Just as the creature reached down to take hold of him once more, Freeman’s fingers came in contact with a long piece of narrow bone. He snatched it up as the mutant grabbed him about the waist and lifted him up, pulling him closer to allow it to get a good look at its prey.
Freeman didn’t think, just acted, slamming the jagged piece of bone he held into the creature’s eye.
It screamed, a long howling cry of pain that echoed in his ears, and then dropped him like a hot rock. Blood was spurting from its face in a bright arc as it stumbled backward, its hands raised as if to pull out the offending material but afraid to touch it, and Freeman cast about, looking for his next move.
His gaze fell upon a long strip of treated leather lying nearby, the kind that might have once served as the strap on an ammo bag or haversack, and he snatched it up, gripping it with both hands and testing its strength between them. It was strong, the leather snapping sharply as he pulled against it, and a plan sprang fully formed in his mind as the creature shook its head and turned to face him. It roared in challenge and rushed toward him for the fourth time, no doubt ready to crush the puny figure that had dared to hurt it.
This time he was ready.
As the creature thundered toward him, he timed its approach, forcing himself to stay still despite every instinct screaming for him to get out of the way, waiting, waiting, and then, at the very last second, he made his move. Ducking under its grasping arms, Freeman grabbed hold of one of the many fibrous growths that covered the creature and swung up on its back, just like a child climbing aboard for a horsey ride. As the enraged creature reared upward, Freeman looped the belt over its head and reared back, one end of the belt in each hand, pulling it against the creature’s neck. He locked his knees into the well between the thing’s shoulder blades, steadying his position and giving him the leverage necessary for what was to come.
The creature might have been big, but it wasn’t stupid. It recognized the threat right away and began trying to reach around behind its back to rip Freeman away from his perch, but its overgrown musculature and warped joints wouldn’t allow it to reach that far back. Realizing that he was out of reach, Freeman reared back even farther and pulled with all his might.
When it couldn’t reach him with its hands, the creature threw itself down on its back in a pile of corpses, trying to crush Freeman with its weight while simultaneously drowning him in a sliding pile of decaying flesh.
The position of the corpses worked in Freeman’s favor, however, dispersing some of the shambler’s weight and protecting him from the worst of the impact. When he realized he wasn’t going to be squashed like a bug, Freeman redoubled his efforts, twisting the ends of the belt and hauling backward against the creature’s thickly muscled neck. He could feel its breathing getting more irregular, as it fought both the weight of its own body and the terrible pressure that he was exerting against its trachea. Freeman refused to let go, determined that only one of them was going to live through this encounter and he had every intention of being the one.
It reared up, trying to get to its feet, but then let out a long rattle and toppled over, lying still.
Freeman kept the pressure on for another five minutes, just to be sure.
When he was convinced it was dead, he let go of the strap and crawled away from the oversized corpse.
Time passed, he didn’t know how long, as he sought to recover his breath and calm the beating of his heart. Eventually, when he thought he was ready, he rose to his feet and staggered back over to the creature’s corpse. He stared at it for a long time, trying to understand just what it was he was looking at, and finally came to the conclusion that it was the result of some kind of experiment gone wrong. It lived and breathed like a man, but had the gray skin and black veins of a shambler. The massive size and odd muscle growths supported the notion that whatever it had been, it hadn’t been natural.
That line of reasoning made Freeman remember his initial thoughts about all the bodies surrounding him, and as he turned to examine the closest of those, the body of a man dressed in the uniform of a French soldier, he received another surprise. The thick black veins pressing out against the man’s skin were unmistakably the sign of corpse gas exposure and infection.
He wasn’t looking at the corpse of a man at all, but that of a shambler.
He turned to another body and discovered that it, too, had been one of the Secret People. So were the bodies that he checked on either side of that. Just to be certain, he got up, slogged his way across the room, and checked several bodies over there.
Shamblers.
All of them, shamblers.
Where had they all come from?
Freeman had been making flyovers of the German lines for years, and as a result he knew that the enemy had their own disposal units for the remains of the undead: men whose job it was to gather whatever was left of the shamblers after each battle and dispose of them in giant bonfires constructed just for that purpose. He’d never heard of shambler carcasses being collected and shipped anywhere else. What would be the point? he wondered.
If they weren’t being shipped in from elsewhere, then it was logical to conclude that these carcasses had all come from somewhere right here at the camp.
That’s an awful lot of dead shamblers.
That didn’t make a lot of sense. As far as Freeman knew, shamblers weren’t useful for much beyond pointing them toward the enemy and ringing the dinner bell. They were too stupid to use as servants and couldn’t be trained to carry out even the most menial tasks because of their all-consuming desire to feed.
Yet clearly they were being used for something, given how many of them there were.
He was missing something.
Something important.
Since he was already covered in filth, Freeman grabbed the nearest body without hesitation. He dragged it over to the spot where he’d first fallen into the pit and used the light coming down from above to look the body over carefully.
