Zombie Pulp

by Curran, Tim

  The knocking came again: slow, relentless, almost mechanical in its complete lack of rhythm.

  Creel, steeling himself, pulled the Webley pistol from his pocket, muttering, “I suppose…I suppose someone should see.” Nobody volunteered to go with him and he was neither surprised at that nor disheartened. He moved away from them, keeping in a low crouch and he was not sure why. He went down the short corridor, feeling the insistent thud of his heartbeat at his temples. Sweat ran down his face inside the mask. Gently, easily, he pushed open the door and went in there, expecting the very worst and knowing he would not be disappointed. The door was heavy, wooden and latched.

  The pounding went on.

  The door trembled in its frame.

  Through the broken window he saw them standing out there, ranks and ranks of them crowding in like flies: children. Probably the same ones that were haunting No-Man’s Land. They pressed up to the missing window pane, dead things with faces that were almost phosphorescent in their whiteness, puckered and seamed like they’d been underwater a long time, wormholes drilled into them. Their eyes were red-rimmed, a glaring translucent silver. They were all smiling, schoolboys and schoolgirls, but those grins said nothing of happiness. They were crooked, tortured grimaces. They reached leathery hands towards the window, nails splintered and packed with black grave dirt.

  “Let us in,” they said together, a whispering choir.

  The door rattled as they pounded on it with more and more grave-cold fists and Creel stumbled away, a dreamlike sort of terror flooding through him like he was hallucinating, his mind unraveling one skein at a time.

  Finally, he let out a choking gasp and fled for the others and that’s when he heard the strangled screams. The dead children had flooded in and neither Sergeant Kirk nor his two riflemen got off a single shot. The children were like locusts, swarming, infesting, coming through the door and crawling through the window, more and more all the time, just as thick as graveworms in carrion.

  Creel fell back, stunned.

  He saw seven or eight of the little monsters take Howard down while another—a little girl in graying cerements—stripped off his gas mask, clutching his terrified face in her white little hands. Then she opened her mouth, yawning it wide and black like a manhole, and from the channel of her throat came a hissing yellow gas that enveloped Howard’s face. He screamed, high and long, until his lungs began to come apart and his thrashing face began to blister and burst with spreading lesions and pitted ulcers. His face quite literally melted like tallow, running and streaming. They got Jameson the same way, breathing out their toxic breath of blister agents, phosgene, and deadly mustard gas.

  As Creel heard the door in the kitchen come off its hinges and the undead children took notice of him, he broke for the stairs, taking one last look and seeing them dragging Kirk away by the legs. His mask was gone, his face hanging in blistered flaps. “Help me,” he wheezed. “Dear God, help me…”

  But Creel couldn’t help him; he was beyond help.

  He raced up the stairs, breathing hard in his mask. Again, the two doorways before him in the dimness. He knew what one led to, but he was going for the other. As he paused before the room with the weird fruiting corpse in it, listening for the sounds of hell following, he heard something that sent fingers of panic threading through him.

  In the room, behind that door…movement.

  Not a subtle movement as before…no, this was a big sound, a huge sound that made him lose his balance, fumble against the wall so he did not go flat out. He felt a very real need to scream, but his tongue felt like it was slippery in his mouth, oily and sliding.

  In the room, those sounds…

  Like knotted roots being yanked up from stony soil.

  Handfuls of them pulled from the earth.

  That’s what he was hearing along with sort of a moist shifting noise, a sort of slithering, and a dry hollow moaning. Then…footsteps, dull and dragging, something brushing the walls in there like vines rustling in the wind…a stench of vegetable decay and woodrot…

  The door began to whisper open.

  He saw a white pulpous hand reaching out of the darkness.

  Then he was through the other door, throwing it shut behind him. As the children flooded up the stairs and that nameless germinating thing scratched at the door, he threw the shutters open and climbed out, trying to ease himself down the wall like a monkey and succeeding in dropping about twelve feet to a cobbled alley.

  He saw two of the children right away coming out of the mist at him, hands held out to make contact. Their shrouds were but filthy shifts stained with grave-soil and grave-drainage, faces like those of grinning white clown-puppets, eyes the color of moonlight on water. They were filled with poison gases as if they had sucked them up like sponges….gas steamed out of them in wisps and slow-turning tendrils, rising from mouths, innumerable holes and crevices in their faces and flesh.

