“Of course,” the oberst said, echoing Freeman’s own comment from moments before, his voice practically dripping with false generosity. “Perhaps it might help your decision making to understand the alternatives as well.”
He clapped his hands and turned expectantly toward the door. A moment passed and then the butler came into the room, pushing a serving cart ahead of him. On it was the largest covered platters Burke had ever seen. The aroma of meat basted in its juices filled the room, and Freeman found his mouth watering.
With the help of an assistant, the butler managed to lift the platter off the cart and to place it on the table in front of the oberst. Several of the officers leaned forward in eager expectation.
The butler lifted the lid from the serving platter, and Freeman stared in horror at what was sitting on the table in front of him.
The platter held a man’s torso and head, roasted long enough that the skin had split and the liquefied fatty tissues were spilling out. An apple had been forced into the man’s open mouth and was held there with the edges of his teeth.
That was bad enough, but what made the bile in Freeman’s stomach surge upward toward his mouth was the fact that he recognized the face of the man on the platter.
It was the soldier who’d been removed from the barracks when Freeman had arrived earlier that day.
He made it a few feet away from the table before he was violently sick on the polished wood floor. As he fled the dining room, he could hear Schulheim’s laughter chasing him down the hall as he went.
Chapter Twelve
STALAG 113
Roll call was at six the next morning. The prisoners were roused by the shrill blast of a guard’s whistle and had only a few minutes to assemble on the parade ground outside the barracks. One of Schulheim’s officers showed up and supervised the prisoner count and then, when it was determined that all of them were present, led them over to the mess hall for their morning meal.
Given what he’d seen in the commandant’s residence the night before, Freeman was leery of eating anything put in front of them, but as he watched the other prisoners settle down at the tables with their cup of gruel and hunk of black bread, he decided it was safe enough. The food didn’t do much more than remind him of how hungry he was, and he knew that was part of their captor’s strategy: keep them weak enough that they wouldn’t have the energy to attempt a breakout. The poor food combined with the hard labor he knew would come would be enough to exhaust any man, never mind one who was wounded as he was.
When breakfast was over, they were divided into four groups for the morning work detail. Freeman ended up in the same group as the short, dark-haired man who’d saved him from being beaten by his fellow prisoners when he’d first arrived at the barracks, and Freeman resolved to have a word with him if at all possible.
A pair of guards led them across the camp and over to the muddy field that Freeman had seen the day before. Men were paired up to work together, and Freeman ended up being paired with Mustache from the night before. He did not say anything to Freeman until they had been given their tools, a trowel and a hoe, and were led by the guard to their assigned stretch of ground.
After the guard had left them, the dark-haired man began to hoe the ground with short, sharp motions. Prisoners were not allowed to speak while working so he kept his voice to little more than a whisper and did not look at Freeman when he spoke.
“I believe we got off on the wrong leg, you and I, no?”
“Foot,” Freeman replied automatically.
“I’m sorry?”
“Foot. We got off on the wrong foot. And yes, we did.”
“Ah, foot. Yes, I shall remember that. I am Claude Demonet, capitaine, 29e Regiment d’Infanterie.”
“Jack Freeman, major, Ninety-Fourth Squadron, American Expeditionary Force.”
Claude was quiet a moment, then said, “You understand now? The anger of the men?”
Freeman flashed on the sight of a man’s roasted head and torso artfully arranged on a silver serving platter and quickly shook his head to clear it. He wanted to say something to heal the breach, but what do you say to a man whose companion had been, quite literally, served for dinner the night before?
Finally, he settled and said, “I’m sorry. Was he a good man?”
Claude laughed. “No. But that matters not. No man should suffer such a fate.”
Ain’t that the truth.
“Does that . . . happen often?” Freeman asked, trying to imagine the guards showing up each evening to decide who would be on the menu that night. It was a horrifying thought, all the more so because he could almost believe it.
His fellow prisoner shrugged. “Once every week or so.”
“You can’t be serious!”
Another Gallic shrug. “Perhaps they take their cue from the walking dead. Meat is scarce, and if it’s good enough for them . . .”
Freeman was horrified, as much by the Frenchman’s calm acceptance of the situation as he was by the act of cannibalism itself.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “How can you let this go on?”
Claude kept his head down, but his words carried clearly to Freeman. “Every attempt we’ve made to escape has ended in failure. No one has made it even fifty feet past the fence. The last attempt resulted in the execution of ten men. Five others were thrown in the pit. We could hear them screaming for hours.”
“Surely that is better than sitting around and waiting to be chosen to grace the oberst’s dinner table!”
This time the Frenchman did look up.
“The men who were executed had not even participated in the escape attempt!” he snapped, then spat upon the ground in disgust at the memory. “Schulheim’s way of teaching us a lesson about obedience. All we did was provide more meat for his larder. Better to be alive, and await our chance for revenge, than die outright with nothing to show for it!”
