by Curran
Oh not that, don’t wake that ankle up.
The woman turned, putting red gleaming eyes on the girl. “Nah! Nah!” she cried out in a rasping voice that was full of grave dirt. “Not et one! The finding of the meat! The getting of the meat! Must be aged, must be soft!” She threw something towards the far wall. It might have been a heart. The girl scampered after it, began chewing and sucking on it.
So this is what it had come to? This was the malignant, loathsome sort of evolution that had been going on in graveyard towns like Mattawan. The dead were not just shambling in the streets and hiding in the shadows or hunting in packs…they had formed familial bonds of a sort, basal tribe-like hunting units. This is what had been going on in the shadows, the mortuaries, cellars and ruined houses. Breeding and evolving like crawly, slimy things beneath rotten logs.
Evolving.
Cabot did not move. He had not moved when the girl tasted him and he would not move now. They thought he was dead, so he would be dead. They were letting him cool before they dressed him out.
The man stumbled away and the woman followed him, muttering about the finding of meat, the stocking of meat, and the tasting and filling of meat. The girl tagged behind, crawling on all fours like an animal. Cabot heard stairs creaking as they went up to the second floor.
He waited.
Flies covered him, biting him, laying their eggs. Beetles crawled over his face.
He did not move.
*
Later, when Cabot opened his eyes, there was only silence.
The zombie family was gone.
He listened for a long time and only heard the flies, the rats that came out to feed upon the dead. He sat up, a brilliant thunderclap of pain in his leg. He dragged himself away from the corpses, through sticky pools of blood. Using a table, he pulled himself up. He could not put weight on his leg. He found a shovel in the corner.
A shovel? Yes, of course a shovel. They’ve probably opened every grave in the county. When the truck comes from Hullville they probably get their share and bury it until it’s soft and wormy the way they like it.
He knew it couldn’t be this easy.
He couldn’t simply walk out of there without them knowing. But he did. He hobbled out of the room and through a door that was hanging from its hinges. The night air was damp and sour-smelling, but fresh compared to the house. His breath did not want to come, his ankle was throbbing, his body knotted with aches and pains, but he kept going. Even with the shovel as a crutch, he was every quiet. Through yards, across streets, down alleys. Moving by instinctive sense alone, he found the park.
The dead were not there.
He looked for them, but the mist was empty. Just decaying houses, collapsing fences, leaning and splintered telephone poles whose lines hung limp as spaghetti. The truck would not be far. He would find it, get in it, get away. Yes. He would pull the lever that opened the doors to release his cargo. The Wormboys would take care of the rest. Then he would go back, make up a story. Maybe crash the truck and call for a pick-up on the radio, say the dead had attacked, he’d released the cargo to draw them away.
Yes, yes.
Through the mist, the latticing of shadows.
The truck would be just ahead.
He stopped, suddenly roped tight with fear. He could hear…yes, grunting sounds, sucking sounds, chewing sounds. The stink of blood in the air was violent and overwhelming. He crept through the fog, knowing he had to see and then, hidden behind a bush, he did.
The doors were torn off the truck.
Jesus…look at that.
The rear door was open, lift gate down. The Wormboys were everywhere. They had released the cargo and fell on them in a starving mass. It was a sea of blood and bodies and entrails out there now, the dead squirming in the waste like worms, feeding and fighting, blood-slicked faces snapping up meat. A feeding frenzy. They bit the bodies in the streets, one another, even themselves.
Now was the time to get out.
Cabot hobbled away into the mist until he found the sign marking the perimeter of the town. Only then did he dare rest. But not for long. He moved down the road, weaving through the auto graveyard out there. And then…lights.
Headlights.
They were coming for him.
Thank God.
He stepped out, waving his arms. A truck. It slowed. Cabot fell over, just worn out and used up. He lay there, half-conscious, just breathing, just alive. Not much more.
“Help me with him,” a voice said.
“Where…where you from?” he heard his voice ask.
“Moxton,” the man said. “Moxton.”
Hands on him. He was lifted gently into the truck. It was warm in there. He drifted off, feeling safe at last. It was good.
*
Later, Cabot opened his eyes.
There was darkness all around him. He heard people mumbling and sobbing, pushing against him, crawling over him. He tried to get up and he was knocked flat. He tried to talk to the people with him but he was not heard. With a slowly dawning horror, Cabot understood. Understood how that truck was from Moxton and not Hullville and in Moxton they did what they had to survive.
A great clicking. A groaning.
Moonlight pushing in as the rear doors of the truck opened.
People screaming.
Mist flooding into the bay like toxic steam. And in that mist, hulking shapes and morgue shadows with reaching arms and graying fingers. Graveyard faces specked with flies, faces gone to wormy white pulp, all grinning with long gnarled teeth and leering with glossy red eyes.
Cabot closed his eyes.
And waited his turn.
MORBID ANATOMY
“ Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?”
- Frankenstein, 1817
1
An Introduction and a Horror
Of my experiences in the Great War with Dr. Herbert West, I speak of only with the greatest hesitation, loathing, and horror. For it was to the flooded, corpse-filled trenches that we came in 1915.