  Creel did not hesitate for one moment.

  He ran right through them knocking them aside, back into the fog where they seemed to dissolve and become part of it, two columns of corpse-gas.

  He had no true idea where he was in the village and everything was crowded, compressed, debris laying in hills and mounds, huge craters filled with black water opening at his feet. Alone. He was alone now and he knew he was alone and the idea of that was something he did not dare contemplate. Not yet. Not here. He groped through the mist, edging along the bullet-pocked brick façades of buildings, staring up at blank windows looking down upon him, crawling over blasted, crumbling walls of stone, limping down narrow streets that were gray and misting.

  And then—

  For one moment, one that put him down on his knees, he saw something in the mist that could not see him. Just for a moment. It came out of the fog and was enshrouded by it just as quickly. A woman. A woman in a white bridal gown. She was feeling her way along a wall with outstretched fingers, looking for something and perhaps someone.

  Creel just waited there silently until she passed.

  He knew she hadn’t heard him. In order to hear you needed ears and in order to have ears you needed a head and this woman had been missing that vital accoutrement. Just a wandering trunk.

  Madness most certainly insinuating itself by this point, Creel came stumbling down a low hill, liking the sound of his muddy boots on the cobbles, the sound of rain dripping, the way the fog was a great hungry ghost trying to eat him—

  And he screamed.

  Screamed because it was there, waiting for him: the thing from the cavalry post. It still wore its tomb-filthy shroud, a great and graying winding sheet that covered its head in a loose hood and its outstretched arms in yards of worm-eaten graveyard cloth. Plumes of fog rose up around it, making it look like it was smoldering.

  “Creel,” it said in a voice of subterranean damps, “Creeeeeeellll—”

  Then he was running again, slipping through the mist, hiding, waiting, rising to run again, knowing that those children were out there in numbers and that even if he managed to avoid them, he could never, ever avoid the shrouded thing…it would find him wherever he went.

  He stumbled into an open square.

  A dozen men trained rifles on him.

  “Hold your fire,” someone said. “He looks…almost human.”

  Creel dropped to his knees, shivering, holding himself, sobbing behind his gas mask.

  He was taken inside a ruined building and soon, the gas dissipating sufficiently, all removed their masks. He found himself in the company of a reconnaissance patrol of the Canadian 1st Light Infantry.

  A tall, handsome medical officer with stark, haunted eyes said, “You can return with us to the lines. My name is—”

  “Hamilton,” Creel said with something of sneer. “Doctor to the dead.”

  21

  The Corpse Factory

  “You’ll excuse my deceit, I hope,” said Dr. Herbert West to me, “but after you told me what was happening, I somehow lacked the f
ortitude to confess to my crimes. I knew if I had admitted my foul deeds you would have no longer helped me and I so dearly needed your help…the reanimation of the dead is…is not a solitary pursuit. It is not something one does alone by candle light.

  “You see, old friend, I became somewhat fixated with the idea of mass reanimation. I needed a group of cadavers that had all fallen at the same time, sharing the exact or near-exact moment of death. It would be a comparative study, you understand, wherein I would be able to establish a certain modus operandi as to why certain animals rise up at a certain time and others need more time for the reagent to regenerate metabolic processes. So…when I heard about those children gassed during the shelling of the orphanage at St. Bru…I could not help myself. They were buried instantly in a common grave and it was there I went, mere hours after their interment.

  “I did not go alone. You will recall a certain Monsieur Cardoux that I had become somewhat reliant upon in my researches? Cardoux was the undertaker employed by the Army to bury not only our dead but the Hun who had fallen within our perimeter. He was not well liked, as you can recall, by either peasant or soldier. Both would turn away from him in the street when they saw him coming with his boxy old hearse towed by a single draft horse. The children of the villages…yes, they would spit at him, throwing stones and shouting, “Allemands! Allemands!” when they knew he had a berth filled with German corpses. He was an odd sort, certainly, well known for his criminal dealings and shady operations. I can see him even now—his dirty old coat, the red scarf at his throat, the moth-eaten black satin top hat he wore so proudly. His beady rodent’s eyes, leering grin of yellow teeth. Yet…he was of use to me and I had full authorization to use the Hun remains as I so pleased.