It had been a young man, somewhere in his midtwenties. He was dressed in a green jumpsuit that looked remarkably like those Freeman had seen the Geheime Volks wearing. He stripped it away and then examined the body as best he could for any sign of injury, any evidence that might point to what had killed the man.
He came up empty-handed.
Could be a lot of things, he told himself. A heart attack. An aneurysm. The wrong kind of chemical exposure. Maybe even poison.
It couldn’t mean what he was thinking it meant.
That the shambler had only died once and that its death had occurred after it had been raised!
How was that possible?
The question nagged at him, poking and prodding at his subconscious, the way his tongue would push at a loose tooth when he was younger, and he spent much of the night pondering the issue until he fell into an exhausted, fitful sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
FIELD HOSPITAL
Burke spent the two days following his meeting with Colonel Nichols regaining strength and working with his new arm. While similar to the previous model, this version allowed for a greater range of motion and was supposed to operate in a smoother fashion. Or, at least, that’s what he’d been told. He hadn’t yet mastered the fine muscle control needed to pull that off and so he spent several hours each day learning how to control the clockwork mechanisms inside the iron and brass framework.
He was standing by the window waiting for his discharge papers to arrive so he could get back to his command when there was a knock at the door. He turned to find a young corporal standing there. The newcomer snapped a salute and then crossed the room to hand Burke a message slip.
“Colonel Nichols’s compliments, sir.”
Burke took the note, glanced at it, and then read it again more carefully. It said:
You’ve been temporarily reassigned to MID, per General Morrissey. Paperwork to follow. Briefing at 1500 hours. Corporal Davis to provide transport.
—Nichols
Burke looked up.
“Are you Davis?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Says you’re supposed to escort me to a briefing.”
“Yes, sir. Colonel Nichols asked me to bring you there straightaway.”
Burke hesitated. “Any idea what it’s about?”
“No, sir. Above my pay grade, sir.”
“Yours and mine both, Corporal,” Burke muttered beneath his breath.
He didn’t like the idea of being reassigned, not at all. He’d been with the 316th Infantry Regiment, 81st Division for longer than he could remember, and he considered many of those boys his personal responsibility. Leaving them behind was not something he’d planned on doing. At least not this side of a pine box, anyway. But there really wasn’t much he could do about it. According to Nichols’s message, the order had been approved by General Morrissey himself, which meant there wasn’t anyone over Nichols’s head with whom he could lodge a complaint.
Still, it didn’t mean he had to disappear without saying good-bye. He turned the message sheet over and wrote a quick note to Charlie, letting him know what had happened. When he was finished, he ordered Corporal Davis to see that it was delivered immediately after he’d taken Burke wherever it was that he needed to go.
His task completed, there wasn’t anything else to do but get on with it.
“All right, Corporal,” he said. “I’m in your hands.”
Davis led him outside and then asked him to wait a moment while he fetched their transportation. Burke didn’t mind; the sunshine felt warm on his face, and it was good to be out in the open air, away from the reek of antiseptic and the stench of wounded flesh that he’d been dealing with for the last few days.
He opened up a fresh pack of Sweet Caporal cigarettes and shook one out. He didn’t care much for the mild tobacco they used, being a Chesterfield man himself, but he’d won the pack in a card game the night before and they were all he had. He lit the cigarette with his pocket lighter and took a deep drag.
“What I wouldn’t give for one of those,” a voice said.
Startled, Burke glanced to the side where he saw a man tied upright to the wheel of a parked artillery wagon a few yards away. Known to the British as Field Punishment #1, this common disciplinary action had been adopted by the AEF and used for lower-level crimes like public drunkenness.
In the early years of Burke’s enlistment, when Mae’s death and his own guilt surrounding the event were both fresh in his mind, he’d had a tendency for getting a bit hot under the collar. Any slight, real or imagined, had been enough to throw him into a fit of temper. More than once he’d ended up both drunk and disorderly, caught fighting while in uniform or verbally insulting an officer. As a result, he knew just what it was like to stand without chance of relief for hours at a stretch, your muscles burning with pain. It was that very knowledge that caused him to impulsively honor the man’s request.
He walked over, held the cigarette up to the prisoner’s lips, and let him take a drag.
“Damn, that’s good,” the prisoner, a corporal by the single chevron on his shoulders, said. “Thanks.”
Burke nodded. “How much longer you got?” he asked.
The corporal glanced up at the sun, checking its position. “Coupla hours, I think. Depends how long that bast . . . um, the lieutenant thinks it will take for his point to sink into my thick skull.”
“And his point was?”
“Anything the lieutenant says is the Gospel truth,” the corporal said quite clearly, and then, under his breath, added, “Even if he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow.”
Burke laughed. He’d met his fair share of officers just like that and knew how infuriating they could be. The man’s good humor in the face of what was sure to be a painful punishment showed a strength and hardheaded stubbornness that reminded Burke of himself.
Replacing the cigarette in the man’s mouth, he said, “Perhaps you’d best keep that, then. You might be here for a while yet.”
Corporal Davis pulled up behind them in a Dodge staff car. Burke said good-bye to the lance corporal and climbed into the front passenger seat.
