By the Blood of Heroes

by Joseph Nassise

  Time was running out.

  Burke clambered back inside the wrecked train and hunted through the first couple of cars until he found Williams and Compton. He found Compton tending to his unconscious squad mate.

  “Can you walk?” Burke asked him.

  The other man nodded.

  “The rest of the team are hunkered down in an old shell hole about fifteen feet to the right. Start walking and I’ll be there in a minute to help you; I’m going to get Williams out of here first.”

  Compton struggled to his feet and began to shuffle in the right direction. One of his arms hung at an unusual angle and Burke realized that it was broken.

  Still, a broken arm was better than being blown to bits in a mortar attack.

  Burke slipped his arms underneath Williams’s unconscious form and stood up, taking the young private with him. He adjusted Williams’s weight, getting the grip right so he wouldn’t drop him along the way, and moved to follow Compton.

  He heard the engine before he realized what it was, and by then it was too late.

  Compton had managed to get halfway to the shell hole when the sound of the aircraft’s engine caught his attention. Burke was looking right at him when Compton looked up, caught sight of the aircraft, and then twisted and shook as a stream of bullets slammed into him, sending his body crashing to the ground.

  “No!” Burke screamed, but he knew it was too late.

  The plane roared overhead, the black Iron Crosses on the underside of its wings standing out sharply against the bright red paint that covered them.

  The German ace wasn’t ready to let them go.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  NEAR THE FRONT LINES

  As Richthofen swept by overhead, Burke used the time to make a run for the shell hole where the others were waiting. He heard the scream of the incoming mortar rounds just seconds before he reached the hole. He threw himself and Williams over the side as the shells plunged to earth.

  This time, the spotter got it right.

  The shells slammed into what was left of the locomotive, sending shrapnel flying through the air in every direction. If they’d been out in the open, they would have been cut to pieces, but because they were hunkered down below ground level they managed to withstand the barrage without further injury.

  Jack grabbed him by the arm as soon as the shelling stopped.

  “Now what?” he shouted, trying to be heard over the ringing in all their ears.

  Burke pointed toward the Allied lines a few hundred yards away. “We make a run for it.”

  His brother stared at him. “Are you crazy? We’ll never make it.”

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  If they stayed out here, the enemy would eventually get them, be it Richthofen, the mortar operators, or the German troops who couldn’t be that far behind them on the other side of the wreckage.

  Their only hope was to make it to Allied lines, and there was only one way to do that.

  Run like hell.

  Richthofen circled high above the battlefield, watching and waiting for the right moment. He had no intention of letting Major Freeman and his rescuers escape his grasp.

  He’d already killed one of their number with his last pass, watching with satisfaction as the shells of his Spandau machine guns tore him apart where he stood. When the rest of his companions emerged from that foxhole they were hiding in, he’d dive down and eliminate them as well.

  Look there!” Freeman said, pointing to a spot about halfway to Allied lines, between two large sections of barbed wire.

  Burke looked in that direction, not getting what his brother was pointing at. There were a number of abandoned positions from when the British had retreated after an earlier strike, what looked like half-buried bodies of former soldiers, and . . . an empty machine-gun nest, complete with a Lewis gun still on its tripod!

  “I see it, Jack,” Burke said. “What do you have in mind?”

  Freeman looked skyward, searching for Richthofen’s plane but not seeing it. He knew the German ace wouldn’t be gone for long.

  “Richthofen is going to swoop down on us the minute we leave the cover of this shell hole. There’s no way we can outrun his plane, not over rugged terrain and having to deal with barbed wire at the same time. We’ll never make it.

  “But we can make that gun,” he said, eyeing it greedily. “And if it’s in working order, we can use it to defend ourselves until reinforcements come or until there is a lull in the fighting long enough to make a run for it on our own. What do you say?”

  Graves and Jones were listening in, and they all agreed it was the best option available to them. Burke was ready to rush out and make a run for it, when Jones pulled him back into the hole.

  “Hang on a minute, Captain,” the other man said. He fished around amid the debris near the edge of the shell hole and picked up a shiny piece of metal that must have come from some interior section of the locomotive. Jones settled on the edge of the shell hole, facing Allied lines, and began catching the sunlight with the metal and flashing it toward the infantry men in British uniforms that he could see manning the Allied line.

  There was no response.

  Jones tried again.

  Still no response.

  “I don’t think it’s going to work,” Burke began and just then it did. One of the soldiers in the trench flashed a message back to Jones, who read it with a smile before flashing out a reply.

  “What did he say?” Burke asked.

  “I told him we are Americans with my first message and asked him not to shoot us when we make a run for it. He must not have believed me. He asked me who won the World Series last year.”

  Burke frowned. “But the Series was canceled last year.”

  “Exactly. And when I told him so, he knew we are who we say we are.”

  “So he’s not going to shoot?”

  Freeman laughed. “I sure as hell hope not. Getting shot by our Allies after surviving all this would really put a damper on the postmission celebration.”

  Burke definitely agreed.

