Zombie Pulp

20

The Deserted Village

The village sat atop a low series of hills, a great junkyard of scattered rubble, broken walls, burned vehicles and upended carts lying amongst sandbagged gun pits, shattered roads and yawning ditches. The misty skyline was framed by roofless stone cottages, the high standing scaffolds of buildings and leaning chimneys. Weeds grew up from cracked cobbles and leaf-covered pools of water flooded cellars lacking houses to cover them.

Looks like a Medieval siege took place here, Creel thought. He looked around and was satisfied that this place was indeed of Medieval vintage. The mazelike winding streets, the great outer wall (now mostly smashed), the high towers, the houses and buildings crowding in upon one another…yes, certainly Medieval in design. A walled city. Defensible.

He tried to picture it intact and found that he could not; too many wars, too many battles, his mind was only able to sketch in somber grays and reaching darkness, destruction and desertion. Looking around, the city was some immense stripped skeleton of rising bones, femurs and ulnas and rib staves, split roofs like yawning skulls and a shrapnel-pitted church steeple like a reaching metacarpal.

Isn’t it funny how it’s always death with you? Or maybe it’s not so funny at all, boyo. Even when you were a kid, you didn’t care about dogs and cats…not unless they were found rotting in a ditch.

“This…I think this is Chadbourg,” Kirk said to them as they stood amongst the crumbling wreckage.

Chadbourg was one of those places that changed hands a dozen times in the early days of the war. The Huns taking it, then getting tossed out by the British or Canadians, who themselves were forced out by successive attacks and concentrated shelling. There had been a few actions near the village in the past months, but only minor skirmishes.

“Chadbourg,” Creel said. “That means we’re well away from our own lines.”

“Aye,” Kirk said. “A bit west…probably quite near the Canadians, I’m thinking.” He looked around, trying to get his bearings. “We’ll have a rest here, I think.”

Howard started shaking his head. “But those things-”

“Are not something we need worry about. Crazed, all of them. Broke free from an asylum, I shouldn’t doubt.”

That was so thin you could see through it, but it made Creel smile when he didn’t think he had any smiles left. You had to hand it to Kirk; he just refused to give in. The living dead were crawling out of their graves and he was concerned with finding a place to lay up a bit before the march back to friendly forces. Creel almost burst out laughing at the very idea of it. Well, the undead haven’t lunched on us quite yet, have they? Let’s have ourselves a nice brew-up. There’s a good fellow. He contained his laughter and mainly because it would have been hysterical and sounded more like a scream than anything else.

They moved up the main thoroughfare, the mist enclosing them from all sides, the ruins rising up around them in ghostly, vague shapes, shadows clustering in doorways, rats scurrying in dead-end alleys, ravens sitting atop the creaking signs of pubs and cafes that had fallen into themselves.

According to Kirk, Chadbourg had been abandoned over a year before when the troops starting moving in from either side. Yet, to walk through those streets, meandering amongst heaped rubble and broken stone and staved-in walls, there was a sense of decay that was thick, heavy, almost palpable with age. Shutters hung from empty windows by threads, collapsed doorways looked in on moist rancid darkness, stairways terminated in midair and crept below street level into flooded blackness. It stank the way a cemetery at Ypres had smelled, Creel remembered, after a vicious shelling by the Hun that churned up the ground, exhuming graves and rotting boxes, tossing skeletons into trees and atop roofs; a pestiferous, moldering stink of subterranean slime and leechfields.

Most of the houses and buildings were nothing but heaped debris, hills and ramparts of it, some so high you could not see over them and others filling streets so they were impassable.

When they did find a habitable structure, the roof was usually gone, nothing but splintered timbers overhead crisscrossed against the grim leaden sky.

Finally, they found a brick house with a half-timbered second story that was intact save the outside wall was scathed by machine-gun fire and the windows were broken out. It was cramped and damp-smelling inside, but there was some dust-laden furniture and even a grandfather clock with a bird’s nest built into the face. Looking at it, Creel had to wonder how many times some aproned peasant woman, her back sore from churning butter, her hands white with flour, had looked at that clock face and waited for her men to come in from the fields, clumping boots dusted with wheat chaff.