Perhaps I held some naive patriotic and nationalistic motives of serving mankind and saving the lives of the war wounded-a state of mind induplicable once the truth of war is known-but with Herbert West it was never the case. Openly he disparaged the Hun, but secretly our commission in the 1 ^ st Canadian Light Infantry was merely a means to an end. You see, my colleague’s motives were hardly altruistic. Though a surgeon of exceptional, almost supernatural skill, a biomedical savant and scientific wunderkind, West’s lifelong obsession was not with the living but the dead: the reanimation of lifeless tissue and particularly the revivication of human remains. And in the war itself and the horrid by-products it produced like some great fuming factory of death, he saw the perfect environment for his arcane research…not to mention unlimited access to plentiful raw materials.
I came to the war as West’s colleague, yes, but I felt deep inside that I was answering the subtle call of a higher power, that I-and my surgical skill-were the instruments of good in a theater of evil. I arrived with high ideals and within a year, I departed Flanders, hollow-eyed, broken, my faith in mankind hanging by a tenuous thread. For many months, the memories struggled within me, stillborn shadows of pestilence-living, crawling, and filling my throat until, at times, I could not swallow nor draw a solitary gasping breath.
If that seems a trifle melodramatic, then let the uninitiated consider this:
Flanders, 1915.
A cramped, claustrophobic maze of waterlogged trenches cutting into the blasted earth like deep-hewn surgical scars. Throughout the long misty days and into the dark dead of night, machine-guns clattering and high-velocity shells bursting, the thumping of trench mortars and the choking cries of gassed soldiers tangled in the barbwire ramparts. The stink of burned powder, moist decomposition, and excrement. Rotting corpses sinking into seas of slopping brown mud. Rats sw
arming atop the sandbags. Flares going up and shells coming down. And death. Dear God, Death running wild, sowing and reaping, gathering His grim harvest in abundance as the bodies piled up and the rain fell.
It was just the sort of place where a man of Herbert West’s peculiar talents would thrive.
Unlike I who held faith in the existence of the human soul and its ascension, upon death, unto the throne of God, West held no such misconceptions (as he put it). He was a scientific materialist, a confirmed Darwinist, and to him the soul was a religious fantasy and the Church existed only as a political entity to oppress and control the masses for its own remunerative ends. Life was mechanistic by nature, he claimed, organic machinery that could be manipulated at will. And if I had doubted such a thing, he proved it repeatedly with a reagent he had developed that galvanized life into the dead…often with the most unspeakable results.
Even now, these many years later, I can see West-thin, pale, his blue eyes burning with a supernal intensity behind his spectacles-as he sorted through the piles of corpses, whispering off-color remarks to me and giggling with his low cold laughter as he scavenged about like a butcher selecting only the finest cuts…a clot of gut, a stray undamaged organ, a particularly well-proportioned limb or the rare intact cadaver. I can see corpses floating in flooded bomb craters and the black clouds of seeking corpseflies. And I can see the terrified eyes of young men about to go over the top in search of their graves.
I can see Flanders.
I can see West’s workshop-a converted barn-part surgical theater and part laboratory of diabolical creation. I can see things in jars and vessels of bubbling serum…remains that should have been dead but were horribly animate with a semblance of ghoulish life. I can see the headless body of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee that West had reanimated. And I can hear the Major’s head crying out from its vat of steaming reptile tissue right before German shell-fire brought the structure down in a blazing heap.
But worse, far worse, are the dreams that come for me in the blackest marches of night. For I see Michele. Articulated, wraithlike…she comes to me like a jilted lover in the night. She wears a white bridal gown like a flowing shroud. It is spattered with mud and gory drainage, threaded with mold and infested with insects. I can clearly hear them buzzing and clicking. I can smell her odor which is flyblown and fusty, equal parts mildew and filth and grave earth. She comes to me with outstretched arms and I seek her as fast. Her bridal train is discolored, ragged, worried by plump graveyard rats whose stink is the stench of the darkest, moldering trenches of Flanders. When her arms embrace me I shiver for I can feel the grave-cold of her flesh, the coffin-worms writhing in her shroud. I gag on her stink.
She does not kiss me.
For she has no head.
2
The Walking Dead
Creel had been in Flanders for four months, embedded with the 12 ^ th Middlesex, when he got invited on a little raiding party that was being thrown together. No volunteers were asked for. The sergeants went down the forward trench, picking men at random like apples from a barrel and none of them were too happy with the idea.
Somehow, he had thought there would be a little more military precision involved in such a thing, but it was no different than anything else in that war. Eenie, meanie, miney, mo. Looking at the dour faces of the selected, Creel asked Sergeant Burke what would happen if one refused to go.
Burke got that pained expression on his face that Creel so often seemed to inspire. He was Creel’s aid. His job was to stay by Creel’s side, keep him in one piece if possible and keep him out of trouble…if such a thing were feasible.
“ Well, they’d replace him, wouldn’t they?” Burke said. “Then they’d march him out and shoot him.”
Creel wrote that down, amused by his own question.
