Zombie Pulp

11

Tomb Orchids

The dead waited.

In mud holes and bomb craters and shell pits, in skeleton forests and decimated villages and ruined cellars and filth-bubbling trenches, they waited. Moist with decomposition and sprouting tangles of green moss and rungs of polished white bone, they waited. In flooded ditches and muddy trench walls, in cheap plank coffins and beneath mildew-specked tarps, they waited and would wait. Steaming with rank corpse gas, netted in morbid sheaths of fungi, and exhaling the vile stench of the charnel and tombyard, they were patient.

The rain fell and the mud pooled and the slime oozed beneath a misting gray sky the color of gelatin. The swarming graveyard rats worried at the dead, fed on them, brought their degenerate pink-skinned brood to term in their bellies. The flies covered them in buzzing black shrouds two inches thick and the maggots erupted from mouths and eye sockets, orifices and the lips of green-furred wounds in boiling, squirming masses, ever-fattening themselves on carrion and decay until they burst with wing.

For the dead of Flanders there was silence and the death-watch ticking of eternity…but then something began to happen. Maybe it was in the black soil, the yellow-brown sluicing muck, the water, or the falling rain…maybe it was set loose when a certain barnlike edifice occupied by Dr. Herbert West and his grave-wares was shelled by German artillery. But it was there. It was active. It had potential. It was the catalyst that canceled out death and filled rotting husks with a grisly semblance of animation, a gruesome half-life. Day by day as it grew more concentrated, a toxic effluvium of resurrection, eyes winked open like marbles in tombstone gray faces and mouths yawned wide like clamshells and essential salts, so long dormant, were revitalized into motion. From the muddy, flowing, bubbling bog of No-Man’s Land, faces like rotting weed and cemetery pulp peered into the night, ice-white fingers clawed in the slime as a great furnace of creation began to boil in the primordial ooze and warm amniotic mud of Flanders which was not so different from the primeval seas of earth where life first began.

By night, there was the sound of things pushing up from the swampy landscape, fingers breaking through the crust of graveyard mold, and ruined faces sliding from the mud. Each night, more and more. And beneath the wan, sickly moon of Flanders, in the gray rain and yellow fog and rustling shadow, there was a sound of feeding, gnawing and tearing, the noise of teeth on bone and lips sucking juice.

Each night it grew louder.

And louder.