneyards, mud swamps, refuse and the wrecked machinery of war, blown by a cold/hot thermal wind that stank of putrescence, sewage, and excrement…he was sick to his core.

  For he could not get past the awful and somewhat monomaniacal idea that this was his private hell and it was being staged for his benefit.

 

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