Zombie Pulp

by Curran

  The soldiers, all with the same blank eyes, walked past, saluting. One guy they called Slivers-because he’d been a carpenter in Knightsbridge-openly broke down, went to his knees, and began to sob.

  No one went to him.

  The Tommies stood around in their mud-caked boots and filthy greatcoats, Enfield rifles slung at their shoulders. They were dirty, desperate, their eyes huge and hollow, faces like living skulls. They had lost the ability for pity.

  Burke finally went over to Slivers and helped him to his feet and Slivers clung to him like he was something he had lost long ago and found again. “Got Dick, didn’t they? He was my mate. He was right in front of me and the pissing Hun got him. Right in the fucking head, they did.” He showed Burke a series of dirty smears on his uniform blouse. “That’s Dick’s brains. They sprayed on me. They was in me eyes and all over me face. This is what Dick thunk with. Poor old Dick. He was such a good mate. What am I supposed to do now, eh? What am I supposed to do without me mate?”

  But nobody really knew. They were all shattered, fatigued, worn thin as wires and they didn’t have the strength to do much but stumble back into the trenches and consort with their private hell.

  “ It was a mess,” one of the sergeants told Creel later. “See, what kind of action is it when you’ve got no bloody artillery what to support you with? No bleeding shells for them bleeding guns?”

  “ Not good,” Creel said.

  “ No, sir, not good.” The sergeant looked up and down the trenches, that long stare in his eyes like he was looking for something he could never hope to find. “It was a real mess out there. Shells coming down and men dying, fighting for every inch of ground. Patrols bumping into patrols, companies getting tangled up with other companies and that gas coming down and which way was which and who was who…saw our own boys get gassed by our own shells. Plunk, plunk, plunk, they went and no warning. Our artillery, what there was of it, didn’t cut through the Hun barbwire like it was supposed to and I was watching men, mates of mine, getting their boots tangled in it while the Hun cut them down. Ain’t that the life?”

  Creel gave him a cigarette, an American one, and he liked that. Started laughing at how American tobacco could make it to the front but no Americans.

  “ Country’s divided,” Creel told him. “Some want to fight, some don’t. Lots of Americans joining the Canadians to get a taste.”

  “ Nothing against your countrymen, mate. If I was them, I’d stay home. Enjoy life, ain’t nothing but death here. We ain’t winning and neither is the Hun.”

  As night drew on, Creel was in the dugout with a group of enlisted men and the stories started circulating as he knew they would and he knew he was going to hear things that he wanted…and dreaded…to hear. Lot of it, of course, was scattered recollections about the raids on German lines, just bits and pieces that shook themselves loose from the men’s minds as they sat and contemplated. As Creel listened, he watched men stripping their shirts off, their backs scratched raw and red from flea and lice infestations. Some of them stripped naked and ran the flame of a candle along the seams of their underclothes and you could plainly hear the lice eggs crackling. It was the only sure way to get rid of them or keep them at bay.

  “ Funny bit, it was,” a corporal was saying. “One night, the mist hanging heavy, we lost C Company’s machine gunner and his two mates, see? We go up to the fortification, the gun pit, there’s the Lewis gun, all the ammo boxes pretty as you please…but no men. All five of ‘em are gone. How do you figure that? German sappers took ‘em, they wouldn’t leave the gun and ammunition, would they?”

  “ No bodies?” Creel said.

  “ Nothing, mate. Must’ve carted off the bodies even though it makes no bloody sense to take corpses and not weapons, now do it?” He shook his head. “Nothing there except them funny prints in the ground.”

  Creel felt something cold take hold of him. “Funny?”

  “ Sure. Bare prints, they was. You know, like somebody were walking about without boots on.”

  This would have been the point, Creel knew, that if the corporal’s story was just a lark the men would have begun ridiculing it. But they didn’t. They just sat about in the semi-darkness, smoking silently, their eyes shining in the murk.