Being a journalist, he was there out of the mutual suffering of the general staff and the line officers. The Brits already had their own carefully-controlled correspondents, they didn’t need some Yank from the Kansas City Star coming in and mucking things up with his glib tongue and saucy manner, but President Roosevelt had pushed the British on the matter. Saying that if American correspondents were not embedded with British and Canadian units, it would harm the war effort…in other words, if the proper spin wasn’t presented to the American public by Americans, he’d never be able to get the public to swallow the idea of committing troops and dollars.
So the British Expeditionary Force submitted and the BEF did not like submitting to anything.
There were four men in the raiding party: Sergeant Kirk, Corporal Smallhouse, Privates Jacobs and Cupperly. In addition to his Enfield rifle and fixed bayonet, Jacobs carried fifty rounds of ammunition. Kirk was the grenade man. He carried a haversack filled with Mills bombs. Smallhouse was a grenade thrower, too. Last in line was Cupperly, another rifleman with fifty rounds in his bandolier.
Two other raiding parties led by two other sergeants would be going out as well.
“ We’re going to go out and play naughty schoolboy,” Kirk said, grinning. “Our job is to annoy, disrupt, and cause trouble. A burr in the Hun’s behind, that’s us. A merry lark it shall be.”
Creel found it interesting how Kirk, who was a pretty decent guy by all accounts, really enjoyed these raids. There was a mischievous gleam in his eye and a crooked smile to his face like the appointed task was a bit of boyhood deviltry like tipping over privies or putting wormy apples on the teacher’s desk.
With Burke and Creel tagging behind, they went over the top at nightfall and into the muddy, corpse-strewn waste of No-Man’s Land. Faces blackened, moving like shadows, they crept at a low crouch or crawled through the mud, legions of corpse-eating rats moving in dark rivers around them. On his belly, Kirk cut them a hole through the wire and within minutes they spotted two German forward sentries. Jacobs and Cupperly took them out silently, rising like shades behind them and clubbing them over the heads with the butts of their rifles, then bayoneting them in the throats. It took very little time and the only noise was the impact of rifle butts against helmets and the sound of blood bubbling from gored throats.
Silently then, the raiders dropped into the first line of trenches which were well ahead of the main German trench system. They crept their way through, moving from bay to bay, tossing grenades when they heard movement. They killed half a dozen Hun this way. It was quite efficient, Creel thought, and the element of surprise was a big part of it. There had been an artillery barrage less than an hour before which drove the Germans from their trenches and into their sandbagged dugouts on higher ground. The only men left behind were sentries and they paid with their lives as all three raiding parties moved fast, clearing trenches and stealing equipment, destroying anything they couldn’t take with them.
Burke told Creel later that it was a near-perfect raid, for usually the Germans heard them cutting through the wire and opened up with machine-gun fire.
The three parties combined cleared over four-hundred feet of trench before they heard a German reaction force mounting a counterattack.
The raiders slipped out of the trenches with three prisoners, running and stumbling back to their own lines. All in all, it was a crazy, heart-pounding sort of way to spend a few hours.
One of the captured Germans was an old white-haired sergeant with only two teeth left in his mouth. He had surrendered instantly, throwing up his arms and shouting, “Kamerad!”
“ Lot of them give up easy like that,” Burke said. “Just glad to be out of this bloody war.”
The prisoners were taken into one of the British dugouts where they could be interrogated by the intelligence officer. Creel and Burke and a few others waited there with them. Creel gave the old sergeant a cigarette and he grinned with those near-empty gums. He smoked the cigarette, muttering, “Kamerad,” under his breath again and again as if to reinforce the point. But after a time, he began to look very grim, jabbering on incessantly and pointing in the direction of No-Man’s Land. “Die t
oten…die toten!” he began to cry out, his eyes as dark as burnt cinders. “Die toten…die toten dieser spaziergang! Das tote wandern! Die toten dieser spaziergang!”
“Quit yer yabbering,” Burke told him.
But if it was yabbering, then it was some of the most unusual yabbering that Creel had heard in that war. Maybe his German wasn’t the best, but what the sergeant was saying was all too clear and the fear behind it unmistakable.
The dead, he was saying. The dead that walk.
That’s when Creel began to get a few ideas and getting them, smelled blood in the water.
3
Memento Mori
The Germans mounted a small, inconsequential, half-hearted offensive that left their corpses scattered about the perimeter like rice after a wedding. The rain fell, bloating the corpses, puffing them up into particularly unpleasant white mounds of decomposition that flowered weird growths of fungi. Though the stink of them was no worse than the usual smell of Flanders, they did season things up to the point where the officers were complaining and that got action. A small group was sent out to bury them in a mass grave.
Creel went with, taking his little box-shaped Brownie camera with him and getting some nice shots of the cadavers. He had quite a collection by that point: corpses blown up into trees, tangled in the wire, sinking in the mud, nested by rats, and-his favorite-a Hun officer who’d been machine-gunned but was held upright in a casual sort of stance by a sharp oak branch that had speared him through the back. When Creel had snapped that one, many months after the First Battle of Ypres, the officer had been nearly picked down to bones by the local ravens and buzzards-sparrows nesting in his ribcage and skull-and he looked very much like a skeleton on a jaunty afternoon stroll, steel helmet tipped at a rakish angle.