by Curran
22
Morbid Anatomy
While the soldiers watched the street for enemy incursions, Dr. Hamilton took Creel into a back room and together they smoked and it took little prodding for Hamilton to tell him the story he so badly wanted to hear. It was a quick version of events because there was no time for much else.
“And you expect me to believe that?” Creel said, his cynicism alive again, spinning like a drill bit within him, hot, relentless, boring deeper into him as it sought truth not battlefield horror stories, but… truth.
This is the truth and you have to accept it. Truth couched in fiction and fiction couched in truth, raving, demented, full-blooded, surreal and hallucinatory, but the truth, he told himself. The whole nine yards, the scream-in-your-face truth.
“Whether you believe it is of absolutely no concern to me,” Hamilton said, not miffed, not insulted exactly. He was beyond that. His eyes were the dismal, cheerless mirrors that reflected the war itself-graveyards, battlefields, and body dumps. And something more, something almost cabalistic and mystical lorded over by a pain that was without end.
And Creel, feeling all the horror and pain and madness of the past few months coming back at him, biting into his throat with teeth, began to curse him, to shout at him, to call him every rude, loud, boorish and ultimately meaningless name he could think of.
Hamilton said nothing.
His face was absolutely blank; he was untouchable.
The patrol moved out then and Creel tagged behind. Out of the rubble and twisted streets of wreckage and into the surrounding countryside which was ravaged, torn open, bleeding a sap of mud and brown stinking water. The fog still held and it was a grim world as the sun sank and the darkness crept up from hollows and ditches. The entire area around Chadbourg was a flooded trench system with staved-in bunkers, shattered stone and sandbag ramparts, collapsing dugouts and the remains of men, horses, ammunition wagons and mangled artillery pieces sunken into the earth.
Ten minutes after darkness found them, the world exploded with gunfire.
The darkness at either horizon was lit by flashing lights as heavy guns on both sides began to exchange salvos and the earth began to tremble as if from a distant quake. Shells were bursting and ammo dumps on both sides went up in great blazing pyres that painted the sky with guttering red light. The artillery officers were marching their salvos at each other’s lines and soon enough the countryside surrounding Chadbourg was near to ground zero and shells were landing everywhere and men were being thrown down face-first in the mud.
“MAKE FOR THE TRENCHES!” someone cried. “TAKE COVER! TAKE COVER!”
Creel was knocked into a mud pool right atop two bodies in an advanced state of putrefaction. They were the only things that kept him from drowning in the slop. They were bloated like fleshy barrels and they popped when he fell on them, dissolving into a gray-white jelly beneath him as he madly scrambled to be free, hot gases of decay filling his head and making his eyes water. He fought free, pulling an entrenching tool from his belt and sinking it into firmer earth, pulling himself free of carrion.
The platoon was scattered as whiz-bangs and heavy shells erupted all around them, tearing men to pieces. The survivors leapfrogged from shell-hole to shell-hole, barely avoiding red-hot shrapnel that flew through the air in cutting arcs. Mud and dirt and water were thrown high above, coming back down again in rains of filth. The shellfire was stirring up the old battlefield, bringing up buried stenches of decomposed bodies and pockets of chlorine gas, a dozen pungent odors competing against the stink of cordite and burnt powder. Yellow and scarlet flares burst overhead, filling the mist with wavering shadows.
The Tommies made for the trenches and jumped into them with cries of horror, for the dirty water was deep with Hun corpses that went to a sludge of liquid putrefaction beneath their trench boots. They fought through the corpses and standing water as salvos of shells battered the earth around them.
By the time Creel managed to crawl over there, he saw rolling clouds of green and white smoke coming over the trenches in dense columns, mixing with the mist, forming a ghastly pall that swallowed everything, separating men but a few feet apart. It cleared somewhat after ten or fifteen minutes, but never went away entirely, just drifting around in fuming patches that hemmed the platoon quite neatly into their private hell.
