Zombie Pulp

by Curran

  Creel heard his own voice speaking, talking about the barrage, about Burke. When he had finished, he was sobbing. But it was out. It had to come out.

  “ You got one of them cigarettes?” Howard said after a time. When he got it lit and took a few calming drags, he stared at the wall, something old unwinding behind his eyes. “I want to tell you something you’ll never write about. But I have to tell it before Kirk gets back. He wouldn’t like me talking of it.”

  “ Go ahead,” Creel said, burying the memory of Burke inside him. “I’m listening.”

  Howard sighed. “Last night, before we found you, mate, we found something else. It was a tunnel. We couldn’t say whether it was one of ours or one of theirs but Sergeant Kirk got this idea that we should have a look in there, see if we could scavenge some weapons, maybe a few bombs. Awful looking place it was, winding into the hillside like the barrow of a troll from one of them books me mam used to read to me as a boy. Well, in we went and it was a dank-smelling place, mud and water dripping from the roof. The floor sort of mucky and wet. Kirk had hisself a little torch he’d taken off a Hun corpse, but he was using it sparingly as it was just about petered out. So we move along in there and we can smell the dead, but the dead can’t hurt you none, they says, better than the living far as that goes. Pretty soon we’re having trouble walking so Kirk lights his torch and, blimey, all about us is bones. A few corpses, too, all white and puffy, kind of spongy if you stepped on ‘em. But the bones. Well, they was everywhere and it’s not the sort of thing that a bloke likes to be looking at by the light of a flickering torch, now is it? Especially bones with tooth marks in ‘em.

  “ Well, that torch, she gives up her ghost and I have to wonder if that ain’t a good thing. Bloody hell, it’s so dark you can’t even see your feet or the nose on your own face. But Kirk wanted to push on, the bastard. So dark, so dark. Things was hanging from the roof on chains…husks, human husks. I saw them before the light died. All stripped down, eaten. Onward we goes deeper into it and it’s like crawling down the throat of something hungry, something with teeth. I suppose it was…well, the quality of that dark which disturbed me clean to my roots, you see. There was something god-awful threatening to it that made my hackles rise and I figured the others felt it too, for about then we heard a funny sort of sound…a rustling, shifting sort of sound like we were in the lair of some sort of beast. We could hear it breathing with a rough, phlegmy sort of sound. Then…well, kind of a gnawing, crunching sort of sound like a big hound makes with a bone and being that there were only human bones and remains in there, well it don’t leave much to the imagination, now does it?

  “ About that time, I figure, we hear these steps coming toward us and Kirk, he tells whoever it is to back off because we got weapons and we’ll use them. Retreat, he tells us when those big slapping footsteps keep coming. Get the hell out. Kirk needs no more coaxing, see, he pulls his Webley pistol and fires off a few rounds. Well, about that time he screamed like a little boy seeing a ghostie coming out of a closet. Well, so happens, I looked back and wish to God I hadn’t. In the muzzle flash of the Webley, I saw what he was shooting at…or part of it…it was big, Mr. Creel, much bigger than a man. It was naked, hairless, moving with a sort of side-to-side gait, something that wasn’t any one thing but lots of different things all stitched together…different skins and shiny pelts and something like white blubber maybe…and a face. A blurry white sort of face. And eyes. Big yellow eyes. Well, that’s it and I don’t want to speak of it no more.”

  Creel did, of course, becoming very interested when Howard said it was stitched together, wondering what sort of feral horror it indeed was but Kirk came in with Jameson and from the looks on their faces, something had happened and it didn’t look like something good.

  “ What-”

  Kirk held a finger up, shushing him. His eyes were wild and stark and very close to lunacy. He had seen something and it was devastating. Jameson had a smile on his face that was stupid and mindless, like the painted grin of a wooden puppet. Nobody dared speak. They listened, they waited, they felt around with psychic fingers to make contact with what was out there. And by that point, Creel was certain it was not the enemy. A German patrol would have been welcome.

  A sound.