  “Well, it was to the cemetery at St. Bru that Monsieur Cardoux and I went that very night, those unfortunate little waifs cold only a matter of hours. Cardoux had been paid well, but as I saw him there, skulking about the fresh graves with his shovel, a ghoulish figure to say the least, I knew the matter before us was more than a matter of monetary compensation.

  “Cardoux, you see, had something of an unsavory, unnatural fixation with the dead. I had seen it in his buzzard eyes many times, the carnal twist to his swollen pink lips. Do I dare even mention the shocking, nauseous activities it was rumored he partook of? The unholy grave-wares it was rumored his small stone cottage in the wood was decorated with? The grisly grinning death masks upon the walls so meticulously preserved and presented? The blasphemous trophies of mummified children frozen in gruesome poses of play? The grave-loot and charnel trinkets that he displayed with sardonic obsession? The locks of hair braided into funereal ropes that dangled from the ceiling? The revolting shelves of infant’s skulls? The tanned heads and bone sculptures, the jeweled necklaces of teeth and the memento mori volumes bound in human skin? Yes, a thoroughly vile creature was our Monsieur Cardoux, graveworm, corpse-rat, a grinning, drooling deviant who—I later learned—shared his bed with that tiny, unspeakable golden-haired cadaver.

  “Given time, oh yes, Cardoux would have been hanged by the peasants, perhaps his entrails would have been torn out with iron hooks and burned in the traditional way.

  “But listen: to the cemetery at St. Bru we went, two skulking grave-robbers, resurrectionists in more than name, I assure you. The children, as I have said, were interred in a common grave. So beneath that pale harvest moon, cloaked by the crepuscular shadows of grotesque graveyard trees, we began to dig. Down into the black, moldering earth as the sepulchers and tomb-angels crowded about us. It was simple enough work. The boxes were four feet down. Deep enough to discourage the wild dog packs and tunneling graveyard rats, but not too deep for the weary workmen and their grim chore. We opened the communal grave and, one by one, we unearthed those small, pathetic plank boxes, scraping them free of dirt, flicking obscenely swollen earthworms aside. We opened each box and of the forty-seven cadavers within, only thirty-two were of use to me. We laid them out on the ground, single-file, moonlight washing their dead little faces an even boneyard white. Carefully then, Cardoux holding the lantern for me—and breathing quite hard, not out of exertion but some unnamable, abhorrent passion—I made the necessary incisions at the base of the skulls and injected each with a necessary concentration of the reagent.

  “It took about thirty minutes.

  “And thirty minutes later, there was still no reaction. I was encouraged by supple limbs and the pliability of muscles and tendons, but I was unable to record any significant rise in metabolic temperature. I had given each a pre-measured dose that was less than used for an adult taking into account overall body mass. But nothing happened…or almost nothing. Some twenty minutes after I had injected the animals I noticed something not necessarily encouraging but certainly disturbing: their eyes were open. Every single last child had their eyes open and this after they had been gummed shut before the makeshift funeral. I examined each by the light of the lantern and those eyes were open, glistening like wet stones, almost brilliant and sparkling with vitality. Lips were pulled into pale smiles that were almost mocking.

  “Yet…nothing was happening. It was almost as if they were playing possum, as insane as that sounds. Something about them unsettled me in ways I cannot describe. But it was a failure. Nothing more, nothing less.

  “Cardoux kept staring into their faces, illuminating their grave-pallor with the lantern. ‘Look at these little darlings, eh?’ he said to me. ‘Ah, it is as if they would wake at any time…can you not feel it?’ I pretended I was unaware of his somewhat unwholesome attentions to certain handsome blonde girls, that macabre craven gleam in his eyes, the drool that hung from his lips. He volunteered to re-box them and re-inter them himself. ‘A great surgeon and scientist such as yourself, Dr. West…he should not be bothered with such unpleasantries, eh? Let Cardoux take care of it while you run along. No, no, have no fear, my friend, for I will not be alone. My fine little darlings and sweet dumplings will keep me company far into the night…’