“Something,” a voice said, “something out there…”
Creel peered over the ruptured sandbags, digging his boots into the muddy trench wall. He had hoped to see a row of Hun helmets and fixed bayonets charging in their direction, but what he saw was something quite different.
Figures…forms…skeleton-shadowed apparitions rising up from the bubbling brown mud, from pools and lagoons and bogs of corpse-slime. In whole and in piece, Hun in rotted uniforms and Tommies with blank fish-white eyes and puckered holes for mouths, peasants with rotted faces of graveyard ooze, and the children, of course, ghost-faced, hollow-eyed, clouds of poison gas rising from their shriveled mouths like steam.
Creel saw them as he knew he would see them, ranks of them rising at every quarter. Like twisted, distorted things seen through a cracked window pane, they pulled themselves up in grim battalions, running with ochre-brown mud.
He saw a Tommy not ten feet away suddenly disappear in a flurry of reaching white hands that came from the trench walls and floor and the gurgling water that sluiced around his waist. Many of them were not attached to anything but limb shanks. He screamed as they tore at him, joints popping and ligaments snapping, rendering him to a dismembered flailing thing like themselves.
The Tommies were shooting, throwing grenades, hacking the dead apart with trench knives and bayonets and still their numbers swelled, more rising all the time like maggots-white and wriggling and voracious-abandoning graying meat for something sweeter.
The living dead came in waves of carrion washing ashore on a charnel beach of white gleaming bones, piling up into great ramparts of festering rot that were hideously alive, hideously animate, creeping and slithering, stumbling about on skeleton legs and pulling themselves forward on their bellies like corpse-rats.
As Creel screamed and fell into a black hole within himself, he saw hands crawling about like white bloated spiders. He saw hopping legs. Undulating torsos. Inching trunks. Things walking about with nothing above the waist…and still more fingers broke through the mud-scum and more tombstone faces floated to the surface of black pools.
The night became a surreal shadow-world backlit by blazing stumps and burning sandbags, described by rolling pockets of fog, punctuated by screams and gunfire and the occasional shell tossing earth up in fiery plumes like lava from volcanic cones.
He pulled himself up out the trenches as they were infested by the undead. He crab-crawled over the blasted earth, swimming across flooded bomb craters, navigating skeleton forests, picking his way through jawless skulls, jutting femurs and ulnas, yellowing ribcages and obscenely white lengths of vertebrae. Slicked with dirt and the slime of carrion, he found a dugout up above the water line and fell into it, landing on a heap of rubble that gave way and dropped him into a hollow filled with a few inches of rank water.
“Hello, mate,” a voice said as he pulled himself free. “You’ll give my best to Dr. West, won’t you?”
In the flickering light of fires and descending flares, Creel saw a Tommy sitting there in a mildewed uniform. His face was like something braided from yellow, black, and vividly red ropes. Each alive, each horribly undulant. A slick green corpse-worm slid from his left eye socket and another from the cavity of his nose and then a dozen were coming out, splitting his face lengthwise and sideways, and the flesh was crumbling, dropping away in clots and loops, leaving something behind like a grinning fright mask feathered with strings of tissue. That grinning mask kept smiling until it burst apart in a wild, hysterical cackling that rolled into the night becoming part of the chaos that was breaking open in every conceivable direction.
Creel dragged
himself from the dugout, moving over bones and through slime and ooze and mud. Then he fell into the muddy depths of the trench, sliding on his belly into the water like a seal. Clawing up walls of smooth moist clay, he saw a flapping gray shape above him and uttered a choking cry as his throat filled with a thick mass of terror he could not swallow away.
It was the thing from the cavalry post, the thing from Chadbourg…that malevolent shrouded graveyard angel.
Only it wasn’t.
Just a scarecrow, he realized with a dry laugh in his throat. Just a scarecrow.
The shroud had been hung from a couple iron poles shoved into the earth that had been used as a framework for sandbags that were now blasted away. The thing had abandoned its winding sheet now. It was no longer hiding and Creel had the craziest feeling that it wanted him to know this, that there was something darkly symbolic in this offering of graying, slime-spattered cerements.