A guard glanced in their direction, and Freeman immediately put his head down and tried to look busy. It must have worked, for the guard did not head in their direction.
After a few minutes, he dared to asked another question.
“The pit? What’s that?”
But Claude would only shake his head and say, “Trust me, monsieur, you do not want to go to the pit.”
Movement from the other side of the fence caught Freeman’s eye, interrupting the follow-up question that was on his lips. He watched as several figures emerged from a barracks-like building in the distance, on the other side of another double set of chain-link fences. They were too far away from them to make out any details, but there was something definitely odd about the way they moved and carried themselves, like injured men who were just learning how to use their limbs again.
Claude caught him watching.
“Geheime Volks,” he said in German and then, at Freeman’s blank look, “the secret people.”
Claude waited a moment for a guard to pass by and then went on.
“I know you are familiar with the walking dead.”
Freeman nodded. At this point he couldn’t imagine a single man, woman, or child in all of Europe being unfamiliar with the shamblers, the kaiser’s death troops.
“What would you say is their biggest weakness?”
That was easy. “They’re stupid,” Freeman said. “Barely controllable, even with those collars they wear. They’re effective as a weapon only in large numbers and with a simple objective before them.”
Claude nodded. “And if they were no longer, how do you say, dumb?”
If the shamblers could be molded into cohesive, interworking units, the stalemate at the front would likely fall apart within weeks, if not days. Right now the control collars allowed them to be sent in specific directions and kept them from attacking the German troops that worked in conjunction with them, but that was all. If the devices could be improved to allow for independent action . . . that would not be a good thing for the Allies.
He said as much to Claude.
The Frenchman nodded his head toward the figures in the distance. “Someone is not satisfied with the status quo and has begun trying to improve the process. Already they are growing more intelligent, more capable of thinking for themselves.”
As Freeman watched, the group of undead soldiers began to follow their leader through a series of simple tasks. March forward ten paces. Stop. Turn left. March forward ten paces. Stop. And so on. If any of them got out of line or seemed to lose focus, a switch would be thrown on the control box and a bright arc of electricity would dance for a moment across the surface of the shambler’s collar, visible even from this distance.
He was about to ask Claude how they were instigating the change when he noticed the Frenchman had frozen in place, stiff with tension. Following the man’s gaze, he saw Oberst Schulheim’s black staff car parked by the edge of the field. The officer in charge of the work detail stood by the rear door, speaking to someone inside the vehicle through the partially opened window. It wasn’t hard to guess who, either. As if to confirm his suspicions, Freeman saw a hand encased in a black leather glove emerge from the window and point directly at them. A moment later the officer signaled to several of the guards standing nearby, and the group headed in their direction.
“Merde!” Claude swore beneath his breath.
“What are you doing?” Freeman hissed, trying to keep his head down and appear like he was working while at the same time keep an eye on the approaching Germans.
“Whatever happens,” Claude told him, “don’t interfere. They don’t like troublemakers, and they have their own way of dealing with them, as you discovered last night.”
The officer, a hauptmann, or captain, and his entourage marched right over to where Claude was standing, waiting for them. The hauptmann didn’t hesitate, just drew back his hand and backhanded the Frenchman for having the audacity to stand in his presence.
“The oberst would like you to join him for supper this evening,” the hauptmann said in passable French, eliciting laughter from the men under his command.
Claude didn’t respond, nor did he resist as the guards seized him by the arms and began dragging him toward the edge of the field.
Freeman, however, was not going to stand for another man being dragged away like a side of beef for the commandant’s table. He rushed forward as fast as his injured leg would let him, carrying the hoe Claude had discarded in one hand and slamming his shoulder into the guard on Claude’s right, knocking him to the ground. Before anyone could react, he’d whipped the hoe around like a baseball bat, getting his hips and shoulders into it, striking the guard on Claude’s left right in the face with a solid thwock. Down he went, too.
“Run!” Freeman cried, as he spun to face the rest of the opposition, not giving any thought to where his new companion might actually run to but determined to provide cover long enough for him to make a break for it.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Claude just standing there watching him.
It was so beyond Freeman’s expectation of what should happen that it literally brought him to a grinding halt. He stood there, staring at the other man in shocked disbelief.
“Why didn’t you run?” he asked.
“Run where?” Claude replied.
That was all the explanation he was ever going to get. At that point the hauptmann stepped forward and smacked the wooden baton he carried across the back of Freeman’s head, causing him to drop the hoe and sending him to the ground. The other guards moved in, kicking him with their heavy-soled boots and beating him with their batons.
Chapter Thirteen
THE PIT
When Freeman came to, he found that a guard had a hold of each arm and they were pulling him along, his feet dragging in the dirt. His head was spinning and he felt like throwing up, which was making it difficult to concentrate.
He must have blacked out momentarily, for when he was next aware of what was going on, he found that he was lying facedown in the dirt next to a large piece of iron. A sharp, discordant sound filled the air as the iron was dragged away, revealing a round hole several feet in diameter.
