Zombie Pulp

15

The Sleep of Reason

Tucked away in a little funk hole scraped into the side of the trench, just large enough to curl up in, Creel managed to drift off around five and the dreams came for him right away.

He saw the sun, buried behind layers of leaden clouds, extinguished like a match dropped in a puddle. It sought its grave and moist earth was thrown in after it and it was simply no more.

Then all across No-Man’s Land, there was a stillness and a waiting; morbid seeking shapes drifting about with a lonesome whispering and a stifled, subterraneous breathing. For here it was always the witching hour and the grinning throng of tomb-shadows moved like an October breeze through a sullen churchyard with a sighing breath of rainy crypts. Their cadaverous moon-faces gave praise to the night and the rain and the human wreckage. They were formed of red casket velvet and white mannequin wax. They hid in shadowy pools of reeking water, the black blood of sunken graves, showing themselves only when there was movement and the beating of living hearts.

Creel moved with them, as them.

The legions of the dead.

They were aware, they were sentient, they were driven and relentless and unspeakably hungry. From the pestilent deeps of Flanders they moved, slinking and slithering through sewer-damps and flooded trenches like disease germs in clotted arteries. Throughout this night and many more there would be scratchings at parapets and whispers in the shadows, a clawing at the doors of ruined village houses. Fungous faces would be pressed to shuttered windows and crumbling fingers would scrape against casements. The dead would wake in flooded cellars and ooze down the throats of fire-blackened chimneys and expunge themselves from waterlogged shell-holes.

But they would come.

And every night there would be more.

And he would be one of them, never knowing or fathoming the stillborn depths of their decaying minds.

Together, they marched into the night.

When Creel woke up, a scream on his lips, three fat-bellied rats were gnawing on his boots.