The shells were still coming intermittently, gouts of white and yellow smoke mixing in with the ground fog into a murky haze. The men of the 1 ^ st, those that were still alive, were firing and crying out. Creel was hearing other sounds, too, moist tearings and wet snappings, unpleasant sounds like boiled chicken peeled from bone.
And screaming.
“NO! NO! NO! PLEASE DON’T TOUCH ME! GET AWAY! OH DEAR GOD, GET AWAY-”
That scream tore through the night, raging and barely human, the sound of absolute animal fright and human despair. Then it cycled off into nothingness.
Another scream, somewhere off in the mist and shadows, terminated by a wet, meaty sort of sound like a cleaver sinking into a shank of beef. Then another. And another. And still another. Then Creel knew: whatever was out there, whatever was slaughtering the men, it was moving down the trench in his direction, killing anything that got in its way. Rifles fired. Revolvers. A grenade went off. But none of it could stem the black tide of whatever was rushing through the trenches and Creel had a pretty good idea what it was and what it wanted.
The water was up to his knees and he ran through it, slipping and sliding on the muck that covered the trench floor, tripping over buried things and losing his footing, falling, getting up, his mind gone white with panic.
“Oh…God…oh God,” a soldier called out and Creel turned to see a figure coming out of the fog, limping, shambling, holding itself upright by sheer force of will. In the light of the flares and flames, he could see that the soldier’s face was a mask of bloody strings and ribbons like something had tried to tear it free from the bone beneath and only been partially successful. There were four ruts peeled from the left cheek to the right temple, the remaining eye just a red scarified pit.
“Run!” the soldier said with what life was left to him. “Run while you still can…”
And then something…a gigantic grotesque shape…came out of the fog and took hold of him and neatly tore him in half like he was nothing but a doll stuffed with rags, casting his remains aside and vaulting forward.
Creel ran, fell face first in that polluted water and came out of it, mad with fear, trying to claw his way up the trench wall, fingers digging into soft clay that oozed between his knuckles. Sobbing, he slid back into the water and shivered beneath the icy shadow of the thing that towered over him, the thing that exhaled a hot breath of gnawed corpses.
“Oh please…” he said.
“Creel,” it said to him, reaching down with immense gnarled hands. “You’re one of us…”
23
Catalyst
Make no mistake about it, we were torn apart in the flooded trenches outside Charbourg. Some men died gallantly in the shell-fire, but other men were reduced to whimpering things when they saw what our true enemy was out there, the walking dead that came slithering from their mephitic holes to rage a war of extermination against the living.
We were scattered in every direction and we did what we could, but men to each flank were dying. The Hun had buried their dead everywhere in the trenches-in the floor, in the walls, and that did not take into account all the other corpses in the mud. As I looked around for survivors, ducking every time a shell screamed overhead or erupted in a column of mud and black water, I did not-and could not-know what had reanimated so many. Certainly, West was responsible for some of it…but not this many. Even that megalomaniacal brain could not conceive of a mass resurrection on such a scale.
There was another factor.
A catalyst.
It was not until I found three soldiers who were putting up a fierce defense that I knew what that catalyst was. As the dead poured forward and the soldiers literally blasted them into fragments-some were so rotten and waterlogged from the mud holes and lakes of stagnant water that they burst apart-the earth began to tremble. The water boiled in the trenches. Sandbags collapsed and dugouts crumbled to rubble. A single limbless tree fell over.
The catalyst showed itself.
Not fifteen feet from us it burst from the muddy earth in a yellow, pink, and gray-white mass of surging corpse-jelly. It pushed itself up, hiding no more, a great pulsating, noisome coagulation of tissue in horrible, surging motion…it kept coming and coming, rising up into a great glistening wave of noxious flesh that was easily twenty feet high and twice that in volume.
