Zombie Pulp

23

Catalyst

Make no mistake about it, we were torn apart in the flooded trenches outside Charbourg. Some men died gallantly in the shell-fire, but other men were reduced to whimpering things when they saw what our true enemy was out there, the walking dead that came slithering from their mephitic holes to rage a war of extermination against the living.

We were scattered in every direction and we did what we could, but men to each flank were dying. The Hun had buried their dead everywhere in the trenches-in the floor, in the walls, and that did not take into account all the other corpses in the mud. As I looked around for survivors, ducking every time a shell screamed overhead or erupted in a column of mud and black water, I did not-and could not-know what had reanimated so many. Certainly, West was responsible for some of it…but not this many. Even that megalomaniacal brain could not conceive of a mass resurrection on such a scale.

There was another factor.

A catalyst.

It was not until I found three soldiers who were putting up a fierce defense that I knew what that catalyst was. As the dead poured forward and the soldiers literally blasted them into fragments-some were so rotten and waterlogged from the mud holes and lakes of stagnant water that they burst apart-the earth began to tremble. The water boiled in the trenches. Sandbags collapsed and dugouts crumbled to rubble. A single limbless tree fell over.

The catalyst showed itself.

Not fifteen feet from us it burst from the muddy earth in a yellow, pink, and gray-white mass of surging corpse-jelly. It pushed itself up, hiding no more, a great pulsating, noisome coagulation of tissue in horrible, surging motion…it kept coming and coming, rising up into a great glistening wave of noxious flesh that was easily twenty feet high and twice that in volume.

The men screamed as it continued to rise from a great jagged cleft in the earth like a birth canal.

As sickened as I was, I did not scream.

I knew what it was, you see.

This was some great monstrous mutation formed out of West’s vat of reptilian embryonic matter. When the Germans shelled the barn, West’s original lab, completely destroying it…they had not destroyed what was in that vat. It had escaped and tunneled underground like a monstrous worm, breeding in the darkness, suckling itself upon corpse-fat, corpse-meat, and the rich marrow of thousands of bones sunken into the mud of Flanders. West had another vat, a larger one, germinating at his other workshop in the farmhouse-or had-but this massive organism was part of the original. I knew that without question.

As the men cried out, several going insane, I just waited for that blobby mass to fall over me and squeeze the life from me, make me part of its slithering immensity. But that did not happen. The Hun fired a devastating salvo at us-high-explosive rounds followed by incendiaries. They struck the creature, blasting it into fragments, into a pustulant rain of filth and hot drainage and spongy tissue that rained to earth and then went up in a massive fire storm as the incendiaries struck.

The soldiers were buried alive in mud and the creature’s excrescence…I survived. I crawled out of the muck and somehow found my feet, blessing the Hun for intervention and begging only one last thing of them: that they would send but one more shell to end my wretched existence.

But that did not happen either.

I saw something coming out of the mist. It walked with jerking, mechanical motions, its arms held out before it. I knew what it was. It was dressed in a rotting bridal gown, holding out gray-skinned, black-veined hands for me. It had no head, but it knew where I was and it had been looking for me for some time. I could hear the rats that nested within, the buzzing of the insects that honeycombed that walking corpse.

I should have run, I should have done something.

But it was my Michele, resurrected-I like to believe-via the tissue that had burrowed below. She came for me and I waited for her with my trench knife in hand. Tears rolled down my cheeks and something inside me withered and went black. As she got closer I could see the rotting lace, the white of purity stained with corruption-mud and drainage and coffin-slime, a spreading furry fungi.

A stink of fetid graves in my face, she took hold of me and I allowed this last embrace. Somehow, someway, I heard her voice in my mind like the sound of tinkling bells: I AM HERE.

I brought the trench knife down, crying, shrieking, laid open by savage, cruel memory. I brought it down and kept bringing it down, slashing her into a limbless, writhing thing at my feet that I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed and right before it stopped moving with its obscene graveyard gyrations, the voice again: BUT I LOVE YOU PLEASE PLEASE HOLD ME

I slashed and cut until there was nothing but a reeking, pooling mass of putrescence at my feet and then fell back, struck mad, as carrion beetles came out of her in a black oily flood and rats crawled free and then her belly opened and spewed forth a slimy, shocking pink river of squirming fetal rats that I hacked to bits.

The trench knife still in my hand, splattered with my love’s remains, I staggered off into the mist waiting for the shrapnel-kiss of a shell that never did come.