Zombie Pulp

3

Memento Mori

The Germans mounted a small, inconsequential, half-hearted offensive that left their corpses scattered about the perimeter like rice after a wedding. The rain fell, bloating the corpses, puffing them up into particularly unpleasant white mounds of decomposition that flowered weird growths of fungi. Though the stink of them was no worse than the usual smell of Flanders, they did season things up to the point where the officers were complaining and that got action. A small group was sent out to bury them in a mass grave.

Creel went with, taking his little box-shaped Brownie camera with him and getting some nice shots of the cadavers. He had quite a collection by that point: corpses blown up into trees, tangled in the wire, sinking in the mud, nested by rats, and-his favorite-a Hun officer who’d been machine-gunned but was held upright in a casual sort of stance by a sharp oak branch that had speared him through the back. When Creel had snapped that one, many months after the First Battle of Ypres, the officer had been nearly picked down to bones by the local ravens and buzzards-sparrows nesting in his ribcage and skull-and he looked very much like a skeleton on a jaunty afternoon stroll, steel helmet tipped at a rakish angle.

It became an obsession for Creel in that war to collect photographs of the dead as it had in other wars he had covered. The Tommies either politely ignored him or were openly offended by what he was doing.

“Why?” Burke asked him one day. “Why do you want pictures of that? Your paper won’t print such things.”

Creel had laughed as he always laughed at the question: a cool, bitter sort of laugh. “I do it because I don’t understand death. I don’t understand the process of life becoming death.”

“Nothing to understand, mate. You get it or you don’t get it, saavy? Me mum would say it’s God’s province.”

“Yes, God’s province, but man’s suffrage.”

The day after the Hun were shoveled into a mass grave, the BEF put together their own little counterattack and with similar results. The trenchlines were stagnant and had been for months, the only thing that ever changed was the amount of corpses left to boil in the sun and melt into the mud of Flanders like wax effigies.

Afterwards, Creel watched the walking wounded coming in-grimy, mud-caked, fatigued, bloody-with their slings and bandages, none of them speaking as if the war had erased their voices and turned them into mutes. They shuffled along, limping and hobbling on swollen feet, a procession of the maimed and he got the feeling that when they signed on beneath the grim shadows of Kitchener posters (WE WANT YOU!), they hadn’t expected it to be like this. All of them had the same dead tombstone eyes gray as puddles of rain. The only difference between them and the dead spread across No-Man’s Land is that they were walking.

Die toten dieser spaziergang?

Without a doubt.

The stretcher bearers brought the real bad ones over to the ambulances for a trip to Battalion Aid or the Casualty Clearing Station and most of them would die before they got there. Creel liked to hang around and catch whatever after-action gossip he could. He listened to three men, blinded by gas, eyes patched with gauze, discuss what they had seen out there and it was more of the same. The gas came down on them in a mushrooming, rolling green cloud, they said, that appeared a luminous yellow by the time it reached them, blown by eastern winds. Then the Hun let loose with a massive barrage of shell-fire and smudge canisters that enveloped the battlefield in a pungent white smoke thick as London fog. Men got lost. They charged in the wrong direction. They fell into flooded shell holes and drowned. Some sank without a trace in the yellow-brown mud. The combined gas and smoke smelled like sulfur, one man insisted. No, more like ether, yes definitely ether, said another. But the third claimed it was the odor of rosin. They could not agree on that but they did agree that hundreds died, both Hun and BEF hard-chargers, suffocating on the fumes, choking, gagging, lungs dissolved to yellow froth that spilled from shrieking mouths.

Creel walked amongst the wounded and discovered that some of them had been out there for days following the last offensive, lying in craters in the falling rain, no food, no water, fighting off the rats who were attracted by the raw, meaty smell of their injuries. Many of them were stark mad and many others in good spirits despite the fact that their wounds were crawling with maggots.

Long after the stretcher bearers and ambulances had moved on, Creel was still standing there in the gray afternoon drizzle listening to the distant thump of artillery pieces and the much closer flapping of sheets that covered the dead at his feet. He took snapshots of them and particularly those where his own dark shadow had fallen over them like Death coming to collect His due.

Smoking a cigarette and muttering things under his breath that even he was not aware of, he stood amongst them, breathing in the cool coppery odor of shattered anatomy and the hot smell of infection, filthy dressings, and corpse gas.

He did not feel as if he were alone.

Curran, Tim

Zombie Pulp

An asphyxiating, cold-crawling fear took hold of him and he could not put a name to it. Only that it was all around him, a pall of rising black death, an unearthly possessed malignant intelligence that seemed to be standing just behind him and breathing cold catacomb breath down the back of his neck. He felt like he was bathing in it. When it passed, he was on his knees, panting, shaking, ignoring a wild, insane urge to lay down with the dead and close his eyes so he might know what they knew.

And in his head, over and over and over again, that German voice: Die toten dieser spaziergang.