Zombie Pulp

18

The Dugout

When Creel came awake there were hands on him. The hands of men. A shadowy face said, “Easy, mate. We found you out there. We brought you back. Quiet now. There’s Hun patrols about.”

The last thing he could remember were those creeping children, then running, hiding, dragging himself along on his belly, half out of his mind if not all the way. He must’ve went out cold. Something. He could not remember. Only a braying voice I want Creel! He’s one of ours…

– he bolted upright, sweating, shaking, feverish. His teeth chattered and a canteen was pressed to his lips. Then a flask of rum. He calmed inch by inch, breathed, smoothed out the wrinkles and unsightly folds like he was an unmade bed. Even in the dimness he knew he was still with the 12 ^ th Middlesex, because that was Sergeant Kirk over near the gun slit in the dugout wall, scanning the terrain.

“How’d you get way out here, Creel?”

Burke…oh Jesus, Burke.

“I don’t know. The barrage…everything was torn up…bodies everywhere…I didn’t know which way was which.”

“You’re not alone,” one of the Tommies said.

“Where is this place?”

“It’s a dugout,” Kirk said. “An old cavalry post the Hun overran last winter.”

“How far are we from our lines?”

“Difficult to know,” Kirk said. “I’m afraid the lines have been scrambled. My best guess is we’re a few miles off.”

There were two men with Kirk: Privates Jameson and Howard, both young, both scared, both looking like their mouths were filled with something they could not swallow down. It was near dawn and slowly the dugout began to fill with a soft bluish illumination. The dugout was more or less intact, though the far wall was crumbled as if it had taken a heavy shell. The rest was sandbagged, the brushwood roof heavily timbered. Rubble scattered across the floor, a few rat skeletons in the corner.

“Tonight,” Kirk said. “After dark, we’ll make our move. Until then we’d better sit tight.”

By daylight, Creel peered out the doorway and what he could see was a gutted landscape that could have been anywhere in Flanders. He saw a line of deep-hewn trenches and sandbagged ramparts stretching around the dugout, some of it collapsed, most of it flooded. Beyond the trenchworks was just a flat expanse crated by shell-holes, a few stumps rising up, what looked like the surviving chimney of a stone house in the distance.

Not much else save for a few skeletons rising from the water and a stray skull that was perched atop a trenchknife sank into one of the sandbags like some sort of sentinel.

“We found two Hun last night,” Howard said. “They was skinned. Right down to the muscle.”

Sergeant Kirk shushed him, grumbling about horror stories and nonsense and the slow degradation of the British Army.

Creel had to wonder what other stories Howard knew. Or Jameson. Or Kirk. Because there was no way by this point they hadn’t at least heard things if not necessarily seen them. It seemed unlikely that he himself could have had several encounters with walking dead things and they not a one.

But he had to ask himself: Are you sure? Are you sure this isn’t something more personal? That thing last night, it called you by name and you know it did. Don’t bother pretending otherwise or deluding yourself by saying you were hallucinating. You know better. The dead know you. Maybe all these battlefields you been sneaking around in all these years, all the graveyards you’ve poked into…maybe they’ve laid claim to you…

“You all right, Mr. Creel?” Jameson asked.

“Yeah.” He wiped sweat from his face. “I’ll be better when we get back to our lines.”

“You and me both, mate.”

Creel crept out into the trenches with Kirk to have a better look, but there was little to see but the gouged battlefield, a mass of barbwire clustered about a thicket of denuded trees. With Kirk’s field glasses, he could see that a major operation had been fought here judging by the bomb craters and pitted earth, the spent shell casings in the mud. Over in the thicket, amazingly, there were at least a dozen skeletons tangled up in the wire or tossed right up into the trees themselves, speared through limbs. It was a ghastly, unnerving sight and one that Creel felt he would see for a long time to come. When the wind picked up, a low moaning came from the skeleton forest, the sound of air blowing through hollow skulls and ribcages. It sounded like someone blowing over a bottle…maybe dozens of them.