Another world. Another existence. This place will never know that peace and solid contentment again, he thought. It will never know tired backs settling into feather beds and old women sweeping children into dreamland with twice-told tales and kettles of soup steaming atop blackened stove gratings on Sunday afternoons.

No. It will only know the cawing of crows, the scurrying of rats, the sound of leaves gathering and wind whipping through creviced walls, the spidersilk silence of gathering dust.

Filled with anguish and a bitter fatalism, he went to the window and looked out into the mist-choked streets. The breeze had picked up a bit and the fog blew along with rolling clouds of dust and fine debris.

“Nothing anywhere,” Howard said after he returned from checking the rooms. “Not a scrap of food. Not a bleeding thing.”

Creel found a lantern on a hook, half-filled with oil. “We’ll have some light if we need it,” he said.

Jameson started up the creaking stairs to the upper floor and stopped, grimy hand on the rail.

There was a sound from up there.

Like something dragged over a floor. Something heavy.

Standing there in his dirty greatcoat, dented steel helmet, and mud-caked trench boots, he looked like some little boy playing Army with his father’s old uniform. His face was dirty, though unlined and impossibly smooth like it had been pressed. His eyes were huge and white and he looked like he belonged anywhere but where he was.

Just a sound, that’s all it was, but it stopped everyone like they were standing in quick-set concrete.

The only thing alive about Creel at that moment was the cigarette in his lips: it was trembling. He felt a sharp stab of fear in his belly that kept cutting deeper, making a darkness that was toxic and oily spread through his vitals. It was not the fear of war. Of bullets and bombs and bayonets bisecting his stomach, nothing man-made. This was ancient. A formless, crawling terror that moved through him.

Jameson’s voice, when it came, was dry as a crackling corn husk: “There’s…there’s something up there, Sarge.”

Brilliant deduction, kid.

Kirk looked over to Creel and for the first time Creel saw that it was alive inside the man: fear and indecision. It was infesting him to the point that he was nearly unrecognizable. No more stiff upper lip or confident eyes or hard set to his mouth…no, his face was greasy with sweat and smudged with dirt like a chimney sweep. Eyes red-rimmed and bulging from their sockets, lips pressed tight to stop his teeth from chattering. Something had just given in him and he was now a dirty, hunched-over, chinless, scraggly trench rat, a middle-aged man who had no business in this war.

“We better go have a look, hadn’t we?” Creel said.

Jameson and Howard nodded. Kirk did not move so Creel went over to him, patted him on the back and slid the Webley revolver from the sergeant’s holster.

Poor guy had frozen right up.

He led them on a wild run through the living dead and did not bat an eye, and now…a simple noise from a shuttered room above was enough to suck the blood right out of him. It got like that sometimes in combat, Creel knew. You charged a trench and gored three enemy soldiers with your bayonet, you shot down another, skipped about on a merry lark avoiding machine-gun fire, bullets zipping around you, just so you could get close enough to toss a belt of Mill’s bombs into a trench mortar emplacement. You did your duty and you didn’t think twice about it. You made it through, got back with your mates…then you saw a bullet hole in your helmet that miraculously missed your skull and you fold up, start sobbing and can’t seem to stop.

There’s a breaking point to all.

His was last night when that living dead hag called his name and earlier today in the dugout when that…whatever that was…called his name again. Something broke loose inside and he was no good. Now he could feel the blood in his veins again and the wind in his lungs and he brushed past Jameson with a catty wink, looked back at Howard and the still immobile Sergeant Kirk. He did not feel betrayed by Kirk’s momentary weakness. In fact, he felt stronger and his respect for the sergeant increased.

“Come on, son,” he told Jameson, lighting the lantern, knowing this was what Burke would have done. “We’ll soon sort this shit out.”

Up the stairs then, feeling his strength abandoning him as nerves set in, as shadows pooled and lengthened, as things were heard scratching in the walls and others were sensed in the ganglia at his spine. A short, low corridor above. Two doorways. He knew even then which it would be. His fist sweating on the revolver, he kicked the nearest door open and a rolling wave of hot putrescence blew out at him and nearly put him to his knees.