  At first he was not certain that he had even heard it: a subtle scratching sound. It could have been a rat, but the way Kirk sucked in a gasping breath, he knew it was not. He moved very slowly over towards the gun slit which gave him a pretty good view of the trench system before him. He saw nothing…but he could hear that scratching and that’s when he knew.

  Whatever was out there, it was circling around outside the sandbagged parapet, scratching for a way in like a hungry dog. The trenches themselves were over seven feet deep. You needed a scaling ladder to climb up and over the top. Outside the parapet, another deep ditch had been dug and this to make it that much more difficult for German raiders to make it over the wall. That ditch was slightly deeper, nearly eight feet in depth.

  And that’s what scared Creel at that moment, filled his throat with ice and made his scalp creep on his skull. For he could see just the very top of something, possibly a head, moving through the perimeter ditch. This was what had frightened Kirk and Jameson so badly and this was what wanted in: something large enough that an inch of its head could be seen above the sandbags.

  An odor was coming into the dugout and it was an odor that Creel knew only too well. It was the rank, suppurating stench of infected wounds and gangrenous tissue, filthy battle dressings and bile. And maybe something beyond that-vomit and corruption and cesspools gassy with decay. It was the smell of the thing out there, something birthed in the ravaged, dead womb of battlefields and maggoty mass graves.

  They could hear it raking splintered nails over the sandbags, patient, very patient, but anxious to get at them.

  “ What…what is it?” Howard finally whispered.

  “ A ghost,” Jameson said in an airless voice.

  Kirk licked his lips and kept licking them. “It…I saw it come out of the mist…something gray like a winding sheet…rustling…”

  Creel was trembling now, as were the others, some defeated, hopelessly optimistic part of himself wishing it would just go away. His lips and tongue felt thick and ungainly and he didn’t think he could speak to save his own miserable life.

  And then he heard a voice, dry and scratching, filled with dirt: “Creel,” it said. “Creel…”

  And he almost went out cold at the sound of it, his heart pounding so fiercely he thought it might explode. In his mind, he was seeing that thing out there, that graveyard horror that called him by name-death walking, death stalking-and it rinsed his face of color. There was a scream in his throat but he did not have the strength to let it fly. He tried to stand over near the gunslit and his blood went to his feet and he stumbled over, his fevered mind showing him exactly what was behind that shroud: a distorted death’s-head with eyes like glowering moons, flesh that was acrawl with bloated black flies. Kirk caught him, held onto him, but there was little he could do to bring the blood back into him.

  They gave him rum, rubbed some warmth into his face and finally his lips parted and he said, “It called my name.”

  Kirk and his two men looked at each other. “There was no voice,” he said.

  “ None,” Howard affirmed.

  And that’s when Creel knew it was in his head, only in his head, a very private thing, an invitation to a mass for the dead that only he was being summoned to.

  “ It got through,” Jameson said, on the edge of hysteria.

  Creel figured it would. Sooner or later. There were parts of the parapet that had been destroyed by shellfire and the thing had found one. They could hear it and it was no ghost: slopping forward through the trenches, casting a wake of brown dirty water before it. Closer, closer…

  Sergeant Kirk led them out of the dugout and the mist pushed in from all sides, fuming and dank. The splashing sounds seemed to c
ome from every direction, growing louder by the second. Creel could hear the pained rasp of breathing, that stench growing stronger. Finally, Kirk broke to the right and Howard towed Creel behind him. As they made their escape he clearly saw an immense shrouded gray form emerging from the fog.

  “ Creel,” it said.

  19

  Entombment

  The mist shaped itself into phantoms and drifting ghosts that followed Sergeant Kirk’s retreating party as they pushed forward and away from the devastated cavalry post and what haunted it. The yellow-brown sucking mud came up to their knees and all around them were pools of standing water, shell-holes of bubbling muck, stumps and the masts of limbless trees. Nothing else but refuse and bones, a few corpses that had gone swollen and white in the rain, bursting with greasy gray toadstools. The mist blew around them in heavy blankets and fuming pockets.