  “ Were they…small prints?”

  The corporal shook his head. “The prints of men not children. And the funny thing is they was full of worms, squirming worms.”

  Creel swallowed. “Worms, you say?”

  “ Sure. Maggots. Lots of maggots.”

  Creel did not interrupt as the stories made their rounds and each one-from maggoty footprints to skulking things like children that scavenged the dead to Hun that took. 303 caliber sniper rounds and kept walking-only confirmed what he feared; that something absolutely incredible and horrifying was happening out there.

  Later, he went out into the trenches and it was a quiet night save for the falling rain that went on for several hours before drying up. What it left in its wake was a sickening odor that was beyond dirt and mud, blood and filth and dank uniforms…it was the vile stench of rot, of tanned hides and dark sewers, sumps and mass graves and backed-up cisterns. He had all he could do not to vomit and was that because of the stink of war or was it because inside his own head he was smelling something infinitely worse, infinitely more pestilent, and infinitely more dangerous to his sanity?

  He got away from the Tommies, leaning against the trench wall, mud up to his knees, smoking cigarette after cigarette, listening to the rats crawling around him, and wondering, dear God, just wondering. Something was going on out in the body dumps and sunken graves and green-stinking fields of carrion. How did he track it to its source and if and when he did, what the hell could he really do about it?

  Colonel, now I know you don’t like me because I’m a journalist but just listen for a minute, will you? The dead are rising out in No-Man’s Land and something has to be done about it.

  Creel almost started laughing at that one.

  No, it wouldn’t go over well.

  The Tommies were suspecting things, hinting and intimating at the worst possible occurrences. Down in their hearts they knew something was wrong beyond the usual calamities of war. Maybe they would not put a name to it, but they knew. Some of them, anyway. But the officers? No, never, ever in a million years would they accept it. They didn’t teach the old boys anything about the living dead at Sandhurst, it just wasn’t cricket.

  Creel stumbled through the mud, snaking through the trench system, eyes glazed, skin damp from the rain, heart beating with a low and distant rhythm, wilting beneath the pall of stark memory, sliding down deeper into himself, seeking a cool, smooth darkness that was his and his alone.

  13

  Battle Fatigue

  Sometimes he would come awake at night gasping for air like a stranded fish and once the sweating and gasping were over with, he’d wonder what had been suffocating him, but he’d know: the war. After awhile in the trenches it was like all the sweet, pure breath was sucked from your lungs and you were subsisting on corpse-gas, marsh mist, and the smoke of burnt ordinance.

  Awake and knowing sleep was beyond him, he’d make his way up to the fire trench and listen to the Tommies whispering, telling each other how they were certain they would die and they’d never see home again. He’d listen to their voices until they became a lulling soft murmur like ancient clocks ticking away into eternity and soon enough, those voices were rain and running water, clods of earth gently striking coffin lids which was the sound of time. As dawn neared, there were low voices, the rattle of equipment, the snap of a rain-soaked poncho, the slushy sounds of mud. Now and again, something like laughter or sobbing, and then deep silence winding away into emptiness. The wind would sing a final mournful song amongst the battlements and clay-spattered earthworks. Rats would scurry out beyond the sandbags. A lone dog would howl.

  In the days following the Battle of Loos, Creel began to wonder-and not for the first time-about t
he state of his mind and more so, the state of all minds in that war. He was starting to think that there was some infectious, collective insanity making the rounds like a germ and he could not remember the last time he had spoken with anyone that was remotely ordinary.

  The Tommies bothered him.

  Their youth ground to ash, they contemplated their deaths like old men, hoping only that there would be something to bury. The relentless, dogged combat and deprivation and inhumanity and suffering of the trenches were deteriorating their minds into a stew of morbid dementia and pandemic melancholia. The good white meat of reason had been chewed away and what was left was something rancid that sought the earth and quiet entombment. So many of them had reached the stage where they were convinced that the only way to be a good soldier was to die in battle. And it was not some misguided heroism, but a sort of fatalism that each day survived only prolonged the pain and the sooner it was over with the sooner they would be out of the mud and filth of the trenches and even death was better than living like a rat in a hole.