“Gah,” Jameson said. “That stink.”

It was revolting and moist and cloying. It nearly made Creel stumble back down the stairs because he certainly did not want to look upon anything that smelled like that. Sucking in a shallow breath through his teeth, he stepped forward, holding the lantern high, night-black shadows swimming around him like eels.

What he saw made him step back because he was not really sure what it was he was looking at…just a swollen white mass spreading over the floor, a fermenting, yeasty excrescence.

It was a corpse.

Someone had died up here and instead of their remains crumbling away, they had grown in the damp shuttered darkness like a fleshy mushroom. He could see the basic outline of a skeleton-a grinning skull, a basket of rib staves, a pipe cleaner arm, a knee drawn up-all of it covered in a soft white pulp that had risen like bread dough turning the corpse into a great fruiting body that had ripened like a juicy peach, sprouting and budding and blossoming. Tendrils of that white decay had spread over the floor and grown right into the planks and up the walls like climbing vines in a cobwebby, lacey filigree that even hung from the ceiling in threads and ribbons.

It was disgusting to look at and worse to contemplate for given time, Creel thought, the creeping charnel rot would have invaded every last stick and board in the house until it all came down in a glistening fungoid mass.

“Who you suppose it was?” Jameson said, holding his nose.

Creel shrugged, staring at the oily gray toadstools that filled the eye sockets and sprung jaws in great clusters. “A peasant maybe. An injured soldier that crawled up here to die…”

“But we heard something move.”

“Maybe it was that… mass weakening the timbers.”

The words had barely left his mouth when the entire pulpy fungal mass shivered like jelly. Then it did it again. And Creel plainly saw a viscid wave pass through the thing like a breaker heading ashore in a sea of gelatin.

“Something in there,” Jameson said.

Creel did not dare speak. For whatever it was, he was certain that it was somehow responding to their voices or the vibrations of the same. That wave shuddered to a rest in the lower regions of the corpse and from between the legs there was a wet, tearing sound as the membranes of soft rot were sheared.

Both Jameson and Creel saw it.

They saw that fleshy mound between the corpse’s legs rip open and two tiny hands emerge that were waxy and gleaming, oddly boneless in their rubbery contortions.

Jameson let out a wild scream and just started shooting, he put three rounds into the mass where the rest of thing must have been and it stopped moving…those hands seemed to curl and wither, withdrawing back into the body cavity.

A woman, Creel thought with a madness scratching in his brain. Died pregnant…only what was in her did not die, it gestated in moist putrid blackness, it came to term in her rotting womb, something inhuman, something unbelievable, and something somehow related to everything else that’s going on.

They came down the stairs, faces pasty and stomachs in throats, but they did not report on what they had seen and nobody asked for the war came to life again and they heard the distant thump-thump-thump of heavy guns sending out shells. They went shrieking over Chadbourg and a few hit nearby with resounding explosions that shook the earth. They were pretty close and Creel figured they landed out in the cemetery. Overhead, the shells were coming and going, the Canadians and the Hun exchanging pleasantries.

“We’re right in the middle,” Howard said.

The shells started landing inside the village, throwing rubble into the air, knocking down walls and opening immense craters in the narrow streets. A house across the way took a direct hit and was literally thrown up into the air, raining down as bricks and burning lathes and sticks and debris.

“We better get out of here,” Kirk said.

As they crouched near the doorway two and then three shells hit around them, the shock waves sending them to the floor, plaster falling around them, nails ejected from walls. Outside there were clouds of dust competing with the mist and then all grew quiet.

For a moment, then two.

Then more shells were coming but they landed in the village with an almost gentle pop, pop, pop. Not high-explosive ordinance, these were shells of a different variety and everyone knew what they were just by the sounds.

“Gas,” Kirk said. “Masks, everyone.”

For the next twenty minutes one gas shell after another hit, the streets not only thick with fog and blowing dust, but vaporous clouds of phosgene and mustard gas. It all combined together into a heavy, consuming soup that brought visibility down to ten or twelve feet at best.