  Their boots and greatcoats were so heavy with mud that there were times when they literally could not go forward, but Kirk would not let them quit. After a time they found some higher ground, an island in the swamp of Flanders, and they took a few moments amongst the trees and wiry bushes to clean the mud off their boots.

  Kirk, who had been judging position by what he could see of the sun-a hazy sinking disc at best-said, “We can’t be far from our lines now. I’m surprised we’re not right on top of the Hun. One should think they’d be thick out here.”

  Nobody commented on that. They smoked and breathed and stared about with glassy eyes set in pale, grime-slicked faces.

  They had a short trip through the thicket and then into the battlefield again or what had once been one. More shell-holes, huge bomb craters, the remains of barbwire enclosures sinking into the earth, great bogs of stagnant fly-specked water floating with dead rats. But just beyond, duckboards rising in and out of the swamp. They were crisscrossed, zigzagging, a veritable maze stretching into the mist. There had been action here and not too long ago, for there were shallow pools of decomposing bodies, both men and mules, cordite cans, splintered trench supports, shell casings, sheet iron fragments, fallen trees, empty boots…refuse in every direction. They saw a few sandbagged posts, the bird-picked remains of soldiers who’d manned them.

  They clambered onto the nearest duckboard and it was a relief to feel something solid beneath them. But the unsettling thing they all felt and felt deep was the almost unnatural silence. Not so much as a distant shelling or staccato burst of machine-gun fire, yet Kirk assured them they were moving south towards friendly forces.

  They pushed forward, preying for some sign of life.

  Then Out of the fog they began to see objects thrusting from the murk. They were tall and leaning, luminously white, some nothing but simple wooden crosses and others rising headboard-shaped gravestones.

  “A bloody cemetery,” Howard said. “Of all things.”

  “They were fighting in a graveyard…bloody hell,” said Jameson.

  “That fighting is long done,” Kirk told them as they advanced, the duckboard sometimes sinking but never giving way completely beneath them.

  They moved forward and Creel did not say a word. He could feel something around them, the same sort of feeling he’d had back at the cavalry post…and it was getting stronger. It moved up his spine like claws and settled into his belly in a thick dark mass.

  “Look,” Howard said.

  There was a woman far to their left at the periphery of the mist. She was dressed in some ragged shift that was streaked with mud. Dark hair fell down one shoulder like a noose. Her face was gleaming white. She stood still as a statue, something sculpted, something incapable of movement. Then she opened her eyes and mouth and they were filled with a seeping blackness that was horrible to see.

  “Keep going,” Kirk said. “Bloody crazy woman.”

  But Creel knew better and so did the others.

  The deeper they got into the cemetery the more profuse were the stones. They jutted from tangled stands of vegetation knotted with barbwire, from rank pools of water and ooze, rows upon rows of them, clustering and white and flecked with lichen, intersecting duckboard crossing amongst them. Creel heard splashing sounds too large to be rats. The noises seemed to coming from everywhere in the burial ground. And then they all began to see things in the mist, shivering white apparitions slowly weaving their way towards them.

  As they moved ever forward, words beyond them now, it began to be hard to distinguish-out of the corner of one’s eye-between the monuments and the people rising up behind them.

  Creel saw children standing out there-pallid things, waterlogged and puffy, mouths opening and closing like those of suffocating fish.

  Sergeant Kirk kept everyone moving until they were nearly running on the duckboard.

  The sound of their boots echoed off into the still nothingness. Rifles were clenched in hands, stomachs in throats, hearts racing, minds spinning on the edge of madness. A bloated man who was quite naked and distended with gas stepped out of the fog and stared at them with sightless pockets of blood for eyes. Kirk went to his knees in a firing stance and put two rounds from his Enfield into the intruder. The first round made the bloated man flinch, the second made him pop like a balloon, nothing but white goo and clots of bloodless drainage on the duckboard.

  They were everywhere now.