Everyone was hungry but there was no food to be had and precious little water. So they waited. And waited. A light drizzle fell all morning and then, by two that afternoon, a heavy fog settled in thick as a tarp. Just beyond the barbwire, the world was a surreal, gloomy place of gauzy mist and leaning, nebulous shapes.

Kirk did not like it. “Too easy for a Hun raiding party to slip up on us.”

He posted himself with Jameson outside, both of them with Enfield rifles but no grenades. They stayed within visual contact and kept watch.

Creel heard his own voice speaking, talking about the barrage, about Burke. When he had finished, he was sobbing. But it was out. It had to come out.

“ You got one of them cigarettes?” Howard said after a time. When he got it lit and took a few calming drags, he stared at the wall, something old unwinding behind his eyes. “I want to tell you something you’ll never write about. But I have to tell it before Kirk gets back. He wouldn’t like me talking of it.”

“ Go ahead,” Creel said, burying the memory of Burke inside him. “I’m listening.”

Howard sighed. “Last night, before we found you, mate, we found something else. It was a tunnel. We couldn’t say whether it was one of ours or one of theirs but Sergeant Kirk got this idea that we should have a look in there, see if we could scavenge some weapons, maybe a few bombs. Awful looking place it was, winding into the hillside like the barrow of a troll from one of them books me mam used to read to me as a boy. Well, in we went and it was a dank-smelling place, mud and water dripping from the roof. The floor sort of mucky and wet. Kirk had hisself a little torch he’d taken off a Hun corpse, but he was using it sparingly as it was just about petered out. So we move along in there and we can smell the dead, but the dead can’t hurt you none, they says, better than the living far as that goes. Pretty soon we’re having trouble walking so Kirk lights his torch and, blimey, all about us is bones. A few corpses, too, all white and puffy, kind of spongy if you stepped on ‘em. But the bones. Well, they was everywhere and it’s not the sort of thing that a bloke likes to be looking at by the light of a flickering torch, now is it? Especially bones with tooth marks in ‘em.

“ Well, that torch, she gives up her ghost and I have to wonder if that ain’t a good thing. Bloody hell, it’s so dark you can’t even see your feet or the nose on your own face. But Kirk wanted to push on, the bastard. So dark, so dark. Things was hanging from the roof on chains…husks, human husks. I saw them before the light died. All stripped down, eaten. Onward we goes deeper into it and it’s like crawling down the throat of something hungry, something with teeth. I suppose it was…well, the quality of that dark which disturbed me clean to my roots, you see. There was something god-awful threatening to it that made my hackles rise and I figured the others felt it too, for about then we heard a funny sort of sound…a rustling, shifting sort of sound like we were in the lair of some sort of beast. We could hear it breathing with a rough, phlegmy sort of sound. Then…well, kind of a gnawing, crunching sort of sound like a big hound makes with a bone and being that there were only human bones and remains in there, well it don’t leave much to the imagination, now does it?

“ About that time, I figure, we hear these steps coming toward us and Kirk, he tells whoever it is to back off because we got weapons and we’ll use them. Retreat, he tells us when those big slapping footsteps keep coming. Get the hell out. Kirk needs no more coaxing, see, he pulls his Webley pistol and fires off a few rounds. Well, about that time he screamed like a little boy seeing a ghostie coming out of a closet. Well, so happens, I looked back and wish to God I hadn’t. In the muzzle flash of the Webley, I saw what he was shooting at…or part of it…it was big, Mr. Creel, much bigger than a man. It was naked, hairless, moving with a sort of side-to-side gait, something that wasn’t any one thing but lots of different things all stitched together…different skins and shiny pelts and something like white blubber maybe…and a face. A blurry white sort of face. And eyes. Big yellow eyes. Well, that’s it and I don’t want to speak of it no more.”

Creel did, of course, becoming very interested when Howard said it was stitched together, wondering what sort of feral horror it indeed was but Kirk came in with Jameson and from the looks on their faces, something had happened and it didn’t look like something good.

