Curran Array - Zombie Pulp

Burke went along. Haines did not include him by name because he did not like him. Burke had the VC and Haines was livid with jealousy.

Creeping over the sandbags, they moved up on the dugout.

A hot stench of decay wafted out at them. Inside, it was shadowy and dim, black swarms of flies rising in clusters, crawling over their faces and hands. There was three feet of water inside, rubble and refuse, and Sergeant Stone. He was leaning up against the wall like he was about to catch a smoke…only he was slit open from belly to throat and perfectly hollow within. Not a scrap of viscera or meat could be seen.

“ Rats?” Creel said, amazed by that point that anything could sicken him.

But Haines shook his head, breathing hard. “He wasn’t bitten open, you fool… he was slit. He was opened by a trench knife, maybe, then gutted, cleaned out like a bloody fish.”

Again, Burke examined the body and flashed Creel a look. “Like the others,” he said.

“ What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Haines demanded.

“ It means, you great bloody gob, that Stone was chewed on by something that wasn’t a rat nor a dog,” he said, glaring into the man’s eyes. “These teeth marks…they’re from something else. Something, I’m thinking, that walks about on two feet like we do.”

“ Idiot,” Haines said, crawling up and out of the dugout.

“ Scared stiff, ain’t he?” Burke said, pointing a thumb at the sergeant’s hasty retreat. “Don’t blame him, I don’t. Not at all.”

Creel found himself staring at Stone’s face which was a grinning grave rictus, lips pulled back from discolored teeth. There were maggots in his eye sockets. In the tomblike silence of the dugout you could actually hear the industrious suckering sounds of them feeding.

“ Enough,” Burke said.

They moved back over the crumbling wall, the bricks tumbling away beneath them. Scratch was waiting there with his rifle, surveying the flooded trenches and the swimming rats crossing them. There was a Hun corpse at his feet.

“ Look at this,” he said. He pressed his foot down on the corpse’s chest and the blackened tongue slid out from between the lips. He lifted his boot and the tongue retreated. He kept doing it, giggling, human remains having lost all shock value for him.

And the war will end, Creel thought, taking a snapshot of the body, and he’ll have to go back home, his mind a black sore of corruption.

“ Kelly!” Haines called out, just above a whisper but firm. “Kelly!”

They looked around and he was nowhere to be seen. They moved off to his last position but there was nothing. Swearing under his breath, Haines led them off, circling around the post in an ever-widening search pattern.

Kelly was gone.

“ We better be off,” Burke said. “Whatever got him is still out there. I can…I can smell it.”

And the absolutely crazy thing was so could Creel. What was that odor? Sharp, pungent, like a stench beyond death.

“ Oh, Christ,” Scratch said. “He was there…I saw him…”

Creel studied Haines. This was a judgment call now and he could almost hear the gears whirring in his head. Did they retreat back to the trenches and leave Kelly or did they stay and risk their own lives in what might be a vain search? Maybe the reconnaissance patrol took him out quietly. Maybe he sank in the mud. Maybe he wandered off. The grim possibilities were endless.

Scratch’s face was white as cream, flecked by specks of mud. His squinting eyes like knife scars, his mouth trembling. Haines peered about like a hunting hawk. Burke was listening. The rain came down in gray sheets, chill and clammy.

“ Quiet now,” Haines said, picking up on something.

Creel felt it and feeling it could not be sure of what it was…just a vague unformed terror that seemed to be swelling inside him, filling him up and making him go bad to the roots. He studied the devastation, the falling rain, the plumes of mist creeping over the ground.

“ It’s coming,” Burke whispered.

Creel was hearing it, too…something out there in the fog, something moving in their direction. Slowly. At first it was just a muffled sound and then it became clearer: footsteps in the mud. Squishing sounds of feet-many feet. Stealthy, relentless. Then something else that sounded just beneath the falling rain like a hissing but soon revealed itself to be whispering, voices whispering.

Creel felt an irrational terror move inside him. His mouth was so dry he could not swallow. Those footsteps were coming from just ahead, to the left, to the right, as was the whispering. It was growing in volume but it was completely unintelligible. Like pressing your ear to a bedroom wall trying to make out voices in the next room that were purposely hushed.

“ Ain’t the Hun,” Scratch said, his voice squeaky like a rusty hinge.

The whispering was practically on top of them.

Soon, any second now, what was out there would step out of the mist and Creel did not know what that could be. He could not wrap his rational brain around it, could not make himself believe it was men…for in his mind he saw specters and flesh-eaters, things with eyes like seeping red wine.

“ Withdraw,” Haines said under his breath. “Pull back…pull back for the life of Christ…”

And they did just as forms emerged from the fog. Neither Haines nor Scratch saw them and Burke had turned away, but Creel did. Just for a second before the fog enveloped them again. What he saw were…small, elfish, wraith-like things that looked very much like children.

He clearly saw a boy and his face was that of a stripped skull.

Dr. Herbert West

I had assumed, and maybe even hoped, that following the destruction of West’s laboratory in the barn that his research would also come to an end. That it was obscene and blasphemous, I did not doubt. That by taking part in it I had damned my eternal soul, I firmly believed. After the barn crashed down and burned into a smoldering heap of timbers, I implored West to stop. As fascinated as I was by his compulsions, his obsessions, his almost preternatural scientific acumen, I fully believed that it needed to come to an end. That the shelling of the barn was akin to the finger of God. An omen. A portent. Call it what you will.

When I broached these thoughts to West two days after the shelling as he amputated the leg of a man with considerable dexterity, he laughed at me. “Stop now? Now when I stand upon the threshold of ultimate creation? I think not. Now is the time for more intensive study than I have yet undertaken,” he told me, that cruel gleam in his eye. “Now, if you would kindly step down from your moral high ground and abandon your lofty ethics, Lieutenant, there are wounded men here that require attention.”

Typical West to a fault-arrogant, egotistical, superior. As if I was the one who was derelict in his duty. No matter. On the orders of Colonel Brunner, the A.D.M. S. of our sector, I was sent down to the battalion aide post as Medical Officer and I was glad to be away from West and whatever might be going on behind those glacial eyes of his. My duties at the front were fairly routine. I started my day with the morning sick parade where those thought to be too ill for duty were examined. There was the usual amount of malingerers, but many serious cases as well. The soldiers seemed to feel better with an M.O. at hand though in many situations, there was very little I could do.

The trenches were generally broken up into three sets-the forward fire trench, the rear trench, and the extension trench. The forward, I discovered, was nearly always about waist-deep in water while the rear had about two feet in it and the extension was flooded to nearly five feet in depth. As M.O. I had to slog through like the rest, barely keeping my footing on the slimy mud beneath.