  Puckered white heads were rising from flooded graves and looking at the men with eyes like black wormholes. Caskets bobbed to the surface of filthy ponds and gnarled hands reached from the mud. The dead were swimming like rats now, propelling themselves through the water and thick weeds with the side-to-side motion of snakes. They glided ever forward, ashen and pitted with holes, serpentine and sleek despite their disfigurements. The woman they had originally seen waited for them on the duckboard, black water running from her mouth and eyes, leaving trails dark as crude oil down her bleached face.

  Kirk and Howard blew her off the duckboard with their rifles. The slugs made her seem to implode, to collapse into a tower of squirming pink-gray rottenness that struck the duckboard like an emptied pail of fish guts. Some of it was still moving.

  The dead were swarming.

  From every sunken hole and muddy ditch and slimy box, they rose and gave a slow, shambling chase, seeming to be in no hurry. They turned maggot-squirming faces the color of newly risen moons in the direction of their quarry and slowly, relentlessly, gave pursuit. They crowded the duckboards, swam through the water, clawed from the mud, emerged from the weeds and from beneath tombstones.

  Creel followed behind the others, numb, used up, his mind sucked down into a narrow chasm. Then they were free of the cemetery and the duckboard was climbing a hill and they scampered up over it and saw a ruined, shelled village just before them.

  And then Creel’s mind began to work again and he knew that the dead weren’t going to kill them. That had never been part of the plan. No, they were herding them into this place just as they had been compelled to do.

  20

  The Deserted Village

  The village sat atop a low series of hills, a great junkyard of scattered rubble, broken walls, burned vehicles and upended carts lying amongst sandbagged gun pits, shattered roads and yawning ditches. The misty skyline was framed by roofless stone cottages, the high standing scaffolds of buildings and leaning chimneys. Weeds grew up from cracked cobbles and leaf-covered pools of water flooded cellars lacking houses to cover them.

  Looks like a Medieval siege took place here, Creel thought. He looked around and was satisfied that this place was indeed of Medieval vintage. The mazelike winding streets, the great outer wall (now mostly smashed), the high towers, the houses and buildings crowding in upon one another…yes, certainly Medieval in design. A walled city. Defensible.

  He tried to picture it intact and found that he could not; too many wars, too many battles, his mind was only able to sketch in somber grays and reaching darkness, destruction and desertion. Looking around, the city was some immense stripped skeleton of rising bones, femurs and ulnas an
d rib staves, split roofs like yawning skulls and a shrapnel-pitted church steeple like a reaching metacarpal.

  Isn’t it funny how it’s always death with you? Or maybe it’s not so funny at all, boyo. Even when you were a kid, you didn’t care about dogs and cats…not unless they were found rotting in a ditch.

  “This…I think this is Chadbourg,” Kirk said to them as they stood amongst the crumbling wreckage.

  Chadbourg was one of those places that changed hands a dozen times in the early days of the war. The Huns taking it, then getting tossed out by the British or Canadians, who themselves were forced out by successive attacks and concentrated shelling. There had been a few actions near the village in the past months, but only minor skirmishes.

  “Chadbourg,” Creel said. “That means we’re well away from our own lines.”

  “Aye,” Kirk said. “A bit west…probably quite near the Canadians, I’m thinking.” He looked around, trying to get his bearings. “We’ll have a rest here, I think.”

  Howard started shaking his head. “But those things-”

  “Are not something we need worry about. Crazed, all of them. Broke free from an asylum, I shouldn’t doubt.”

  That was so thin you could see through it, but it made Creel smile when he didn’t think he had any smiles left. You had to hand it to Kirk; he just refused to give in. The living dead were crawling out of their graves and he was concerned with finding a place to lay up a bit before the march back to friendly forces. Creel almost burst out laughing at the very idea of it. Well, the undead haven’t lunched on us quite yet, have they? Let’s have ourselves a nice brew-up. There’s a good fellow. He contained his laughter and mainly because it would have been hysterical and sounded more like a scream than anything else.

  They moved up the main thoroughfare, the mist enclosing them from all sides, the ruins rising up around them in ghostly, vague shapes, shadows clustering in doorways, rats scurrying in dead-end alleys, ravens sitting atop the creaking signs of pubs and cafes that had fallen into themselves.