“ What-”

Kirk held a finger up, shushing him. His eyes were wild and stark and very close to lunacy. He had seen something and it was devastating. Jameson had a smile on his face that was stupid and mindless, like the painted grin of a wooden puppet. Nobody dared speak. They listened, they waited, they felt around with psychic fingers to make contact with what was out there. And by that point, Creel was certain it was not the enemy. A German patrol would have been welcome.

A sound.

At first he was not certain that he had even heard it: a subtle scratching sound. It could have been a rat, but the way Kirk sucked in a gasping breath, he knew it was not. He moved very slowly over towards the gun slit which gave him a pretty good view of the trench system before him. He saw nothing…but he could hear that scratching and that’s when he knew.

Whatever was out there, it was circling around outside the sandbagged parapet, scratching for a way in like a hungry dog. The trenches themselves were over seven feet deep. You needed a scaling ladder to climb up and over the top. Outside the parapet, another deep ditch had been dug and this to make it that much more difficult for German raiders to make it over the wall. That ditch was slightly deeper, nearly eight feet in depth.

And that’s what scared Creel at that moment, filled his throat with ice and made his scalp creep on his skull. For he could see just the very top of something, possibly a head, moving through the perimeter ditch. This was what had frightened Kirk and Jameson so badly and this was what wanted in: something large enough that an inch of its head could be seen above the sandbags.

An odor was coming into the dugout and it was an odor that Creel knew only too well. It was the rank, suppurating stench of infected wounds and gangrenous tissue, filthy battle dressings and bile. And maybe something beyond that-vomit and corruption and cesspools gassy with decay. It was the smell of the thing out there, something birthed in the ravaged, dead womb of battlefields and maggoty mass graves.

They could hear it raking splintered nails over the sandbags, patient, very patient, but anxious to get at them.

“ What…what is it?” Howard finally whispered.

“ A ghost,” Jameson said in an airless voice.

Kirk licked his lips and kept licking them. “It…I saw it come out of the mist…something gray like a winding sheet…rustling…”

Creel was trembling now, as were the others, some defeated, hopelessly optimistic part of himself wishing it would just go away. His lips and tongue felt thick and ungainly and he didn’t think he could speak to save his own miserable life.

And then he heard a voice, dry and scratching, filled with dirt: “Creel,” it said. “Creel…”

And he almost went out cold at the sound of it, his heart pounding so fiercely he thought it might explode. In his mind, he was seeing that thing out there, that graveyard horror that called him by name-death walking, death stalking-and it rinsed his face of color. There was a scream in his throat but he did not have the strength to let it fly. He tried to stand over near the gunslit and his blood went to his feet and he stumbled over, his fevered mind showing him exactly what was behind that shroud: a distorted death’s-head with eyes like glowering moons, flesh that was acrawl with bloated black flies. Kirk caught him, held onto him, but there was little he could do to bring the blood back into him.

They gave him rum, rubbed some warmth into his face and finally his lips parted and he said, “It called my name.”

Kirk and his two men looked at each other. “There was no voice,” he said.

“ None,” Howard affirmed.

And that’s when Creel knew it was in his head, only in his head, a very private thing, an invitation to a mass for the dead that only he was being summoned to.

“ It got through,” Jameson said, on the edge of hysteria.

Creel figured it would. Sooner or later. There were parts of the parapet that had been destroyed by shellfire and the thing had found one. They could hear it and it was no ghost: slopping forward through the trenches, casting a wake of brown dirty water before it. Closer, closer…

Sergeant Kirk led them out of the dugout and the mist pushed in from all sides, fuming and dank. The splashing sounds seemed to come from every direction, growing louder by the second. Creel could hear the pained rasp of breathing, that stench growing stronger. Finally, Kirk broke to the right and Howard towed Creel behind him. As they made their escape he clearly saw an immense shrouded gray form emerging from the fog.

“ Creel,” it said.