Feeling generous, Richthofen said, “I’m going to invite Taschner to join us for the launch. He deserves to understand the impact his contributions will have on the war effort. Besides, it will be good to finally meet the man.”
“As you wish, Herr Richthofen.”
Which, when you got right down to it, Richthofen thought, was what this was all about anyway. What he, Manfred von Richthofen, wanted. Nothing else really mattered.
Chapter Thirty-five
ON THE ROAD TO VERDUN
With the help of a map found on the body of an oberleutnant at the scene of the ambush, Burke led the squad away from the farmhouse less than five minutes after the last shot had been fired. He was concerned that the truck fire would bring reinforcements, so he cut eastward through the forest rather than follow the contours of the road as he’d originally intended. He set an accelerated pace, worried as he was about what might happen to Freeman if word of the patrol’s destruction should reach the wrong ears. The men, too, seemed to understand the necessity; if they did not, they at least kept their complaints to themselves.
The forest was full of well-cleared trails and they made good time, covering several miles in short order. When they stopped for a break, Burke gathered the men together for a quick strategy session.
“We’re about two and a half miles from our objective. Without the intel from the partisan group, we don’t know what kind of defenses to expect at the camp, so from this point on we make as little noise as possible. If you need to communicate on the trail, use hand signals only. I want everyone to keep their eyes peeled as well. The last thing we want to do is walk into an enemy observation post.”
At the rate they’d been traveling, Burke anticipated that they would reach their objective, a thickly wooded area that overlooked the west side of camp, by late afternoon. They’d observe the target from that location and hopefully get an understanding of where Freeman was being kept. Once they knew that, they could decide on a specific plan to get him out.
The last section of their march proved uneventful. They made good time and reached the outer reaches of the camp right on time. But when they reached the tree line and looked out from cover at their objective, they received a major shock, leaving many of them staring openmouthed in surprise.
Stalag 113 was no more.
In its place was a battle-torn and fire-ravaged shell that had ceased functioning as a POW camp and was now nothing more than a silent witness to the catastrophe that had claimed it.
Several of the outlying buildings were nothing more than smoldering ruins from which smoke still drifted. Large holes had been torn in the fence line, and one of the guard towers looked like it had been smashed flat by a giant’s foot. For a moment Burke wondered why they hadn’t seen the smoke during their approach, then realized the thick tree cover had prevented them from doing so. Now they couldn’t miss it, just as they couldn’t miss the bodies littering the ground inside the compound.
Jack might be down there, dead or dying, Burke thought and was surprised by the anxiety it caused. He hadn’t thought he had any feelings left for his half brother, especially not good ones.
With a wave of his hand, Burke led the squad forward.
They stopped just inside the broken front gates and surveyed the death and destruction before them. Bodies lay everywhere they looked. Some were dressed in the bluish-gray uniforms that were the hallmark of the kaiser’s army while others wore lighter gray coveralls with the letter K on their backs, an abbreviation Burke knew was used to reflect their status as prisoners of war. Strangely, the positions of the bodies made it clear that the two groups had died side by side manning the barricades against what appeared to be a third group.
Just who, or rather what, they’d been defending against became clear a few yards deeper in the camp as Burke and his squad stumbled over the corpse of their first shambler.
This one had been cut almost in half at the point just below its ribs. The upper half of its body lay at an angle to the lower half, connected by only a few ragged strands of tissue near the spinal column. The creature’s guts were spread out along the ground beside it. The shambler was dressed in a green jumpsuit, now stained dark with blood. Burke was about to step over it and move on when what he was seeing actually registered on the conscious side of his brain and brought him up short.
The shambler was dressed and not in the usual rags. No, this one was wearing a drab, olive-colored jumpsuit that clearly served as some kind of uniform and a new one at that.
Sonofabitch.
The realization forced him to look closer at the corpse, which caused several other differences to spring out at him.
Most shamblers he’d encountered were physically damaged from whatever violent act had taken their life before they were brought back as one of the walking dead. If they had been dead long enough, they might have even started to rot. This particular shambler looked physically intact. In fact, if you ignored the thick black veins visible beneath the creature’s skin and the fact that its torso had been all but cut cleanly in half, it actually looked, well, healthy.
That’s not right.
Burke squatted down next to it to get a closer look.
To his untrained eye, there seemed to be some evidence that the creature’s face had undergone physical changes during the resurrection process, not the least of which was a bony ridge running from the nose, up over the top of the head and down the back of the skull. Its fingers were elongated, and there was an extra joint on several of them. The fingernails had thickened and grown out by several inches, creating a natural weapon that, judging by the dried blood and scraps of flesh caught beneath them, had been useful in the fight that had taken the creature’s life.
“What is it, Captain?” Graves asked, noting his interest in the body.
As Burke glanced in the professor’s direction, the shambler at his feet opened its eyes and lunged for him from the waist up.