  With their wide white eyes and muddy faces, they would look upon Creel like he was some sort of exotic species, a mad thing that belonged in a cage, and ask the inevitable: “What in the Christ are you doing here? You could be home.”

  Creel would tell them that he had no home and a silent apartment in Kansas City didn’t count because it depressed him. He hated being at the front and he hated being away from it. That was something they understood.

  “No wife or little ones, mate?”

  “None. One divorce. Can’t hold a family together jumping around the world looking for that story I can’t seem to find.”

  “How many wars for you now?”

  “Thirteen,” he’d tell them.

  They wouldn’t comment on that number as if acknowledging it would contaminate them with its poor luck. They’d just keep asking him why he was there and he’d tell them the truth: “I’m looking for something.”

  They’d ask what and he would not say.

  What really could he say?

  That he saw Flanders as a great poisonous flower and they were all trapped in its petals, waiting for it to close up, caught in the inevitable venomous darkness, waiting for the slow call of forever night? Even to him with the somewhat morose and macabre rhythms of his thoughts that sounded more than a little like some kind of psychological/metaphorical sinktrap, the result of an overtaxed mind and an overburdened imagination.

  But that was how he saw it.

  Death was here, in this place. Malignant, wasting, hungry death and it was a force far beyond anything as simple as the misfortunes of war. It was alive, elemental, discorporeal and sentient…and he could feel it and had felt it ever since he got to Flanders.

  Like it has been waiting for me, he often thought in the heavy shades of night. I’ve hounded it through battle after battle and now it’s not running from me anymore, it’s not hiding, it’s just waiting in the darkness like an ivied graveyard angel, arms open to embrace me and draw me beyond the pale into a world of rustling shadows and nonexistence.

  And whenever his cynicism laughed at the very idea, he needed only take a tour of the countryside by day, chain-smoking and nail-biting, to see that it was not too far from the truth.

  This was Death’s place.

  He did not know what Flanders was before it was scarred by trenchworks and gutted by shellholes, its viscera yanked inside out and covered in mud and sunken in stagnant rainwater, a great bog floating with carrion and peppered by bones…but he was pretty sure it had been a pretty place. Probably green and growing, fertile, old world European where you could smell the sweet flowers and count the yellow haymows at the horizon, listen to the creak of horse-driven farm wagons meandering up rutted dirt roads. Like something out of a pastoral landscape by Pissarro or Cezanne.

  But now war had claimed it and forever changed its face from wonderland to wasteland. The countryside had been dotted with tiny farming villages-he knew that much because their ruins were everywhere-and he imagined they had been quaint little places once upon a time. But they would never be that way again. The hand of Death was absolute, it had cast a diabolical spell here, a sinister alchemy, an infection that rotted Flanders to its moldering bones. That could never be completely erased. When he looked around now and saw those villages like monuments standing in rubble, cold, blasted, and empty, surrounded by boneyards, mud swamps, refuse and the wrecked machinery of war, blown by a cold/hot thermal wind that stank of putrescence, sewage, and excrement…he was sick to his core.

  For he could not get past the awful and somewhat monomaniacal idea that this was his private hell and it was being staged for his benefit.

  Insane. Paranoid. Egostistical. Yet, it had now reached the point where he could not seem to remember a life before Flanders. Even when he tried to remember his mother, his father, his brother in Cleveland and his ex-wife in Boise, all he saw were the shattered faces of the war dead from his collection of mortuary photographs.

  That’s all there was.

  And he feared it’s all there ever would be.

  Maybe I’m nothing but a maggot feeding on death like they always said, but it all leads here. It all leads to Flanders and what’s happening here. The dead are rising and I’m going to find out why because that’s my destiny.