Creel had been at the Second Battle of Ypres when the gas shells were dropping all around them and men were dying in numbers. One enterprising medical officer in the trench told the men to urinate into their handkerchiefs and press them to their mouths, that the ammonia in their urine would neutralize the chlorine gas. Creel had tried like hell to pee, but nothing came out, his penis seeming to pull into itself like a snail seeking the safety of its shell. Another soldier pissed in his hankie for him and never was he so glad to press another man’s urine to his lips.

But that was chlorine.

And he already knew from the smell that they were dealing with phosgene and mustard agents. The only thing that could be done was to keep the masks on and keep out of any concentrated clouds, for the mustard could burn right through cloth and continue burning into your flesh.

When Jameson made for the door, breathing hard beneath his mask, Sergeant Kirk pulled him back. “Let it dissipate,” he said, his voice hollow and distant behind his trench mask.

They waited as the gas settled, four men in hot masks, staring around through bug-eyed ports, all riven with fear for gas was the one thing that terrified everyone.

“Somebody outside,” Jameson said. “I saw them.”

Creel began to feel that fear building in him. It was too soon for the Hun to arrive; they would wait until the gas had done its work before they came storming in. No, whoever it was, it certainly was not the Germans.

They all pressed in near the window, the shutters gone, the glass long broken out of it. And, yes, out in the billowing, blowing fog and gas they could see forms moving, dozens of them. They were staying within the periphery of mist, not showing themselves, just massing in numbers.

Creel heard a pounding.

Everyone went still, tense.

“The kitchen,” Kirk said in a weak voice. “Somebody’s knocking at the kitchen door…listen…”

The knocking came again: slow, relentless, almost mechanical in its complete lack of rhythm.

Creel, steeling himself, pulled the Webley pistol from his pocket, muttering, “I suppose…I suppose someone should see.” Nobody volunteered to go with him and he was neither surprised at that nor disheartened. He moved away from them, keeping in a low crouch and he was not sure why. He went down the short corridor, feeling the insistent thud of his heartbeat at his temples. Sweat ran down his face inside the mask. Gently, easily, he pushed open the door and went in there, expecting the very worst and knowing he would not be disappointed. The door was heavy, wooden and latched.

The pounding went on.

The door trembled in its frame.

Through the broken window he saw them standing out there, ranks and ranks of them crowding in like flies: children. Probably the same ones that were haunting No-Man’s Land. They pressed up to the missing window pane, dead things with faces that were almost phosphorescent in their whiteness, puckered and seamed like they’d been underwater a long time, wormholes drilled into them. Their eyes were red-rimmed, a glaring translucent silver. They were all smiling, schoolboys and schoolgirls, but those grins said nothing of happiness. They were crooked, tortured grimaces. They reached leathery hands towards the window, nails splintered and packed with black grave dirt.

“ Let us in,” they said together, a whispering choir.

The door rattled as they pounded on it with more and more grave-cold fists and Creel stumbled away, a dreamlike sort of terror flooding through him like he was hallucinating, his mind unraveling one skein at a time.

Finally, he let out a choking gasp and fled for the others and that’s when he heard the strangled screams. The dead children had flooded in and neither Sergeant Kirk nor his two riflemen got off a single shot. The children were like locusts, swarming, infesting, coming through the door and crawling through the window, more and more all the time, just as thick as graveworms in carrion.

Creel fell back, stunned.

He saw seven or eight of the little monsters take Howard down while another-a little girl in graying cerements-stripped off his gas mask, clutching his terrified face in her white little hands. Then she opened her mouth, yawning it wide and black like a manhole, and from the channel of her throat came a hissing yellow gas that enveloped Howard’s face. He screamed, high and long, until his lungs began to come apart and his thrashing face began to blister and burst with spreading lesions and pitted ulcers. His face quite literally melted like tallow, running and streaming. They got Jameson the same way, breathing out their toxic breath of blister agents, phosgene, and deadly mustard gas.

As Creel heard the door in the kitchen come off its hinges and the undead children took notice of him, he broke for the stairs, taking one last look and seeing them dragging Kirk away by the legs. His mask was gone, his face hanging in blistered flaps. “Help me,” he wheezed. “Dear God, help me…”

But Creel couldn’t help him; he was beyond help.