“What’d he do?” Burke asked, nodding back over his shoulder at the prisoner as they made their way through the camp.
“You mean Jones?” Davis asked. “Shot a German officer.”
Burke stared at him. “They’re punishing him for shooting the enemy?”
The corporal shrugged. “His lieutenant said the shot was too far. Told him not to take it.”
Now Burke understood. It hadn’t been the fact that Jones had shot an enemy officer or even that he’d disobeyed an order not to do so. No, Burke would have bet the rest of his cigarettes that the lance corporal was being punished solely because his lieutenant, whoever he was, hadn’t liked being proved wrong.
“How far?” he asked.
Misunderstanding, the corporal replied, “We’re going to the other side of the camp.”
“No,” Burke said. “How far was the shot?”
Davis grinned. “Nearly a thousand yards. Wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself. It was almost as if that Hun had been smitten by the hand of God himself.”
Burke glanced back, but the corporal was out of sight. A thousand yards with a Lee Enfield? That was some damned fine shooting.
Davis drove to an old farmhouse on the southeast side of camp that had been converted to a makeshift headquarters building. A pair of guards stood out front, but they did little more than nod at Davis as he led Burke inside the building. They then walked past the communications officers working on the first floor and up a flight of stairs. They went down a short hallway and stopped in front of a door at the end. In other, more peaceful times, it would likely have been a bedroom.
“Wait here a moment,” Davis said, then turned, knocked, and disappeared inside. He was only gone for a moment; when he returned, he ushered Burke inside, closing the door behind him.
The bedroom furniture, if that was indeed what the room had originally been used for, was long gone. A table and chairs were set up in the middle of the room, and maps of the front were tacked to most of the available wall space. The smell of freshly brewed coffee hung in the air and Burke eyed the cart standing in the corner with envy. The scent of fresh coffee had him salivating where he stood.
Colonel Nichols was already there, along with three other men. Burke recognized two of them; Lieutenant Colonel Bishop was the division commander and in charge of the six units stationed along this stretch of the front, while Brigadier General Morrissey held overall command authority for the entire sector. Both men were heavy hitters, with more command authority than Burke ever even dreamed of aspiring to, and he reacted the way officers have been reacting since time began when in the presence of the hallowed brass. He snapped to a textbook perfect salute.
“At ease, Captain,” the general said, waving the salute aside.
Duty taken care of, Burke turned his attention to the stranger.
He was dressed considerably better than the others in expensive trousers, a long-sleeved linen shirt, and a waistcoat. A gold watch chain ran from the button of his waistcoat into the left pocket. Burk noted a topcoat and hat hanging on a rack at the back of the room, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out who they belonged to.
Who was this joker and what was he doing at the front? Burke wondered.
Colonel Nichols handled the introductions, answering Burke’s unspoken question.
“You already known General Morrissey and Lieutenant Colonel Bishop, I assume.”
“Of course,” Burke replied, nodding a hello to each of them. “Good morning, General. Lieutenant Colonel.”
“And this,” Nichols continued, waving his hand in the stranger’s direction, “is Clayton Manning. He’ll be sitting in on our discussion today.”
That was it. No explanation of who Manning was or what his purpose might be. Nor did Nichols’s
matter-of-fact tone give Burke any sense of how he should feel about the civilian’s presence. Manning looked familiar to Burke, but he couldn’t place where or when he might have seen him.
He shook hands and was surprised by the strength in the other man’s grip. He might be dressed a bit like a dandy, particularly for a visit to the front lines, but there was no doubting the fact that Manning was a man who wasn’t afraid of a little hard work.
Right now, Burke needed to figure out what he was doing in a room with the division’s top brass and the gung ho colonel from Military Intelligence Division.
“Help yourself to some coffee, Captain,” Nichols said, and Burke didn’t need to be told twice. Cup in hand, he returned to the table and took the seat that Nichols indicated.
No sooner had Burke settled down than a flustered young lieutenant burst into the room, a disorderly stack of papers in hand. He went pale at the sight of senior officers, and for a moment Burke was certain he was going to rabbit out of there, but he just gulped and moved to his place at the front of the room.
“Whenever you’re ready, Stephens,” Nichols said, a touch impatiently, as the lieutenant fussed with his paperwork.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
The young man took a deep breath and then got under way, referring to the large map on the wall behind him throughout the briefing.
“Three days ago, four biplanes from the Ninety-Fourth Squadron took off from the airfield at Toul in response to the sighting of several enemy aircraft near the front.”
The lieutenant’s voice had an odd nasal quality that made Burke hope the briefing wouldn’t last long.
“The squadron engaged an observation balloon and a pair of Pfalz fighters just over the line at Nogent. They were successful in downing all three.”
Good for them, Burke thought.
“The flight leader opted to continue patrol and took his squadron across the line into occupied territory. When they did not return several hours later, they were declared missing in action.
“Word came through official channels two days later that the squadron had been shot down by pilots from Jasta 11, with Rittmeister Richthofen personally claiming credit for the death of the squadron leader.”
By the Blood of Heroes Page 10