  They were getting ready to make a run for it when noise from behind them caught their attention.

  Burke and Freeman turned around, only to be met by the sight of a pack of shambler hounds clambering up the side of the train’s wreckage.

  “What the hell are those?” Burke asked.

  “Hounds,” said Freeman, “now run!”

  Without waiting to see if he followed, Freeman leaped to his feet and ran for it.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  TOWARD THE ALLIED LINES

  From high above, Richthofen’s superior eyesight saw one of the Americans, he didn’t know which, burst from the shell hole and make a run for the Allied lines.

  That was the signal he’d been waiting for.

  He banked his plane over to the left and headed for the ground in a steep dive.

  Burke saw the strange new shamblers charging toward him across the crater-strewn ground and didn’t need to be told twice that it wasn’t a good idea to stick around and see what happened. Nothing that moved that fast or had that many teeth was ever friendly.

  He screamed at Graves and Jones to run for it, then scooped up Williams’s unconscious form and charged out of the shell hole in their wake.

  Burke kept his gaze locked firmly on Freeman’s back, letting that be his guide. He concentrated on putting each foot down on solid ground and pumping his legs as fast as he could get them to go.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the British men who were lining the trenches raise their guns to their shoulders, getting ready to unleash a volley. With his arms full, he couldn’t even wave them off.

  But when the shots were fired, neither he nor Graves nor Jones were targeted, but rather the pack of shamblers that was closing in behind them. Burke only realized they were that close when the skull of the nearest creature exploded from a well-placed shot, splattering him with gore.

  He forced himself to run f
aster.

  Richthofen brought his Fokker triplane racing along the battlefield at just a few dozen feet above the ground. He could see the Americans running for safety in the distance, and he had no intention of letting them reach their goal.

  In his anger and excitement, he triggered his guns before he was fully in range.

  Freeman reached the barbed wire and spent a few precious seconds searching for a way through the barrier. At last he found it, a long vertical slit that some earlier sapper must have cut in the wire, and he pulled the sides apart and slipped through, doing his best not to look back, knowing that it would only slow him down.

  He charged forward the last few yards and threw himself into the foxhole, scrambling for the machine gun.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the approaching aircraft and heard the sound of its guns long before it was in range.

  Burke heard the growl of the Spandau guns and knew Richthofen had returned, but he could only keep his legs churning forward and pray that he would be quick enough to save himself and Williams. The foxhole next to Freeman’s was only a half a dozen yards away now. They were so close . . .

  Something grabbed his ankle and yanked him off his feet.

  Williams’s unconscious body went tumbling away from him.

  Richthofen saw the hounds take down one of the Americans and smiled in satisfaction. His eyes gleamed and fury rose in his heart as he came swooping in like the avenging eagle on his personal crest, determined to punish those who dared stand in his way.

  His finger tightened on the trigger . . .

  Freeman jumped up behind the Lewis gun, pulled the charging handle, and let loose with a stream of bullets directed at the Fokker triplane as it came across his field of vision.

  The bullets slammed into the aircraft directly in front of the cockpit, sending bits of wood and canvas flying away through air, and riddling Richthofen with .303 mm rounds that tore through his flesh as if it were paper.

  He watched as Richthofen reacted like any good pilot would do when faced with the same circumstances, pulling back on the stick and climbing nearly straight up in an effort to evade the guns. Freeman thought Richthofen had miraculously survived to fly another day until he watched the aircraft reach the apex of its arc and then just twist over and come speeding back down toward the earth in a completely uncontrolled fall.

  The triplane sped downward, faster and faster, slamming into the earth nose first somewhere behind the German lines.

  Freeman couldn’t believe it.

  He’d shot down the Red Baron!

  Freeman’s timely intervention kept Burke from being splattered all over the landscape by Richthofen’s machine guns, but it also left Burke to deal with the shambler that had seized his ankle and yanked him off his feet.

  For once Burke didn’t mind. He was tired of running, tired of backing down from a fight for the greater good of the unit. Now all he wanted to do was avenge the death of his friends, and the shambler in front of him made the perfect target.

  Like the shamblers they’d seen feasting on Strauss’s body and the ones Freeman had seen at the testing facility, this shambler moved with far more dexterity and cunning than any Burke had ever encountered. No sooner had it pulled him off his feet than it was scrambling to overwhelm him on the ground, trying to pin him beneath it where it could rake at him with both its hands and feet.

  Burke caught hold of the creature’s limb and executed a well-timed judo throw, tossing the creature over him, giving him time to scramble back to his feet before it came charging again.

  This time he was ready for it.

  As it rushed forward, Burke drew back his fist and fired a solid right hook into the creature’s chin, lifting it off its feet and sending it toppling over backward.

  Before it had a chance to recover, Burke flung himself atop it, using his right hand to pin its neck to the ground. He raised his left hand, the mechanical one, and plunged it directly into the creature’s chest, smashing through the rib cage and wrapping his fingers around its spine.

  Grinning savagely at the creature pinned beneath him, he tore its backbone in two.