The pit, he thought dimly.
Even in his dazed state he recognized the pungent odor of death and decay that was rising up out of the ground. He didn’t have long to think about it, though, because at that point the guards bent down, rolled him over a few times to get him closer to the hole, and then pushed him over the edge with a few kicks of their booted feet.
There was a brief moment of free fall and then Freeman struck the floor with bone-jarring force. The guards’ laughter filtered down to him from above, followed by the sound of the lid being dragged back into place.
A bit of light was coming in around the edges of the metal slab and through a handful of holes bored in its surface, so he wasn’t in complete darkness. He pushed himself up on his hands to take a look around and saw that he was sitting in a rough-hewn chamber about ten feet wide with a ceiling about the same distance above his head. Amid the shadows to his left he could just make out what looked to be the entrance to another chamber or possibly a tunnel mouth.
The terrible smell was so strong that it burned his nostrils and cleared his head of the lingering sense of dizziness he’d been feeling. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he was able to see that the ground around him was littered with human corpses in various stages of decay.
Here, what was left of a man’s face was sliding slowly off his skull, the empty eye sockets staring back at him as if in accusation. There a woman’s arm thrust up through a pile of rotting flesh in defiance, the fingers of her hand hooked into a claw. Dozens of corpses littered the floor of the chamber alone, never mind the hundred or more that had been haphazardly stacked against the walls and were now rotting together into a giant mound of decaying flesh.
He’d seen his fair share of horror during the war, but nothing that compared with this! He had to close his eyes and swallow hard several times to keep from vomiting.
Many of the corpses were still wearing the remains of uniforms. He could see several different colors; the horizon blue of the French, the tan or khaki of the British and American forces, even the dull gray worn by the Germans. There were a fair number of darker gray jumpsuits present as well, similar in style and cut to his own, identifying those who wore them as former prisoners. It was clear, though, that the dead prisoners were in the minority.
So where had all the dead soldiers come from?
It had been months since there had been a major battle in this area; the kaiser’s troops had pushed the line west to its current location in midwinter of last year. Any remains collected after that battle would long since have rotted away. Yet he could see the corpse of a French infantryman who didn’t look like he’d been dead for more than a week.
He didn’t have time to investigate, however. As he stepped forward, intending to examine the corpse for any answers it might yield, movement off to his left caught his attention. He turned in that direction, only to see the largest shambler he’d ever seen step out of the shadows at the back of the chamber.
It was a good two and a half to three feet taller than he was, half again as wide at the shoulders, and was covered with knots of muscles that seemed to have grown haphazardly out of control like malignant cancers. It was dressed in the shredded remains of what might have once been a jumpsuit, reminding him of the Frankenstein monster he’d seen in one of those new silent pictures a year or two before the war started.
Freeman suddenly understood why the prisoners had feared the pit.
As it stepped into the weak light, he realized his initial impression was wrong. It wasn’t a shambler at all, for shamblers have no need to breathe, and even from across the chamber he could see its massive chest heaving up and down as it struggled to take a breath against the weight of its own flesh. He could also see the pale white cataracts that covered much of its eyes and suspected that it would have a hard time seeing as a result. The sniffing sound that reached his ears
seconds later added weight to his hunch.
The creature turned its head slowly from side to side, hunting for whatever disturbed its rest, and Freeman went still, hoping to escape notice, but it was not to be. The creature’s oversized head swung in his direction and seemed to lock in on him like a stream of machine-gun fire. With a roar that shook the confines of the small space, the creature rushed at him.
For something so big it moved surprisingly fast, and Freeman had no choice but to throw himself to the side to escape its grasping hands. He landed amid a pile of decomposing corpses with a fleshy smack and tried to scramble away, but he was unable to get any traction as the flesh of the corpse on which he’d landed simply sloughed off against the weight of his hands and feet.
That was all the time the creature needed. It whirled around and snatched his ankle in one of its oversized hands. Without pause it lifted him off the ground and hurled him across the room.
Freeman flew through the air and slammed into the opposite wall, taking the brunt of the blow on his right shoulder and narrowly missing cracking his head open against the stone. He slid to the floor, dazed and disoriented.
The creature was on him in seconds. It bent over him and let out a thunderous roar, like a gorilla claiming its territory, then snatched him up and threw him again.
Freeman bounced off a pile of corpses and crashed to the floor, his head pounding and his thoughts scrambling. He was in trouble and knew it. There was no way he was going to beat this thing on strength alone; he was going to have to find a way to outsmart it.
The creature began to stalk toward him, its feet crushing the remains of what Freeman now assumed were its previous victims beneath each step, its breath wheezing in and out.
His hands scrambled through the muck, searching for something he could use to defend himself as the mutant creature moved toward him. His heart was pounding and his mind was screaming at him to run, but he knew there was nowhere to go. There had to be something he could use . . .
By the Blood of Heroes Page 9