It took a split second for Burke to realize he’d never move fast enough to get out of the way, to see the shambler’s lips open revealing a mouth stuffed full of row after row of sharp-looking teeth, to hear Graves’s shout of surprise as if from miles away . . .
The top of the shambler’s head blew apart just before the sound of the rifle’s report reached Burke’s ears, and the creature flopped back down against the hard ground, dead once more.
His heart pounding, Burke looked up to find Jones lowering his rifle from his shoulder, a thin wisp of smoke drifting from the end of the barrel.
The two men eyed each other.
Then Graves broke the spell by passing between them as he threw himself down next to Burke in his eagerness to examine what was left of the shambler.
“Did you see that?!” he exclaimed, acting like a kid in a candy store. “It’s got fully articulated . . .”
Burke tuned out the rest. He climbed to his feet and found Charlie standing next to him, ready to help. That made him realize how shaken he was by the shambler’s attack; he hadn’t heard his sergeant approach.
“You all right?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah, I’m good,” he told him, then he raised his voice so the others in the squad could hear him. “Double-check any shambler carcass you come across. There’s plenty of ammo lying around, so don’t hesitate to put a bullet through every skull in order to be sure they are dead; we don’t want these things getting back up again when we’re not looking.”
They had no idea how many of the undead might still be moving on the base, so they stuck together, wanting the increased firepower they could bring to bear. Splitting into pairs might have made the work go faster, but it was a risk Burke was unwilling to accept. If one of their isolated teams ran into a pack of live shamblers, they’d be overwhelmed in seconds, just like the base’s original inhabitants. No, they’d stick together, even if it took all day to cover the base in its entirety.
They moved quickly but carefully, checking each corpse for signs of life by nudging it wit
h the barrel of a rifle or the sole of a boot while a partner kept a bead on its skull with his own weapon. If it didn’t move, and it was human, they checked to be sure it wasn’t the corpse of Major Freeman and then searched it for anything useful—ammo, grenades, even cigarettes. Those they found were quickly confiscated and passed around.
Every building had to be searched to ensure that there weren’t any shamblers hiding in the shadows, so they developed a system to reduce the risk. Two men would wait on either side of the door, weapons ready, while a third would kick it in. The minute he did so the others would spin around the doorjamb and take out anything waiting inside. When the first room was cleared, they moved on to the next. It was time consuming, and the sheer tension of expecting a group of shamblers to come charging out of every doorway had their nerves on edge. Several times they were forced to put down an injured but still struggling shambler, but thankfully they didn’t encounter any uninjured ones roaming the grounds.
When they’d cleared all but the large, two-story building that appeared to be the base headquarters, Burke headed in that direction, hoping to find some answers. They still hadn’t found any evidence that Jack had ever been here and the idea that they had come all this way for nothing was not sitting well with him.
Chapter Thirty-six
HEADQUARTERS BUILDING
A staff car was parked just in front of the building. The car’s windshield was cracked and its tires shredded to ribbons. It was surrounded by the half-eaten bodies of several German soldiers. A handful more bodies, both human and shambler this time, led up the stairs and through the shattered front doors of the building. Burke surveyed the carnage, eventually deciding that the command staff had tried to make a run for it and had been forced to retreat back inside the house when the shamblers attacked.
A quick search of all but the commandant’s office confirmed that the rest of the house was empty. They left the office for last, because of the barricade that guarded the entrance. The men assigned to hold the position had died where they stood, but the doors beyond were still intact and gave Burke some hope that there might be someone still alive in there who could give them some answers.
Those hopes were dashed, however, when they broke down the doors and discovered the commandant, one Oberst Schulheim, according to the plaque on his desk, sitting in his chair, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. On the floor nearby was a second man, this one lying in a puddle of his own blood. From the bullet holes in the back of his white lab coat it was clear that he had been shot from behind by the commandant. A briefcase lay near the man’s outstretched hand, the files inside spilling out across the floor.
While Charlie checked the rest of the room, Burke walked over, scooped up the files, and began looking through them.
They were in German, but Burke was still able to recognize their contents as scientific notes of some kind. The long chemical formulas were a dead giveaway. He could pick out certain words here and there, mostly names, like that of Manfred von Richthofen. In fact, Richthofen’s name appeared in various places in several of the files, which Burke found curious.
“Anything interesting?” Charlie asked, from where he was currently rifling through the papers on the commandant’s desk while trying not to get the dead man’s blood on himself.
“I’m not sure,” Burke replied, still looking at the papers. “Ask Graves to come in here, will you?”
Charlie nodded and stepped outside to find the professor.
While he waited, Burke tried to quench the sense of unease growing in his chest. The intelligence they’d received claimed Jack was being held at this facility, but so far they had found neither hide nor hair of him. If he’d been here, he was gone now.
With no clue as to what might have happened to him or where he might have gone, their options were severely limited. Occupied France was an awfully big place. Jack, if he was still alive, could be anywhere within its boundaries. Hell, Burke thought, at this point he could be anywhere within the German Empire.