  “I shouldn’t have allowed it. I do not claim by any means, of course, to be of the utmost moral and ethical fiber where my work is concerned, but there are certain disagreeable things that sicken even I. Oh, I knew full the obscene attentions that Cardoux would impress upon those sleeping angelic forms…yet, thoroughly depressed and disheartened by what I considered another abysmal failure…I left him to it. And it was only several days later, after a marathon session of surgery at the aid station, that I knew I could not let the matter rest. I made inquiries of Monsieur Cardoux, but to my astonishment and ever-growing unease, he could not be located. I went so far as to contact Captain Fleming, the Corps Burial Officer—or, as the Tommies called him, the ‘Body Snatcher’, the ‘Cold Meat Specialist’—but even our dour Captain could not help me. That’s when I knew something had happened. Something horrible, yet, considering Cardoux’s shall we say ‘peculiarities’, not unwarranted, hmm?

  “It was through Fleming that I tracked down the grimy, crumbling hovel in the dark wood where Cardoux squatted when not involved in more funerary pursuits. It was just after sunset when I arrived alone and I found his tall, narrow, evil-looking peasant’s hovel darkened, threaded in shadows of the blackest coffin silk. Repeated knockings upon the heavy, ivy-hung door brought no response. Finding the door unlocked, in I went. The stench of the charnel was immediate and I found it most repellent even with my nose which was somewhat jaded from the odiferous emanations of my laboratory and assorted battlefield litter.

  “I immediately sought and found an oil lantern and there is no need to describe what I saw as I have already sketched that out for you. In the flickering orange-yellow light, shivering beneath the cold marble leering of his collection, shadows crawling about me like hell-spawned imps, each step revealed more unnamable, hideous sights in that museum of the catacomb. For everywhere was the blasphemous plundered tomb-loot and disinterred faces of the undertaker’s ghoulish obsession. But it was not these things which made me perspire and ch
atter my teeth, but it was what I saw in the large high-timbered room amongst the moldering oblong boxes: the remains of Monsieur Cardoux, a mangled corpse riven throat to belly. But not alone, oh no. For crouched over him, their teeth sharpened upon his bones, were the children. They looked up at me with their vaulted eyes, grave-pallid faces pulling into sepulchral grins that are nearly indescribable. Bits of gore dropped from their mouths and I fled, dear friend, I burst from that house of horrors, a mad and gibbering thing. For, you see, they called me by name. They knew me.”

  This was the story told to me by West upon the morning of my wedding day. If it was intended as a gift, it was of the most dreadful variety. Yet, it certainly explained things and justified certain fears of mine. I now knew why he asked me if I had seen anyone on my trip out to his workshop; he was firmly convinced that the children were watching him, making no threatening overtures as of yet, but studying him intently for reasons he would not dare admit to me. But I knew it had something to do with a conspiracy of some sort directed against him by the dead risen by his hand.

  It was but the first tragedy of that day I shall never forget.

  At the chapel in Abbincour, I took the hand of my betrothed that day. If I could but capture the essence of Michele LeCroix standing there at the altar in her white bridal gown, the sun arcing through the stained glass windows and surrounding her in a halo of purity. But I cannot. Hers was a clean beauty, fresh, vibrant, and breathtaking as she stood there, tall and angular, looking upon me with her huge dark eyes, her olive skin contrasting the flawless white of her gown and lace. That is how I shall always see her. And that, you see, is in fact my final image of her before that immense German shell came screaming through the air, landing just outside the church. It was fired—I later learned—by a gigantic siege gun, a 420mm Howitzer. The shell itself weighed well over 800 pounds. When it exploded, it took out the entire western wall of the chapel which had stood for some three centuries by that point. The wall literally vaporized, the chapel went to matchsticks, and all present save for a few were buried in an avalanche of rubble and debris, most mangled beyond recognition and crushed to pulp. I remember coming to as I was being dragged from the blazing, shattered husk of the church by West and Colonel Brunner. I fought free of them, completely out of mind, hearing the screams of the dying echoing in my ears, and I recall hearing Brunner say, “Dear God, man, don’t go in there! Don’t look at her!”