Pat Kelleher - Black Hand Gang

A cool breeze blew through the resulting hole. Everson braced his hands on the sides and stuck his head through tentatively.

“What’s through there?” he asked Chandar. “Can we get out that way?”

Chandar peered into the darkness beyond and said nothing.

“We mean no harm,” said Everson. “We just want to leave with our people.” Still Chandar remained obstinately silent. Everson shook his head in despair, and then addressed his men. “Right, 1 Section, secure the other side. Make it snappy. This whole thing’s turning into a shambles.”

The weary warriors made their way cautiously through the hole in the passage. As their eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond, they heard the scuttling and frantic clicks of hundreds of Chatt voices. Atkins’ flesh crawled with revulsion at the sound. The only light came from the familiar luminescent lichens, their faint glow barely illuminating the chamber’s details. Long sinuous dry channels covered the floor, converging on an entrance in the far wall. Atkins noticed the frantic activity in them about halfway across the chamber.

“This’ll brighten the place up,” said Mercy, brandishing his Flammenwerfer. Gutsy opened the valve for him. A fiery orange geyser of flame erupted from the nozzle, casting an infernal glow across the chamber, illuminating pale Chatt and Urmen workers dragging clusters of pearlescent white globes away from the intruders, down the channels toward tunnels in the far walls.

“Poilus, any idea what this place is?” asked Everson.

“It’s their nursery,” replied the Urman with mounting horror. “We are under the edifice now, underground. We shouldn’t have come here.”

Around them, the walls of the chamber were full of recesses. They reminded Atkins of a church crypt, only the bodies that lay in these weren’t dead. Chatts and Urmen moved back and forth among them, dragging out helpless pupae. At the soldiers’ end, however, the cavities had seemed empty until Pot Shot gave a startled yelp. Idly poking about in one with his bayonet, he had come across the desiccated remains of some sort of partially formed nymph Chatt.

“Scared seven shades of shit out of me, that did,” said Pot Shot.

“It’s dead. Mummified,” said Gazette. “Been here a while, has that.”

“Ugly bugger, ain’t it?” said Porgy.

“You’d know,” retorted Mercy.

Its head was enlarged and bulbous, three of its limbs withered and deformed, its metamorphosis gone horribly wrong. And the more they looked, the more deformed, dead Chatts they found.

They advanced slowly across the chamber. A round of rapid fire scattered the Chatts seeking to reach a dry channel filled with large fat, white wriggling larvae. Standing over the limbless grubs, Gutsy thrust his bayonet into one with a vicious satisfaction. Thick viscous fluid oozed out.

By now, the rest of the men had scrambled through into the chamber behind them.

“Light!” called Everson.

A Very flare arced up and hit the chamber roof. It fell into a channel filled with grubs, spitting out its harsh white light. The larvae began twisting and writhing in the intense heat, throwing macabre shadows on the walls as more Chatt workers, undeterred, crept forward again in an attempt to save them.

Gutsy let loose another burst of rapid fire.

“Stop!” Chandar cried.

“It’s grubs, sir,” said Gutsy with disgust.

“It’s their young!” said Atkins in protest. “What are we now, Bosche baby-killers?”

Chandar, hissed, clicking his mandibles together in agitation. “This is the Queen’s egg chamber. You have threatened Khungarrii young, there is no way out for you now. Rhengar and the scentirrii will crush you. A pity. You are like no Urmen this One has known. Jeffries promised you to us. This One would have liked to have learned more. This One senses there is much he will never know about you, but GarSuleth wills it.”

“Let us go and we will leave them unharmed,” said Everson.

“I have not that power.”

“They’re coming through!” said a private keeping watch by the bomb-blasted aperture through which they had entered the chamber.

With no choice, they moved further into the nursery. Everson and 1 Section led the way along the runways between the dry channels. “Which way out?” Everson asked Chandar.

The Chatt gave a kind of shrug, as if any answer was useless now.

Atkins noticed a glint in the shadow beyond one of the apertures, the dull sheen of lichen light on carapaces. From an opening across the chamber came the martial sound of marching.

“Stand To!” said Everson. “We’ll make a stand against this wall, use the channel in front as a fire trench. Sergeant Dawson, set up the Lewis gun on our flank. Hold until they spread out and we can take down the maximum number.”

The group of thirty-odd soldiers, barely even a platoon, fell into a practiced routine, seeking what cover they could in the shallow channels and setting their rifles on the banks.

“Otterthwaite, see if you can’t persuade them to stay back in the tunnels a little longer,” ordered Everson.

“Right you are, sir.” The sharpshooter looked down the barrel of his rifle towards the tunnels. He picked his target and squeezed the trigger. A squeal followed the rifle’s echoing report. Otterthwaite fired repeatedly, but the march of feet and the dull clatter of armoured insectile shells grew into a din as the first of the Chatt soldiers emerged from the gloom of the tunnels.

The nurses, Padre Rand, still under the influence of his otherworldly ennui, Half Pint, Napoo and others too wounded to help were set to the rear against the chamber wall. Nurse Bell took up a rifle from one of wounded men. “They’re not going to take me,” she said through gritted teeth when she met Nellie Abbott’s questioning look. The driver acquiesced mutely. A private with an arm in a sling offered her his bayonet. Nellie took it.

Sister Fenton stepped forward and Bell thought she was about to scold them but she, too, nodded sternly at another wounded soldier. “Give that to me,” she said, indicating his bayonet. He handed it up without protest and she gripped its handle self-consciously. The other two nurses looked at her nonplussed. “Belgium,” was all she said. All of England had heard of the Bosche atrocities there in the early years of the war.

In the fire channel Atkins nervously awaited the order to shoot. Seeing the massed ranks of insects before them was unnerving, but seeing them along the rifle barrel, it became business, and a business he knew how to do. He picked his targets and waited for the order.

To his left and right Gutsy, Porgy, Gazette, Pot Shot and Mercy were doing the same. He met their eyes one by one, an unspoken conversation of wordless encouragement and silent goodbyes. If this was it, they would give as good as they got and take as many of the damn things with them as possible when they went. The anger he’d felt at himself, Atkins now turned outwards towards the Chatts.

THE FIRST WAVE of Chatt soldiers swarmed onto the floor of the nursery chamber.

Brandishing his revolver, Everson stepped forward, bringing Chandar with him. “We just want to leave,” he called out across the chamber.

A Chatt stepped forward from the ranks.

“Rhengar,” said Chandar. “Njurru scentirrii of the Khungarrii Shura.”

“Let us go,” called Everson. “Allow us safe passage out of here with our people or we will destroy your young, your nursery!” He deplored the tactic, but he felt he had no choice if he wanted to save his men. They were cornered.

Rhengar hissed. In turn, the Chatt soldiers began to hiss, some beating the flats of their short swords against their chests.

“Well, that’s not good,” muttered Everson, and then nodded to his Platoon Sergeant.