He raced up the stairs, breathing hard in his mask. Again, the two doorways before him in the dimness. He knew what one led to, but he was going for the other. As he paused before the room with the weird fruiting corpse in it, listening for the sounds of hell following, he heard something that sent fingers of panic threading through him.

In the room, behind that door… movement.

Not a subtle movement as before…no, this was a big sound, a huge sound that made him lose his balance, fumble against the wall so he did not go flat out. He felt a very real need to scream, but his tongue felt like it was slippery in his mouth, oily and sliding.

In the room, those sounds…

Like knotted roots being yanked up from stony soil.

Handfuls of them pulled from the earth.

That’s what he was hearing along with sort of a moist shifting noise, a sort of slithering, and a dry hollow moaning. Then…footsteps, dull and dragging, something brushing the walls in there like vines rustling in the wind…a stench of vegetable decay and woodrot…

The door began to whisper open.

He saw a white pulpous hand reaching out of the darkness.

Then he was through the other door, throwing it shut behind him. As the children flooded up the stairs and that nameless germinating thing scratched at the door, he threw the shutters open and climbed out, trying to ease himself down the wall like a monkey and succeeding in dropping about twelve feet to a cobbled alley.

He saw two of the children right away coming out of the mist at him, hands held out to make contact. Their shrouds were but filthy shifts stained with grave-soil and grave-drainage, faces like those of grinning white clown-puppets, eyes the color of moonlight on water. They were filled with poison gases as if they had sucked them up like sponges… gas steamed out of them in wisps and slow-turning tendrils, rising from mouths, innumerable holes and crevices in their faces and flesh.

Creel did not hesitate for one moment.

He ran right through them knocking them aside, back into the fog where they seemed to dissolve and become part of it, two columns of corpse-gas.

He had no true idea where he was in the village and everything was crowded, compressed, debris laying in hills and mounds, huge craters filled with black water opening at his feet. Alone. He was alone now and he knew he was alone and the idea of that was something he did not dare contemplate. Not yet. Not here. He groped through the mist, edging along the bullet-pocked brick facades of buildings, staring up at blank windows looking down upon him, crawling over blasted, crumbling walls of stone, limping down narrow streets that were gray and misting.

And then For one moment, one that put him down on his knees, he saw something in the mist that could not see him. Just for a moment. It came out of the fog and was enshrouded by it just as quickly. A woman. A woman in a white bridal gown. She was feeling her way along a wall with outstretched fingers, looking for something and perhaps some one.

Creel just waited there silently until she passed.

He knew she hadn’t heard him. In order to hear you needed ears and in order to have ears you needed a head and this woman had been missing that vital accoutrement. Just a wandering trunk.

Madness most certainly insinuating itself by this point, Creel came stumbling down a low hill, liking the sound of his muddy boots on the cobbles, the sound of rain dripping, the way the fog was a great hungry ghost trying to eat him And he screamed.

Screamed because it was there, waiting for him: the thing from the cavalry post. It still wore its tomb-filthy shroud, a great and graying winding sheet that covered its head in a loose hood and its outstretched arms in yards of worm-eaten graveyard cloth. Plumes of fog rose up around it, making it look like it was smoldering.

“ Creel,” it said in a voice of subterranean damps, “Creeeeeeellll-”

Then he was running again, slipping through the mist, hiding, waiting, rising to run again, knowing that those children were out there in numbers and that even if he managed to avoid them, he could never, ever avoid the shrouded thing…it would find him wherever he went.

He stumbled into an open square.

A dozen men trained rifles on him.

“ Hold your fire,” someone said. “He looks…almost human.”

Creel dropped to his knees, shivering, holding himself, sobbing behind his gas mask.

He was taken inside a ruined building and soon, the gas dissipating sufficiently, all removed their masks. He found himself in the company of a reconnaissance patrol of the Canadian 1 ^ st Light Infantry.

A tall, handsome medical officer with stark, haunted eyes said, “You can return with us to the lines. My name is-”

“Hamilton,” Creel said with something of sneer. “Doctor to the dead.”