  One thing was certain: as he sought death, death sought him.

  14

  Shell-Shock

  The fourth night following the Battle of Loos, Creel was in the support trench trying to catch a few winks in the shadow of the machine-gun blockhouse when German flares began to fill the sky. They burst yellow-green overhead, trailing sparks, drifting down on little parachutes, their flickering light turning the trenchworks into some surreal, expressionist tangle. Then the shells started coming down as the Hun worked their artillery and siege guns. While some covered their heads-Creel included-he saw many who just sat around, smoking, and staring off into the night watching the rounds coming in as sandbags disintegrated and huddled men vanished in thundering explosions and mud flew and the parapet crumbled, the air hissing with smoke and steam. He watched one young private looking up as a shell came down, greeting it, tracing its descent with his eyes, then there was eruption of debris and water and he was no more.

  The barrage lasted another ninety minutes and when it was over Creel’s ears were ringing, his gums sore from clenching his teeth, his hands throbbing from being balled into numb fists. It was amazing the things you would do as you waited to die, waited for the shell that would turn you into mulch. A few slugs of rum, a cigarette or two, and he began to relax somewhat though nobody in Flanders ever truly unwound.

  For some time there was silence, only the sound of the wounded being evacuated, the dripping water, the air pungent with the stink of burnt cordite, hot metal, and burning canvas. A welcome odor that overpowered the stench of the trenches and the evil smells blowing in from No-Man’s Land.

  Creel drifted off.

  Around three a.m., a noise cut through the night…something that might have been the tormented scream of a man or the agonized shrill howl of a dog. Creel came awake with Burke next to him and could not be sure. Only that it was eerie and it shocked him into silence as he listened to it rise up into a wild unearthly wailing then fade away.

  Then there was the sound of rifles firing, men shouting and more than a few men screaming hysterically. Creel and Burke followed the sounds with a dozen other men down the communication trench and it came far from the rear where little sandbagged Elephant Shelters were being used as makeshift morgues for the dead from the barrage. It was sheer chaos as the Tommies either fought forward to get a look or fell back in waves after they had. Lights from lanterns and electric torches were jumping about, throwing wild shadows over the muddy ground.

  That weird wailing sound rose up again and Creel could feel it right up his spine.

  “What the hell is it?” he cried out.

  “It’s been feeding on them corpses!”
one man said.

  “Keep back!” shouted an officer and the men responded, pulling away as that wailing rose and fell, sounding at times very much like a piercing human scream and at others like a bestial roaring that fragmented into guttural cackling.

  Burke tried to pull Creel away, but he shrugged him off. He had to see this…whatever it was. He just had to see it. He was drawn forward with a sort of magnetism.

  “Jesus,” Burke said when they got close enough.

  Inside the shelter Creel could see a seething mass of motion, teeth flashing and eyes blazing. One of the officers had a Webley in his hand and he pumped three rounds into the thing and it snarled ferociously, then let go with that all-too human, high-pitched screaming that seemed to echo on and on as if there were a dozen creatures in there and not just one.

  “Is…is that a dog?” Creel said under his breath, wishing like hell he’d brought his little camera with him.

  Whatever it was-and he was making no rash guesses-it looked roughly dog like in appearance, like some massive hairless hound whose flesh was ghostly white and pulsating, almost vibrating with a jellied undulant motion. Yet, if it was a dog, then it was horribly distorted and grotesque, something made of mounded pallid flesh and twitching growths, a massive head rising up on a fleshy trunk, limbs seeming to splay out in every direction and Creel could not be sure that some of them did not have fingers.

  All around it were mutilated corpses that it had been tearing apart in some manic feeding frenzy.

  The stink of violated carrion was unmistakable…but a worse odor blew off the thing itself that was acrid and almost violent, like apples rotted to acidic cider.

  A rifle squad came forward and just stood there, not sure what they were seeing or what they should do about it.