The men screamed as it continued to rise from a great jagged cleft in the earth like a birth canal.
As sickened as I was, I did not scream.
I knew what it was, you see.
This was some great monstrous mutation formed out of West’s vat of reptilian embryonic matter. When the Germans shelled the barn, West’s original lab, completely destroying it…they had not destroyed what was in that vat. It had escaped and tunneled underground like a monstrous worm, breeding in the darkness, suckling itself upon corpse-fat, corpse-meat, and the rich marrow of thousands of bones sunken into the mud of Flanders. West had another vat, a larger one, germinating at his other workshop in the farmhouse-or had-but this massive organism was part of the original. I knew that without question.
As the men cried out, several going insane, I just waited for that blobby mass to fall over me and squeeze the life from me, make me part of its slithering immensity. But that did not happen. The Hun fired a devastating salvo at us-high-explosive rounds followed by incendiaries. They struck the creature, blasting it into fragments, into a pustulant rain of filth and hot drainage and spongy tissue that rained to earth and then went up in a massive fire storm as the incendiaries struck.
The soldiers were buried alive in mud and the creature’s excrescence…I survived. I crawled out of the muck and somehow found my feet, blessing the Hun for intervention and begging only one last thing of them: that they would send but one more shell to end my wretched existence.
But that did not happen either.
I saw something coming out of the mist. It walked with jerking, mechanical motions, its arms held out before it. I knew what it was. It was dressed in a rotting bridal gown, holding out gray-skinned, black-veined hands for me. It had no head, but it knew where I was and it had been looking for me for some time. I could hear the rats that nested within, the buzzing of the insects that honeycombed that walking corpse.
I should have run, I should have done something.
But it was my Michele, resurrected-I like to believe-via the tissue that had burrowed below. She came for me and I waited for her with my trench knife in hand. Tears rolled down my cheeks and something inside me withered and went black. As she got closer I could see the rotting lace, the white of purity stained with corruption-mud and drainage and coffin-slime, a spreading furry fungi.
A stink of fetid graves in my face, she took hold of me and I allowed this last embrace. Somehow, someway, I heard her voice in my mind like the sound of tinkling bells: I AM HERE.
I brought the trench knife down, crying, shrieking, laid open by savage, cruel memory. I brought it down and kept bringing it down, slashing her into a limbless, writhing thing at my feet that I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed and right before it s
topped moving with its obscene graveyard gyrations, the voice again: BUT I LOVE YOU PLEASE PLEASE HOLD ME
I slashed and cut until there was nothing but a reeking, pooling mass of putrescence at my feet and then fell back, struck mad, as carrion beetles came out of her in a black oily flood and rats crawled free and then her belly opened and spewed forth a slimy, shocking pink river of squirming fetal rats that I hacked to bits.
The trench knife still in my hand, splattered with my love’s remains, I staggered off into the mist waiting for the shrapnel-kiss of a shell that never did come.
24
The Conqueror Worms
“Turn and face me, Creel,” came the voice that was oddly eloquent like Death himself yet garbled as if spoken through a mouthful of suet. “Look upon me.”
Creel did as he was told, kneeling there in the mud and slopping brown water, clay packed beneath his fingernails and dirty water running down his face. It was not a voice you could refuse. He looked and his throat filled with hot desert sand, a choking whirlpool of it. His lungs gasping, his eyes refusing to shut out the horror they took in.
The Angel Of Death-for it could be nothing else-was a huge, hulking, bulging mass of muscle, fleshy growths, and corded artery barely contained in a stretched, shining gray skin that was intersected by black suturing, a zigzagging, overlapping maze of it that held it together. It was manlike in form, but bulbous and mounded, its misshapen head bald on one side and sprouting with irregular tufts of long greasy black hair on the other, plated machine-like beneath by a jutting, distorted skull that was trying to burst free, the nose but a skullish cavity, one eye set much lower than the other, black and juicy like a tumor, the other yellow and bright and unbearably sentient.