Curran Array - Zombie Pulp

That made Burke laugh. “You believing them stories? Old Creel? The kingpin of cynical bastards everywhere? Cor, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“ You saw those prints. You felt something out there.”

But Burke wouldn’t have it. “Not me, not me. Didn’t feel a thing. And I didn’t on account I like to sleep at night.”

The mist still held thick after breakfast and Haines gathered them together-Creel, Burke, Kelly, and a Private known as Scratch because of his lice infestations-and they climbed up on the fire step. Captain Croton scanned the perimeter with his trench periscope. “Right,” he said. “Good time as any.”

As they went over the sandbags, Creel understood the fear that ate at every man on the line. As foul and disgusting as the trenches were, there was safety in them and out beyond was death waiting, hiding in every draw and pocket. They crawled over the muddy ground, slipping through breaks in the barbwire ramparts that were tangled with bird-picked skeletons, and soon enough they were out in No-Man’s Land.

Though the fog was still heavy, Creel could see the shattered landscape of shell-holes, oozing pink clay and pooling brown mud, heaps of pulverized brick. There had been a forest or wood here at one time and now it was just a wasteland of stumps and limbless trees rising up like telegraph poles amongst sucking black mud holes crisscrossed by duckboard.

“ All of you stay behind me,” Haines said. “Stay on the duckboard and be quiet.”

“ Do what the bloody git says,” Burke said under his breath.

“ What was that?”

“ Nothing, Sergeant,” said Burke, grinning.

Gripping his Enfield, sixty pounds of fighting kit on his back, Creel did as he was told as they moved single file down the duckboard which seemed to sink into the mud as their weight pressed down upon it. Dirty water sloshed over their ankles and the stink of putrescence rose from pools of muck that were inundated with assemblages of corpses, maggoty and green, white bone shining through graying hides. Corpse-flies filled the air with a steady low buzzing. Out in the mist, he could hear the splashing and squeaking of rats.

How Haines navigated, he did not know. No sun, no stars, nothing but the repetitious expanse of stumps and sinkholes, the rain coming down in sheets, bomb craters bubbling with brown water, a muddy slime sluicing over the duckboard itself. But Haines was an old hand. He’d been in the trenches since the beginning, fighting amongst the slapheaps and pitheads of the Mons coalfields and leading suicidal charges against German Jager Battalions at the Battle of Marne. Maybe he had the intelligence and personality of a toad, but he knew his business.

The duckboard sank away just ahead but they stayed on it, feeling it beneath them as they waded through thigh-deep water that was cold and heavy, floating with branches and abandoned ration tins and empty rusting cordite cans, all matter of refuse. Rats swam from one heap to the next, huge things, bloated and greasy. The duckboard carried them up out of the swamp and soon enough there was no more duckboard-just the remains of the forest ahead, the shafts of blackened trees like graveyard monuments, crowded, leaning, strung with rusting barbwire, mist like white lace drifting about their trunks.

Haines led on and the muck was up to their knees but thankfully got no deeper. The sergeant let them rest a moment while he took a bearing with his compass. There were rags and bones, boots and helmets everywhere as if the moist, steaming earth had regurgitated a meal of men. Scratch and Kelly sorted around a bit, finding shell casings and old Lewis gun drums, scaring carrion crows from the remains of Hun soldiers.

“ Look at this,” Scratch said, holding up a German helmet with a bullet hole channeled neatly through it. “He took it in the head, poor bastard.”

“ Aye, but it was quick, weren’t it?” Kelly said, gnawing on some canned Bully Beef.

“ You eating again?” Burke said.

“ I’m hungry.”

“ Swear you got the worms or something.”

“ Pipe down,” Haines told them, reading his compass.

Creel sat there smoking, clicking off a few shots of the wreckage around him with his Brownie. He did not need to be there at all and he knew it. He could have had a soft, cushy job back home in Kansas City. He rated an editor’s job, but here he was in this misting netherworld of rats and crows, carrion and mud. He didn’t belong here…then again, he hadn’t belonged in the Balkan Wars or the Mexican Revolution, the Second Boer War or the Boxer Rebellion, but he’d been there and now he was here.

War and the litter it produced, always drew him.

Sighing, he watched Kelly and Scratch.

Just kids. That’s all they were. Maybe the atrocities of the trenches had bleached the innocence from their eyes and replaced it with a perfect hollow glaze of indifference, but they were still kids. He watched them scavenging, playing in the mud while Burke just shook his head. They found the fully articulated skeleton of a Hun officer gripping a tree trunk for dear life. They could not pry him loose…he had grown into the tree with ropy tendrils of decay like the fibers of woodrot threading through a deserted house.

Haines gave the word and they moved on, splashing through the muck, rain running from the brims of their steel helmets. It grew very quiet. Nothing moved. Nothing scurried. Water dripped from the trees, but little else. The mist blew around them in churning clouds. Creel wiped a mixture of cold sweat and colder rain from his face, very much aware of the beat of his heart. His greatcoat and mud-slicked boots seemed like concrete. He thought if he stopped completely he would simply sink away. He was seeing things moving around them, but he knew it was imagination…ghosting, long-armed forms at the periphery of his vision.

“ Down,” Burke suddenly said.

They crouched in the mud, not seeing anything or hearing anything…then three ghostly forms emerged from the fog: a German reconnaissance patrol, faces blackened, bayonets fixed. They moved with an eerie silence over the boggy ground, not muttering a word. They faded into the mist and Creel could not be certain that they hadn’t actually been ghosts.

Ten minutes later, fighting through mud pools and crawling over the exposed roots systems of blasted trees, they sighted the trench system and ruined dugout Sergeant Stone and his men had been using. Creel could see a nearly-obliterated sandbag rampart enclosing a series of trenches flooded with a slimy yellow muck which bobbed with rat corpses. There was a crumbling brick wall that looked like the remains of a house or hut that had taken direct hits from heavy artillery. A single dead tree rose up above it, hooded crows gathered on its remaining branches.

They moved closer, spread out now so that a single volley of machine-gun fire could not cut them all down in a single sweep.

A crow squawked.

Rain fell.

And for each man, dread moved in their bellies.

Creel put a cigarette in his mouth and it was sodden with the rain almost immediately.

“ Go easy here, gov,” Burke told him, a guiding hand on his shoulder. “My back’s up. We’re being watched. Sure we are.”

Creel looked around but could see nothing. Yet, he could almost feel eyes, watching eyes, staring out at them from the gathering fog.

Rats scratched over the sandbags, dozens of them sitting atop the broken wall as if waiting for something. Creel nearly stepped on a bloated white corpse and then jumped back when he saw not two but three rats come out of the torso in a steady march. They hissed at him and went on their way.

“ Kelly, I want you off to the left flank,” Haines said. “Scratch…the right. Secure the area. Creel, with me.”