Equally disturbing were the events that had apparently unfolded prior to their arrival. How had a group of shamblers gotten loose among the general population of the camp and gone on a feeding frenzy, attacking guards and prisoners alike? It was clear that faced with a common enemy, the two groups had banded together in an attempt to stop the threat, but what wasn’t clear was how it had all started. He could guess at the end, though; large gaping holes in the outer fence suggested the surviving shamblers had forced their way out of the camp only to disappear into the depths of the forest.
Where they were now was anyone’s guess.
Charlie returned at that point with Graves in tow, stopping Burke’s musings. Burke handed the professor the files he’d been looking at and asked him to translate as best he was able.
It didn’t take him long. “Hmm,” Graves said, as he looked them over. “These look to be records of experiments, some current, some going back several months. This one is from February, this one from the November before that, and this one . . . wait a minute. What’s this . . . ?”
Graves began reading aloud, mumbling about chemical reactions and methodologies to get specific populations to react within certain guidelines and . . .
The professor abruptly stopped talking to himself, flipped forward several pages, read some more, and then collapsed into a nearby chair, a shell-shocked look of horror on his face.
“It can’t be,” he said, more to himself than the others.
Burke heard him clearly, though, and something in Graves’s tone sent shivers up his spine. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good news, and that made him nervous.
“Talk to me, Graves,” he said. “What do they say?”
The professor looked up, and in his eyes Burke saw that wild look that people get when they’re on the verge of panicking. The man kept glancing down at the pages of the file in front of him and then around the room, like a caged animal searching for a way out.
“Take it easy, Professor,” Burke said. “It can’t be all that bad.”
But apparently it was, for rather than answering, Graves began flipping through the file again, frantically rereading certain sections and muttering to himself. “No . . . no no no . . .”
That was as much as Burke could take. “What the hell’s going on, Graves?!”
The professor started and then visibly pulled himself together. He turned to Burke and took a deep breath.
“They’ve found a way to modify the corpse gas so that it affects both viable and necrotic tissue.”
Viable and necrotic.
Living and dead.
Burke couldn’t believe what he was hearing. If Graves was right, the implications were staggering. The war would be over in a matter of days, the kaiser’s army sweeping over the Allied defenses as the gas turned everyone it touched into flesh-eating monsters.
“Are you sure?” Burke said at last, when he’d found his voice.
“No,” Graves replied, “but I think I know a way to test my theory.”
He got to his feet, handed the files to Burke, and disappeared out the door. He was only gone a moment; when he came back, he was dragging the corpse of a shambler by its heels.
“Don’t just stand there; give me a hand with this,” he said, when he realized the other two men were staring at him in surprise.
Charlie jumped to help, and they managed to get the corpse up onto the commandant’s desk. Like the shambler that had attacked Burke earlier, this one too was dressed in a green jumpsuit. Graves pulled a knife off his belt and began to cut the clothing off the body, explaining as he went.
“I’ve examined hundreds of shamblers over the last several months. Most were frontline soldiers killed in the line of duty and raised by a touch of the gas, only to be killed a second time by our troops.”
He finished cutting the jumpsuit open and peeled it back, revealing the shambler’s gray skin.
“Every shambler I’ve examined had had two sets of mor
tal wounds as a result, the one that most recently ended its unlife and another, earlier wound that served as the original cause of death. If the information in the files is accurate, if our enemy has, indeed, managed to alter the composition of the gas enough to impact living tissue . . .”
“ . . . then we should only see one set of injuries,” Charlie finished for him.
“Sergeant Moore is correct,” Graves replied, bending over to examine the corpse more closely. “This should only take a few minutes.”
Burke didn’t want to watch. Excusing himself, he stepped outside for a bit of fresh air, pulling the pack of cigarettes he’d been carrying since this whole mess started out of the inside pocket of his uniform as he went. One final cigarette stared back at him. He hesitated for a moment, muttered a low “Fuck it,” and then lit up.
A few minutes later, Graves came out the front door, wiping black shambler blood off his hands with a towel he’d picked up from somewhere inside. Charlie followed close behind. Seeing the troubled expressions on their faces, Burke asked, “Well?”
“One set of injuries. Definitely postmortem,” Graves said.
“Which means what, exactly?” Burke didn’t want there to be any room for misunderstanding.
“Either that . . . man in there died of some internal injury, a heart attack, maybe even a stroke, something that might not be obvious any longer due to physical changes incurred during the resurrection process, or else the files are correct and he was alive when he was exposed to the gas.”
Shit.
Chapter Thirty-seven
STALAG 113
Burke opened his mouth, not yet knowing what he was going to say to Graves but knowing he had to say something, when a sharp whistle caught his attention.
Glancing toward the sound, Burke saw Private Jones standing in the watchtower by the gate, pointing frantically to something out on the road.
By the Blood of Heroes Page 25