  The shambler snapped at him as he climbed off it, still alive but unable to get up with its spine severed in two. As Burke staggered to his feet, he heard cheering and turned to see a squad of British soldiers headed his way, led by Jones.

  Gathering Williams in his arms, Burke went to meet them.

  Epilogue

  Burke stared at the piece of paper that Colonel Nichols was extending toward him as if it were a deadly snake filled with poison, with the promise of a long, slow death. Reluctantly he took it, doing what he could to summon the nerve to look at what it said.

  Word had come in several hours before, but Burke was still numb from the news. Two massive airships, sister crafts to the one Burke had destroyed at the facility near Verdun, had taken off from undetermined locations. One had crossed the English Channel and bombed London while, less than an hour later, the other had moved down the American coastline to do the same thing to New York.

  It was his worst nightmare, magnified a thousandfold.

  Then Nichols had shown up, paper in hand.

  “You’ve earned the right to see this,” he said quietly, handing it to Burke.

  It was a signals traffic report, the kind of thing that was routinely used to collect information being relayed from one location to another, usually by telegram. Burke recognized the three-digit code in the upper-right corner indicating that the traffic had originated from the embassy in London and that it had been sent with the proper encryption.

  The first telegram was dated several hours earlier.

  ENEMY AIRSHIP OVERHEAD. STOP. ANTI-AIRCRAFT BATTERIES INEFFECTUAL. STOP. BOMBS ARE FALLING. STOP.

  Burke stared at the words, willing them away, as if by sheer force of thought he could wipe the words from the page and by doing so turn back the clock and keep the horror from engulfing them all. The universe, however, refused to hear his plea.

  He knew what the next cable was going to say long before he shifted his gaze lower on the page to read it.

  GAS AFFECTING LIVING AND DEAD ALIKE. STOP. WINDS CARRYING IT THROUGH THE CITY. STOP. ALL PERSONNEL ORDERED TO REMAIN INDOORS. STOP. THE DEAD HAVE TAKEN TO THE STREETS. STOP.

  Like a horrendous train wreck that he just couldn’t look away from, Burke lowered his gaze to the next cable on the page, the paper rustling in his shaking hands.

  CONTACT WITH WHITEHALL LOST. STOP. MAIN GATE OVERRUN. STOP. THE DEAD ARE IN THE BUILDING. STOP.

  And then, finally, one last communication. Just a single line with a notation that this one had been sent in the clear.

  GOD HELP US ALL.

  “We lost contact with the embassy shortly thereafter,” Nichols said gently.

  Burke nodded. He didn’t need to be told what happened after that.

  Thousands of pounds of gas had been dropped on each city during the attacks, turning untold scores of people into flesh-hungry ghouls. No one knew how many were dead, either in the initial bombardment or in the hours that followed as the creatures spread through the cities.

  Plans were being made to destroy the bridges and tunnels leading to Manhattan in the hope that cutting the island off from the rest of civilization might be enough to contain the spread of the creatures. Five million people were being written off, just like that. Burke had to fight not to be sick at the very thought of it.

  And England? No one knew what the hell they were going to do about England. London was not so easily segregated from the rest of the country . . .

  “There was no way you could have known, Burke. You were there to pull Freeman out, that was all.”

  Burke didn’t say anything. In his mind’s eye he kept seeing the name on that massive airship.

  Megaera.

  One of the three Furies of Greek mythology.

  He didn’t have to ask to know that the other two ships had been named Alecto and Tisiphone and cursed himself
for not seeing it earlier.

  If only he’d made the connection in time . . .

  After several moments of silence he looked up and asked the question he’d been waiting several hours to ask. “Any word on Sergeant Moore or Corporal Manning, sir?”

  Nichols shook his head. “I’m sorry. Nothing. But you’ll be the first to know, Captain.”

  Burke wondered if that were true.

  Two hundred miles away, Dr. Eisenberg stared at the prisoner in front of him. He was a hulking fellow, with the grizzled look of a veteran, and had passed all the physical fitness tests he’d been given.

  He was a perfect choice for testing the next phase of the process.

  The fact that his injury kept him from remembering who or what he was made his selection even more interesting.

  Eisenberg finished setting the dials on the control panel and stepped back out over to his companion.

  “Are you ready, Sergeant?” he asked.

  The former American nodded.

  “Good,” said Eisenberg. “I know this procedure will help you remember some of what you have lost. I’m going to strap you down so you don’t injure yourself while you are in an unconscious state, all right?”

  Again the nod.

  Eisenberg wondered if the subject might regain his capacity for speech after the procedure as well.

  The subject lay down on the table the doctor selected for him and then lay docilely while the straps were secured about his arms and legs.

  Eisenberg pretended as if he’d forgotten an important document from his office and excused himself from the room, taking care to lock it behind him.

  Returning to the control panel, he flipped a few switches.

  In the room on the other side of the viewing screen, a pale green gas began to flow.

  Night fell over the battlefield, and the usual flood of rats emerged from their warrens to see what might be available to feast upon that evening.